Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

Critical Notes 317
curious from the standpoint of a statistical argument. Both majority and minority
source-critical factions therefore have an interest in knowing McIver and Carroll’s hidden
grounds for assuming that the Gospels are all mutually independent.
McIver and Carroll’s assumption of mutual independence also creates inconsistencies
in their application of the experimental results. To illustrate the applicability of their
experiments to our understanding of the Gospels, they compare the agreements
between Matt 24:45–51 and Luke 12:41–48 (expressed as underlined words in parallel
texts) with the agreements between the writing of one of their experimental subjects
and the text upon which that subject is known to have relied. They observe that the parallels
between Matthew and Luke have “a visual appearance very like that observed in
those who retained their written source in experiment 5” (p. 684). They apparently do
not notice that the two relationships that they are comparing are represented by very
different vector diagrams: one consists (according to their own stated assumption) of
two writings independently using a third, while the other consists of a writing and its
direct source. Although McIver and Carroll seek to explain the Matthew–Luke agreements
through their use of a common source, they compare these patterns of agreement
with those of a known case of direct borrowing. One should always expect a lower rate of
agreement between the two pendant writings within a fork model of transmission than
between either of those writings and its source, because the agreements in the former
case are mediated by a third writing while those in the latter case are unmediated. In
order to apply their experimental results in a way analogous to their view of Matthew
and Luke, they should have compared Matthew–Luke sequential agreements with
agreements appearing between the students participating in the experiment, rather than
with agreements between the students and their source. 4
One needs to remember that McIver and Carroll are out only to determine which
parts of the Gospels spring from written sources, and not so much what the distance
between the wording of the Gospels is for its own sake. Nevertheless, the flaw in their
reasoning still raises questions about their procedure. If it takes a sequence of sixteen
words in a nondistinctive or nonaphoristic passage to prove dependence on a written
source, then their assumption that Matthew and Luke are mutually independent complicates
things a great deal, for we then must account for the probability of two pendant
documents coinciding in their choice of such agreements. This means that considerably
4 Although there are some differences, McIver and Carroll are essentially committing the
well-known error associated with Theodore Rosché, who argued that the fact that Matthew and
Luke had lower rates of agreement in the double tradition than they had with Mark in the triple tradition
meant that Q was not a written source (“The Words of Jesus and the Future of the ‘Q’
Hypothesis,” Bib 79 [1960]: 210–20). Rosché was heavily criticized for his error: see Charles E.
Carlston and Dennis Norlin, “Once More—Statistics and Q,” HTR 64 (1971): 59–78; Sharon L.
Mattila, “A Problem Still Clouded: Yet Again—Statistics and ‘Q’,” NovT 36 (1994): 313–29; John S.
Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2000), 57. Carlston and Norlin sum up Rosché’s error as follows: “in examining the Triple
Tradition to see how faithfully Matthew and Luke reproduce their Markan source, he measures the
statistical distance of each gospel from Mark; but in examining the Double Tradition to see how
faithfully Matthew and Luke have reproduced ‘Q,’ he measures their distance from each other”
(“Once More—Statistics and Q,” 60).