Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

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Journal of Biblical Literature
shorter agreements in Matthew and Luke might be indicative of their use of a written
source.
This logical misstep looms even larger in the next part of McIver and Carroll’s article,
in which they try to show the existence of parallel passages that are better explained
through oral memory, contending that signs of “the mechanisms of memory” characterize
“the majority of the parallels between the Synoptic Gospels” (p. 686). Anyone who
presupposes the Q hypothesis needs to consider the degree to which the substitution of
synonyms and the atomizing of sequential agreements that McIver and Carroll attribute
to the “mechanisms of memory” might be due to the failure of Matthew and Luke to
coincide in their use of Q. A hypothetical comparison between Matthew and Q might
actually reveal more of the sorts of agreement that McIver and Carroll found to characterize
the use of a written source.
This brings us to another basic problem with McIver and Carroll’s study: they
seem to think of the evangelists as compilers without redactional programs (stylistic, literary,
and ideological) of their own. The results of McIver and Carroll’s study could
have told them that such a picture was not realistic, but the authors seem to have limited
their inferences to one line of reasoning. Noting that “the emphasis on verbatim accuracy
given to the participants in their instructions produced near 100% accuracy in the
copying from a written text, something not found in the parallels between the Synoptic
Gospels,” they infer that the evangelists’ mode of operation must have been different (p.
674). They do not consider that their authorial policies could have been different. As we
will see below, many of the redactional refinements found in the Gospels involve stylistic
preferences connected with the smallest and most colorless words, refinements that
one hardly expects to find in the case of a student allowed to cull freely from a prepared
source.
McIver and Carroll correctly note that aphorisms tend to be reproduced word for
word, but they fail to mention that there are two possible reasons for this: not only is the
exact wording of an aphorism more easily remembered than the wording of nonaphorisms
(as they note), but the precise wording of an aphorism is also more ingredient to
the aphorism as a traditional/semantic unit and is therefore less dispensable. Whether
one wishes to pull camels, elephants, or siege engines through the eye of a needle, the
difference of expression, when counted in terms of verbatim agreements, will tend to be
localized to one or two terms in the aphorism. One can choose to swap camels for elephants,
but it is more difficult to imagine someone choosing to rearrange the wording of
the whole saying. So while aphorisms make it through McIver and Carroll’s experiments
intact because they are more memorable, they perhaps make it through the Gospel tradition
intact simply because they are more aphoristic. It is surprising that McIver and
Carroll do not notice this crucial distinction, because they seem to brush against it when
they note that poetry is remembered either word for word or not at all. The more we
liken aphorisms to poetry, the more we should realize that precise wording is an ingredient
aspect of the aphorism.
McIver and Carroll’s Chart of Sequential Agreements:
Corrections and Comments
McIver and Carroll present a chart of the longest sequential agreements in the
Gospels. Unfortunately, their chart contains errors and omissions that compromise its
usefulness. Although McIver and Carroll sometimes recorded longer sequential agree-