Wednesday, July 14, 2021

William Farmer on Evidence for the Two-Gospel Hypothesis: Mark is Capable of Combining His Sources

 

Mark Is Capable of Combining His Sources

 

In the last passage (Luke 7:18-35), the only verse in Luke also found in Mark is Luke 7:27. This verse is a unique conflation of Mal. 3:1 and Ex. 23:20. Because this unique combination of these two Old Testament passages is found in three synoptic Gospels, it is instructive to compare them carefully and in detail.

 

Behold, I will send my messenger before your face,
who shall prepare your way before you.—Matt 11:10

 

Behold, [I] will send my messenger before your face,
who shall prepare your way before you.—Luke 7:27

 

Behold, [I] will send my messenger before your face,
who shall prepare your way.—Mark 1:2

 

This unique conflation of the texts of Mal. 3:1 and Ex. 23:20 is exactly the same in all three Gospels with two exceptions. First, there is no pronoun in the Greek text of Luke and Mark standing behind the English pronoun “I” in the above translation, while there is in Matthew. This pronoun is unnecessary in Greek, since the ending of the Greek verb apostello (“I will send”) informs the reader that the subject is the first person singular. The English pronoun “I” has been placed in brackets in Luke and Mark to indicate this difference between their texts in Greek and the Greek text of Matthew. The second exception is the absence of the phrase “before you” in the text of Mark. If Matthew and Luke have independently copied Mark, how can one account for the presence of the phrase “before you” in both Matthew and Luke because this phrase is not present in the text of Mark? This is one of the famous agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark. IT clearly stands in the way of accepting the view that Matthew and Luke had independently copied Mark.

 

Based on the Two-Source Hypothesis, one might first think that Matthew and Luke have independently copied Mark, despite the difficulty of this agreement against Mark. But this agreement against Mark is not the only difficulty. It seems unlikely, even without this difficulty, that Matthew and Luke, independently, would both take this verse from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel and independently place it into a text from their respective copies of Q where it fit perfectly like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

 

It would seem less implausible to argue that these words were already in the text of Q and that Mark and Q overlap at this point. But even this explanation will hardly work because of the unusual character of this verse. How could we explain that this unique blending of Mal. 3:1 and Ex. 23:20 present in Q has been so closely preserved in Mark? This close agreement is better explained by a theory that permits a direct literary relationship among these three Gospels.

 

Assuming the validity of the Two-Source Hypothesis, no satisfactory evidence explains how Mark’s text could be so close to the nearly identical texts of Matt. 11:10 and Luke 7:27 without positing that the evangelist Mark himself has gone to his copy of the Q source and abstracted this particular conflated text of Malachi and Exodus and jointed it to a citation from Isa. 40:1 in another story concerning John the Baptist. It follows that Mark, based on the Two-Source Hypothesis, is definitely capable of combining material from different sources.

 

It is not unreasonable to think that in composing a text about John the Baptist where he follows a tradition that identifies John in relation to a text from Isaiah, Mark—if he knew a Q source where John is again identified in relation to Old Testament prophecy—would have decided to bring this second citation of scripture together with the text from Isaiah. In so-called Q the source of this conflated text id identified simply as coming from scripture without specifying its author. Because most Christian prophecies are attributed to Isaiah, Mark can be forgiven for including this unidentified prophecy from the same prophet Isaiah. This is the way to explain the mistake Mark has made in attributing this citation from Malachi-Exodus to the prophet Isaiah.

 

In answering the question “What is the Two-Gospel Hypothesis?” the third point to note is that adherents of this hypothesis have no difficulty in accepting evidence that Mark is capable of combining his sources. In fact, they are prepared to regard this point as crucial for understanding the synoptic problem. (William R. Farmer, The Gospel of Jesus: The Pastoral Relevance of the Synoptic Problem [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994], 29-30)