Wednesday, July 14, 2021

William Farmer on Evidence for the Two-Gospel Hypothesis: The Minor Agreements

  

The Minor Agreements

 

Jesus Is Mocked

 

57 Then they spat on his face and slapped him and hit him,
68 saying:

“Prophesy to us, O Christ,
Who is it who is striking you?”—Matt. 26:67-68

 

63 And the man who held him, mocked him, beating him,
64 And blindfolding him, they questioned him,
saying:
“Prophesy,
Who is it who is striking you?

65 And they spoke many other words against him, reviling him.—Luke 22:63-65

 

65 And some began to spit on him and to cover up his face and to slap him and to say to him:
Prophesy”;
And the attendants received him with blows.—Mark 14:65

 

All verbatim agreements in Greek between Matthew, Luke, and Mark are underlined in the above texts. The term “minor agreement” is used to refer to agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark in passages where Mark contains a parallel passage. The agreements as a whole between Matthew and Luke against Mark are rather striking. Matthew and Luke agree with one another against Mark in using the participle form of “to say”: saying, and then they agree with one another against Mark in including the question: “Who is it who is striking you?” The problem for those who advocate the Two-Source Hypothesis is that, according to that hypothesis, neither Matthew nor Luke had access to the other. Both have independently copied Mark. How then, based on this hypothesis, can one explain the above agreements between Matthew and Luke? The word “prophesy” could have been copied from Mark because it is present in the parallel text Mark. And the agreement in using the participial form of the very “to say” instead of the infinitive as in Mark, could be explained as due to a stylistic preference on the part of Matthew and Luke. But the presence in the texts of both Matthew and Luke of the question: “Who is it who is striking you”? cannot be explained as having been copied from Mark, because those words are not in Mark’s text.

 

Defenders of Markan priority have been unable to explain this evidence to the satisfaction of most scholars. In most cases, the minor agreements are explained by defenders of Markan priority as due to stylistic preference. But many cannot be so easily explained. Sometimes extensive agreement between Matthew and Luke against Mark is explained by conjecturing what is called an overlap between Mark and Q.

 

In these instances, it is suggested, Matthew and Luke have copied Q and not Mark. But no one has ever suggested the overlap theory to explain the presence of the question “Who is it who is striking you?” in Matt. 26:68 and Luke 22:64. This would require Q to have a passion narrative, and few defenders of the Two-Source Hypothesis would want to assume that.

 

Based on the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, Matthew has presented Jesus being distracted by his tormentors and taunted with the words: “Prophesy to us, O Christ, who is it who is striking you?” For the distracting effect of being spat upon, Luke substitutes the act of blindfolding, to bring out the cruelty of Jesus’ mistreatment. How could Jesus possibly see who was striking him after his tormentors had blindfolded him?

 

Mark’s account includes the spitting in Matthew and well as the covering of his eyes in Luke, and includes the other harassing treatment—slapping and hitting. By omitting the question, “Who is it who is striking you?” and closing his account with the words: “and the attendants received him with blows,” the reader is allowed to imagine Jesus’ tormentors relentlessly escalating violence against him, from the physically harmless though insulting: “being spat upon,” through mildly violent “slapping,” to Jesus being violently beaten following the terse and mocking command to “prophesy.”

 

The agreements among all three accounts can be explained on the sequence of composition. The agreements between Matthew and Luke are explained by Luke’s use of Matthew, and the agreements between Mark’s account and those of Matthew are explained by Mark’s use of these two earlier Gospels. Objections to this sequence can be raised, but so far the objections are based on subjective considerations, such as: Why would Mark have done this or that? Or why would Luke have modified Matthew in this way or that way? There is no hard literary evidence against the Two-Gospel Hypothesis that equals the importance of the agreement between Luke and Matthew against Mark found in the minor agreement, “Who is it who is striking you?”

 

There are both positive minor agreements and negative minor agreements. The minor agreements in the mocking incident just discussed is an example of what scholars term a “positive minor agreement,” a case where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark by the positive act of including a question that is not found in Mark. The other kind of agreement is created when Matthew and Luke agree in not having something that is found in Mark. This is called an “agreement in omission.” Some scholars term this a “negative agreement” of Matthew and Luke against Mark. Although these negative agreements in omission have in the past been given less attention than the positive agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark, in recent years they have been playing a more important role in the international discussion of the minor agreements. For example at the 1991 Symposium on the Minor Agreements in Göttingen, Germany, under the sponsorship of the theological faculty of the University of Göttingen, the agreements in omission between Matthew and Luke against Mark played an important role. (William R. Farmer, The Gospel of Jesus: The Pastoral Relevance of the Synoptic Problem [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994], 134-36. For a discussion of “negative agreements,” see pp. 136-38 on the calling of Matthew)