Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

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Journal of Biblical Literature
While there is overlap between the various categories, it is clear that long
sequences of 16 or more words belong exclusively to the group that retained
the source and could copy from it. From the perspective of the development
of a test for the presence of copying, the critical group is the group that
returned the source before writing. The longest sequence of words in the
exact order for almost all of them was fewer than 8. None of them had a
sequence of words greater than 15.
The experiments have also shown that this characteristic is accurate only
for narrative material, and that it is possible that longer sequences of words
from poems and shorter aphorisms might be remembered exactly. Thus it is
now possible to state a general test to determine the existence of written
sources: Any sequence of exactly the same 16 or more words that is not an
aphorism, poetry, or words to a song is almost certain to have been copied
from a written document. (pp. 679–80; emphasis original)
McIver and Carroll next try to apply these insights to the Synoptic Gospels. They
present a table identifying twenty-three passages containing sequential agreements of
sixteen or more words, listing them according to length: 31, 29, 28, 28, 26, 26, 24, 24, 24,
24, 23, 23, 23, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 17, 17, 16, 16, 16. They pare down this list of parallel
passages by removing seven “short aphorisms or distinctive sayings” and seven “longer
distinctive sayings.” 3 That leaves only the following agreements: 31, 28, 28, 24, 23, 22,
19, 17, 16. For McIver and Carroll’s procedure, it is not the length but rather the location
of these agreements that matters, as they take each sequence longer than sixteen
words to reveal the existence of a written source for the section of Gospel material that
the sequential agreement represents. The nine sequences listed above represent the following
passages (as defined by Huck’s synopsis) respectively: Matt 10:16–25//Mark
13:3–13; Matt 11:25–30//Luke 10:21–24; Matt 24:45–51//Luke 12:41–48; Matt
3:1–2//Luke 3:1–20; Matt 24:15–28//Mark 13:14–23; Matt 11:1–19//Luke 7:18–35; Matt
22:41–46//Mark 12:35–37; Matt 8:1–4//Luke 5:12–16; Matt 24:29–35//Mark 13:24–31.
At this point, McIver and Carroll reveal one of their critical assumptions: “If it was
decided on other grounds that it was unlikely that one evangelist copied directly from an
existing Gospel, then it would be necessary to postulate a minimum of two further
sources: one, the apocalyptic discourse (Mark 13 and parallels), which all three Gospels
used, and one used by both Matthew and Luke but not Mark (perhaps Q?)” (p. 683).
There are a number of problems with this assumption. First, the authors never tell us on
what “grounds” it might be “decided” that “it was unlikely that one evangelist copied
directly from an existing Gospel.” From the standpoint of scholarly opinion, the “if” that
supports this assumption is a huge imposition: it has been over a hundred years since
such an assumption was current among scholars in general. From the standpoint of
logic, it is necessary not only to explain one’s departures from general consensus but
also, in certain cases, one’s acceptance of consensus. Although McIver and Carroll’s failure
to allow that Matthean/Lukan coincidences could be the result of interdependence
is not so curious from the standpoint of the history of scholarship—Q is so ingrained in
people’s minds that they still have difficulty conceiving of a world without it—it is very
3 This filtering process is supported by McIver and Carroll’s “experiments 1 and 2.”