Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

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Journal of Biblical Literature
Bergemann sought to show that the verbal agreements in Matthew’s Sermon on the
Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain demonstrate the use of separate Greek renderings
of an Aramaic Grundrede rather than the shared use of a common sayings source
(Q). He showed that the rates of verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke range
between 8 and 100 percent and that the values comprise a fairly smooth curve. 6 In
response to Bergemann’s procedure, Adelbert Denaux pointed out that the range and
curve of agreements between Matthew and Mark, and between Luke and Mark, are
similar to that which Bergemann noted for Matthew and Luke. 7 Denaux rightly faults
Bergemann for thinking of the evangelists as compilers working “with the aid of scissors
and paste.” 8 It appears that McIver and Carroll have fallen into the same trap. The evidence
of the Gospels does not suggest that we should gather the patterns of agreement
into two baskets, the one marked “written source” and the other “memory.” Rather, the
numbers plot a continuous curve. It is wrong to view the evangelists as scissors-andpaste
compilers, whose ability to use a given source (written or oral) necessarily coincides
with their fidelity to that source.
Conclusion
I have no doubt that insights gained from memory experiments could be relevant
to our understanding of ancient oral and scribal culture. That alone makes them valuable
for biblical studies. McIver and Carroll’s recent attempt “to develop criteria for
determining the existence of written sources,” however, represents a misapplication of
this area of study. Their endeavor to divide the Synoptic Gospels into sections using
written sources and sections dependent on the “mechanisms of memory” runs aground
on the fact that they compare sequential agreements between two purportedly independent
writings (Matthew and Luke, on the Q hypothesis) with sequential agreements
between a writing and its direct source (the experimental subject and his/her prepared
source), and on the fact that the gapped nature of many of the longer sequential agreements
in the Gospels is due to redactional preferences rather than memory lapses.
John C. Poirier
poirier@siscom.net
1100 N. Main St., Franklin, OH 45005
6 Stephen Hultgren similarly observes, “The degree of verbal agreement in the double tradition
ranges quite broadly, from about 10% to 100% or nearly 100%” (Narrative Elements in the
Double Tradition: A Study of Their Place within the Framework of the Gospel Narrative [BZNW
113; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002], 338).
7 Adelbert Denaux, “Criteria for Identifying Q-Passages: A Critical Review of a Recent Work
by T. Bergemann,” NovT 37 (1995): 105–29, esp. 117.
8 Ibid. For similar criticisms, see John S. Kloppenborg, review of Thomas Bergemann, Q auf
dem Prüfstand, in JBL 114 (1995): 325–27; idem, Excavating Q, 62–65.