Well, before we move into our subject for today, why don't I pray for us? And then we'll do that. Let's go to the Lord and pray. Father, as we reflect on our Lord Jesus, we are thankful that You chose and Your great providence to bring Him at a time when people would observe and record and record faithfully, and record from a variety of perspectives who Jesus was and what He did. As we desire to worship the risen, crucified Lord, the one who is the incarnate Son of God, the one who is worthy of all worship, this is extremely helpful to us. And so Lord, we thank You for Your divine plan, evidence in the four gospels that we have. And Father, I would ask that today, as we seek to understand better who Jesus is, that You would also give us insight into how we can best approach the gospels. And Father, I know that this is a conversation the church has had for centuries. So we pray that You would illuminate all of us, and I certainly include myself there, as we seek to understand the gospels and better glorify You. As this class to that end and Your wonderful name, amen. Last time we were starting to talk about the different similarities and dissimilarities between the gospel narratives. And I had mentioned that especially with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you can look at various narratives that are paralleled in each, and you'll see that there's a lot of similarity in wording. And occasionally there's divergences in wording as well. And I want to see if I can give you an example of that, let's see if I can find it. This is a synopsis, you can see it's put Matthew, Mark, and Luke in parallel columns. If you're having a little difficulty reading, it's because the camera is a little fuzzy here. And it could also be because the synopsis is in Greek. So my apologies in both respects, but what you see here is an attempt to put the Greek text of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in parallel and actually put the lines so that you can come straight across and do some comparisons. Now this is the cleansing of the leper right here. And if you come across, I've underlined, and what you can't see here is that I've underlined in a variety of different colors to do a study of the comparison of the traditions in these three spheres. And the colors signify where there's distinct material, where there's material that overlaps in specific in terms of wording. And then when it overlaps, when it overlaps between Matthew and Mark, between Mark and Luke, between Matthew and Luke, that kind of thing. Now, unfortunately, this is working out worse than I thought, because I've forgotten that there were color issues here. But if I were to say, take Mark, going straight down here, okay? This is all in red in my outline, indicating that it is distinct in terms of the specific wording in Mark. This word, lepros, is in brown and blue because it appears in all three traditions, see where I'm putting my fingers, ding, ding, ding. So it's in all of that. But then if you go afterwards, you realize that this is in red here, this is in red, lot of red. And there's some blue showing that this word is very similar in the two. This word, lego, and shows up in all three. This word, especially, met Carthasai to cleanse me, in particular, if you're able to cleanse me, that phrase right there shows up in all three traditions, verbatim. But then you very quickly get it to some distinct material. This shows up in all three materials, verbatim. But then you get, again, some distinct elements here, verbatim, right across. And then this agrees by itself, these two agree with one another. This is obviously just by itself, and then you have distinct material, et cetera, et cetera. So if you want, if you go through what you have there, is a narrative that is very similar to one another on the surface. They all talk about the cleansing of the lepper. But only at a few key junctures is the wording identical between all three traditions. But then it's very striking that the wording can be identical between all three traditions, especially because there's different ways in Greek to say effectively this. But they instead use exactly the same verbal forms and such. All that to say, when you start slapping percentages on this, then there's a lot of percentage of material that's the same. When you start looking at individual words, then the picture becomes much more complex in terms of the relationships between the different gospels. So the same story is in all three gospels. And at times, the exact same wording is all three gospels. But there's a lot of aspects of each telling of the story that puts it in its own words. Now, that's not to say that, then if you were to read these through English, you would get a very different impression about what's going on. The differences effectively are slight. And yet, the authors are using different words most often to represent the same thing. That's some of the complexity you get. Now, I could go through page after page, but I'm realizing, especially with the lack of color up here, it's not going to be that helpful. The point I'm trying to make is similarities and differences, and they're a lot more complex than sometimes people will ledge, especially if I just said to you, 90% of Mark is in Matthew and Luke. Well, 90% of what? Well, 90% of the storyline is in Matthew and Luke, but it's much more hazy when you get to the individual words. Now all that has to do then with determining the likelihood of literary dependence between the different gospels. And so we're going to talk more about that here in a moment. What I want to do is close this up, because it's going to get the way and move on to our discussion. So if you have the structured outlines from last time, you might pull those out, and we'll proceed. What I left our discussion last time was I brought up the idea of the synoptic problem, which is effectively, why is it that Matthew, Mark, and Luke share such similarities, and yet at times can be quite different from one another. That's the synoptic problem. And I started to give you some proposed solutions in terms of, especially literary solutions. One idea being that Matthew came first was copied by Mark and Luke, or the Augustan formulation of it, that Matthew came first, Mark drew on Matthew, and then Luke drew on Mark, or the Greecebox hypothesis that Matthew came first, then Luke, and then Mark drew on each of those. So you have these different ways of viewing things with the idea that Matthew came first. Now one of the reasons that the idea that Matthew came first is so appealing to people is because a number of early church fathers, Eranias, I mentioned, who is second century, so within 100 years of the time of the Gospels, Eusavius, who is at the end of the third century, and then ultimately Augustan. But there is a tradition in the church that Matthew wrote the first gospel, and he wrote it in Aramaic, which would have been the common language in Palestine. So we have some fairly early church history tradition that says Matthew came first, and so many people are attracted to that just on the strength of the historical reminiscences of the church alone. Now it should be said that a hundred years between the time Matthew would have written and the time Eranias was writing is a long time. And so some of those, whether Eranias had reliable evidence that Matthew came first, is a different issue, and one that has some complexity in its discussion. But that's part of what's going on there. The view that has, is most popular today in terms of modern scholarship, is Mark in priority, that Mark came first. And usually the view is something like this that Mark came first, Matthew used Mark, and Luke used Mark. The main problem with that is that there are a number of instances, especially teachings of Jesus and also some miracles, that show up in both Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark. So how is it that both Matthew and Luke have the same material at times with very similar, if not identical wording, if all they had was Mark that was common between them. So the most common formulation of this actually is what is known as the two source hypothesis, which postulates another literary source that we don't have anymore. Some of you may have had German, and you'll know that the German word for source is Kwella, begins with the letter Q. And so therefore people have identified this source as Q, short for the German Kwella. And the idea then is that Matthew and Luke both drew independently on Mark and Q. And that is the two source hypothesis. You can see why it's necessary here to postulate a separate source, and not so much over here. If Matthew came first then the amount of material that's in Mark that overlaps with Matthew, he simply excerpted from Matthew. And then the further agreement between Matthew and Luke on some of the sayings of Jesus, especially, could also come from Luke reading Matthew. So that's why in a sense each of these works fairly well, although the Augustine proposal is the most problematic there because if Luke is only using Mark then how did he end up with some of the same sayings material that is in theory in Matthew. But in any case this one, or this one, has a lot of explanatory force on its own. Whereas if you get over here and you want to put Mark first then you're going to have to postulate an additional literary source that the two share. So that's the two source hypothesis. Now a further variation on this then is related to that proposal which tries to explain why this is identical so far to that. We saw the two source proposal up here. But there's other material that only shows up in Matthew and other material that only shows up in Luke. So where did they get that? Well if you're working in the paradigm of Matthew and Luke especially were just assimilating the sources that they had in front of them and weaving them together and that they were dealing almost entirely or perhaps entirely with literary sources then you're going to come up with a literary solution to that. And therefore Matthew is going to have this additional hypothetical source M and Luke is going to have this additional hypothetical source L which is the additional stuff that's in Matthew or Luke respectively that's not common to the other Gospels. M and L there obviously just stand for Matthew and Luke but kind of proto-Matthew proto-Luke or something like that is how it would be described. And that then would be described as the four source hypothesis because if you count them up between M, Mark, Q and L you got four sources necessary to construct Matthew and Luke. So that's the various kind of literary proposals. Now let me stress one last time. This assumes that especially with regard to Matthew and Luke that they are using almost exclusively literary sources. We're not talking at this stage any kind of oral tradition. We're talking a lot more literary sources. Does anybody want any clarity on that or do you have any questions at this stage? Let me just say too. I plan on evaluating all of this later in our hour together. But at this stage I just want you to know what some of the things people are saying, any question to comments? Just a question on M and L, would they eliminate the possibility that Matthew or Luke, the M and L would be their personal experience? The thing that's a very good question, the question is, would they eliminate the possibility that Matthew and Luke, the authors of Matthew and Luke are working off of their personal experience? If that's the case then presumably you don't really need these literary sources right because they're working off of personal recollection. It must be said that in the history of doing source criticism, which is what we're doing here, talking about what the sources were and such, often the assumption that people are working with is that the final form of Matthew and Luke is second century, and that you are not in fact actually dealing with Matthew the Apostle and Luke the follower of Jesus. Luke might have been the follower of Paul. Luke might be considered the follower of Paul. Matthew at this stage is referred to as the Mithaean community. Maybe they were once in touch with the Apostle Matthew, but we're no longer dealing with the Apostle. They're pretty much assuming in a lot of these literary source approaches that you're not dealing with eyewitnesses in terms of at least Matthew and Luke as they're writing the Gospels. The short answer to your question is no, they're not assuming that they have actual recollection. That is also to say, just tagging off of that, that one of the issues that arises out of all this is when would you date the Gospels? Because if you date the Gospels early, then it creates issues for why do you need an am, why do you need an am, why do you need an am. That kind of thing. Other questions or comments? So they still believe Mark was in eyewitnesses? I couldn't say that all the people who would hold the source theories would say that even. What they would say, what they would be willing to say is that Mark is earlier and therefore working from the eyes of a historian, the earlier the source, the better. They probably would be willing to go that far, okay? Okay. We're moving on then. Another question we could ask is, why is it that we have to work with entirely literary sources? I mean, effectively, that's kind of what your questions were getting at in some ways. If these people were eyewitnesses, then why do they need written sources? That's a question. Moreover, even if Mark and Luke are who, the churches typically said they are, namely, Luke is a, is principally a follower of Paul, ultimately also in contact with Peter. Mark is initially a follower of Paul, probably John Mark is often the church tradition says. He's John Mark initially a follower of Paul, but especially becomes associated later in his ministry with Barnabas, but especially with Peter. And so effectively, Luke's sitting at the feet of Paul, Mark's sitting at the feet of Peter, they are getting very good oral traditions about what went on in the life of the ministry of Jesus. Okay? Now, notice I just switched it then. We are no longer talking about literary sources. We're talking about oral traditions and the telling of the story, the orality. Part of the switch from moving from literary sources, say at the beginning of the 20th century, to within a couple of decades moving to considering more oral traditions in the church, is a switch in kind of the way that modern thought moved from seeing everything as literary to recognizing orality more. If you, I mean, one could try and psychologist whole movements and scholarship, but entering into the 20th century, what is the paradigm of learning? Well, the paradigm of learning is you write a really good book, and you know you're smart if you've written a really good book, lots of footnotes, you know, that's a smart person there. And then if you're dealing with scholars whose whole lives revolve around books and literature, and then they look out and they see people telling stories to one another, especially kind of then, you know, backwards folklore kind of stuff. They think, well that's not very scholarly or very historical. So they're thinking in terms of written sources. Well towards the beginning of the 20th century, scholarship moved to studying folklore and in interest in oral traditions and how oral traditions are passed down in cultures and society. Effectively, there was a greater appreciation for folklore and the orality of oral cultures. So there was a kind of shift in terms of scholarly interest, and that opened up the kind of possibility for people to come at this from an oral perspective, and to say that even if we grant that Matthew and Luke were drawing on mark, and possibly another literary source, still a lot of what they might be writing down might be coming from oral tellings and retellings of stories in the early Christian community. And that is not an inherently bad thing. So there was a shift to thinking about orality and gospel traditions. However, people also in studying folklore noted that as folklore is progresses from generation to generation, infacies and stories might change. So you had this interest with the Grims fairy tales and things like that where you're writing down the stories that are out there in an oral form. But there's also a recognition coming out of all of that that these things change over time. Now if that's the case then, what causes the change? Well some people would say that the community itself shapes the way that stories get told. If the community is struggling with particular issues, the community is seeing its own demise as modern culture is coming in and increasingly taking over rural territory. Or there are crises that are being produced because of the use of certain weaponry as opposed to other weaponry. Or there's crises that are going on because of the breakdown of marriage. These kind of things make it into the way that people construct oral stories then. And though you might tell Hansel and Gretel again, the story takes on a different life as it goes down through just different generations. So this is how scholars are thinking in terms of herality. I'm going to set that aside for just a few minutes and we'll come back to that. In my mind, the shift from literary to herality is actually very helpful here. Because if you look at analogous situations in the first century, one of the major analogies we have in first century Judaism in terms of the passing down of teachings is from rabbinic tradition, the rabbis. I don't remember, I think I asked you to memorize when the Mishnah was written, right? 200, very good, 8200. It was written at that time, well, if you read through the Mishnah, it tells again and again of, you know, Rabbi Akiva said this, or the school of Huleil said this as opposed to the school of Shammai, or it'll talk about Rabbi Yoseb and Yoseb and Yoseb. And all of those people are figures that lived 100 and 200 years before the time the Mishnah was written, okay? So there's still telling stories not just of what they did, but what they specifically taught. And if you go in that context, you realize that the rabbinic teaching was in a very much an oral stage through the first century and into the second century AD. As part of my job as a young Rabbi, a student, would be not just to learn the written law, especially the Torah, the first five books in the Bible, the Pentateuch, but also to learn the oral law. So Charlie passes on to me, the great Rabbi, Charlie passes on to me a tradition. I remember what Charlie said. I associate it with Charlie's name, and I try and pass it on to my own disciples and pupils, so that it goes several generations until the Mishnah is written, and the great Rabbi sits down and writes the whole Mishnah from these oral recollections of what's come before. He is sure, in the first century, you had a very oral environment for teaching in Judaism. That was the rabbinic paradigm. And to the degree that Jesus was himself seen as a Rabbi passing down, not writing down, but passing down oral sayings that were then to be remembered by his students, it seems to me that thinking of life in an oral way is helpful here, okay? It is not to say that you can't have written sources, but it is to say that those written sources came down parallel to oral sources. Now, I want to evaluate then some of these issues with regard to source theories, but in doing so, I'd like it if you would turn with me to Luke chapter 1, and let's look at the prologue there. Luke chapter 1 verses 1 through 4, this is the famous prologue of the Gospel of Luke, okay? It starts off as follows, inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as those who, from the beginning, where eyewitnesses and servants of the Word have handed them down to us, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in a consecutive order. The translation there is very difficult as to what he means, whether it's just kind of in a logical order or in a right order, in an order that rightly recounts the gist of what Jesus was all about. But to, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent theophilus, so that you might know the exact truth about the things you have been taught. Let me make a few comments on this passage. First of all, he is writing to theophilus. There's a variety of options as to what theophilus is here. This is a word that comes from theos, God, and then filet or something, friend of God, or a lover of God, but especially a friend of God in this context. So the word itself has a meaning, a friend of God. At the same time, it was fairly common practice among Jews and antiquity, and it went to Christians and antiquity as well, to have names like this that meant something. So theodotus was a gift of God, a theos dotas, a gift of God, not kind of thing. So this could very well be a person's name, or it could be kind of a designation for a kind of title of the kind of attitude the person should have coming into this. Of those two options, I think it more likely that he is writing to a particular individual with the idea that he's writing a gospel that he will be read by a lot of people, but he's writing it and dedicating it to this individual named theophilus. Very possibly then, theophilus might have paid for the writing process because writing implements are very expensive, the pyrus was expensive, etc. Possibly also paid for the distribution of the gospel, making copies of it which would have also been very expensive. All of that is fairly hypothetical, but I see him writing to a particular individual. By the way, the prologue to the book of Acts also mentions this man theophilus, which goes to show a certain amount of unity between Luke, the gospel, and Acts, the same author, probably the same audience, etc. So there's a kind of a side on that. The second thing that I want to draw out of this is this person is intelligent and intends to write good sound history. He is interested in truth, not only truth, but exact truth, so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught. He's interested in creating a gospel that gives you an accurate sense of when on in the life of Jesus. And he's going to do so through very careful research and investigation, verse 3. It seems fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully. We're not dealing with somebody who sat down and said, you know, I want to just crank out something about Jesus and make him into the person I want him to be. He's going to carefully investigate everything. So what I want you to get from this prologue as well is a sense of the respect that we should have for this author as a historian, indeed, as well as a theologian. The last thing that I want to say about this is he was aware of the people who came before him in the process. You have basically two groups in verse 1 and verse 2, verse 1, and as much as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us. This does not overtly say written account. It could be an oral account and an oral tradition, but it seems to me more likely to be a written account. So he's saying there are written accounts that have come before me. Verse 2, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word have handed them down to us. Now that word of handing them down is much closer to oral tradition, but this isn't just oral tradition that's been passed down through like generation after generation and is very removed from people who actually saw who Jesus was. But the author here is aware of the need to look to eyewitnesses and it's eyewitness oral tradition that takes precedent over other things. Now what I draw from that, then, is that it is possible that Luke overtly was aware of literary sources. It does not explicitly say that he used them here, but he was certainly aware of them. And he's also aware of an oral tradition that is associated with eyewitnesses and the people who are classified as the servants of the word. And then he's going to use all of this responsibly. Therefore, I am not inherently opposed or opera-ri opposed to literary source discussion because Luke himself seems to allow that. There were other literary writings before him, some of which he may have carefully investigated and drawn upon for his narrative. On the other hand, I think it unwise of us to assume that all of this happened purely on a literary level by the time it got to Matthew and Luke. Luke himself is very aware of oral tradition and especially of that that goes back to eyewitnesses and is worthy of respect. So if you were to push me on this right now, I would head towards something closer to the two-source Mark and Priority solution with substantial oral tradition in the mix. So much so that the oral tradition, even when Luke, for instance, is using a written source that the oral tradition may cause him to choose words that are at variance with his source in Mark, if he's using Mark. And then that gets back to the beginning of the hour where I showed you that synopsis that you couldn't see the colors on and tried to describe why it is that you have basically the same thrust of a narrative in terms of a leper being cleansed, et cetera, at times verbatim wording between the three gospels, but it more often than not, the specific wording varies between the gospels. And most often, frankly, when it varies, it's the selection of a synonym that means basically the same thing, but it's still it's a different word than what you have in Mark that suddenly Luke is using or something like that. And it seems to me if we have a mix of kind of written sources and oral sources, that can help account for what we see going on kind of on the ground in a synopsis in the Greek of Matthew Mark and Luke, all right? I don't think that's something to be scared of is something to recognize that these early gospel writers were aware and careful in their approach to their sources, right? Any questions? Oh, okay. When you talked earlier about these are written in the 2nd century and then different communities responded to different things, you seem to be bringing up specific things, specific arguments that have been made. I'm going to get there in just a second. When we do source, and then we're going to go to form criticism, it'll come up with form criticism. Very good question, and I'll lead us to what I'm about to say now. Isn't it possible that the Q is simply the oral tradition? Q could be the oral traditions. I would certainly acknowledge that as a possibility, yeah. And I mean there might be things we could consider that aren't even here, so it's possible that Mark, Matthew, and Luke are drawing on an earlier literary source, I'm just completely hypothetical. And there's no church tradition to support this at all, but say Peter wrote something down. You know, they could all be drawing on that. So I think our proposals have to be viewed with a certain amount, I mean we have to be somewhat tenuous in any of these proposals. But it is possible that Q represents a very strong oral tradition. And by the way, similar wording can also be accounted for in oral tradition. There's been some wonderful work done on oral tradition in the rabbis showing that they were very careful to maintain wording and interested in passing down accurately traditions that came before. And it's also important to realize that we live in the 21st century and so we don't live in an oral context anymore. So we don't have a lot of respect for it because I don't know about you, but you know somebody says it, and like five minutes later I can't recount the exact wording, right? Because I'm so used to having a written thing in front of me, if I need, if I'm interested in exact wording, you know I pull out the book and I point to the page, right? Instead of having a honed memory skill that is used to when Rabbi Charlie says something being at sticks, and I'm going to be able to say it verbatim, not just five minutes from now, but 20 years from now and for the rest of my life, and then I'm going to train other people to be able to do the same. And we need to recognize that that's the kind of environment that Jesus is working in as much closer to that than what we have. And if we do that, then we have a higher respect for kind of the orality of tradition there. Hypothetically, if Q existed, if we had it, would it be in the canon? If Q existed hypothetically, well all of these hypothetical canon questions are just that, hypothetical. If we found Q, would we know that we have it? That's one question. And then secondly, I would not reopen the canon in general, and even more pristine form of that question would be, we know that Paul wrote letters that we don't have in the canon. He even refers, for instance, to the second Corinthians to previous letters. And so we know there's stuff that's not. If one of those letters, surface that we thought, possibly could be written by Paul where we add that to the canon, well, frankly, if that ever happened, there would be significant discussion there. And I'm not sure how it would come out. But at this end of things, I'd say, first of all, anything that came out, I'd be highly skeptical of at this stage. And then secondly, reopening the canon, I mean, the early church might have known what they were doing and not including something in the canon, as well as including in what they did in the canon. And so I'd be very hesitant to change the canon in any respect. Good question. Uh-huh. Couldn't Q go back into the scene, prior to you were in there, the first diagram? Right. Couldn't you have something like, well, here, it's possible. Yeah. I'm not sure exactly how you would draw it. But for instance, you could modify the Augustine diagram. Looking at first diagram. Yeah. You could modify the Augustine proposal to say that Matthew and then Q came out of it. The whole reason that you need a Q in theory, and it's a theoretical construct, but the whole reason you need it is to explain these strong agreements at time between stuff that's in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark. And so that's how it kind of fits in there, something like that. By the way, um, you want to hear some scholarship that I'm very skeptical of, and they're very responsible, intelligent people doing this, but there's a whole lot of people out there interested in the theology of Q, I mean, there's book after book being written now about the theology of Q. Now I think that's just strange, because what you have is a hypothetical source, that the only way that we can even postulate its existence is based on the stuff that's in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark. We therefore, even if it's right, don't know the whole of what's in Q. We only know the part of Q that's in Matthew and Luke. And by the way, there could be stuff that's in Luke that goes back to Q that's not in Matthew, but we wouldn't even know it. So reconstructing Q is a, I mean, you're chasing after the wind there, and then what people have done is they've taken Matthew and Luke, and they put it together, and they say, okay, this is Q, so let's study the theology of this. Well, I mean, it's just such a strange endeavor, I was very odd, but there are a whole scholars that are devoting 20 and 30 years of their life to doing that, and I, you know, it's kind of like, well, okay, you do what you want to do, but that just doesn't seem very fruitful to me. Okay, let's move into source form and redaction criticism in our discussion about. What is source criticism? Well, in a sense, source criticism is what we've just done right here, okay? There are several still on the table viable proposals, especially the last three, the grease block hypothesis, the two source and the four source. These are still living discussions now among scholars, but part of the aim of source criticism was to delineate what were the sources used by Luke, for instance, if we were to say that he had sources. And their source criticism, again, is focusing now on literary sources, not oral sources, but literary sources. So in a sense, formulating these diagrams is doing source criticism, but another aspect of source criticism is once you have your diagram, it's then coming to, say, Luke and then parceling out the material and Luke between whether it belongs to Mark or Q or L, okay? And that means taking individual stories and saying verses 1 and 2 come from Q, verses 3 through 5 appear in Mark, so they must be from Mark, verses 6 and 7 is distinctively Luke and so it must come from L. That's source criticism practiced in all of its glory. So there are a number of commentaries, for instance, that will do this. I picked up just a few books that are on my own shelf and there are a number of others downstairs in the basement of the library that would do something like this, so. Here is Joseph Fitzmire, who is a very fine scholar, but working on the Gospel of Luke and his two volume commentary on the Infancy Narrative. Listen to how he frames his questions. I guess what I'm really asking you to look at is, or listen to, is how he assumes what are his assumptions when he approaches the text, because I want you to be able to open a book downstairs when you're asked to write a paper on Prodigal Son, and so you pull off several commentaries, Luke commentaries on the Prodigal Son, and suddenly they'll start doing things that just seem really strange to you, but in a sense it's because you haven't properly understood what their assumptions are. So here's an assumption of somebody who's interested in sources. Whether Luke composed the Infancy Narrative all in one draft, a first form of it, and later made some additions, may remain moot. One opts for the latter. The absence of a tight connection between the Magnificat and its Context, and the Benedictus and its Context, might suggest that at least three passages were added at a later date than the rest. You see, the whole way he's discussing it is, he's not interested in the text of Luke as you have it. He's interested in the order that the material came to Luke, okay? And so that's how he's framing that. And he has his own solution that he presents later. Again, in just a few seconds I flip through and I came to another passage that is helpful. And here we're on Luke chapter 4 and the Nazareth visit. The Luke in form of the story of the Nazareth visit owes its inspiration to Mark 6-1-6-A and in verses 16-22-24, the wording probably comes from Mark. As for the rest, verses 17 through 21, 23, 25 through 30, one may debate whether they are derived from Luke's private source, L, or to be ascribed to Luke in composition, in other words, he made it up himself, okay? And then he goes on, the various suggestions have been made because the story in his present form is, quote unquote, obviously conflated. This sequence of sentences is not smooth. The Markin form of the story was classified form critically by Boltman, that was into form criticism. In the expanded Luke in form, the episode might still seem to belong to that category, having however multiple pronouncements, etc. So what he's doing then is he's working his way through and he has this synopsis in front of him. He has this multi-column thing in front of him and he compares Luke to Mark and where Luke, the stuff that Luke has isn't in Mark, it's got to be coming from a different source and so he starts trying to trace out the sources. That is source criticism. Well, I think what do we do? I think we have to acknowledge that, first of all, I'm going to critique each of these as we go along, but we first of all have to acknowledge that it is based on a fairly hypothetical construct here, and that even where he might vary, vary, encodes from Mark, he might be having some very good oral tradition. The whole thing might come from oral tradition, he's not even looking at Mark, you know. So to do this is a bit of kind of scholarly navel gazing and you'll repage after page of this. Well, I just want you to look at the text, man, you know. And it's very hypothetical, et cetera. It is also somewhat dismissive. So you heard that comment in there about if the stuff's not from Mark, did he get it from Luke or is it Luke's own composition, almost as if it's not as reliable. And so somewhat dismissive. Now frankly, there are some scholars with some very evangelical tendencies, and Fitzmire is actually more conservative than many, and part of his goal through all of this is actually to vouch save the accuracy of the Gospels at times, to say he got this from Mark's who's got to be good, and it doesn't seem to be just his own composition because it seems to come from L, so it has a long legacy, so therefore we can trust the historicity of this account. So he might be using some assumptions I wouldn't agree to try and defend something I very much agree with, named the historicity of the narrative. But that's source criticism, so you should be aware that that's going on in a lot of the stuff that you get in our basement and in our reference self of the library. Any questions on source criticism? Let's move on to form criticism. Some criticism was largely based on the thought and the assumptions of source criticism, but it shifted it to an oral playing field. So even here you would see with Joseph Fitzmire's take on Luke, that he's willing to talk about Mark and about L, but he's interested in effectively also classifying certain narrative stories in terms of their folklore category. So I mentioned just briefly there that Boltman classified this one's story as and then I stopped because I didn't want to leave this in there. The idea of form criticism is that in addition to having these literary sources you had quite a lot of oral sources going on, but there was a lot of time between when Jesus lived and when everything was written down. And during that time, these oral stories made it into different communities and contexts, each with their own issues and problems, and in doing so the stories and the retelling of the story became shaped to the needs of the community. That's the assumption that's going on into form criticism. The other assumption is that you can tell the kinds of things that communities were interested in because a certain community with a certain set of needs was attracted to stories about Jesus that took on a particular form. For instance, stories about Jesus that all had miracles associated with them. That would be a miracle story. And that would be a different form from say a short, quick saying of Jesus which would be a different form from a parable of Jesus which would be a different form from a long teaching of Jesus that didn't use parables. And each of these forms are distinct from one another and they arise in different circumstances or they're attracted to communities in different circumstances. That's the idea of form criticism. In particular, a community that is undergoing suffering and persecution will be attracted to stories that speak to their suffering and persecution and may actually heighten some of the elements of persecution in the story. So if you are looking at these traditions then it's not just that the person writing about their tradition is shaping their tradition but it's the communities that passed on the stories for generations up till the time that they're written down that shape the traditions. So you have certain technical terminology that comes out of that that you should know. The first is form criticism which seeks then to separate the material in the gospels into these different literary forms. Both stories, short sayings of Jesus, longer sayings of Jesus, parables, etc. And it mostly has to do with the teachings of Jesus. The forms were most interested in what Jesus actually said. Another term that's associated with this is tradition criticism and what tradition criticism tried to do was to say okay here's the teachings of Jesus. In the process it went through community X and it went through community Y and it went through community Z and then the author wrote that down. And what tradition criticism was interested in is to take these literary forms and say well the short sayings all go back to oversimplifying but the short sayings go back to community X or maybe to Jesus himself. The longer sayings especially the parables are community X, the miracle stories are community Y and then the final form is community Z. And that's what tradition history is trying to do is retell the history of the early church based on what these hypothetical communities look like. The last term you should know and this is very important and it's a German term actually is seats in Laban. Some of you who have had German will know that that means something akin to situation in life and what that refers to then is the issues that are going on in the community. For instance if the community is being persecuted that is their situation in life. And if you speak of seats in Laban then you're basically saying that situation in life then influences the way that the stories are being told. So seats in Laban describes the situation of the community at the time that those stories are passing through the community. And that's form criticism, all right. Now well let me ask you I was going to give you my critique but I'd be very interested what do you think and what are some of your thoughts at this stage. I think the need to get published is driving a lot of this. The need to get published is driving. So there's some of that, sure. Yeah. There's been the sort of deny any unity within the early church as far as their needs and what they're, but their meaning is a lot of comprised and also doesn't sort of go against the Jewish tradition, the oral tradition that you were talking about. Yeah. Very two very good points. Doesn't this assume, I mean it presumes the community, the ex and community why are quite different from one another instead of saying that there was quite a lot of unity in the early church in terms of the different communities. And so it does make that assumption. And then the second thing is you're right also to point out that it assumes this kind of radical change going on in oral tradition instead of assuming what I tried to say early which is that rabbis were very careful to pass on fairly exactly that which they heard. This is assuming that a lot of stuff is getting changed and such. Yeah. Other thoughts? Yeah. Doesn't really seem to have any regard for like what you'd see this would say is something coming from God that's set, a set order of books that are seen as given to them from God and why would you go get that and change that for your own needs with the community. Yeah. Yeah. This is very much getting behind the canon. It's almost saying that the canon is irrelevant because what you're really interested is the early history of the church. And so the final form actually is almost in the way of that. And so you have to take it apart and put everything into its right time and do that. And the result is a very low view of the canon in many respects. That's right. Any other points? Are these methods? I can understand that they're being applied to like Cinderella or something like that but is it applied also to Plato and the Quran and any other ancient writing? Question. Is it applied to Plato, Quran and other writings? Yes and no. It's not applied too much to Plato. Some of people are interested in setting Plato in terms of what Socrates really said. And it's well recognized that Plato, especially towards the later end of his writing, changed what Socrates had to say to reflect more with what Plato said. So people are asking questions like that of even Plato. But there is not the assumption that Plato is dealing with oral tradition. There's the assumption that Plato actually sat at the foot of Socrates and so at least some of this stuff goes back to Socrates and then he changes rest. So effectively you wouldn't use exactly the same techniques. So in the third regard to the Quran, there are some scholars now doing this with the Quran but they're all doing it in the West because if you try and do this in any Islamic country, literally you're asking for death sentence. So there's a strong social pressure against doing this with the Quran. But it is not fair to say that they only do this with the Bible. They do it with other works as well. So the question is, is this the right set of tools to use in studying the gospels and the Bible? I think that's the way to phrase it for us right now. And just a couple of quick points because we ought to move on. One is this does in many ways presume that you can figure all this out. It seems you can figure all this out because if you can figure all this out, it makes this a lot easier. You can figure out what's actually oral, it's not. So form criticism in many ways was dependent on source criticism and remains that way. It also, and this is perhaps the most significant critique of it, is that it assumes a whole lot of time between hearing here. Because oral tradition does change but remember when I spoke at this earlier, I talked about how if you have a story, say about Hansel and Gretel and you go from one generation to another I'm talking long expanses of time. And I'm also talking a narrative that people, they care about, but they don't care about the same as they're going to care about what Jesus said. What you're assuming in many ways here is that this guy really didn't care about Jesus and what Jesus actually said. He more cared about his community and so he made the idea and the traditions of Jesus alive for his community. But is it not possible that everybody along the way actually wanted to be very accurate in terms of what Jesus said because I don't know, maybe they thought it was the son of God. You know, they had such a respect for who Jesus is that they were careful to record accurately what he said. And I think that's a much more viable way of thinking about these things. The last comment, and this is, this is, gets us into redaction criticism, is that really in tradition history, you're interested. I'm sorry, let me see if I can get out of the way of this. You're interested in X and Y but you're not so interested in Z. And finally some scholars woke up and said, well, you know Matthew matters too. We're interested in what Matthew was thinking as well. So redaction criticism, assumed source criticism, assumed forced criticism but said instead of trying to trace out their tradition history, let's try and see what Matthew was all on about. And the way they would do this is they would take Matthew and the way he treated his sources and see what is then distinctively Matthew, what Matthew's bringing to bear and therefore what Matthew's theology is. And this gets us a lot closer to some of the things we're doing in this class. What I want to do at the beginning of our next meeting together is to flesh out more what redaction criticism is and then critique it as well. Because I think there's some benefits but I think there's some major drawbacks to that. By the way, if you want more material on this, you will know that in your Carson Mullen Wars book especially in that, I think it's the first chapter isn't on the synoptic gospels. He goes through a lot of this stuff and I'm just trying to bring it in a different context so it comes alive to you guys. But it might be worth, if you're a little bit mystified by all this, it might be worth you rereading some of that and just seeing what you can get out of that as well.