Q in Matthew: Ancient Media, Memory Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition 9780567667724, 9780567667748, 9780567667731

Citation preview

LIBRARY OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

564 Formerly Journal of the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series

Editor Chris Keith

Editorial Board Dale C. Allison, John M.G. Barclay, Lynn H. Cohick, R. Alan Culpepper, Craig A. Evans, Robert Fowler, Simon J. Gathercole, John S. Kloppenborg, Michael Labahn, Love L. Sechrest, Robert Wall, Steve Walton, Catrin H. Williams

Q IN MATTHEW

Ancient Media, Memory, and Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition

Alan Kirk

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2016 © Alan Kirk, 2016 Alan Kirk has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: ePDF:

978-0-56766-772-4 978-0-56766-773-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kirk, Alan (Alan K.), author. Title: Q in Matthew : ancient media, memory, and early scribal transmission of the Jesus tradition / by Alan Kirk. Description: New York : Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. | Series: Library of New Testament studies; 564 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005647 (print) | LCCN 2016015068 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567667724 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780567667731 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Matthew--Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Q hypothesis (Synoptics criticism) Classification: LCC BS2575.52 .K56 2016 (print) | LCC BS2575.52 (ebook) | DDC 226.2/066--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005647 Series: Library of the New Testament Series, volume 564 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications (www.forthpub.com)

For Sue, Andrew, Genevieve, and Amy

C ont ent s

Abbreviations ix Chapter 1 Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity 1. Introduction 2. Orality, Oral Tradition, and Performance 3. Orality and Writing Chapter 2 Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media: In Search of a Model 1. Elite Greco-Roman Writing and Rhetoric 2. Evangelists as Tradents 3. Material Media and Ancient Writing Practices 4. Scribes and Scholars 5. Scholars and Source-Utilization: Three Case Studies

1 1 2 9

29 29 40 42 60 73

Chapter 3 Manuscript and Memory 1. Memory in Near Eastern Scribal Education and Greco-Roman Education 2. Written Works at the Boundary with Orality 3. Scribe as Tradent 4. Mouvance: Variation in Manuscript Tradition 5. Writing, Cognition and Topoi-Organized Manuscript Tradition 6. Memory in Composition 7. Memory, Manuscript, and Synoptic Source-Utilization

93 102 110 123 131 142 148

Chapter 4 The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem: Matthew’s Q Utilization 1. Sub-Literary Q? 2. Problems in the 2DH Argument from Order 3. Scribal Mediation of Q Materials 4. Topoi Organization in Q Materials 5. Q as a Cultural Work: Memory/Manuscript Fusion

151 151 161 174 181 182

93

viii Contents

Chapter 5 Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount 184 1. Theories of Sermon Origins 184 2. Matthew’s Source Strategy in the Sermon on the Mount: Summary 189 3. Source-Utilization in Sermon on the Mount: Analysis 190 4. Matthew’s Source Utilization in the Sermon 220 Chapter 6 Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions 1. The Problem of the Transpositions 2. Matthew’s Utilization Actions and Ancient Media Conditions 3. Q Utilization Vector in Matthew 8–12 4. Matthew 4.23–5.2: Galilean Teaching and Healing Tour 5. Explanations of the Markan Transpositions 6. Matthew’s Utilization Strategy: Q and Mark in Matthew 3–12

225 228 231 235 237 242 260

Chapter 7 Q in Matthew: What Difference Does It Make? 1. Matthew’s Scribal Memory Competence 2. Normativity of Mark and Q 3. Mark and Q: Christianities in Conflict? 4. Q a Proxy for Galilean Christianity? 5. Synoptic Problem

298 298 299 300 303 306

Bibliography 310 Index of References 334 Index of Authors 347

A b b rev i at i ons

AB AJPh AJS Review ARA AnnuRevSociol AnOr ANRW ANTC ARID BA BASP BETL BJRL BJS BK BPC BritLibJ BTB CBQ CEQ CJ CognPsych ConBNT CP CPh CQ CSASE CSML CSOLC CSSH DJD Exp ExpTim FAT FzB GNS GRBS

Anchor Bible American Journal of Philology Association of Jewish Studies Review Annual Review of Anthropology Annual Review of Sociology Analecta Orientalia Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt Abingdon New Testament Commentaries Analecta Romana Instituti Danici Biblical Archaeologist Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Brown Judaic Studies Bibel und Kirche Biblical Performance Criticism British Library Journal Biblical Theology Bulletin Catholic Biblical Quarterly Critical Edition of Q Classical Journal Cognitive Psychology Coniectanea Biblica, New Testament Corpus Parisinum Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Cambridge Studies in Anglo Saxon England Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture Comparative Studies in Society and History Discoveries in the Judaean Desert The Expositor Expository Times Forschung zum Alten Testament Forschung zur Bibel Good News Studies Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies

x Abbreviations HTR HSS HSPh HUCA ICC IEJ JANESCU JAOS JBL JECS JExpPsy JHS JJP JoP JRA JRASup JRS JSHJ JSJ JSNT JSNTSup JSRC JTS LangCommun LNTS MemCogn MTSR NEB NLH NovTSup NTOA NTS OLAW OT PastPresent PhilPsych PNTC PW RGRW SAC SAOC SBAB SBLRBS SCAN

Harvard Theological Review Harvard Semitic Studies Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Israel Exploration Journal Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, Cognition Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Juristic Papyrology Journal of Pragmatics Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement Series Journal of Roman Studies Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian Hellenistic, and Roman Period Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplements Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture Journal of Theological Studies Language & Communication Library of New Testament Studies Memory and Cognition Method and Theory in the Study of Religion Neue Echter Bibel New Literary History Novum Testamentum, Supplements Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus New Testament Studies Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World Oral Tradition Past & Present Philosophical Psychology Pelican New Testament Commentaries Pauly, A. F. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. New edition G. Wissowa. 49 vols. Munich, 1980 Religions in the Graeco-Roman World Studies in Antiquity and Christianity Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization Stuttgarter Biblische Aufsatzbände SBL Resources for Biblical Study Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience

Abbreviations SciAm SHC SNTSMS SO SR/SR STDJ TAPA ThHK TRE TSAJ TSK VCSup WBC WMANT WUNT YJC ZARG ZNW ZPE ZRGG ZTK

Scientific American Studies in Hellenistic Civilization Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series Symbolae Osloenses Studies in Religion/Sciences Religeuses Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judea Transactions of the American Philological Association Theologischer Handkommentar Theologische Realenzyklopädie Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum Theologische Studien und Kritiken Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchunen zum Neuen Testament Yale Journal of Criticism Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

xi

Chapter 1 O r a l i ty , W ri t i n g , a n d M e di a I nte r face i n A n t i q ui ty

1. Introduction New insights into ancient media conditions and practices are forcing reappraisals of the standard Synoptic source-utilization hypotheses. Advocates of the major hypotheses increasingly test the feasibility of their theories against ancient media practices and invoke them in critiques of rival hypotheses. Others announce that ancient media realities spell doom for simple documentary solutions to the Synoptic Problem. This lively renaissance in the Synoptic source-critical debate has been hampered, however, not only by the haphazard reception of ancient media research in Synoptic scholarship but also by neglect of ancient scribal and scholarly practices, in particular as these pertain to the memory-based cultivation of manuscript tradition. In what follows we look for the setting for Synoptic writing among ancient media and memory practices, and (for reasons soon to become clear) specifically among the literate activities of ancient scribes and scholars. With occasional critical digressions into the Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis (FGH), we will bring the practices identified to bear on the Two Document Hypothesis (2DH) at two of its vulnerable points. The first is the 2DH’s chronic difficulty accounting on source-utilization grounds for Matthew’s rearrangement of the Q tradition. The second is his striking transpositions of Markan materials in chs. 8–12, which actually have resisted satisfactory explanation on any utilization hypothesis. We will see that Matthew’s seemingly anomalous rearrangements of double and triple tradition constitute a single solution to a formidable scribal utilization problem: how to consolidate two overlapping sources, differently ordered and of different genres, coherently into a new gospel artifact that fully incorporates the normativity of both. Beyond its import for the Synoptic Problem debate, our sourcecritical analysis will open up new angles of view onto the early transmission of the Synoptic tradition, and, by the same token, onto some vigorously disputed questions in Christian origins.

2

Q in Matthew

Owing to the problematic reception of media approaches in Synoptic scholarship, some clarifications and critique are necessary first. It is not unusual to hear claims made for the revolutionary import of ‘orality and performance’ criticism, for ‘paradigm shifts’ and the like. Others, reacting to the overreach, minimize or dismiss the significance of ancient media for work on the standard Synoptic research problems. In fact the Roman world was a mixed media environment in which orality and writing interacted extensively. Clarifying the irreducible properties of each medium, and then their interface, will lay the necessary groundwork for the sourcecritical analysis that follows. 2. Orality, Oral Tradition, and Performance The rise of interest in orality dates to the publication in 1960 of Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales. From field observations of South Slavic bards carried out with Milman Parry, Lord argued that the Homeric epics were composed in oral-formulaic performance (‘composition in performance’).1 Lord and Parry’s work provoked debates in Homeric scholarship over the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, but it also raised broader questions about the relationship of orality, literacy, and written artifacts in societies with high ambient orality. Over the next decades a large body of orality research emerged from a number of disciplines, including anthropology, medieval studies, folkloristics, oral history, and comparative literature. Scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient Judaism began to assess the orality/writing problematic in their fields. Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983) marked the programmatic application of these approaches in Synoptic scholarship.2 Research across these fields has further clarified the properties of oral tradition and forced major qualifications of the Parry–Lord model. Properly understood and applied, this body of research is highly pertinent to intractable problems in the origins and history of the Synoptic tradition. a. Actualization in Performance By definition oral tradition becomes tangible only at the moment of its actualization in utterance. Because orality studies originated in the study of epic poetry, this has come to be called its ‘performance’.3 ‘Performance’ 1. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 2000). 2. Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (repr., Philadelphia: Fortress, 1997). 3. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. xi; Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

3

is a less than ideal term: it carries the risk imputing the special practices of the bardic, epic poetry setting, and ‘composition in performance’ in particular, to all species of ‘orality’ indiscriminately. ‘Enactment’ is a more neutral term, but since ‘performance’ is established, and since it does get at an essential feature of oral tradition, it can continue to serve. In Dell Hymes’s words, it is in performance that ‘tradition [is] made manifest…communicated and made part of human lives’.4 Oral performance is ephemeral, but this does not mean that oral tradition is ephemeral.5 A tradent community’s normative tradition exists ‘inter-mnemonically’; it becomes manifest at the multiple points of its performances, a phenomenon expressed in John Miles Foley’s epigram: ‘Performance is the enabling event, tradition the enabling referent’.6 Ward Parks describes oral tradition as having ‘a continuous life at the level of latent memory, which is brought into expression intermittently through specific performance acts’.7 Both the transmission and the actualization of an oral tradition, that is to say, are grounded in memory.8 b. Traditional Register Oral tradition is ‘marked’ speech: it is demarcated from the profane realm of everyday speaking through a shift into a mode of dedicated speech that taps into what Foley calls the traditional register and John Dagenais

Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 134; Ward Parks, ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 46–61 (55); W. F. Hanks, ‘Text and Textuality’, ARA 18 (1989), pp. 95–127 (111). 4. Dell Hymes, ‘Breakthrough into Performance’, in Folklore: Performance and Communication (ed. Dan Ben Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein; The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 11–74 (69). 5. John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 59; also Hanks, ‘Text and Textuality’, p. 101. 6. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 6; similarly Vansina: ‘A performance is the normal expression of a whole tradition’ (Oral Tradition as History, p. 39). 7. Ward Parks, ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (ed. John Miles Foley; Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), pp. 511–32 (522–3); also A. N. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 75–113 (78). 8. Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as Processes of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22 (17).

4

Q in Matthew

the oral-memorial register.9 ‘An oral text’, says Doane, ‘has internal formal features differentiating it from ordinary language, generic features understood and recognized by both speaker and hearers, and markers at the beginning and ending that separate it from the aural flow around it’.10 Russo illustrates this with the ‘proverb’ genre: ‘[W]hen any speaker… uses a proverb, he or she is invoking the authority of cultural norms as embodied in inherited verbal formulas… The speaker momentarily ceases to use a personal voice in the here and now and instead uses the voice of the shared cultural tradition.’11 This shift creates a virtual space, analogous to ritual space, encompassing performer and audience, for the encounter with tradition. The tradent group is aware that a transaction with its foundational traditions is underway, a transaction that will follow its own communicative idiom.12 c. Reaction with Social and Historical Realities It follows from its actualization in face-to-face utterance that oral tradition will react directly with impinging social and historical exigencies.13 Oral historian Elizabeth Tonkin observes that ‘tellers [of traditional oral histories] must intersect with a palpable audience at a particular moment in time and space’.14 Performer and audience find themselves enmeshed in a 9. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 87; idem, Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 105–6, 138; John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 145–6. 10. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 78; also Armin Sweeny, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 80–1, and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Literacy and Orality (ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 47–65 (50–1). 11. Joseph Russo, ‘Prose Genres for Performance of Traditional Wisdom in Ancient Greece: Proverb, Maxim, Apothegm’, in Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece (ed. Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 49–64 (53). 12. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, pp. 89–90; also idem, ‘Memory in Oral Tradition’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley, Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 83–96 (90), and Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 66–7. 13. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 13. 14. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (CSOLC 22; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 38; Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, p. 108; also Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 80.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

5

particular network of social and historical realities; in a performance, says Paul Zumthor, ‘situation and tradition are united’.15 Hanks describes this as ‘internalizing reception into the production process itself’.16 Social and historical realities are not just ‘context’ for tradition but are co-constitutive of tradition as it is actualized in a discrete performance: the cultivation of tradition is inseparable from its transmission. This does not mean, however, that tradition is merely the projection of social and ideological factors in its performance contexts. A normative tradition is in fact the more determinative factor because of its capacity to shape perception and cognition at the deepest neuro-biological level. d. Multiformity Oral tradition’s situated actualization gives it its most emblematic property: variation, or more technically, multiformity.17 To be sure, a certain amount of variation is random, arising as a matter of course across the iterations of an oral tradition. But much of it is semantic – expressing the symbolic potential of the tradition, driven by the tradition’s sensitivity to social and historical context. Here we see the oral medium’s innate property of variability harnessed to essential cultural tasks. Tradition constitutes a tradent community’s cultural memory: the deposit of narrative and moral materials formative of its identity and ethos.18 Multiformity expresses the very life of the tradition, enabling it to speak authoritatively within the shifting historical frameworks of its tradent groups.19 15. Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction (trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy; Theory and History of Literature 70; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 22. Zumthor is describing the second of the ‘two axes of social communication’, the first being ‘that which joins the speaker to the author’, i.e. to the originator or fount of the tradition. This is important for grasping the powerful cultural effects of tradition enactment: it unites, in a participatory manner, the audience with the source and originating events of the tradition. 16. Hanks, ‘Texts and Textuality’, p. 112; also Øvind Andersen, ‘Oral Tradition’, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; JSNTSup 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991), pp. 17–58 (19); Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 72; Hymes, ‘Breakthrough into Performance’, p. 19. 17. Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 69; also Lord, Singer of Tales, p. 125. 18. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 141–2. 19. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 103; Andersen, ‘Oral Tradition’, p. 29; Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 88; eadem, Oral Poetry, p. 142; Lord, Singer of Tales, p. 101. Jack Goody rejects the Saussurean langue/parole model for explaining multiformity. The Saussurean model locates the forces generating multiformity in the so-called deep structure of the tradition, rather than in the tradition’s contingent

6

Q in Matthew

Jan Assmann notes that a tradent group does not ‘hear’ variation in oral performance as such but as a Wiederholung, a Wiedervergegenwärtigung of the tradition. It is the written medium, with its visual, material properties, that makes variation evident. The written medium invites operations of a different sort upon the tradition. Nevertheless, ‘[i]n der Welt der mündliche Überlieferung ist das Innovations- und damit Informationspotential von Texten gering. Sie halten sich nur dann im kulturellen Gedächtnis, wenn sie weitgehend bekanntes zur Sprache bringen.’20 Equally innate to oral tradition are its countervailing strategies for stability.21 In fact it is the twin axes of ‘variation’ and ‘stability’ that define the phenomenology of oral tradition. e. Oral Genres as Mnemonic Strategies Oral tradition is manifest in a cultural repertoire of genres.22 In predominantly oral societies, memory is the medium for the transmission of essential cultural knowledge. Individuals emerge as performers by virtue of having internalized a group’s salient traditions and the cultural repertoire of genres.23 These genres are a set of mnemonic strategies that maximize the memorability and hence the stability of the tradition while enabling the flexibility that give it its responsiveness to new situations.24 David Rubin analyzes oral genres as ‘systems of multiple constraints’ (for example the schematic form of the genre itself and its typical motif configuration) that are easily assimilated and supply cues to memory.25 engagement with the realities of the community (The Interface Between the Written and the Oral [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], pp. 296–7). 20. Jan Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte im Spannungsfeld von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, in Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen intekultureller Kommunikation und Übersetzung (ed. Andreas Poltermann; Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1995), pp. 270–91 (282). 21. Ruth Finnegan, ‘What Is Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material’, in Oral Literature and the Formula (ed. Benjamin A. Stolz and Richard S. Shannon III; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), pp. 127–55 (134). 22. Vansina, Oral Tradition, pp. 79–81. 23. Ibid., p. 39; Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 78; Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), pp. 38–40. 24. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 251; also F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 81. 25. Rubin, Memory, pp. 119, 300, et passim; also Sweeny, A Full Hearing, pp. 83, 96–7.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

7

Genre-embodied constraints and cues combine to relieve memory of the impossible cognitive burden of memorizing masses of detail.26 Memory mastery of oral tradition is not a matter of rote verbatim reproduction but of accurate recall through competence in a genre system of constraints and cues.27 Multiformity characterizes oral tradition because genre-embodied configurations of constraints and cues permit more than just a single, exact solution in the realization of a tradition.28 Genres, moreover, may be found on a spectrum running from low-constraint genres, which permit a wider range of variation and improvisation, to high-constraint genres that permit only limited variation, though Rubin stresses that ‘in all genres the overall constraints are enough to prevent drift beyond local variation’.29 f. Transmission of Cultural Memory The interplay of variability and stability in tradition is not adventitious. It supports the crucial cultural function of the tradition: to sustain a tradent community’s cultural identity through the contingencies of time. The tradition sets the parameters and supplies the resources for its own variation: innovation is constrained by the material and symbolic resources of the tradition.30 Parks describes this as ‘a dialogue with memory’, Foley as the diachronic axis of tradition ‘that informs the present avatar of its identity’.31 He comments further: ‘The single performance of a traditional oral work is both something unique…and the realization of patterns, characters, and situations known to the audience through prior acquaintance with other performances’.32 Foley invokes his term ‘traditional register’ to clarify how the diachronic depth of tradition determines its ongoing enactments. Oral tradition exists immanently and latently in the traditional register that performers tap into to bring forth particular actualizations 26. Rubin, Memory, pp. 90, 101. 27. Ibid., p. 293; Foley, Theory of Oral Composition, pp. 51–2. 28. Rubin, Memory, pp. 284–5. 29. Ibid., p. 300. 30. Lord, Singer of Tales, p. 118; Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, p. 46 n. 39; Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 25–6, 54. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978): ‘He [the traditional performer] produced his own variations, but within a traditional framework’ (p. 115). 31. Parks, ‘Textualization of Orality’, p. 57; John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 2–3. 32. Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, p. 46.

8

Q in Matthew

of the tradition.33 Variation arises through bringing ‘the reverberative depth of tradition’ into vital interaction with the present realities of the tradent community.34 Each enactment, therefore, stands pars pro toto for the traditional register; each ‘invok[es]…a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself’.35 One ought not, however, attribute an inert stability to the diachronic axis of tradition while locating variation on a so-called performative surface. An adequate model for tradition accounts not only for stability across multiple performances but also for dynamism along tradition’s diachronic axis, an axis that, viewed empirically, amounts to a series of receptions. The poems of Serbo-Croatian bards, Foley says, ‘manifest both the reverberative depth of tradition and the finely worked surface of creative and original ideas’.36 An effective enactment can feed back into the tradition itself and thus into subsequent enactments. A disruptive historical crisis or calamity (exile, conquest, colonialism, genocide, and the like) may bring a community, in its quest to master the crisis, to ransack and exploit its normative tradition in unprecedented ways. The tradition registers this historical disturbance at the deepest level, and its effects run down into subsequent reception contexts.37 g. The Tradent The vectors of stability and variability intersect in the performer, the tradent, the embodiment of a community’s normative tradition. Homer, observes Lord, ‘is the tradition; he is one of the integral parts of that complex’.38 Though tradents are conduits of the tradition, they are hardly passive relays. They are the nexus at which a community’s contemporary realities intersect with its tradition. Tradents have internalized the tradition and its repertoire of genres; they are able to bring it to living expression in performance. 33. John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 10; also idem, Singer of Tales in Performance, p. 6. 34. John Miles Foley, ‘Literary Art and Oral Tradition in Old English and Serbian Poetry’, in Oral-Formulaic Theory: A Folklore Casebook (ed. John Miles Foley; New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 337–77 (365). 35. Foley, Immanent Art, p. 7. 36. Foley, ‘Literary Art and Oral Tradition’, p. 365. 37. See Ruth Finnegan, ‘Introduction: Or, Why the Comparativist Should Take Account of the South Pacific’, in South Pacific Oral Traditions (ed. Ruth Finnegan and Margaret Orbell; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 6–29 (16), on the effects colonialism on South Pacific traditions. 38. Lord, Singer of Tales, p. 147.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

9

h. Composition in Performance? Parry and Lord studied illiterate South Slavic bards performing epic poetry. They coined the expression, ‘composition in performance’, for the bardic ability to perform improvisationally through expert recourse to a cognitive inventory of narrative schemas and metrically fitting formulas.39 So influential was The Singer of Tales that for a time ‘composition in performance’ was projected indiscriminately upon all oral tradition,40 a habit that also found its way into scholarship on the gospel tradition.41 But it is now recognized that ‘composition in performance’, understood as oralformulaic improvisation, is an enactment mode specific to epic poetry, and that it cannot without qualification be taken as the index feature of oral tradition.42 ‘Homeric epic’, Rubin explains, ‘is an unusual genre in that it has only two major forms of organization or constraint: meter and theme. This has allowed an elegant formulaic system to develop, one that is not equaled in genres with additional constraints and a less strict meter.’43 A lesson can be drawn from this misstep: the performance dynamics of a particular genre and cultural setting should not be carelessly generalized to other oral genres and cultural settings.44 3. Orality and Writing a. Closing the ‘Great Divide’ Our discussion so far has focused on the oral medium. Now the written medium comes into the picture. Understanding the core properties of 39. Ibid., pp. 4, 13. 40. Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, pp. 88–9, 130–1, 157–8; Zumthor, Oral Poetry, p. 97. 41. As noted by Paul Foster, ‘Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research’, JSHJ 10 (2012), pp. 191–227 (205). 42. Finnegan, Oral Poetry, p. 80; eadem, Literacy and Orality, pp. 90, 157–8; eadem, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, p. 119; eadem, ‘What Is Oral Literature?’, pp. 144–5; Foley, Immanent Art, p. 14. Zumthor says that push-back against the exclusive oral-formulaic approach began in 1966 (Oral Poetry, p. 97). 43. Rubin, Oral Tradition, p. 104. 44. Alan Dundes, Foreword to John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. x–xi; similarly Dennis Tedlock, ‘The Speaker of Tales Has More than One String to Play On’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 5–33 (6–7); Franz H. Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 237–65 (246 n. 23); idem, ‘Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory’, NLH 16 (1984–85), pp. 31–49 (36).

10

Q in Matthew

the written medium is essential for analysis of the Greco-Roman world. Though marked by a high ambient orality and very low literacy rates, ancient Mediterranean societies were mixed-media cultures in which orality and writing interacted – we dare say, fused – in complex ways. For a long time, however, scholarship saw the relationship of orality and writing as a ‘Great Divide’. The Great Divide approach reified the two media into what Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe in her critique describes as a ‘binary opposition’: orality and writing construed as mutually exclusive and autonomous media modes, to which correspond incommensurable forms of social, cultural, and even mental life.45 Viewing orality and literacy as opposed types is a vestige of an orality romanticism, with roots in European Romanticism, which associated orality with unlettered peasant cultures supposedly characterized by face-to-face communal life, spontaneous creativity, and lack of artifice in their verbal arts, over against which stood literacy as the encroachment of rational artifice and hierarchical, hegemonic control. Aleida Assmann comments: ‘Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit haben in ihrer Formation als polare Begriffe immer wieder zu affektbeladenen, antithetischen Setzungen geführt…Unser romantisches Erbe hat… die beide Begriffe in ein Raster von Natürlichem vs. Künstlichem, Echtem vs. Verfälschendem, Authentischem vs. Nichtauthentischem einreiht… Die eine dient spontaner Artikulation, die andere ist ein Herrschaftsinstrument.’46 The influence of the Great Divide binary has waned significantly. As Larsen points out in connection with ancient Mesopotamia, Yunis and Thomas for ancient Greece, and Melve for medieval Europe, it has been difficult to find any empirical evidence for it.47 Essentializing orality and 45. Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (CSASE 4; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4; also Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 9. 46. Aleida Assmann, ‘Schriftliche Folklore: Zur Entstehung und Funktion eines Überlieferungstyp’, in Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christof Hardmeier; Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 175–93 (175). Finnegan is another trenchant critic of the Great Divide; see her Oral Poetry, pp. 23–4, 34–6, 46–7; also Rosalind, Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 6–8, 26; Matei Calinescu, ‘Orality in Literacy: Some Historical Paradoxes of Reading’, YJC 6 (1993), pp. 175–90 (177–8); and David E. Aune, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Oral Tradition in the Hellenistic World’, in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, pp. 59–106 (60). 47. Mogens Trolle Larsen, ‘What they Wrote on Clay’, in Literacy and Society (ed. Karen Schousboue and Mogens Trolle Larsen; Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1989), pp. 121–48 (143–4); Harvey Yunis, ‘Introduction: Why Written Texts?’ in Written

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

11

writing has given way to recognition that both media can be put to diverse ideological and social uses.48 The Great Divide model owes something, moreover, to the anachronistic projection of the effects of the print culture that arose in early modern Europe back upon the encounter of writing and orality in manuscript, chirographic cultures.49 b. Interface of Orality and Writing The Great Divide has been replaced by an interface model for orality and writing that takes full account of their distinctive media properties.50 Writing and orality are distinct communication ‘channels’ that when present within a Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (ed. Harvey Yunis; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–14 (9); Thomas, Literacy and Orality, p. 17; Leidulf Melve, ‘Literacy – Aurality – Orality: A Survey of Recent Research into the Orality/Literary Complex of the Latin Middle Ages’, SO 78 (2003), pp. 143–97 (158–60). See also Michael H. Floyd, ‘ “Write the Revelation!” (Hab 2:2): Re-imagining the Cultural History of Prophecy’, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), pp. 103–43 (122); Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions and Written Texts in the Cycle of Akkade’, in Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural? (ed. Marianna E. Vogelzang and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout; Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992), pp. 123–54 (129); Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in Early Medieval Society’, PastPresent 158 (1998), pp. 3–36 (35–6). 48. Melve, ‘Literacy – Aurality’, pp. 158–9. 49. Thomas, Literacy and Orality, pp. 18–19; O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, pp. 13–14, 77. Ulrich Knoop criticizes Walter Ong for over-schematizing the orality– writing distinction; his emphasis, for example, on the social ‘isolation’ of the writer ‘ist…nicht zwingend aus dem Prozeß des Schreibens überhaupt abzuleiten, sondern nur aus den Bedingungen in der Moderne’ (‘Zum Verhältnis von geschriebener und gesprochener Sprache: Anmerkungen aus historischer Sicht’, in Homo scribens: Perspektiven der Schriftlichkeitsforschung [ed. Jürgen Bauermann, Hartmut Günther, and Ulrich Knoop; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993], pp. 217–29 [218]). According to Maurice Bloch, Jack Goody worked up his ‘mentalities’ version of the Great Divide in response to his (Goody’s) structural functionalism, which correlated knowledge to social conditions, falling into disrepute in British anthropology because it could not encompass large-scale complex societies. Goody reacted by applying structural functionalism more narrowly to pre-literate societies (hence his problematic homeostatic model for oral tradition), while making literacy the ‘magic ingredient’ that distinguished smallscale from large-scale, complex societies (Maurice E. F. Bloch, How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy [Boulder, CO: West­view, 1998], p. 154). 50. Some representative examples: Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions and Written Texts’, pp. 125–36; Véronique Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit chez Galien’, Colloque la médicine grecque antique: actes (ed. Jacques Jouanna and Jean Leclant; Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres/de Boccard, 2004), pp. 199–218; Thérèse de Vet, ‘The

12

Q in Matthew

cultural sphere, even one with limited literacy, cannot be insulated from each other.51 ‘[S]cholarship over the past twenty years’, Foley declares, ‘especially field research on living oral traditions, has taught us to distrust the false dichotomy of “oral versus written” and to expect complex inventories and interactions of oral and literate in the same culture and even in the very same individual.’52 With regard to the written transmission of traditions associated with the Prophet Muhammed, Sarah Zubair Mirza observes: ‘An intense overlap exists between oral and written modes of transmission. Techniques of redaction…cannot be definitely divided between those belonging to oral and to written methods.’53 In societies where a predominant orality coexists with long-standing but limited literacy, as in the Roman world, a reciprocal feedback, or constant interaction, between the oral and written registers comes into play. This interface is always culturally and sub-culturally specific: it can show all sorts of political, sociological, ethical, and ideological complexions.54 Conversely, the interface approach calls into question the narrow correlation of writing and orality to different social strata: the positing of a monolithic literate sphere encompassing elite and scribal groups, over against which stand illiterate population groups supposedly characterized by primary orality and impermeable to the effects of literacy. Orality – rhetorically refined – was pervasive amongst elites in the ancient world, especially in their interaction with written works.55 Literacy’s effects Joint Role of Orality and Literacy in the Composition, Transmission, and Performance of the Homeric Texts: A Comparative View’, TAPA 126 (1996), pp. 43–76. 51. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, pp. 4–5; also Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 141; Thomas, Literacy and Orality, p. 5. 52. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 3. See also Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, pp. 178–9, and Sweeny, A Full Hearing, p. 1. 53. Sarah Zubair Mirza, ‘Oral Tradition and Scribal Conventions in the Documents Attributed to the Prophet Muhammed’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010), pp. 30–1. 54. Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, pp. 108, 168, 178; Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record, pp. 33–4; Parks, ‘Textualization of Orality’, p. 49; Alois Wolf, ‘Medieval Heroic Traditions and their Transitions from Orality to Literacy’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 67–88, esp. 68; Yunis, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–13; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 6–7; Richard Whitaker, ‘Orality and Literacy in the Poetic Traditions of Archaic Greece and Southern Africa’, in Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (ed. Ian Worthington; Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 205–17 (216); Sweeny, A Full Hearing, p. 66. 55. William H. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 125; Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record, p. 21; Martin

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

13

percolated down into the masses of sub-literate and illiterate population groups, where, to be sure, in the form of bureaucratic writing it registered the demands of the powerful on the resources of the weak. Mireille Corbier points out that ‘[l]’écriture pour les Romains reste…inférieure à la parole dont elle n’est en fait qu’une représentation… Evitions donc pour Rome la confusion tentante de l’oral avec la culture populaire et l’écrit avec celle de l’élite.’56 From her study of Galen’s writing practices Veronique BoudonMillot concludes: ‘[O]ral et écrit entretiennent des relations autrement plus complexes basées sur la réciprocité et la complémentarité…dans la pratique, au IIe siècle de notre ère, l’oral est devenu inseparable de l’écrit’.57 For the transmission of pharmacological knowledge in the ancient world, says Laurence Totelin, ‘we should try to understand the interaction between oral and written word’.58 Unfortunately, this has not always been the direction taken in Synoptic scholarship. c. ‘Performance Criticism’ The binary media schematic persists in Synoptic scholarship (with notable exceptions59). Recognition of the pervasiveness of orality in the ancient world has rightly brought into disrepute the so-called literary paradigm that posits a closed textual universe of reading, copying, editing, and redacting. But in thus modifying its stance, Synoptic scholarship has tended either to make a sharp contrast between oral and written modes of transmission or to set up a lop-sided orality paradigm in place of the Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7; Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction: Setting an Agenda’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 1–29 (22–3). 56. Mireille Corbier, ‘L’écriture en quête de lecteurs’, in Literacy in the Roman World (ed. J. H. Humphrey; JRASup 3; Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991), pp. 99–118 (110). 57. Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit chez Galien’, p. 204. 58. Laurence Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fourth- and Fifth-century Greece (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 17. 59. See, e.g., Samuel Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher: Didactic Authority and Transmission in Ancient Israel, Ancient Judaism, and the Matthean Community (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994), pp. 162–3; idem, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000), p. 108. Harry Gamble comments that in the early church, ‘the two media coexisted and interacted’ (Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 32).

14

Q in Matthew

literary paradigm – this despite Talmon’s warning twenty-five years ago against over-correcting to an ‘orality bias’ in biblical studies.60 A case in point is the tendency of some who work under the banner of ‘performance criticism’ to dissolve written texts into ‘orality’ and ‘performance’ in ways that fail to reckon with the irreducible properties and effects of the written medium. One not only sees orality and writing set in practical and ideological opposition to one other in a way that reinstates the old ‘Great Divide’ binary, but also an exaggerated subordination of writing to orality. ‘We need to move’, urge Joanna Dewey and David Rhoads, ‘from a literary ethos to an oral one; from silence to sound; from writing to speech; from manuscript to memory…from individual readings to embodied performance’.61 ‘Memory’, they assert, ‘was more important than manuscripts as the repository of tradition, and writing – when present – served performance’.62 ‘[O]rality and memory predominated over writing.’63 They liken the ancient Mediterranean world to ‘predominantly oral societies’ in accordance with the ethnographic classification.64 Not infrequently one hears echoes in performance criticism of an orality romanticism: orality is associated with weak and oppressed groups, writing is ideologically associated to power and hegemony.65

60. Shemaryahu Talmon, ‘Oral Tradition and Written Tradition, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period’, in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, pp. 121–58 (149). 61. David Rhoads and Joanna Dewey, ‘Performance Criticism: A Paradigm Shift in New Testament Studies’, in From Text to Performance: Narrative and Performance Criticism in Dialogue and Debate (ed. Kelly R. Iverson; BPC 10; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), pp. 1–26 (19, emphases added). 62. Ibid., ‘Performance Criticism’, p. 13, emphasis added. The same binary surfaces in Richard Horsley and Jonathan Draper’s analysis of Q: ‘The major assumption that must be challenged…is that Q can and should be dealt with as if it were a written text, as opposed to oral tradition’ (Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q [Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999], p. 14, emphasis added). 63. Rhoads and Dewey, ‘Performance Criticism’, p. 1, emphasis added. 64. Ibid., p. 21. 65. E.g. Anne Wire: people in the Roman world wrote ‘to extend one’s power, whether militarily, financially, commercially, or socially’ (The Case for Mark Composed in Performance [BPC 3; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011], p. 43). Christine M. Thomas notes that a difficulty for scholars who identify oral traditions in the Acts of Peter with female storytellers in opposition to the literate modes of the male church hierarchy ‘is that “oralist” attitudes to texts were resident in the church hierarchy as well’ (‘Word and Deed: The Acts of Peter and Orality’, Apocrypha 3 [1992], pp. 125–64 [162]).

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

15

These claims, while certainly incorporating elements of truth, stand in need of serious qualification. It is true that writing – bureaucratic writing in particular – was ancillary to the relations of domination by which the peoples of the Mediterranean were bound to the elites of the Roman Imperium,66 but one also finds scribes aligned with anti-imperial resistance and prophetic movements. Oral and written media interfaced with each other in profound ways. Memory played as extensive a role in manuscript tradition as it did in oral tradition. Ancient Mediterranean society cannot be aligned to ethnographic classification systems that neatly distinguish oral from literate societies.67 Claims that Mark and Q are transcripts of oral performances over-extrapolate the Parry–Lord ‘composition in performance’ model, which scarcely applies even to Greco-Roman poetry. Of Roman poetry in the tradition of Virgil Kenneth Quinn notes that ‘[a] poem is thought of as something that grows slowly, not as an act of inspired improvisation tied to a single occasion and a single performance’.68 ‘[I]s it conceivable’, Werner Kelber asks, ‘that [Mark’s] chirographic composition was entirely unaffected by the potentials of the scribal medium?’69 Even rhetorical declamations were not composed in performance. Indeed, so categorical a subordination of writing to orality makes one wonder why programmatic textualizations of oral materials were ever undertaken to begin with.70

66. Keith Hopkins, ‘Conquest by Book’, in Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, pp. 133–58 (137); see also Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 115, on writing and colonial administration; Harris, Ancient Literacy, p. 123, on writing and Roman administration; and Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ 81; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), pp. 494–6, on administrative writing in Jewish Palestine serving elite interests. 67. Emmanuelle Valette-Cagnac, La lecture à Rome: Rites et pratiques (Paris: Belin, 1997), pp. 307–8. 68. Kenneth Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience in the Augustan Age’, ANRW II.30.1 (1982), pp. 75–180 (87). 69. Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as Mnemohistory’, in Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber (SBLRBS 74; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 265–96 (275). 70. Among performance critics one finds various ad hoc, at times contradictory, attempts to find an answer to that question. Examples include: (1) a hegemony strategy on the part of literate groups; (2) a desire to create a visible icon of a revered tradition; (3) inscription as a ‘transcript’ of an oral performance; (4) transcription so as to train more oral performers, and the like.

16

Q in Matthew

d. Critique of the Critique Intemperate claims made by practitioners of orality methods in gospel scholarship, and particularly their tendency to dissolve writing into orality, have understandably provoked reaction and critique. Unfortunately, sometimes the critics end up simply dismissing media-critical approaches, or they acknowledge them in ways that trivialize the great differences between the ancient and modern experience of media and do not disturb the status quo ante of the standard textualist methodologies. Drawing on his expertise in manuscript artifacts, Larry Hurtado registers trenchant criticisms of performance criticism’s dissolution of written texts into orality. Manuscripts, he points out, despite their demanding script format were not mere memory aids; rather, they were read and to this end often incorporated accents, punctuation, and various other markers.71 This and much else of what Hurtado says is on point, but there are also problems in his critique. While acknowledging the oral and aural dimensions of ancient literate practices he downplays their implications. A ten meter scroll, he notes, has the diameter of a wine bottle and therefore would not ‘have presented any greater difficulties than do books of corresponding sizes today’.72 The issue, however, is not the dexterity one might develop in handling the artifact but that scroll and script formats did not facilitate search and location operations. Similarly, while Hurtado correctly points out the pervasiveness of the written word in the ancient world, he passes over the steeply terraced gradations and uneven distribution of literate skills. That urban sub-elites commissioned paintings and reliefs depicting their literacy indicates that they regarded it as a mark of special distinction. ‘ “Letters” or the like’, Robert Kaster points out, ‘recurred as one of the three or four most important marks of status’.73 More than half the tablets recovered from Pompeii were written by third parties. ‘[I]l est bien probable que la majorité [of the population of Pompeii] était [illiterate]’, comments Robert Marichal, ‘et il faudrait d’autre part tenir compte des scripteurs que leur orthographie et leur écriture permettent de considerer comme semi-analphabètes’.74 Rafaella Cribiore notes that while Egyptian 71. Larry W. Hurtado, ‘Oral Fixation and New Testament Studies? “Orality”, “Performance”, and Reading Texts in Early Christianity’, NTS 60 (2014), pp. 321–40 (329, 334–5). 72. Ibid., p. 329. 73. Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 27, noting the frequency of its mention on grave epitaphs. 74. Robert Marichal, ‘Les tablettes à écrire dans le monde romaine’, in Les tablettes à écrire de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne (ed. Élisabeth Lalou; Turnhout: Brepols,

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

17

society was ‘profoundly literate in the sense that most people were familiar with literate modes in some way…most of the population was still illiterate or semi-literate’ and depended upon the few with some literate skills to broker access to writing.75 Writing ran along administrative networks down into lower social strata. This engendered a category of people Ann Hanson describes as ‘semi-literates’: local individuals who had gained an ability to recognize the formal conventions and make out the vocabularies of the small assortment of predictable bureaucratic genres and perhaps laboriously trace out Greek letters, that is, a level of functional literacy adequate to broker access to these kinds of documents.76 ‘[L]a civilisation romaine’, Emmanuelle Valette-Cagnac says, was one ‘dans lesquelles l’écriture existe, mais où ses potentialités sont encore inégalement exploitées’.77 Ability to read monument inscriptions, for example, was for many a matter of ‘la memorisation des formules le plus usitées’, a level of literacy that sufficed for most to participate in civic life.78 Subliteracy and illiteracy would not have been experienced as a disability, as it is in modern literate society, for ancient society carried out most of its everyday activities quite well without letters.79 Graffiti hardly support inferences to widespread text literacy.80 Against the notion that all written texts were orally performed Hurtado notes that ‘silent reading’ was well attested for the Roman world, 1992), pp. 165–85 (177). Citing the study of R. P. Duncan-Jones (‘Age-rounding, Illiteracy, and Social Differentiation in the Roman Empire’, Chiron 7 [1977], pp. 333–53), Kaster points to widespread ‘age-rounding’ (giving the age of the deceased in multiples of five) on tomb epitaphs in the western Empire. Age-approximation of this kind correlates to high illiteracy rates in contemporary underdeveloped societies. He comments: ‘The observation appears all the more suggestive when one considers that a survey of inscriptions can only include those able to afford a tombstone’ (Guardians of Language, p. 36). 75. Rafaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Greco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 4. 76. Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Ancient Illiteracy’, in Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, pp. 159–98 (160); also Hopkins, ‘Conquest by Book’, pp. 151–2. 77. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture à Rome, p. 18. 78. Ibid. 79. A point made by Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 41, and M. C. A. Macdonald, ‘Literacy in an Oral Environment’, in Writing in Ancient Near Eastern Society: Papers in Honour of Alan R. Millard (ed. Piotr Bienkowski, Christopher Mee, and Elizabeth Slater; Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 426; New York: T&T Clark International, 2005), pp. 49–118 (85). 80. Ibid., p. 106, on the graffiti of Nabatean desert nomads – to be sure, an imperfect analogy to urban graffiti in the Greco-Roman world, but instructive nonetheless about the limits of inferences to literacy that can be drawn from graffiti.

18

Q in Matthew

citing Valette-Cagnac’s work on ancient Roman reading in support. This is not exactly what she says, however. She rejects the ‘l’opposition binaire lecture silencieuse/lecture sonore’.81 Rather, ‘il valait mieux parler de lecture à voix basse que de lecture muette… Dans la lecture, il y a toujours du son, même s’il est plus ou moins audible.’82 Ancient reading instruction aimed toward the expressive oralization of a text, in contrast to the valorization of silent over oral reading in modern education.83 The world of texts, writing, and reading was permeated by orality: ‘Il y a dans les textes anciens, écrit pour être dits ou plutôt tissés par la parole, des affleurements permanents d’oralité.’84 Hurtado does not adequately reckon with this complex media reality. Likewise, he opposes ‘memory’ to ‘reading’ and in general seems to have no place for memory in his media framework.85 Ironically, he appears to have adopted performance criticism’s narrow correlation of memory to orality and its erroneous setting of both in opposition to writing. The second- and third-century manuscript evidence for early Christian lectionary and textual practices that he invokes is scarcely able to render Matthew and Luke’s use of Mark (and Q) intelligible. Clearly, other ground rules, a more differentiated set of media practices, are at work in the transmission of the gospel tradition in the first century. e. Over-oralization of Synoptic Source Relationships Among performance critics Rafael Rodríguez and Werner Kelber represent a more balanced approach. They are particularly sharp and convincing in their critique of conceptions of Synoptic source relations as closed circuits of copying and editing. Nevertheless, their tendency is to oralize Synoptic source relationships in ways that veer close to the old Traditionshypothese. A binary opposition between ‘literary’ and ‘oral’ appears repeatedly in Rodríguez’s analysis. The gospel texts, he says, ‘are instances of the ambi­ ent Jesus tradition rather than editions or redactions of each other’.86 The gospel traditions were ‘primarily accessed as oral phenomena rather than written texts’.87 The written texts ‘appear as actualizations of the tradition 81. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 50. 82. Ibid., p. 70. 83. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 84. Ibid., p. 307. For Valette-Cagnac the practice of recitatio is diagnostic of ancient interaction of orality and writing. 85. Hurtado, ‘Oral Fixation’, p. 339. 86. Rafael Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (LNTS 407; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), p. 111 (the italicization of ‘rather than’ is mine). 87. Ibid., p. 32, emphasis added.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

19

rather than reactions to or editions of each other’.88 Rodríguez conceives individual gospels as immediate actualizations, ‘independent, embodied expressions’, of an ambient corpus of Jesus tradition that exists as ‘an abstract traditional potentiality’.89 He draws here upon Foley’s important concept of the ‘traditional register’ that performers tap into for a particular actualization, or performance, of an ambient cultural tradition. The problem is that Rodríguez’s pronounced oral/written binary prevents him from finding a place for written tradition in the traditional memorial register. Accordingly, while he is able to deliver a robust account of variation in the synoptic tradition, he struggles to explain, and therefore is forced to marginalize, its patterns of agreement, and his case studies are mostly of low-agreement parallels. While not going so far as to deny, for example, Luke’s knowledge of Mark, Rodríguez oralizes the relationship: ‘Luke has not redacted Mark so much as he has retold Mark’.90 Though he professes to ‘not preclude a literary relationship between the gospel texts’,91 such plays a role in his account only when transposed to an oral key. This criticisms ought not overshadow how much Rodríguez gets right. The notion of the ‘traditional register’ is essential for any work on the history of the tradition. It is hard to improve on Rodríguez’s description of how written works like the gospels are generated within a wider memory field of tradition. He grasps the instrumental role of memory in the Evangelists’ appropriation of the tradition, their deep internalization of the tradition. There is no questioning his point that oral utilization practices are a major factor in the rise of variation in Synoptic parallels. What he needs is a model that, rather than marginalizing, can accommodate the powerful effects of the written medium.92 Recognizing the intimate configuration of ancient orality, writing, and memory practices, Werner Kelber is similarly led to reject the adequacy of narrow copy-and-edit models for the Synoptic source relationships, like Rodríguez going so far as to question the utility of the standard sourcecritical hypotheses: In their full implementation these diagrammatic models attribute the texts of Matthew and Luke in their entirety to literary sources, thereby conveying the impression that the composers of these gospel texts are intelligible 88. Ibid., p. 224, emphasis added. 89. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 90. Ibid., p. 149, original emphasis. 91. Ibid., p. 111. 92. In his recent Oral Tradition and the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), Rodríguez adopts a more interactive media approach.

20

Q in Matthew largely as ingenious jugglers of sources, and that their compositions result from the combination of other texts. There is no room in this model for orality, for memorial processes, for social engagement, for mental compositional activities, and for extratextual sensibilities of any kind.93

None of the points Kelber makes here can be disputed. He is too pessimistic, however, about the potential of source criticism to accommodate media and memory dynamics. Ancient writers manifestly used and combined written sources. The problem is that Kelber, not without reason, tends to identify Synoptic source-critical approaches with print-culture mentality per se, and so (not unlike Rodríguez) is inclined to distinguish source criticism itself from tradition and memory dynamics. Kelber’s own further reflections point the way out of the impasse, for he also recognizes the intimate connection that exists between memory and manuscript tradition. ‘Deeper knowledge’, he says, ‘of the dynamic interfacing of memory and manuscript would bring us closer to finding a resolution to the intricate issues that lie at the heart of the Synoptic Problem’.94 In this connection he proposes the following analytical task: ‘How can one imagine – technically, scribally, orally memorially, compositionally – a scribal authority plugging into multiple social, ideational, and historical matrices, while at the same time engaging in near-verbatim copying of some texts…while all the while engaging in a fairly focused compositional activity?’95 He recognizes, in other words, that an adequate source-critical model will be found in the still poorly charted territory of scribal memory competencies. f. ‘Oral-derived’ Works Written artifacts produced in cultural contexts with high ambient orality will reflect this multi-media environment.96 Foley coins the term ‘oralderived’ for texts that display complex interactions of orality and writing, but he applies it more specifically to ‘works that reveal oral-traditional features but have reached us only in written form’.97 He summarizes:

93. Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism’, OT 17 (2002), pp. 55–86, esp. p. 71. 94. Ibid., p. 81. 95. Ibid. 96. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 3; also Finnegan: ‘The trend is to move away from simplified models of encounters between two “different” streams (oral and written) to looking at the complex processes by which texts are shaped by a series of influences and constraints’ (Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, pp. 178–9). 97. Foley, Immanent Art, p. 15.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

21

We can no longer afford to settle for either side of the Great Divide model, for to do so is to turn away from the complex reality of our ancient and medieval texts… I would advocate…evolving a theory or model that explains the complex, hybrid nature of the work rather than seeks to reduce it according to the artificial dictates of one or the other school…a comprehensive theory of textual interpretation that…takes active account of both the oral and the written dimensions of such texts. The goal is to reinvest the textual artifact with something approximating its original complexity in the transitional world from which it comes.98

The ‘oral-derived’ rubric allows a spectrum of ways and proportions in which writing and orality might configure with each other in the origins of a work.99 It avoids binary, reductive analyses that construe the pertinent phenomena as either oral or literary.100 These include labeling works ‘transitional’, ‘intermediate’, or ‘residually oral’ texts, as though they amount to stages in an idealized linear progression from orality to literacy.101 In the ‘oral-derived’ framework, orality and literacy are jointly constitutive of written artifacts.102 (1) Oral Performance to Written Contextualization. An important category of ‘oral-derived’ texts are those that originate in scribal projects that shift oral traditions, actualized only in utterance, into the written medium with its material, spatial, and visual properties – a materiali­zation of the tradition that has far-reaching ramifications. As Aleida and Jan Assmann explain, 98. John Miles Foley, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Interpretation’, in Doane and Paster­ nack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 34–45 (37); also Paul Zumthor, ‘Body and Perfor­mance’, in Materialities of Communication (ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer; trans. William Whobrey; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 217–26 (221). 99. Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, pp. 210–11; Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 169; Whitaker, ‘Orality and Literacy’, pp. 209–11; Doane, ‘Oral Texts’, p. 80. Ferdinand Hahn expressed this principle in his 1987 article, ‘Zur Verschriftlichung mündlicher Tradition in der Bibel’, ZRGG 39 (1987), pp. 307–18 (315): ‘Dabei bedingen mündliche Tradition und schriftliche Gestaltung sich gegenseitig: Die mündliche Tradition prägt das Schriftwerk, die schriftliche Gestaltung wirkt sich auf das Überlieferungsgut aus’. 100. Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, p. 6; Doane, ‘Oral Texts’, p. 75. 101. For critique see Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, p. 120; Bäuml, ‘Medieval Texts’, pp. 37–8; Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions’, pp. 128–9; Christopher Eyre and John Baines, ‘Interactions between Orality and Literacy in Ancient Egypt’, in Schousboue and Larsen, eds., Literacy and Society, pp. 91–119 (112). 102. Foley, ‘Orality, Textuality’, p. 37; also idem, Immanent Art, pp. xiii–xiv; idem, Traditional Oral Epic, p. 19; Whitaker, ‘Orality and Literacy’, p. 214 (‘thorough blending of the literate and oral traditional modes’).

22

Q in Matthew Der Einsatz von Schrift als einem Medium [bietet]…die grundsätzliche Möglichkeit…kulturellen Sinn extern zu speichern… [Es] bedeutet eine t­iefgrei­fende Änderung in der Struktur des sozialen Gedächtnisses. Das Potential, das hinzukommt, besteht in der Kodierung und Speicherung von Informationen jenseits lebendiger Träger und unabhängig von der Aktualisierung in kollektiven Inszenierungen.103

Martti Nissinen describes the effects of the scribal conversion of oracles of neo-Assyrian prophets: The references to the prophets and their words in the sources…no longer belong to concrete contexts in time and space; instead, they have become part of textual contexts created by the craftsmen of the literary works and inscriptions. Even in cases that may originate from actually spoken words in concrete situations, it is the historical and ideological paradigm of the textual world that [now] serves as the interpretive framework for prophecy.104

Catherine Hezser analyzes this media shift in Talmud Yerushalmi’s codification of rabbinic oral tradition, noting that the legal counsels of the rabbis, and those of the Roman jurists codified in Justinian’s Digest, were at first transmitted orally in live legal consultations: As Mario Bretone has pointed out, an important characteristic of repondere was its orality. People would gather at the doorsteps of the [Roman] jurist’s house or approach him in the forum because they considered him the embodiment of the legal tradition. As such the jurist had the role of an intermediary between the abstract and highly complicated legal tradition on the one hand and the populace which needed to apply this tradition to specific circumstances on the other. He was both an interpreter and a creator of that tradition in that he applied older traditions to new situations and participated in the development of new traditions.105 103. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, ‘Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (ed. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg; Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1994), pp. 114–40 (121). 104. Martti Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted, and Invented: Orality and Writtenness in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 235–71 (268). 105. Catherine Hezser, ‘The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Late Antiquity: the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Roman Law Codes’, in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. 1 (ed. Peter Schäfer; 2 vols.; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1998), pp. 581–641 (584), referencing Mario Bretone, Geschichte des römischen Rechts (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 116, 140; see eadem, ‘Roman Law and Rabbinic Legal

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

23

Ugaritic literary texts originated in scribes shifting oral traditions to writing, and plaster inscriptions, dating to 800 BCE, in the east Jordan Valley, attest to the scribal collection and mediation of prophetic oracles in the Levantine area.106 Similarly, Whisenant continues, the Amman Citadel inscription ‘suggests the involvement of royal scribes in the gathering and recording of oracles’.107 This shift of oral materials into writing requires that they be organized according to some principle of coherence, even if only of the loosest kind. (2) Editorial Intervention and the Emergence of the ‘Work’ Hezser points to ‘the broader editorial procedures noticeable throughout the Yerushalmi [that] might yield results concerning the ways in which the Yerushalmi editors customarily dealt with earlier material’.108 Bernard of Clairvaux collected and then reworked oral stories of miracles performed in the name of the St. Foy following the editorial conventions for hagio­ graphy, a labor Brian Stock describes as ‘the placing of spoken testimony within a legalistic framework determined by texts’.109 In other words, projects of this sort operate with some unifying editorial policy with reference to a particular framework genre, often selected for pragmatic reasons. The ancient collectors of oral pharmacological recipes had recourse to the loose catalogue form.110 Out of the diverse oral materials arises, at some at least minimum level of coherence, an integral whole, the ‘work’, more than the sum of its parts, and with a material substratum in the manuscript artifact.111 Naturally, in the course of these operations the traditions are passed through scribal mental and conceptual filters and receive the impress of scribal patterns and habits of writing. Composition’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 144–64 (150). 106. Jessica Whisenant, ‘Let the Stones Speak! Document Production by Iron Age West Semitic Scribal Institutions and the Question of Biblical Sources’, in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production (ed. Brian B. Schmidt; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), pp. 133–60 (145). 107. Ibid., p. 145. 108. Hezser, Jewish Literacy, p. 434. 109. Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 71; see also pp. 66–7. 110. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 298. 111. For a lucid statement of this principle see Christine Hayes, ‘Halakhah le-Mose mi-Sinai in Rabbinic Sources: A Methodological Case Study’, in The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature (ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen; BJS 326; Providence: Brown University Press, 2000), pp. 61–117 (65).

24

Q in Matthew

The properties of the written medium make it possible to stabilize traditions within editorially conceived, significance-laden relationships with other constituent materials; in Aleida Assmann’s words, ‘[d]urch die Schriftlichkeit wird heterogenes Material homogenisiert und damit eine Basis zur Konstitution übergreifender Sinnzusammenhänge geschaffen’.112 This is so even when editorial policy is limited to collecting and anthologizing, which at any rate can easily shade into more complex arrangements. Hezser comments with regard to the Yerushalmi: ‘[T]he construction of discourse, that is, the juxtaposition of individual traditions and the creation of links between them are presented anonymously. While one might imagine that individual traditions were transmitted orally…the combination of these traditions and the construction of argumentation was done when they were written down.’113 In the case of inscribed law-lists from seventh-century BCE Dreros and sixth-century BCE Gortyn (in Crete), the ‘listing of laws in an “organized” way pulls them out of their contexts of pronouncement (probably in judgments) and collects the rules together in a sequential order…so that they can be rearranged, reordered, in more “logical” and consistent ways’.114 By the same token, the written medium makes possible composite works, the consolidation of different genres. Oral tradition of course need not be generically homogeneous (epic poetry, for instance, can be a framework genre for other genres, such as lists of ships), but close elaborative configuration of otherwise heterogeneous materials is evidence of editorial operations and written mediation. Martin Jaffee argues that the juxtaposition of different genres and modes of speech in m. Tamid 3.7 and m. Eruvin 10.10-14 is comprehensible as an editorially reflective operation removed from the immediacy of oral performance, which would produce more uniform formulary patterns.115 Hezser comments: ‘The image of the “mosaic”…suggested for the connection of 112. A. Assmann, ‘Schriftliche Folklore’, p. 179. 113. Hezser, ‘Codification’, p. 609. 114. Goody, Interface, pp. 107–8. Writing may intersect with orality in a trans­ cription of a particular oral event, as with Origen’s stenographers or students’ notes of philosophers’ lectures, but even in such minimalist cases material is subjected to some stylization at the moment of transcription and subsequently to further literary processing. See Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted’, p. 244, and H. Gregory Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews, and Christians (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 87. 115. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 109; see also Aune on the diverse genres brought together by Pausanias, e.g. oracles, oracle stories, thumbnail biographies, myths, sacred tales, etymologies, genealogies, miracle stories, proverbs and aphorisms (‘Prolegomena’, pp. 76–7).

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

25

originally unrelated material in the Digest [of Roman law], seems to be a good visualization model for the arrangement of the material in the Talmud Yerushalmi as well. Here, too, the editors of the sugyot combined originally independent traditions and constructed a new entity.’116 The Assyrian oracle collection (SAA 9 no. 3) described by Nissinen intersperses cultic instructions among the oracles: The first part consists of oracles of salvation and the well-being…of Assur. They are presented without introductory formulae and are followed by cultic instructions, whereas the words…of Istar in the second part are introduced by the formula, ‘The word of Istar of Arbela to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria’, and the cultic instructions are embedded in the wording of the oracles. This bisection probably reflects different phases of the enthronement ritual, the first three oracles and accompanying instructions following the cultic procession directed towards the statue of Assur and the throne room in the temple of Esarra, the following two attaching to the subsequent meal of covenant on the temple terrace. The oracles in SAA 9 no. 3 were most likely copied from individual reports of oracles proclaimed by the prophet during the enthronement rituals and joined together by the editor, who also provided the collection with brief descriptions of the cultic maneuvers at respective stages of the ritual.117

Here oracles with distinct oral origination are integrated into a written framework that brings them into stable relationships to one another and to cultic instructions genres so as to take on a new function as a script for enthronement rituals. (3) Scribal Standardization Nissenen’s and Hezser’s analyses of Near Eastern oracle collections and Talmud Yerushalmi sugyot clarify other indices of scribal appropriation of oral tradition. Nissenen summarizes the salient features of Mari oracle collections thus: Archival copies of texts intentionally designed as collections of prophetic oracles have only been preserved from the time of Esarhaddon… All four [tablets] were probably written by the same scribe… The editorial activity is visible in the standardized design of the collections, all of which follow roughly the same format. In SAA 9 nos. 1 and 2, each individual oracle is followed by an indication of the name of the prophet and the place of origin, separated by a dividing line from the following oracle…‘by the mouth of 116. Hezser, ‘Codification’, p. 623. 117. Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted’, pp. 251–3.

26

Q in Matthew Sinquis-amur, a woman from Arbela’… [I]t is clear that the editor of the collections has attempted a standardized manner of representation, which has required at least a slight stylization of the reports [ironing out idiosyncrasies of the constituent oracles], which were originally separate.118

At work are concerns for systematic concatenation and standardization of multiple, multi-sourced, and originally distinct oracles, to the ends of constructing a cohesive text. The scribe brings the oracles into line with a uniform presentation, as Nissinen puts it, ‘adjusted to necessary scribal conventions and stylized according to the prevailing customs’.119 The written medium makes possible the creation of durable semantic networks among the constituent elements of a work, and editorial activity is evident in the arrangement of materials in argumentative or deliberative patterns. Because these bring heterogeneous traditions into precise sequential and elaborative connections to one another, they are not so apt for the free transmission of the oral medium but rather serve as scripts for enactment. ‘[T]he Yerushalmi stam’, Hezser comments, ‘molds traditions of different generations of earlier scholars into a new argumentative structure’.120 Recurrence of organizational and elaborative patterns in particular points to scribal standardization: [T]he order of the material within the Yerushalmi sugyot seems to follow a certain system, from immediately relevant traditions with case stories and other narratives at the end… The fact that the ordering of material in each sugya irrespective of the tractate basically follows the same structural pattern is an argument in favor of the model which reckons with a ‘final’ editing of the Yerushalmi by a select set of collaborating editors at a particular period in time.121

The song found in m. Tamid 3.7 is embedded in ‘a pattern that appears countless times in Mishnaic legal discussions’.122 Patterns of standardization, therefore, are a reliable index of scribal mediation.

118. Ibid., p. 250. 119. Ibid., p. 244. 120. Hezser, ‘Codification’, p. 611; also Günter Stemberger’s discussion of the ordering of materials in Yerushalmi (‘Mündliche Tora in schriftlicher Form: Zur Redaktion und Weitergabe früher rabbinischer Texte’, in Die Textualisierung der Religion [ed. Joachim Schaper; FAT, 62; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2009], pp. 222–37 [232]). 121. Hezser, ‘Codification’, pp. 622–3. 122. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 106.

1. Orality, Writing, and Media Interface in Antiquity

27

(4) Cultivation of Written Tradition We see that the written medium opens up dramatically new ways of working with tradition. In being transferred to writing, tradition receives a materialized, objectified existence very different from its existence in the oral medium, where it becomes tangible only in its utterance.123 Feldman observes that writing turns the South Pacific oral genre kiyori ‘into a physical object’.124 This is the case even though the written artifact is enacted at the oral–written interface, as with the Assyrian oracle collection above. The medieval scholar Richard de Fournival viewed his escrit as visible depiction – painture – signifying and facilitating reconstitution of what was primarily auditory – parole.125 The written medium stores tradition at a remove from immediate oral realization and positions it stably within editorially conceived matrices of relations among constituent elements of the written artifact.126 In the Roman legal collections, observes Hezser, ‘connections between case stories and rules, connections between a number of case stories, and case stories followed by hypothetical continuations were literary connections made in written collections of traditions by the classical jurists’.127 As indicated by the ‘hypothetical continuations’ within the Roman collections, objectification of tradition in writing enables reflection and interpretative cultivation. In the Mari letters an oracle is combined with the sender’s ‘own opinion and interpretation of the prophecy, often placing it in a wider context and making suggestions as to how it should be heeded’.128 Incorporation in written artifacts, therefore, repositions tradition for utilization in fresh ways by the tradent community. The written medium, Jaffee emphasizes, does not alienate tradition from 123. ‘Das [Verschriften] bedeutet eine “Exkarnation” der Tradition im Sinne der Explizitwerdung und Kodifizierung eines vormals impliziten Wissens’ (Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien [Munich: Beck, 2000], p. 88; also Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 6; Bäuml, ‘Medieval Texts’, pp. 42–3; Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev, ‘On the Boundary between Studies of Folklore and Literature’, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views [ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska; trans. Herbert Eagel; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971], pp. 91–3). H. Vanstiphout makes a similar point in ‘Memory and Literacy in Ancient Western Asia’, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (ed. Jack M. Sasson; 4 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 2181–96 (2181–2). 124. Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, p. 56. 125. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1993), p. 284. 126. See Foley, Singer of Tales, p. 57; Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. 107: ‘[O]ral diffuseness’ is recast ‘into a new constellation of linguistic relations’. 127. Hezser, ‘Codification’, p. 594. 128. Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted’, p. 257.

28

Q in Matthew

orality, moving it into a separate ‘stream’, but creates scripts for oral enactment.129 The written artifact itself leads its existence at the oral–written interface, but by virtue of being externalized in the written medium the tradition is opened up to a new range of writing-based operations. In this same vein, the written medium makes variation evident and a problem in need of resolution. Variation in oral tradition is a corollary of the contingency of its realization in oral enactment settings where variants are not necessarily experienced, or ‘heard’, as such. The problem arises when variants find graphic representation in the written medium and become visible.130 Resolution of the coherence problem raised by variants in the written medium can be achieved through strategies such as adopting definitive versions, conflating, or coordinating variants within a literary framework. The literary genealogists of ancient Greece, for example, adopted these strategies to deal with the numerous oral variants found in the legendary genealogies.131 On the other hand, the oral dynamism of the tradition is not suddenly extinguished with its shift to the written medium, though our analysis of oral factors at work in the cultivation of manuscript tradition must wait for a later chapter. Our more immediate task, now that the properties of orality and writing and their interactive relationship have been clarified, is to consider the different models for ancient writing to determine which might best fit the Synoptic profile. Our particular interest in the scribal Sitz should be evident. It is necessary now to plot scribal practices on the wider grid of ancient media practices and make the case for their pertinence to Synoptic source-critical problems.

129. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 106. 130. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte’, p. 282; also Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record, p. 184. 131. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record, p. 181.

Chapter 2 S ou rce U t i l i z at i on P r act i ce s a n d A n c i en t M e di a : I n S ea rch of a M ode l

The ancient Mediterranean world was a plethora of ‘literacies’. Where among these diverse yet overlapping niches of literate practices do we find the proper analogues to the Sitz of Synoptic source utilization? 1. Elite Greco-Roman Writing and Rhetoric The authorial and rhetorical practices of the elite Greco-Roman literati are frequently taken as the appropriate model for the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. Owing to sources such as Pliny the Younger’s Letters (e.g. 1.20.9; 7.17-20), we are exceptionally well-informed about literary activities in these elite circles. This has led scholars to take the practices of this socially and culturally demarcated group as normative for all ancient composition. P. J. J. Botha, for example, describes these as the ‘methods of ancient writers’, and he finds his prototypes for the Evangelists in authors such as Pliny and Cicero, assisted by lectors and secretaries, excerpting sources, dictating drafts to scribes, reciting and circulating drafts to friends, and revising their work to rhetorically polished products.1 So consistent is his application of the model – ignoring even the source-utilization practices of the Greco-Roman historians – that he wonders how the Synoptics could even have literary-dependency relationships with each other.2 To be sure, cultural 1. Pieter J. J. Botha, ‘ “Publishing” a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism’, in The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (ed. Annette Weissenreider and Robert B. Coote; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), pp. 335–52 (343–4); also idem, ‘ “I am writing this with my own hand…”: Writing in New Testament Times’, Verbum et Ecclesia 30 (2009), pp. 1–11 (5). See also Gamble, Books and Readers, p. 94. 2. Pieter J. J. Botha, ‘New Testament Texts in the Context of Reading Practices of the Roman Period: The Role of Memory and Performance’, Scriptura 90 (2005), pp. 621–40.

30

Q in Matthew

power was concentrated in the elite literati, and the influence of GrecoRoman rhetoric was, as Teresa Morgan puts it, ‘out of all proportion to the relatively small number of literates (and the minute proportion of the population) who studied it’.3 But there are good reasons to question the privileging of Greco-Roman rhetorical and compositional models in Synoptic source analysis and to work towards a more differentiated picture of ancient orality and writing practices. Bowman and Woolf point out that the prestige of the elite Greco-Roman literary tradition has led Western scholarship to privilege elite literate practices, when in fact one finds a diversity of ‘literacies’ in the ancient Mediterranean world.4 Johnson concurs: ‘[I]t seems unhelpful to speak of “literacy” and “reading” in antiquity as though these were one thing for all groups of people and all types of text… [W]e urgently need, rather, to frame our discussions…within highly specific social-cultural contexts.’5 In moving to a more differentiated approach to ancient writing it is important to distinguish between (a) baseline media conditions that affected all trafficking with written artifacts and gave rise to a baseline set of utilization practices, and (b) Sitz-contingent practices of specific social and cultural groups – a distinction not always observed in applications of Greco-Roman rhetorical and authorial practices to the Synoptic gospels, which is why core Synoptic phenomena continue to resist reduction to this model. a. Restricted Distribution of Rhetorical Education The tertiary, rhetorical level of education was the preserve of elites; very few people actually possessed even a modicum of advanced rhetorical training. Cribiore points out that only a small proportion of the population received even an elementary education, which would give ‘only very limited reading and writing ability’.6 Of these few advanced to the ‘grammarian’ level of education, a movement Kaster describes as ‘a trickle, 3. Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge Classical Studies; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 190. 4. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, ‘Literacy and Power in the Ancient World’, in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–16 (12–15). Marius Reiser makes the same point: ‘Dabei setzen die entsprechenden Forscher ungeprüft voraus, daß die gesamte antike Literatur eine traditionsgeschichtliche Einheit mit gemeinsamen Konventionen bildet’ (‘Die Stellung der Evangelien in der antiken Literaturgeschichte’, ZNW 90 [1999], pp. 1–27 [21]). 5. William A. Johnson, ‘Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity’, AJPh 121 (2000), pp. 593–627 (625). 6. Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 131. Kaster notes these schools provided ‘utilitarian’ literacy (Guardians of Language, p. 24).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

31

not a steady stream’.7 In Egypt only the cities and ‘exceptionally large villages’ offered grammarian level instruction, and ‘as a rule, only one grammarian could be found in these centers at a time’.8 Few even of the elite entered upon rhetorical education, and few completed the full course of study.9 Of 57 known students in Libanius’s school in Antioch (fourth century CE), 35 left after one or two years of study.10 The rhetorical curriculum began with the progymnasmata, the ‘preliminary exercises’. The practice of some grammarians of introducing the elementary progymnasmata is attested for Rome but was less common in the Greek East, though Cribiore finds some evidence for it in surviving papyrus exercises in Egypt.11 Ruth Webb likewise notes that in centers without a rhetorical school, grammarians occasionally might have attempted to instruct in some of the progymnasmata, though ‘[t]o be taken through the exercises by a grammarian who had perhaps had very little experience of rhetorical composition or performance would have been a very different experience from being taught in the school of an experienced rhetor’.12 In any case, many of the students who studied in Libanius’s rhetorical school would not have progressed much beyond the first progymnasmata and thus beyond paraphrasing and grammatically inflecting a chreia.13 They left not to practice oratory but for administrative posts or other civic careers.14 These realities caution against jumping from the rhetorical handbooks to assuming any wide distribution of individuals who possessed the corresponding skills.15 Rhetorical competence was grounded in command of 7. Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 24; also Morgan, Literate Education, p. 163. 8. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 40–1; eadem, Writing, Teachers, pp. 20–1; Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 106. 9. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 187. Libanius’s students ‘generally belonged to the upper class, with the exception of the sons of a few unimportant decurians and teachers’ (eadem, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch [Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007], p. 31). On literature, and especially poetry, being the focus of the grammarian syllabus, see Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 58. 10. Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 25. 11. Bonner, Education, pp. 251–3; Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 52. 12. Ruth Webb, ‘The Progymnasmata as Practice’, in Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (ed. Yun Lee Too; Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 289–316 (297). 13. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 56, 224; Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 197–203; Webb, ‘Progymnasmata as Practice’, pp. 297–8. 14. Morgan, Literate Education, p. 197; Cribiore, School of Libanius, p. 146. 15. Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 64–5, 199; Webb, ‘Progymnasmata as Practice’, pp. 297–8.

32

Q in Matthew

the literary tradition and assimilation of the great models of Greek and Roman oratory. The cultural influence of rhetoric was certainly pervasive, but the complex, often indirect routes of its influence means the interface of rhetorical practices with a specimen of ancient writing needs to be carefully weighed, not assumed.16 b. Authorial Practices in the Elite Literary Subculture As noted, the inclination is to project the practices of the elite literary sub-culture indiscriminately upon the Synoptic Sitz. But private recitation of works-in-progress among circles of friends, though attested for Alexandrian literary circles in the Hellenistic period, does not even appear in Rome until the time of Augustus, as a ‘mutation’ in Roman society that saw eloquence move from the forum to the private residence owing to the diminution of the political role of the upper classes in the post-republican period.17 Literary creation took place within these small groups of leisured literati bound by aristocratic ties of friendship, described by E. J. Kenney as ‘the relatively small elite in which high culture flourished’.18 In the Augustan–Neronian period authors not themselves of elite origins but freedmen with outstanding literary gifts were included in circles that formed around culturally minded elite patrons; by the time of Pliny the Younger these literary milieux had become more uniformly aristocratic.19 Reading works in progress before circles of friends was part of what Marietta Horster calls the ‘ “Habitus” dieser Elite’; this required ‘die Demonstration von Bildung and Gelehrsamkeit durch das Verfassen von Gedichten oder Prosawerken in lateinsicher oder griechischer Sprache’.20 16. On this point see Simon Goldhill, ‘The Anecdote: Exploring the Boundaries between Oral and Literate Performance in the Second Sophistic’, in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (ed. William A. Johnson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 96–115 (98). 17. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture à Rome, p. 112; Catherine Salles, Lire à Rome (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), p. 115. 18. E. J. Kenney, ‘Books and Readers in the Roman World’, in Cambridge History of Classical Literature. Vol. 2, Latin Literature (ed. E. J. Kenny and W. V. Clausen; 2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3–32 (10); also Ian Worthington, ‘Greek Oratory and the Oral/Literate Division’, in Worthington (ed.), pp. 165–77 (174). 19. Salles, Lire à Rome, pp. 111–12, 122–3. Freedmen who benefited from elite patronage include Plautus, Terence, and Caecilius. 20. Marietta Horster, ‘Literarische Elite? Überlegungen zum sozialen Kontext lateinischer Fachschriftsteller im Republik und Kaiserzeit’, in Antike Fachschriftsteller: Literarischer Diskurs und sozialer Kontext (ed. Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2003), pp. 176–97 (179).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

33

Works produced in these conventicles were governed by an overt authorial ethos, by the ideal of original artistic invention, and by the accompanying desire for honor among one’s amici.21 This contrasts with the anonymity of the gospels and their orientation to the transmission of a paradosis. Recitations to friends in convivial, leisured settings formed an indispensable part of what was a social process of creating a work and revising it through successive drafts that culminated in a final, polished version that might then receive a wider circulation.22 A literary work’s exposure came when an author decided to circulate and recite drafts among his cultured friends in the literary coterie. The purpose of these performances was not the promulgation of a tradition but to test critical opinion and receive feedback on the merits of the work, which in turn served the ends of the individual literary creation. ‘The work’, notes Starr, ‘remained entirely in the control of the author, who could decide whether it would ever reach a wider public’.23 Pieces of public oratory were revised for written publication in a similar way.24 As with rhetoric, Greco-Roman authorial practices were not confined to the aristocratic social circles. Boundaries between elite literate practices and other ancient literacies were indistinct. But it is difficult to conceive the Synoptics having significant connections with the elite literary Sitz or as products of social practices attested for that sub-culture. Comparable activities are attested only later, when the Church had developed its

21. William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 53–6, et passim; Elaine Fantham, ‘Two Levels of Orality in the Genesis of Pliny’s Panegyricus’, in Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and Its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (ed. E. Anne Mackay; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 221–37 (226–30); also R. J. Starr, ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ ns 37 (1987), pp. 213–23 (213–14). 22. Fantham, ‘Two Levels’, pp. 227–30; see Pliny, Letters 3.18; 7.17; also Rosalind Thomas, ‘Prose Performance Texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the Late Fifth and Early Fourth Centuries’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 162–88 (172); Salles, Lire à Rome, p. 130. 23. Starr, ‘Circulation’, p. 214; also Kenney, ‘Books and Readers’, p. 11; J. B. Poynton, ‘Books and Authors’, Greece & Rome 3 (1934), pp. 94–104 (100); Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, pp. 88, 100, 145, 154. 24. ‘[F]irstly on the occasion of their public performance, the actio of delivered speech; then in subsequent recitation to his friends; and finally the written form or oratio’ (Fantham, ‘Two Levels of Orality’, p. 226, referring to Pliny’s Letters 1.20.9; 7.17-20; also Worthington, ‘Greek Oratory’, p. 165).

34

Q in Matthew

own elite literary tradition and practices of literary patronage.25 That a significant distance separated the Synoptic Sitz from the elite literary setting is confirmed by additional incongruities. c. Rhetorical Paraphrase and Synoptic Variation Greco-Roman historiography forms an important subset of elite ancient authorship. The study of source-utilization in ancient history-writing has given much leverage on Synoptic source-critical problems. But historio­ graphical works diverge significantly from the Synoptic profile in their stylistic canons and patterns of variation and agreement vis-à-vis sources. Greco-Roman history writing aimed for homogeneity of style through rhetorical paraphrase of sources – an ideal no doubt unevenly realized.26 Greco-Roman authors passed their work through their own compositional, rhetorical grids; it was to be the uniform product of their individual stylistic enterprise and skill.27 This is a far cry from what one sees in the Synoptics. Given Greco-Roman authors’ consistent paraphrasing, the alternation of variation and agreement in Synoptic parallels is, as Mattila puts it, an ‘anomaly’.28 F. Gerald Downing comments that ‘[w]ith so much pressure in favour of paraphrase, and so common a conviction of its validity, it really does seem very strange that we find so much identical wording among our Synoptic Gospels’.29 Baum argues that only a modest proportion of Synoptic variation can be attributed to stylistic modification.30 Kloppenborg 25. For example, Origen and his staff of stenographers supplied by Ambrose (Eusebius, H.E. 6.23.2). See Gamble, Books and Readers, p. 137, and Megan Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 202. Jerome’s ‘mode of literary production’, Williams notes, is ‘elite, even aristocratic’. 26. Armin D. Baum, Der mündliche Faktor und seine Bedeutung für die synoptische Frage (Tübingen: Francke, 2008), p. 134. 27. Gert Avenarius, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (Meisenheim am Glan: Anto Hain, 1956), pp. 55–70, surveying these stipulations for composition found in Lucian and confirmed by the rhetorical handbooks. 28. Sharon Lea Mattila, ‘A Question Too Often Neglected’, NTS 41 (1995), pp. 199–217 (209). 29. F. Gerald Downing, ‘Writers’ Use or Abuse of Written Sources’, in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem: Oxford Conference, April 2008 (Festschrift Christopher M. Tuckett; ed. P. Foster, A. Gregory, J. S. Kloppenborg, and J. Verheyden; BETL 239; Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 523–50 (531). Downing drew attention to this anomaly back in 1980, noting how rarely Josephus agrees verbatim with his biblical sources (‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus Antiquities and the Synoptic Gospels’, JSNT 9 [1980], pp. 29–48 [33]). 30. Baum, Der mündliche Faktor, p. 138.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

35

points out that rhetorical paraphrase by both Matthew and Luke would have left few close agreements in the double and triple tradition because ‘the likelihood of coincidental agreement in not changing Q would be exceedingly low’; consequently, rhetorical paraphrase cannot have been their mode of source-utilization.31 This is not to deny that the Synoptic writers put their individual stylistic and rhetorical impress upon their materials. But different factors are evidently at work in their reception of the tradition. d. Greek Style The gap that exists between the Greek of the Synoptics (including Luke’s) and the cultured Greek of elite literary prose suggests different composi­ tional Sitze. The ancient cultured despisers of Christianity disparaged the Greek of the Gospels, and Loveday Alexander points out that the Church Fathers acknowledged ‘that the earliest Christian writers must have lacked… paideia’.32 Marius Reiser comments that ‘[s]chon Sprache und Stil machen die neutestamentlichen Schriften somit zu Fremdkörpern in der überlieferten pagan-griechischen Literatur’.33 Alfred Wifstrand likens the Greek of New Testament writers to Hellenistic Fachprosa.34 Luke’s Greek, along with that of the Letter to the Hebrews the most cultivated of the New Testament, lacks ‘the classicizing tinge [that] was at that time regarded as good form in rhetoric and historiography’; it belongs instead to a stream of Hellenistic Jewish literature that took the LXX as its classicizing model.35 The incongruity is even more pronounced in Mark and Matthew.36 In Contra Apion 1.50, Josephus acknowledges that for the stylistic revision of the Jewish War he used assistants who, as Avenarius puts it, ‘besaßen jedenfalls die für diesen Zweck erforderliche rhetorische Bildung’.37 If a member of the Jewish elite, who is consciously emulating Greek models, required expert assistance to put his writings into stylistic shape, one will be cautious about imputing 31. John S. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation and Reproduction of the Double Tradition and Oral Q?’, in Synoptic Problems: Collected Essays (WUNT 329; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014), pp. 91–119 (112). 32. Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 180. 33. Reiser, ‘Stellung der Evangelien’, p. 3. 34. Alfred Wifstrand, Epochs and Styles: Selected Writings on the New Testament, Greek Language and Culture in the Post-Classical Era (ed. Lars Rydbeck and Stanley E. Porter; trans. Denis Searby; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2005), pp. 71–5. 35. Wifstrand, Epochs and Styles, p. 29, also pp. 41–3, and Reiser, ‘Stellung der Evangelien’, p. 20. 36. Wifstrand, Epochs and Styles, pp. 20–1. 37. Avenarius, Lukians Schrift, p. 88.

36

Q in Matthew

advanced rhetorical skills to the Evangelists. In a similar vein Hurtado notes that the differences in lay-out and script between early gospel manuscripts on the one hand the literary bookrolls on the other point to origins in different user-communities.38 e. Greco-Roman Rhetoric in the Gospels? Attempts to show the influence of Greco-Roman rhetoric in the Synoptics have run up against certain limitations. Whitney Shiner connects Mark to the practices of rhetorical declamation, associating the Gospel to an ‘ideal performance style for the time and culture’, by which he means the rhetorical practices described in the handbooks and modeled in the speeches of the orators.39 Mark ‘is a “published” version of an existing semi-standardized performance in the same way that the written Ciceronian speeches were adapted versions of the actual orations’.40 While this model attempts to do justice to the oral complexion of Mark, its simple identification of orality with oratory is questionable. The practices of public oratory certainly percolated down to non-elite circles, as Shiner argues,41 but his analysis does not take adequate account of the gap between elite and nonelite orality. In any case, orations in their published form displayed ‘des differences notables entre l’oeuvre originelle et le livre édité’; pre-publication revision took them far from the immediacy of their oral delivery.42 Vernon Robbins shows the influence of the chreia elaboration in the Synoptics, which are dense in chreias, but his more ambitious attempt to connect the cultivation and history of the tradition to progymnastic rhetorical practice runs into difficulties. Robbins is one of the first New Testament critics to have sized up the complex mix of orality and writing in the ancient Roman world. To represent this reality he juxtaposes Greco-Roman rhetorical practices with scribal practices under the rubric ‘rhetorical-scribal culture’. The result is an informed model with wide explanatory reach. Robbins uses the ‘rhetorical-scribal’ rubric to mount 38. Larry Hurtado, ‘What Do the Earliest Christian Manuscripts Tell Us about Their Readers?’, in The World of Jesus and the Early Church: Identity and Interpretation in Early Communities of Faith (ed. Craig A. Evans; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011), pp. 179–92 (189). 39. Whitney Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel: First-century Performance of Mark (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), p. 3. 40. Ibid., p. 112. 41. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 42. Salles, Lire à Rome, p. 158. She points out that ‘le Panégyrique de Trajan…est bien différent du texte prononcé devant le Sénat en septembre 100, car les remaniements effectués par Pline le Jeune pendant plus d’un an ont triplé ou quadruplé le volume du discours d’origine’.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

37

an explanation of how variation can arise in the written medium, one that disposes of the false dichotomy between oral (high variation) and written (low variation) Synoptic sources.43 Nevertheless the model strains to encompass the complexity of the tradition. Robbins breaks the latter’s wide range of variation (low to high) down into three reproduction modes known from the handbooks. He then correlates these to skill levels gained respectively in the elementary (primary), grammarian (secondary), and rhetorical (tertiary) stages of the educational curriculum: (1) ‘rhetorical, progymnastic composition’ for higher-variation passages; (2) ‘recitation composition’ (corresponding to the grammarian level) for lower variation passages; (3) ‘scribal’ composition (corresponding to elementary education) for close agreement passages, that is, directly copied with ‘corrections and improvements’.44 The unnuanced identification of scribes with copyists and primitive educational levels is already dubious. But taken on its own terms the tripartite schema seems to entail that the rhetorical engagement of the tradition (pushing it to higher variation levels) is mostly occurring in the ‘progymnastic’ mode, and that lower-variation passages (‘recitation composition’) are less rhetorically engaged. In other words, it cannot comprehend the Synoptic tradition and its patterns of variation and agreement as a unified communicative phenomenon. The main division Robbins sees in the tradition is between ‘recitation composition’ (lower-variation) and ‘rhetorical’ or ‘progymnastic composition’ (higher variation). By construing ‘recitation composition’ as marking the ‘transition’ to the rhetorical education inculcated by the progymnasmata, Robbins tries to infuse some rhetorical life into the ‘recitation composition’ mode and thereby reduce the tension between these two modes of reproduction.45 But this does not overcome the logic of graduated categories that distinguish 43. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act in Plutarch and the Gospels’, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (ed. Duane F. Watson; JSNTSup 50; Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), pp. 142–68 (148–9). 44. ‘ “Progymnastic composition”, in contrast to scribal reproduction, consisted of writing traditional materials clearly and persuasively rather than in the oral or written form it came to the writer’ (‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act’, pp. 145–6). Robbins takes ‘recitation composition’ as the baseline mode for transmitting the tradition in a ‘rhetorical culture’ (‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition and the Pre-Gospel Traditions: A New Approach’, in The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism [ed. Camille Focant; BETL 110; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1993], pp. 111–47 [120–1]). 45. Robbins, ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act’, pp. 146–7. Kloppenborg’s experimen­ tation with a taxonomy of ‘wooden’ vs. ‘rhetorical paraphrase’ modes of repro­­duc­tion in the tradition has similar problems (‘Variation and Reproduction’, pp. 116–17).

38

Q in Matthew

recitational from progymnastic deployment of traditional materials. Synoptic variation runs the gamut from almost zero to almost one hundred percent agreement, touching virtually every point in between. It resists analysis into a bi-partite or tri-partite taxonomy of rhetorical modes. Robbins productively compares some of the chains of deliberative argumentation often found appended to Synoptic chreias with the chreia elaboration taught in the progymnasmata. The Beelzebul Accusation (Lk. 11.14-23), for example, displays many features of a chreia elaboration.46 But the attempts to fit elements of the Synoptic sequences into standard progymnastic argumentative maneuvers are sometimes procrustean and forced.47 The same is true for Robbins’s attempt to make the chreia elaboration the mechanism driving the history of the tradition – not in itself an implausible notion, given that progymnastic practices mediated the Greco-Roman cultural tradition. But in a manner reminiscent of the old form-critical expansion of the tradition incrementally from dominical sayings, he takes the rhetorical elaboration taught in the handbooks and turns it into a diachronic tradition-history that turns the deliberative steps in a Synoptic elaboration into stages in the growth of the tradition.48 In short, while the chreia elaboration is certainly a useful tool for analyzing Synoptic patterns of argumentation, there clearly are other factors at work in the cultivation and transmission of the tradition. Alex Damm applies Greco-Roman rhetorical techniques directly to Synoptic source-critical questions. His source-critical conclusions are sound; what might be questioned is his ancillary claim that the Evangelists likely 46. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘Rhetorical Composition and the Beelzebul Controversy’, in Burton L. Mack and Vernon K. Robbins, Patterns of Persuasion in the Gospels (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1989), pp. 161–93. 47. In the Beelzebul Accusation Robbins takes Lk. 11:17 to be the first argument in the elaboration and the hostile remark in 11:15 as the topic (‘censure’; ‘judicial charge’) (‘Beelzebul’, pp. 173–64). He is correct that 11:17 is the first counter-move to the accusation in 11:15, but given the form-critical features of the double chreia, Jesus’ retort constitutes the core assertion of the chreia. 48. Robbins, ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition’, pp. 135–6; also Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), p. 199 (original ‘Cynic sage’ sayings of Jesus, subsequently elaborated as the tradent group moves through a social history). Richard Last compares early Christian writing, not to Greco-Roman rhetoric, but to writing practices in Greco-Roman associations (‘Communities that Write: Christ-Groups, Associations, and Gospel Communities’, NTS 58 [2012] pp. 173–98). Last correctly questions the analogy between the Synoptics and the literary works of elite, repute-seeking Greco-Roman authors (pp. 195–6), but among the types of writing in the associations (by-laws and the like) there is little that seems analogous to gospel writing.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

39

had advanced training in Greco-Roman rhetoric.49 Appealing to Robbins’ and Mack’s work on the chreia elaboration he reasons: ‘The gospels are not Kleinliteratur, but rather rhetorically informed works. And this means they are the products of a rhetorical education.’50 His restriction of alternatives to either Kleinliteratur or ‘products of a rhetorical education’ forecloses on other possible Sitze of expert writing. Similarly questionable is his tentative inference from ‘rhetorically informed’ to elite rhetorical education. Few even of the elites entered upon rhetorical education, though, to be sure, one or two years would suffice to learn the beginning progymnasmata. Assimilation to elite Greco-Roman rhetoric obscures distinctions among the three Evangelists, who among themselves occupy different locations on the social and cultural matrix. Damm is aware of the difficulties imputing an elite, tertiary-level education to the Evangelists; hence in the end he remains undecided whether they were trained in the full course of rhetorical education or the progymnasmata only. Greco-Roman rhetorical theory was a particular – certainly influential – systematization of what in fact were (and are) common rhetorical strategies also attested for other literate Sitze, other cultures, and indeed for persons with no formal training at all in rhetoric; their appearance in the Synoptics, or in Paul for that matter, does not point unequivocally to a rhetorical education.51 Burridge notes that ‘rhetorical theory in its stricter sense applies best to ancient oratory’, and he cautions against forcing the gospel materials into its patterns.52 Synoptic source-utilization, though hardly sealed off from the influence of Greco-Roman rhetoric, appears to belong to a cultural project of a different sort.

49. Alex Damm, Ancient Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem: Clarifying Markan Priority (BETL 252; Leuven: Peeters, 2013), pp. 15–17. 50. Ibid., p. 17. It is not clear what is at stake for Damm in attributing advanced rhetorical education to the Evangelists. The main grounds for his claim appear to be Mack’s and Robbins’s work on Synoptic chreia elaborations. The attribution does allow him to experiment with applying the wider range of Greco-Roman rhetorical theory to the Synoptic parallels. 51. As shown by Ryan S. Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 6–7, 27–8, 218, 255; also Richard A. Burridge, ‘The Gospels and Acts’, in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C.–A.D. 400 (ed. Stanley E. Porter; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 507–32 (510). 52. Burridge, ‘Gospels and Acts’, p. 529. Damm acknowledges that the fit between elite rhetorical practice and the Synoptics is less than perfect, since the former does not focus on source adaptation (Ancient Rhetoric, pp. 38, 238).

40

Q in Matthew

2. Evangelists as Tradents If not to the Greco-Roman authors and rhetors, where does one look? One clue is that the Synoptics, rather than consistently paraphrasing, only partially digest their traditional materials. The relationship of the Synoptic writers to their source materials is different from the relationship of the authors of the Greco-Roman works to their sources. Authorial presence in the Synoptics recedes behind the materials; it remains immanent in the tradition. Erhard Blum compares Hebrew Bible historiography with Greco-Roman historiography and finds the same distinction. It is a matter, he explains, of the distinction between a tradent and an author. The tradent, in contrast to the author, is anonymous and immersed in an authoritative tradition. The tradent ‘is not present as an author who judges and evaluates his sources from a critical distance, but as a “transmitter” who participates in the tradition itself’.53 Michael Fishbane brings Hebrew Bible tradents into focus as scribal tradents, for whom transmitting and cultivating the tradition constituted a single operation.54 The corpus of rabbinic literature is similarly less the product of authors than of tradents.55 Christine Hayes summarizes: [T]he redactors of rabbinic texts…were shaping and weaving an enormous corpus of inherited traditional materials. Of course they exercised freedom in recombining, recontextualizing, glossing and otherwise manipulating earlier traditions. However, they were also constrained by the raw materials they received, by the agenda set in earlier combinations and contextualizations, by the community within which they worked and even by the genre of the work being produced.56

Alexander calls attention to another important parallel: works that trans­mit diverse bodies of specialized, wissenschaftliche knowledge or Fachliteratur that she calls the Hellenistic ‘school tradition’, thus with a close connection to the oral instructional Sitz, for example, the works of the Hippocratic Corpus. The concern of these works is not rhetorical 53. Erhard Blum, ‘Historiography or Poetry? The Nature of the Hebrew Bible Prose Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. L. T. Stuckenbruck, S. C. Barton, and B. G. Wold; WUNT 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007), pp. 26–45 (33). 54. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 37, et passim. 55. Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Rabbinic Authorship as a Collective Enterprise’, in Fonrobert and Jaffee, eds., Cambridge Companion, pp. 17–37 (21–5). 56. Hayes, ‘Halakhah le-Mose mi-Sinai’, p. 63.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

41

expression and persuasion but transmission of an authoritative tradition of specialized knowledge with the aid of the written medium.57 Notably, the Fachschriftsteller typically were neither of elite status nor clients of elite literary patrons, though individual members of the elite, like Varro, might write works of this kind.58 The point is not to assign the Synoptics too quickly to this or that category but to open to view Sitze of ancient writing dedicated to the cultivation and transmission of tradition.59 Moreover, the distinction between ‘author’ and ‘tradent’ is relative, not categorical, best seen as a spectrum with gradations from tradent to author and vice versa. GrecoRoman authors (historians in particular) and rhetors worked with source materials and cultivated traditions, while tradents exercised judgment, displayed a measure of literary and rhetorical skill, and might have historiographical interests and programs. Jens Gerlach points out that even in the florilegia collections, very much at the ‘tradent’ end of the spectrum, one sees the ‘Ausdruck eines gestalterischen Willens, eines Konzeptes’.60 Renate Wittern notes that in comparing the different medical handbooks found on the Hippocratic Corpus ‘konnten wir…den Übergang von der Tradierung kollektiven Wissens zur einzelnen Arztpersönlichkeit fassen’.61 The tradent–author spectrum is indispensable for clarifying the source utilization practices of the Evangelists. Synoptic phenomena point to tradent practices, and we have begun to identify literate Sitze dedicated to tradent activities. Before pursuing these leads further, however, it is essential to clarify the material, artifactual conditions of ancient media. Writing practices were bound to the material realia of ancient media. Different material formats – wax tablets, notebooks, and bookrolls, for example – served pragmatic and cultural ends matched to the properties of the medium. Specific literate practices 57. Alexander, Preface, pp. 44–5, 197, 208–9, et passim. 58. Horster, ‘Literarische Elite?’, pp. 185, 191–3. 59. See Samuel Byrskog, ‘A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond’, ZNW 98 (2007), pp. 1–27 (21–3). 60. Jens Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”? Anmerkungen zur Praxis byzantinischer Gnomologen und ihrer philologischen Erfassung’, in Selecta colligere I: Akten des Kolloquiums ‘Sammeln, Neuordnen, Neues Schaffen: Methoden der Überlieferung von Texten in der Spätantike und in Byzanz’ (Jena, 21.–23. November 2002) (ed. R. M. Piccione and M. Perkhams; Allesandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003), pp. 69–93 (76). 61. Renate Wittern, ‘Gattungen im Corpus Hippocraticum’, in Gattungen wissenschaftlicher Literatur in der Antike (ed. Wolfgang Kullmann, Jochen Althoff, and Markus Asper; ScriptOralia 95; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), pp. 17–36 (35).

42

Q in Matthew

had corresponding material dimensions. The inventory of ancient media (scrolls, tablets, scripts, and the like) established a baseline set of media conditions and practices. Specific writing practices were adjustments to the material constraints of ancient media. Synoptic scholarship has recognized the significance of these material media realities for source criticism, though less care has been taken to ensure that Synoptic phenomena actually fit the media practice in question. 3. Material Media and Ancient Writing Practices a. Wax Tablets; Tablet and Papyrus Notebooks In Synoptic source criticism wax tablets and notebooks are invoked with some frequency to get around difficulties in a particular utilization hypothesis. Wax tablets were thin slabs of wood coated with wax. The wax received marks made by a stylus, and its salient media property was that it was easily erasable, thus that it ‘permet des corrections rapides et demeure toujours réutilisable’.62 Tablets might be bound together by thongs to create a notebook, usually in bundles of two or three, occasionally more, but owing to bulk rarely more than ten.63 Quintilian recommended sheets of parchment (membranae), likely bound together in a similar manner, for those whose eyesight made the use of waxed surfaces for writing difficult (Inst. 10.3.31-32). In addition to wax tablets, papyrus was also widely used for school notebooks. Tablet dimensions varied, though often they were rather small; the long sides of the exercise notebooks discussed by Cribiore were ten centimeters or less.64 Poynton mentions one specimen that ‘measures 9 inches by 7, another 7 inches by 4’; many were smaller, adapted to the size of the hand (pugillares).65

62. Dragan Božič and Michel Feugère, ‘Les instruments de l’écriture’, Gallia 61 (2004), pp. 21–41 (21). See the descriptions by Laurie E. Pearce, ‘The Scribes and Scholars of Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Sasson (ed.), pp. 2265–78 (2269), and Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, LangCommun 9 (1989), pp. 175–91 (175). 63. Božič and Feugère, ‘Les instruments’, p. 22; Patrice Cauderlier, ‘Les tablettes grecques d’Égypte: inventaire’, in Lalou (ed.), pp. 63–96 (72); Graham H. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 173; Poynton, ‘Books and Authors’, p. 94; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 66, 155. 64. Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 72. 65. Božič and Feugère, ‘Les instruments’, p. 22; Poynton, ‘Books and Authors’, p. 94; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 149.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

43

Easily erasable and of limited capacity, wax tablets were used principally for ephemera, for transitory writing. The vast majority of tablets found in Egypt contain school exercises, but also survey measurements, calculations, receipts, drafts of contracts, drafts of compositions, in general, say Božič and Feugère, ‘tout ce qui peut demander à être corrigé, remanié, effacé’.66 They were, in Small’s words, ‘the preferred temporary repositories for almost every kind of written transaction, which if marked for preservation would be transferred to the more permanent medium of the scroll’.67 Pliny the Elder’s notarii recorded the excerpts he dictated onto tablets and notebooks for transfer to scrolls.68 Tablets were also used in working up preliminary drafts of compositions.69 The medieval mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381) used a wax tablet for writing down inspirations, which he wrote up ‘in finished form’ when he returned to the monastery.70 Legal instruments such as contracts, loans, certificates, and wills might also be transmitted on wax tablets that were specially designed to bear seals and to ensure the inviolability of the contents for longer-term documentation.71 Literary works found on tablets or notebooks are usually

66. Božič and Feugère, ‘Les instruments’, p. 21; also Cauderlier, ‘Les tablettes’, p. 72 (see his full inventory of Egyptian tablet survivals with content descriptions, pp. 74–94); John Lawrence Sharpe III, ‘The Dakhleh Tablets and Some Codicological Considerations’, in Lalou, ed., Les tablettes à écrire, pp. 127–48 (129); Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 65; Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 156; also Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, p. 175; Michelle P. Brown, ‘The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York’, BritLibJ 20 (1994), pp. 1–16 (7–8); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008), p. 25. 67. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 150; also Poynton, ‘Books and Authors’, pp. 95–6; Loveday Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels’, in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 71–111 (83) (see Pliny, Letters 3.5; Quintilian, Inst. 10.7.30). Small (Wax Tablets, p. 150) notes that ‘the representation of the simultaneous use of tablets and rolls appears only in business scenes’, i.e., to compare what someone was supposed to have paid, the roll, with what was paid at the time, the tablet. 68. Pliny, Letters 3.5.14-15. 69. Brown, ‘Role of Wax Tablets’, pp. 10–11. 70. Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, p. 180. 71. Marichal, ‘Les tablettes’, p. 173; Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 65.

44

Q in Matthew

connected with school exercises.72 Hezser points out with regard to rabbinic usage that ‘neither entries in wax tablet notebooks or on scraps of papyrus or parchment would usually be kept’.73 The proto-codex did not differ significantly from the notebook in its usage – ‘recording ephemera, notes, and first drafts’ – on whose design it was based.74 b. ὑπομνήματα Ὑπομνήματα is a versatile rubric for forms of ancient composition that have in common their preliminary, provisional, and/or loosely organized character. In one important usage ὑπομνήματα designates ‘preliminary draft’. Wax tablets were sometimes used directly to work up a draft, though given the limited capacity of tablets it was common practice to use them to take down excerpts and notes, raw materials for the drafting of the envisioned work, for transfer to papyrus sheets or rolls, likely with some initial sorting.75 For Lucian, ὕπομνημα designates the rough draft of a historical work that gives an initial organizational shape to the author’s excerpted raw materials, a σῶμα…ἀκαλλὲς ἔτι καὶ ἀδιάφθρωτον, ‘a body of material as yet with no beauty or continuity’.76 Avenarius comments:

72. Tiziano Dorandi, ‘Den Authoren über die Schulter geschaut: Arbeitsweise und Autographie bei den Antiken Schriftstellern’, ZPE 87 (1991), pp. 11–33 (32). Dorandi identifies a few cases of literary remains in papyrus notebook form, for example Tiro’s transfer onto papyrus of some of Cicero’s notes that he discovered. 73. Hezser, Jewish Literacy, p. 203. 74. Harry Gamble, ‘Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon’, in The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – the Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45 (ed. Charles Horton; JSNTSup 259; London: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 26–39 (34). 75. Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, pp. 86, 169–70; Dorandi, ‘Den Authoren’, p. 29; Jens Erik Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro’s de Re Rustica (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici 4; Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1968), pp. 105–8; see Quintilian, Inst. 10.3. Alcidamas, comparing the extempore skill required for forensic oratory with the deficiencies of those who compose their speeches, comments: ‘Would it not be ludicrous if, when the herald announces, “Who of the citizens wishes to speak?”, or, when the water-clock in the courtroom is already flowing, the orator should proceed to his writing-tablets to compose and memorize his speech?’ (On the Sophists 11, trans. LaRue van Hook, in ‘Alcidamas versus Isocrates: The Spoken versus the Written Word’, Classical Weekly 12 [20 January 1919], pp. 89–94). 76. Lucian, ‘How To Write History’, pp. 47–8, in Lucian VI (trans. K. Kilburn; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1978).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

45

Dieser vorläufige Entwurf…stellt also zwischen Stoffsammlung und formgemäßiger Ausarbeitung die mittlere Stufe dar…Diese Gebilde (σῶμα) zeichnet sich gegenüber den amorphen Materialmasse schon durch eine gewisse Geschlossenheit aus, trägt aber sonst noch den Charakter des Unschönen (ἀκαλλὲς) und Ungegliederten (ἀδιάφθρωτον). Ihm fehlt noch das, wodurch das fertige literarische Werke im Inhaltlichen und Formalen sein künstlerisches Gepräge erhält, nämlich der auf Figuren und Rhythmen beruhende sprachliche Schmuck (κάλλος) und die kunstvolle Anordnung (τάξις).77

Although this ὕπομνημα ‘[läßt] die Umrisse des künftigen Geschichtswerkes bereits erkennen’, it embodies the work in draft, in its still incomplete, transitional state, awaiting the final, style-oriented revision. Dorandi describes ὑπομνήματα as ‘d[ie] provisorische Fassung eines Buch, wobei das Rohmaterial größtenteils überarbeitet und geordnet war, aber noch nicht die letzte stilistische Verfeinerung erhalten hat’.78 He identifies PHerc. 1021 as a draft of Philodemus’s anthology of Platonic philosophers, noting its ‘merkwürdig unordentlich ausgeführte Schrift, die ungleichmäßig beschriebenen Seiten, die Hinzufügungen, die Tilgungen, die Wiederholung von Stellen, die adnotationes zur Bezeichnung von Umstellungen, Einfügungen, möglichen Textverderbnissen und ferner die Tatsache, daß PHerc. 1021 ein Opistographon, d.h. auf Vorder- und Rückseite beschrieben ist’.79 Lucian describes the authorial objectives of final revision as follows: ‘Then, after arranging them into order, let him give it beauty and enhance it with the charms of expression, figure, and rhythm’ (εἶτα ἐπιθεὶς τὴν τάξιν ἐπαγέτω τὸ κάλλος καὶ χρωννύτω τῇ λέξει καὶ σχηματιζέτω καὶ ῥυθμιζέτω). The boundaries between such preliminary drafts and the only roughly sorted collections of excerpts and notes they were based upon was indistinct; both were called ὑπομνήματα.80

77. Avenarius, Lukians Schrift, pp. 85–6. 78. Dorandi, ‘Den Autoren’, p. 32; see also C. B. R. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives’, JHS 99 (1979), pp. 74–96 (81–2, 94–5); George Kennedy, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, in The Relationships Among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. William O. Walker Jr.; San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978), pp. 125–55 (136–7), and Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production’, pp. 93–4. 79. Dorandi, ‘Den Autoren’, p. 16. Avenarius points out that the middle part of Josephus’s Vita appears to be still in ὕπομνημα form (Lukian’s Schrift, p. 88), and parts of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War appear to have been unrevised when he died. Owing to his haste Varro left many of his technical works in unpolished form (Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 91). 80. Dorandi, ‘Den Autoren’, p. 32; Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 115.

46

Q in Matthew

In fact the ‘preliminary draft’ meaning for ὑπομνήματα was mostly apposite to Greco-Roman history writing, where a rhetorically polished final form was the objective; in other cases ὑπομνήματα might refer to works that circulated as such in a more loosely revised format that sufficed for the pragmatic and cultural function of the work.81 In Greek scholarly circles, ὑπομνήματα designated free-standing commentaries on literary texts; these likely began as a scholar’s text-critical, lexical, and grammatical annotations to a text that then coalesced into a free-standing companion commentary.82 Anthologies and chreia collections that took a loosely coher­ing form could also be referred to as ὑπομνήματα. One of Diogenes Laertius’s sources, the scholar Favorinus of Arelate, excerpted miscellaneous stories of the philosophers and their teachings and collected them in two works. Though Diogenes refers to these as ὑπομνήματα (ἐγὼ δὲ εὗρον ἐν τοῖς Ὑπομνήμασι Φαβωρίνου κτλ. [8.532]), Mensching argues that a more precise designation is Apomnemoneumata (ὑπομνήματα, ‘reminder’, here shading into ‘memoirs’). From the fragments he deduces that Favorinus’s Apomnemoneumata had a structure of five or more books, was organized by theme, and was intended by Favorinus to give wider circulation to his Lesefrüchte and thus to instruct.83 The work, in other words, was very much like ὑπομνήματα understood as an initial collection of excerpts and a preliminary drafts, but it was intended for circulation in this form. Diogenes’s own Lives and Opinions, a collection of excerpts from numerous sources and displaying a loose biographical and doxographical organization, likewise falls into this generic range of ὑπομνήματα.84 In a sub-category of its usage ὑπομνήματα refers to writing taken virtually direct from an oral instructional situation, serving as a ‘reminder’ of the oral material. A transcript a student might make of a teacher’s lectures and given 81. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, pp. 110–15. 82. Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 12; Franco Montanari, ‘Correcting a Copy, Editing a Text: Alexandrian Ekdosis and Papyri’, in From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship (ed. Franco Montanari and Lara Pagani; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 1–15 (3). 83. Eckhart Mensching, Favorin von Arelate: Der erste Teil der Fragmente Memorabilien und Omnigena Historia (Texte und Kommentare 3; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), pp. 27, 39. 84. Jorgen Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978), p. 53. Dorandi thinks that the loose arrangement of the materials in Diogenes’ Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers suggests a draft (‘Den Autoren’, p. 29).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

47

a perhaps slightly revised form was a ὑπομνήματα.85 Cicero’s son, in a letter to Tiro (Cicero’s secretary), asks him ‘to send a “librarius”…to help him transcribe his notes [hypomnemata]… By “hypomnemata” he undoubtedly means the notes he makes on pugillares during lectures.’86 Boudon-Millot describes this practice as ‘un fonction…de l’écrit conçu comme simple relais et mise en mémoire d’un enseignement oral qui l’a précédé’.87 Galen applies the term ὑπομνήματα to the transcription short-hand stenographers made of a public lecture he gave on dissection at the request of the Roman consul Boethus. Boudon-Millot comments: ‘[I]l s’agit d’ailleurs de simples notes (ὑπομνήματα) prises sous la dictée et auxquelles Galien attache bien peu d’importance puisqu’il ne songe même pas à s’enquérir de leurs destinataires exacts. Il en va en revanche tout autrement quand l’écrit est destiné à se suffire à lui-même et à rencontrer une grande diversité de lecteurs.’88 Galen, that is to say, was vexed when ὑπομνήματα of his lectures somehow found their way into public circulation. Works that he intended for authorized circulation he preferred to compose himself – and to the requisite stylistic and rhetorical standards. Loose, open-ended collections of pharmacological, ‘Hippocratic’ recipes that originated in oral instruction might also be designated ὑπομνήματα.89 In all these cases the term ὑπομνήματα is particularly close to its root meaning – a minimally processed written ‘reminder’ of what one has heard, of an oral instructional tradition.90

85. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 143 (with reference to Quintilian, Inst. 1 Preface 7-8 and 2.11.7); Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, p. 183; Kennedy, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, pp. 152–3. Discussion can also be found in Small, Wax Tablets, p. 37; Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production’, pp. 89–95 (commenting on Galen, De libris propriis proem [Kühn XIX.8-11 = Scripta Minora II.91-93]); Snyder, Teachers and Texts, p. 87. Snyder argues that Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentaries on Aristotle are probably descended from ‘rough transcript[s] of the subject matter covered in his school on any given day’ (p. 91). 86. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 108 (Cicero, ad Fam. 16.21). 87. Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit chez Galien’, p. 206; Alexander: ‘[T]he written text is essentially the same material as the oral performance but may be extended, fossilized, and finalized in different ways’ (‘Ancient Book Production’, p. 95). 88. Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit chez Galien’, p. 207, referring to Galen, Pronostic 5 (Kühn XIV, 626.17). 89. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 298; Loveday Alexander, ‘What Is a Gospel?’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels (ed. Stephen C. Barton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–33 (23–4). 90. Alexander, Preface, pp. 62–3.

48

Q in Matthew

c. Tablets, Notebooks, and ὑπομνήματα in Synoptic Scholarship Tablets, notebooks, and the loosely cohering forms of writing comprised by the term ὑπομνήματα are often invoked in Synoptic source criticism ad hoc, as handy expedients to solve a particular utilization difficulty, or because these material formats and genres conveniently fit certain preconceptions of the form, history, and transmission of the tradition. Performance critics, for example, with their one-sided emphasis on orality, give frequent prominence to the ‘transcript’ species of writing. An informed attempt to account for Synoptic phenomena along these media lines was mounted by the classicist George Kennedy in a 1978 essay. Invoking both the ‘transcript’ and ‘preliminary draft’ meanings of ὑπομνήματα, he argued that Q, which he assumed to be just a loose collection of sayings, was a ὑπομνήματα of apostolic preaching, that is, the latter directly taken up into the written medium through transcription. The Synoptic Gospels similarly originated as ὑπομνήματα of apostolic preaching, he argues, but have undergone further literary refinement. Synoptic patterns of variation and agreement arose out of cross-copying among early collections of ὑπομνήματα in circulation.91 Kennedy therefore traces Synoptic variation back to different oral renderings (preaching) directly inscribed upon corresponding transcripts; these variants then migrate and aggregate across various intersecting lines of transcript transmission, much as in manuscript transmission. In his critique Reginald Fuller points out that the form-critical heterogeneity of the Synoptic tradition does not support Kennedy’s derivation of the Gospels uniformly from ὑπομνήματα of apostolic preaching.92 Kennedy views Synoptic origins through the lens of Greco-Roman rhetoric: an oration (apostolic preaching) is taken down in writing and subsequently polished for official circulation.93 Wax tablet or papyrus notebook usage is also invoked as an expedient to get rid of pesky anomalies for a particular Synoptic utilization hypothesis. The difficulties Matthew’s use of Q presents for the 2DH, the theme of the present work, have led some 2DH scholars to this recourse (see below, Chapter 4). John Poirier, to resolve the difficulty for the FGH of how Luke, given the mechanics of scroll utilization, manages to rearrange 91. Kennedy, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, pp. 148–53. Birger Gerhardsson also suggests that written gospels were a natural development from the use of notebooks to make smaller collections, though he acknowledges that there is no evidence for the latter usage (The Gospel Tradition [ConBNT, 15; Lund: Gleerup, 1986], p. 51). 92. Reginald H. Fuller, ‘Classics and the Gospels: The Seminar’, in Walker, ed., Relationships Among the Gospels, pp. 173–92 (178–9). 93. Ibid., p. 178.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

49

his Matthean materials, imputes wax-tablet usage to Luke.94 Poirier first imagines Luke’s usage along the lines of the use of tablets in Greco-Roman authorial projects: to facilitate collection and gestation of materials, subsequently worked up into a preliminary draft (in Poirier’s view also on wax tablets), which is then refined and transferred in clean copy to a papyrus roll. The wax tablet medium seems to Poirier to provide the flexibility needed for Luke’s operations on Matthew. The notion that Luke works up a preliminary draft of his gospel on wax tablets raises the difficulty, however, of the limited capacity of wax tablet notebooks. After venturing that ‘he could have bought or borrowed enough tablets to do the job in one pass’, Poirier opts to associate the three large divisions of Luke (3.1–9.50; 9.51–18.14; 18.15–24.53) with ‘three successive uses of wax tablets’.95 This hardly solves the problem. It was quite a feat for the twelfth-century writer Baudry of Bourgueil to compose a poem of 112 verses on a 14-leaved wax tablet.96 Luke would need quite a bit more capacity to draft just one of these segments.97 But then Poirier tacitly switches scenarios to having Luke use wax tablets in more of a direct source-utilization mode: to excerpt passages from Matthew and transfer them into their new arrangement in the Travel Narrative. Luke’s reordering of Matthean materials is, accordingly, a simple matter of rearranging tablets. Poirier therefore awkwardly combines two quite different compositional procedures. Nor is it clear how a utilization scenario of copying and rearranging excerpts accounts for the patterns of agreement and variation in the parallels. The fundamental problem is that Poirier, not alone among Synoptic source critics, has difficulty breaking away from a strict visual-utilization model; hence he adverts to expedients such as wax tablets, notebooks, codices, bookmarks, and the like. 94. John C. Poirier, ‘The Roll, the Codex, the Wax Tablet, and the Synoptic Problem’, JSNT 35 (2012), pp. 3–30 (23–4). 95. Ibid., p. 23. 96. Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, pp. 186–7. 97. Downing estimates ‘at least 60–70 for each one-third successive section of his Gospel’ (F. Gerald Downing, ‘Waxing Careless: Poirier, Derrenbacker, and Downing’, JSNT 35 [2013], pp. 388–93 [391]). As Downing points out, Diogenes Laertius treats the report (‘some say’) that Philippus of Opus (Plato’s secretary) copied out Plato’s The Laws (418 pages in the Teubner edition), which he allegedly found in complete draft on wax tablets, as curious hearsay, and that there really is no evidence for the kind of usage Poirier attributes to Luke. Sharpe says that the Philippus story arose in the context of the ancient debate about the authenticity of the Epinomis, an appendix to Plato’s Laws, as a way of asserting the authenticity of the Laws (direct from Plato on the original wax tablets!) and the inauthenticity of the Epinomis (‘The Dakhleh Tablets’, pp. 128–9).

50

Q in Matthew

In other cases wax tablets and notebooks are invoked to imagine scenarios in which the transmission of the oral tradition is propped up by the written medium. Richard Bauckham argues that since there were probably literate individuals to be found in the primitive community, ‘it does seem unlikely that no one would have even noted down Jesus traditions in notebooks’.98 Graham Stanton suggests that ‘the first followers of Jesus…in Judaea, in Galilee, or in eastern Mediterranean cities’ will have made wide use of notebooks to inscribe Jesus traditions.99 He acknowledges, however, that ‘with the exception of 2 Tim. 4.13, we do not have explicit evidence for the use of notebooks by first- or even early second-century Christians’.100 The greater difficulty is that the argument is entirely a priori: there are not even residues of evidence in the tradition for this parallel transmission of the oral tradition in the written medium. Bauckham tries to dispense with this difficulty by claiming that the closeness of the notebooks to orality ‘must make it virtually impossible for us to distinguish them from oral sources’, but in virtually the same breath he wants to find evidence for them ‘in some of the so-called Q passages where Matthew and Luke are in almost entirely verbatim agreement’.101 In any case his claim is belied by the Hippocratic medical recipe collections: these interact very directly with the oral transmission of the materials, but even their minimalist catalogue form survives into the medical treatises into which they are eventually incorporated.102 d. Excerpting Practices Excerpting surfaced above, in the discussion of ὑπομνήματα as roughly sorted collections of excerpts. The widespread practice of excerpting was a response to the problems the scroll medium raised for access to its contents.103 98. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), p. 289. Maurice Casey thinks that the tradition almost from the beginning was ‘written down on wax tablets and the like’ (An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 190), and that Matthew and Luke used these as sources (p. 48). 99. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel, p. 189. 100. Ibid., p. 182. Stanton’s claim that early Christian communities routinely used notebooks as vehicles for Jesus traditions and subsequently even alongside the written gospels serves him as an explanation for variants on gospel passages found in the Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr: they were drawing upon notebooks (‘Early Christian Preference for the Codex’, in Horton, ed., Earliest Gospels, pp. 40–9 [48]). 101. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, p. 289. 102. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 298. 103. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 102.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

51

Scrolls were unwieldy, and reading required two hands – the right to hold the scroll open, the left to guide the wind-up. Skeat describes the mechanics as follows: ‘The right hand merely supports the bulk of the roll while the left pulls out a stretch for reading. When this had been read, the left hand does not roll it up – it rolls itself up, the left hand merely preventing it from rolling too far. The left hand then pulls out another stretch of papyrus, and the reading proceeds.’104 Though with practice one could certainly develop dexterity in handling a scroll, as Skydsgaard notes ‘[t]he difficulties connected with the use of literature were considerable compared to ours’.105 In particular the scroll format made search-and-location operations difficult. One needed to unroll the scroll to find a specific passage, and the mostly unbroken and minimally punctuated lines and columns of script further complicated the locating and discriminating of sought-for passages. Totelin observes that the scroll format of Hippocratic medical treaties ‘makes the act of browsing almost impossible’106 – this despite recipe boundaries being grammatically marked and sometimes supplied with visual markers such as the paragraphos (horizontal line), ekthesis/eisthesis (extension of opening line into the margin/indentation of the line), and blank spaces.107 Bookrolls did not offer retrieval aids such as tables of contents. In rare cases, as a very rough-and-ready retrieval aid, authors of multi-volume books might include at the beginning of each volume a brief synopsis of the roll’s topics to assist readers looking for specific sections.108 In addition to the difficulties they raised for retrieval operations, bookrolls were expensive, difficult to come by, and often borrowed. Accordingly, writes Johnson, ‘the effort of excerpting and collecting is, as matter of course, directed toward the obscure, the difficult to access, books not to hand’.109 Excerpting therefore was standard reading practice, in David Konstan’s words, ‘a natural adjunct to reading’; it was the way of appropriating the essential contents of a work

104. T. C. Skeat, ‘The Origin of the Christian Codex’, ZPE 102 (1994), pp. 263–8 (265). 105. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 115. 106. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 231. 107. Ibid., p. 228. 108. Christian Jacob, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, in Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire (ed. David Braund and John Wilkins; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 85–100 (107–8); also Denis Michael Searby, ‘The Intertitles of Stobaeus: Condensing a Culture’, in Thinking Through Excerpts: Studies in Stobaeus (ed. G. Reydams-Schils; Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 23–70 (28). 109. Johnson, Readers and Reading Cultures, p. 132.

52

Q in Matthew

by selecting and copying out noteworthy passages as one read.110 Johnson notes that ‘Gellius records how he found some bundles (fasces) of obscure Greek marvel texts for sale, and immediately read and excerpted them over the course of the next two nights’.111 Excerpting was a means for familiarizing oneself with a work; it was essential to one’s ‘ “meeting” (ἐνέτυχον// περιέτυχον) with a book’.112 Mejer says of Diogenes Laertius that ‘his main material was a large number of excerpts of which, obviously, he was not in full command’.113 Through excerption one coped with the range of one’s reading; it was ‘a technique for organizing, archiving and retrieving the materials found across many books read’.114 In antiquity memory was instrumental in overcoming the accessibility problems of scrolls. Memory for Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists ‘provided…an organization, an order, a mental indexing and “search function” far more efficient than hundreds of bookrolls to be unrolled and run across’.115 Excerpting distilled out the essentials of a work to assist their digestion into memory. Excerption’s pragmatic functions were extended to its use as a research procedure. Hence its connections with ὑπομνήματα, understood as collections of excerpts from numerous sources that provided the raw materials for a writer’s preliminary drafts.116 Excerption mediates Varro’s relationship to his sources in de Re Rustica. Since the latter was left in an unpolished state, and since Varro’s Theophrastus sources have survived (Historia Plantarum and de Causis Plantarum), the work gives insight into excerption as a source-utilization method. Varro shows us that excerption was selective: only those elements of a source relevant to the writer’s project were excerpted. A different example also illustrates this point: Nature of Women, a gynecological work found in the Hippocratic Corpus, is a handy 110. David Konstan, ‘Excerpting as a Reading Practice’, in Reydams-Schils, ed., Thinking Through Excerpts, pp. 9–22 (19); also Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, pp. 102–3. 111. Johnson, Readers and Reading Cultures, p. 115 (Attic Nights 9.4.5). 112. Jacob, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, p. 106. 113. Mejer, Diogenes Laertius, p. 28. 114. Jacob, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, p. 106. 115. Ibid., p. 108; also Small, Wax Tablets, p. 181. Carruthers quotes Hugh of St. Victor: ‘Therefore, we ought to gather something brief and secure from everything we learn which we can store away in our little chest of our memory’ (Book of Memory, p. 105; from Didascalion [trans. J. Taylor; New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], p. 87). 116. Searby, ‘Intertitles of Stobaeus’, p. 54; Jacob, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, pp. 105–6; Snyder, Teachers and Texts, pp. 94, 148; Dorandi, ‘Den Autoren’, pp. 14–16, 32–3; Mejer, Diogenes Laertius, pp. 14–18

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

53

reference work created by excerption of a much larger and comprehensive gynecological work Diseases of Women, and ‘in die nur die praxisrelevanten Teile – also Symptomatik, therapeutische Maßnahmen und Rezepturen – aufgenommen wurden’.117 Getting back to Varro, ‘prior to the final literary elaboration’ another selection would have been made from this ‘immense volume of raw material’.118 Excerption broke up the order and severed the sequential connections of the materials in the sources and made it possible for Varro to reorder the excerpted elements extensively in the new work, or as Skydsgaard puts it bluntly, to ‘jump about in Theophrastus’ extensive botanical writings’.119 Varro brings the materials in the sequence de Re Rustica 44.3-46 together from ‘scattered places’ his two Theophrastus sources.120 No trace of their original order in Theophrastus survives the operation.121 Varro adapts excerpts to their new contexts by paraphrase, abbreviation, elaboration, and similar operations, though he can also copy them verbatim.122 His ‘piecemeal’ rearrangement of his materials, by excerption severed from their original contextual connections, produces instances of garbling and occasionally errors of fact. ‘In the period between excerpting the passage and writing the treatise’, Skydsgaard explains, ‘Varro has forgotten the context’.123 Varro’s confusion of Theophrastus’s instructions on the optimal time for summer grafting (C.P. I.6.3-9) with the spring planting (de Re Rustica 40.3) shows that ‘his excerpts have become disarranged’.124 Varro does not have command of his sources, which in any case is indicated by his resort to excerption in the first place. e. Excerpting and Synoptic Source Utilization Difficulties in Matthew’s and Luke’s use of their sources cannot be resolved by appeal to excerption practices. Excerpting was mostly a copying operation, one that, in Snyder’s words, ‘leave[s] the language and phrasing [of the source]…largely intact’.125 As Konstan puts it, excerptors 117. Wittern, ‘Gattungen’, p. 26. 118. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, p. 115. 119. Ibid., p. 78. 120. Ibid., pp. 85–6. 121. Ibid., p. 78. E.g. Varro takes materials from Theophrastus’s Historia Plantarum in the following order: H.P. VIII.1.5; I.7.1; I.10.1; VII.15.1. Interspersed are materials from de Causis Plantarum in this order: C.P. I.20.4; I.14.2; I.12.1; III.3.4; II.19.1. 122. Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar, pp. 64–5, 77. 123. Ibid., p. 74. Some excerpts were likely ‘so short that the original meaning has vanished’ (p. 86). 124. Ibid., p. 81. 125. Snyder, Teachers and Texts, p. 148.

54

Q in Matthew

‘cut and paste, and so lack any voice of their own’.126 To be sure, when excerpts were used as raw materials for new compositions they might well undergo significant transformations in the drafting process. But Matthew and Luke clearly are not drafting up their compositions from an intermediary collection of excerpts from their sources. Excerption therefore cannot account for the patterns of variation that arise in Matthew and Luke’s use of their sources. Moreover, it was a means of encountering a work, of familiarizing oneself with its essential contents, which scarcely describes Matthew’s and Luke’s relationship to their sources. The selectivity of excerption also contrasts with Matthew’s and Luke’s thoroughgoing appropriation of their sources. Excerption to wax tablets, if posited as an intermediate step, does not dispense with the problems scroll utilization raises for Matthew’s rearrangement of Q materials (or on the FGH, Luke’s rearrangement of Matthean materials). It just creates a collection of excerpted materials, in the sequence of the source, still to be rearranged and coordinated with other source materials.127 The breaking down of sources into selected excerpts for piecemeal reassembly that one sees in Varro has no analogy in Matthew and Luke. Even Matthew’s use of Q, or Luke’s use of Matthew on the FGH, cannot be conceived in this way, since in both scenarios lineaments of the absolute and relative order of the source remain. Matthew and Luke feel bound by their sources in a way that Varro does not. Conversely – and this is the crucial point – they are masters of their sources in a way that Varro does not even approach. f. Scroll Utilization The mechanics of handling scrolls, as this bore upon source utilization, have been canvassed by Derrenbacker, Downing, and others. We will review and supplement the salient points. As noted, reading a scroll monopolized both hands. Some complicated maneuvering lay between reading a source and copying it; likewise, consultation of more than one scroll at a time was impracticable.128 Small, a historian of Greco-Roman art, finds ‘no…ancient representations of multiple texts open simultaneously’.129 Writers typically did not spread their scrolls out on tables or desks. A desk would have been of no greater use than the floor for management of two or more scrolls. Tables could support objects with flat, stable surfaces such as vases, statuary, tablets, and coins; in scenes depicting financial transactions they are used 126. Konstan, ‘Excerpting as a Reading Practice’, p. 9. 127. This is why Poirier must argue that Luke rearranges his wax tablets. 128. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, p. 93. 129. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 167.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

55

‘not for recording the transaction, but for counting the money’.130 Iconographic evidence of writing on tables features tablets, not scrolls, and the scribes are taking shorthand, not copying.131 A table or chest if present held writing accessories such as inkwells. Since the average scroll was between ten and thirty feet long, tables would hardly have advantageously accommodated even a single scroll, and ‘the likelihood of a number of rolls being open simultaneously…while actually writing was, therefore, extremely low’.132 Scribal posture, notes Derrenbacker, ‘was either squatting, with one’s tunic stretched over one’s knees creating a crude but efficient writing surface, or seated, on a stool or bench with the writing surface (usually a scroll) propped up on one knee, which could be supported by a stool’.133 In this position it is hard to maintain visual contact with an exemplar.134 Royse explains that it presented difficulties even for simple copying operations: ‘[S]ince both hands of the scribe were occupied with the copy being produced, the scribe had no way to track the text in the exemplar. Hence, when the scribe’s eye left the exemplar to write and then returned to it, there was not a convenient finger to mark the current position.’135 Scrolls facilitated sequential rather than random access to their con­­tent.136 Source-utilization strategies were accommodations to this con­ straint. The logistics of handling a scroll and accessing its contents ruled 130. Ibid., pp. 150–1; see also W. Sanday, ‘The Conditions Under Which the Gospels Were Written, in Their Bearing Upon Some Difficulties of the Synoptic Problem’, in Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. W. Sanday; Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 3–26 (16–17). 131. See the Museo Ostiense relief (http://www.ostia-antica.org/vmuseum/ marble_6.htm). For discussion see Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Malcolm Choat, ‘The Copyist at Work: Scribal Practice in Duplicate Documents’, in Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, Genève, 1–21 août 2010 (ed. Paul Schubert; Recherches et Rencontres 30; Geneva: Droz, 2012), pp. 827–34 (829). 132. Jocelyn Penny Small, ‘Artificial Memory and the Writing Habits of the Literate’, Helios 22 (1995), pp. 159–66 (161). 133. Robert A. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL 186; Leuven: University Press, Peeters, 2005), p. 38; also Kenneth Willis Clark, ‘The Posture of the Ancient Scribe’, BA 26 (1963), pp. 63–72 (69–71); George M. Parássoglou, ‘ΔΕΞΙΑ ΧΕΙΡ ΚΑΙ ΓΟΝΥ: Some Thoughts on the Postures of the Ancient Greeks and Romans When Writing on Papyrus Rolls’, Scrittura e Civilita 3 (1979), pp. 5–22 (7–8, 14–15); Small, Wax Tablets, p. 151. 134. Gamble, Books and Readers, p. 90. 135. James R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 99. 136. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 31; also Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 16–17.

56

Q in Matthew

out complicated utilization actions. Therefore authors and editors working with two or more sources tended to follow one source at a time.137 This practice had two major variants (naturally a writer could advert to both). The first was to alternate sources, either for longer stretches or in shorter chunks. Livy does this in sections where he switches back and forth between his Roman sources and Polybius, taking a block of material from one, a block of material from the other, his objective being to integrate their individual contributions coherently into a fuller account.138 The second was to select one source to form the spine of a work or a segment of it, with other source material integrated here and there in the sequence determined by the Hauptquelle. Plutarch often followed this procedure in composing his Lives, Livy adopted it in numerous sections of his History, and Derrenbacker has demonstrated it for Diodorus, Strabo, and Arrian in their use of the Megasthenes and Eratosthenes sources on India.139 Of Livy Luce writes, ‘Before beginning [a section of] his composition, Livy’s aim was to read through his sources with an eye to selecting the one whose version would form the basis of his account… From one or more secondary sources he would add material that was missing in his main source, or, less frequently, he would make substitutions where the main source was less detailed or less appealing.’140 Plutarch in his Roman Lives for the most part exploits Pollio’s history for his narrative line, onto which he has ‘grafted’ supplemental materials drawn from a variety of sources, such as biographies, histories, published speeches, oral traditions, and apophthegmata.141 He integrated ‘disparate item[s]’ from a non-narrative speech source, Cicero’s Philippic, into appropriate contexts in his Pollio narrative source in his Life of Antony.142 Plutarch and Livy followed one source principally 137. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, pp. 92–3; Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 116. 138. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 113, with reference to Josephus in the Antiquities. For Livy see T. J. Luce, Livy: The Composition of His History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 117–18, 129–30, 196–7, discussing 42.10.0–42.30.8; 44.23.1–45.4.1; and 45.17-25. Charles Talbert pointed out in 1978 the relevance of this practice to Synoptic source criticism (‘Oral and Independent or Literary and Interdependent? A Response to Albert B. Lord’, in Walker, ed., Relationships Among the Gospels, pp. 93–102 [99]). 139. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, pp. 86–93; Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 85–9; Luce, Livy, pp. 144–7. 140. Luce, Livy, p. 147. 141. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, pp. 86–91. 142. C. B. R. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Adaptation of His Source-Material’, JHS 100 (1980), pp. 127–40 (30).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

57

or two or more sources serially.143 Pelling draws attention to the difficulties facing authors desiring to integrate a non-narrative, thematically organized source with the lead narrative source: ‘If two accounts did not deal with events in the same sequence – if, for instance, one narrated chronologically, while the other ordered events thematically – it would be cumbrous business to roll back and forth to find the parallel account’.144 In such cases, he suggests, the author may have accessed relevant passages in the second source through memory. Derrenbacker finds corroboration that authors typically followed one source at a time in Strabo, Arrian, and Diodorus, who in making primary use of the Megasthenes source on India frequently append supplemental material from other sources to the end of the relevant Magasthenes pericopes.145 Scroll logistics raised the technical problem of combining overlap passages in different sources, therefore present in variant versions and different order. This issue surfaces frequently in Livy’s use of Roman sources and Polybius. Rather than fashion a critical version of his own, a strategy Luce says would be ‘alien to antiquity’,146 Livy reconciled his sources into a coherent sequence, ‘salvaging most of both by judicious rearrangement and minor omissions’, or, where the divergence of overlapping sources was too great, choosing one as Hauptquelle and incorporating material from others as supplements.147 Livy handled doublets either by incorporating them as distinct episodes or as flashbacks, or – where their divergences were not so great – by combining ‘elements peculiar to each’ into a single version.148 The scroll medium constrained to patterns of sequential utilization. This is why, as Derrenbacker observes for the ancient authors he analyzes, ‘we do not see a radical reordering of source material’.149 Similarly, the contin143. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, p. 94. 144. Ibid., p. 93. 145. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 85–6. 146. Luce, Livy, p. 143. 147. Ibid., pp. 137–8, also pp. 198–9. 148. Ibid., pp. 137–8. Difficulties in the management of two scrolls and the lack of word separation in the texts themselves made minute comparison and micro-conflation of parallel versions a challenge; hence close textual conflation in ancient authors was rare. When conflation does occur it is simple, an ‘inlaying’ of longer textual sequences (F. Gerald Downing, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem’, JBL 107 [1988] pp. 69–85 [70], referring to Theon, Progymnasmata 3.12-13; also Derren­ backer, Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 116). 149. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 116–17; also Luce, Livy, pp. 143–4.

58

Q in Matthew

uous nature of the bookroll conduced to composing the new work linearly forward from the beginning.150 The scroll, its random access limitations notwithstanding, was not an insuperable obstacle to the reordering of units, particularly if a writer had a solid grasp of a source. In Book 40.2.6–3.2 Livy reorganizes Polybius’s list of individual embassies to Rome (Pol. 23.9) under the thematic principle of type of Senate reply.151 But the constraints the scroll medium placed upon utilization explain why shared order is an important indicator of literary relationships. Livy, says Luce, ‘never so combined his source material that he produced a version essentially of his own making: that is, one vouched for by none of his sources’.152 g. Scroll Utilization and Memory Because scroll design made search operations laborious, ancient writers frequently relied upon memory of a scroll’s contents. Greco-Roman historians and biographers seem to have worked to develop a provisional memory of sources pertinent to their current project. Plutarch’s and Livy’s memory grasp of their sources was of the sort gained through extensive preliminary reading (doubtless assisted by excerpting and ὑπομνήματα).153 Diodorus Siculus hints at this practice when discussing why so few universal histories have been attempted: ‘Since both the dates of the events and the events themselves lie scattered about in numerous treatises and diverse authors, the knowledge of them becomes difficult for the mind to encompass and the memory to retain’.154 Plutarch’s memory utilization of his sources was, as noted, based upon a preliminary period of cramming of this sort. Pelling suggests that this accounts for some peculiarities in Plutarch’s use of his sources: ‘[T]hus a story from pro Plancio is garbled and emasculated at Cic. 6.3-4 and the quotations from Brutus’ letters at Brut. 22 provide a pastiche of several different passages from two different letters. We should not infer that Plutarch did not know the works at first hand, but he is certainly unlikely to have had them under his eyes while composing.’155 In Life of Coriolanus Plutarch confuses the names of Coriolanus’s mother (‘Volumnia instead of Veturia’) and wife (‘Vergilia 150. Luce, Livy, p. 187. 151. Ibid., p. 213. 152. Ibid., p. 113. 153. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, pp. 92–6. 154. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1.2.4 (trans. C. H. Oldfather; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). 155. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method’, p. 93. Kenney refers to ‘the notorious inaccuracy in citation by ancient authorities, who tended to rely on memory and to cite from the beginnings of books’ (‘Books and Readers’, p. 16).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

59

instead of Volumnia’); he also mixes up the order of the tribes attacked by Coriolanus given by his source Dionysius.156 A project as ambitious as Livy’s required a wide-ranging program of preliminary reading.157 Luce thinks it likely that in composing specific episodes, Livy read ahead again in his sources a short way, priming his short-term, gist memory of the pertinent materials, and then wrote adapting the materials from memory.158 Gist memory of this sort would account for frequent but otherwise unmotivated variations, such as Livy’s rendering of topics in the eulogy of King Attalus in a different order from Polybius (33.21.1-5/Pol. 18.41),159 and especially in longer passages ‘the garbling of the original…toward the end of the unit…when the details of the original were not as fresh in Livy’s mind’.160 Livy occasionally creates ad hoc fixes to cover up – or he lets stand – conflicts in the sequences of episodes that had evidently caught him out as he moved back and forth between parallel sources, another indication that he was not composing from deep memory competence in his sources.161 h. Scroll Utilization Practices and Synoptic Source Criticism All ancient writers, regardless of cultural, social, or occupational niche, were bound by common media conditions, particularly the scroll format, to a baseline set of utilization practices. This is what gives the sourceutilization practices of Greco-Roman historians their capacity to inform Synoptic source-critical enquiry. One must again beware, however, of making unqualified projections of the practices of Greco-Roman his­torians and biographers such as Livy and Plutarch onto the Synoptic writers; one must also weigh what distinguishes them. This points us back to the heuristic distinction between author and tradent. The relationship of the Evangelists to their sources is different from these authors to their sources. The Evangelists have not picked up their acquaintance with their sources through a program of preliminary reading preparatory to writing. Matthew and his recipient community’s cultural stake in Mark is of a different order from the stake Livy and his social circles have in Polybius’s History. By the same token, the memory competence of the Evangelists in their m­aterials likewise operates at a different level (see Chapter 3).

156. D. A. Russell, ‘Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus’, JRS 53 (1963), pp. 21–8 (22). 157. Luce, Livy, pp. 188–9. 158. Ibid., p. 194. 159. Ibid., p. 212. 160. Ibid., p. 215. 161. Ibid., pp. 200–201.

60

Q in Matthew

4. Scribes and Scholars Hence the need to widen the enquiry, without overdrawing the distinction from Greco-Roman authorial practices, to other Sitze that featured expert writing practices exercised upon sources and traditions. Some of these Sitze will be found at the cultural encounter zone between Hellenism and the ancient scribal cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, or to be more precise, at the interstices of ancient scribal practices and GrecoRoman scholarly practices. In distinction to Near Eastern scribal cultures, Greco-Roman society sharply distinguished scribal and literary functions. Though there are not clear lines to be drawn anywhere, the advanced literate competencies associated with scribes in the Near Eastern cultures in Greco-Roman society tended to be associated with scholars, a group that in turn only partially overlaps with the elite Greco-Roman literati. To get a view of this complicated picture we will first outline scribal roles in GrecoRoman society, shift to the ancient Near Eastern scribal cultures, and then circle back to Greco-Roman scholarly practices. a. Scribes in the Elite Greco-Roman Literary Setting Much of the bibliography on scribal practices focuses on copying practices. No doubt this is because manuscript remains are the chief surviving empirical testimony to scribal activity, but in Synoptic scholarship one finds an entrenched caricature of scribes as ‘copyists’. There can be no question that copying (transmission of tradition) was a core scribal function, and that the competencies of most scribes did not go much beyond the clerical. ‘Scribe’ is a notoriously imprecise term, and under that rubric one finds very different levels of training in applied literacy.162 But the ‘copyist’ caricature owes something to the peripheral role scribes were assigned in the elite Greco-Roman literary Sitz, which separated literary from scribal activities. Scribes in these elite settings, the librarii, played accessory roles, charged mostly with taking dictation and copying. Bilabel in his survey of the term finds that librarius designates individuals charged with clerical tasks such as keeping accounts, maintaining files and records, and writing letters, and that librarius ‘wird dem scriptor (= Autor)…gegenüberstellt’.163 Cicero 162. Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Trans­ mitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 54; Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (STDJ 54; Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 13; Roger S. Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 79–80. 163. F. Bilabel, ‘Librarius’, PW 13 (1926), cols. 137–9. In his discussion of the transmission of medieval Jewish manuscripts, Malachi Beit-Arié notes: ‘The low

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

61

distinguished his writing (scribere) from the copying activities of scribes (describere/transcribere).164 Scribes in these settings were of marginal social status, usually slaves or freedmen.165 b. Administrative Scribes Owing to low literacy in a closely administered bureaucratic society, scribal skills were in wide demand. Writing originated in Mesopotamia for commercial, administrative uses, and a high proportion of scribal activity in antiquity was clerical and bureaucratic, not least to meet the documentary demands of imperial administrations. Most scribes in the Roman world were engrossed by routine clerical functions such as drafting documents, often working from templates or mother copies, adapting the formulaic language of standard administrative genres to specific cases.166 These genres might include deeds of sale, contracts, tax assessments, tax receipts, receipts for seed advances, affidavits, census declarations, letters, petitions, surveys of agricultural production, land surveys, and the like. Syriac documents, including slave sale contracts, petitions, leases, and letters, attest the penetration of administrative writing into villages around

position of hired scribes, and their inferior intellectual status in the social hierarchy, are attested both in the Orient and in Ashkenaz. In the Orient these are reflected in their meager wages, while according to Sefer hasidim copying was the profession of those who were not capable of studying the Bible or Aggada’ (‘Transmission of Texts by Scribes and Copyists: Unconscious and Critical Interferences’, BJRL 75 [1993], pp. 33–51 [40]). 164.  Myles McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’, CQ ns 46 (1996), pp. 469–91 (483), citing Att. 12.14.3; 13.21a.1; also Tiziano Dorandi, ‘Zwischen Autographie und Diktat: Momente der Textualität in der antiken Welt’, in Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechischen Kultur (ed. Wolfgang Kullmann and Jochen Althoff; ScriptOralia 61; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993), pp. 71–83 (77). 165. Kim Haines-Eitzen, ‘Scribes, Greece and Rome’, in Encyclopedia of Ancient History (ed. Roger Bagnall et al.; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 6086–7 (6086); Raymond Starr, ‘Lectores and Roman Reading’, CJ 86 (1991), pp. 337–43 (338). 166. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, pp. 29–30, 54; Bagnall, Everyday Writing, pp. 79–80; K. Donker van Keel and B. J. J. Haring, Writing in a Workmen’s Village: Scribal Practice in Ramesside Deir El-Medina (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2003), pp. 6, 18, 38 (ancient Egypt); Hannah M. Cotton and Ada Yardeni, eds., Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Naḥal Ḥever and Other Sites (DJD, 27; Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 13; Scott Bucking, ‘On the Training of Documentary Scribes in Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic Egypt: A Contextualized Assessment of the Greek Evidence’, ZPE 159 (2007), pp. 229–47 (231–4).

62

Q in Matthew

Dura Europa and Edessa.167 The Babatha and Salome Komaise archives (early second century CE) from the Judean desert give insight into landholding Jewish families from the village of Maoza in the trans-Jordan area. Documents from the archives include tax assessments, census declarations, contracts, and records of judicial proceedings, and many originate in interactions with courts and administrative offices in the larger regional centers of Petra and Rabbath Moab.168 The librarii mentioned in the archive are Jewish. Though Aramaic is their native language, they can write Greek, though on the whole rather clumsily.169 (1) Education of Administrative Scribes\. There is much that is unclear and unsystematic about scribal education; therefore only cautious generalizations can be made about the literary competencies of administrative scribes. It cannot be assumed that an administrative scribe in Egypt had exposure even to the lower levels the Hellenistic curriculum. ‘It is not even clear’, Morgan says, ‘whether literate and numerate education included the training of scribes…either in basic literacy or in their professional skills’.170 Many Greek and Roman scribes, mostly slaves or freedmen, were likely trained in standard clerical genres through scribal apprenticeships.171 In both the Roman and Greek worlds liberal education was regarded as not befitting those of servile and freedman status. Clerical education therefore ran on a separate track from the liberal education of the grammarian’s school. Many scribes of servile or freedman status acquired an occupational, utilitarian literacy through apprenticeships to other scribes or, at least in Rome, in separate vocational schools that did not feed into grammarian education.172

167. Bagnall, Everyday Writing, p. 100; Hopkins, ‘Conquest by Book’, p. 149 n. 44. 168. Benjamin Isaac, ‘The Babatha Archive: A Review Article’, IEJ 42 (1992), pp. 62–75 (73–4). 169. Hezser, Jewish Literacy, pp. 313–14; Hannah M. Cotton, ‘The Languages of the Legal and Administrative Documents from the Judaean Desert’, ZPE 125 (1999), pp. 219–31 (227); Cotton and Yardeni, Documentary Texts, p. 206; Naphtali Lewis, Yigael Yadin, and Jonas Greenfield, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989), pp. 6–13. 170. Morgan, Literate Education, p. 32. 171. Haines-Eitzen, ‘Scribes, Greece and Rome’, p. 6086. 172. Alan D. Booth, ‘The Schooling of Slaves in First-Century Rome’, TAPA 109 (1979), pp. 11–19; Clarence A. Forbes, ‘The Education and Training of Slaves in Antiquity’, TAPA 86 (1955), pp. 321–60 (323–8, 342).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

63

The Ptolemies when they took over Egypt initiated a drive, through tax concessions for teachers, to create a Greek-literate scribal class.173 Here one must also reckon with the factor of a transplanted Greek-speaking ruling class and Greco-Egyptian population elements from the establishment of cleruchies. The curriculum of the Ptolemaic program used Greek cultural texts that included Homer, extracts from the Greek playwrights, and Alexandrian poetry.174 It is unlikely, however, that many of these scribal students advanced very far, if at all, into the grammarian and rhetorical levels of education, which in the Hellenistic world was mostly an elite endeavor, the point of which was to impart the values that marked one as a member of the elite. There is evidence, moreover, that the two-track, socially segregated system attested for Rome that separated clerical from liberal education, clerical literacy from liberal paideia, prevailed elsewhere also, including Egypt.175 Naphtali Lewis says of administrative scribes in Egypt that though their educational level varied, ‘most give the impression of being merely literate rather than highly educated. They wrote mostly in formulas and clichés, a fact which shows up in the various contracts they penned and most strikingly (to us) in the private letters, many of which are little more than the most impersonally worded collections of greetings and conventional good wishes.’176 Notarii, says Kaster, practiced ‘a form of literacy distinct from liberal letters and traditionally reserved for men of humble origins’.177 He argues in the same vein that the notion of the integration in the ancient world of primary and secondary education is a misconception: most students entering the grammarian’s school were from elite or sub-elite families and had received their rudimentary education at home, not in the school of the grammaticus, which provided ‘general, utilitarian literacy’ to members of the non-elite population able to attend.178 Other evidence offers some corroboration for this. Non-standard orthography in documents from the Tebtunis archive suggests that in Roman Egypt Greek cultural literacy did not penetrate to lower administrative levels.179 173. Dorothy J. Thompson, ‘Literacy and Administration in Early Ptolemaic Egypt’, SAOC 51 (1992), pp. 323–36 (324–6). 174. Dorothy J. Thompson, ‘Language and Literacy in Early Hellenistic Egypt’, in Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (ed. Per Bilde; SHC 3; Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1992), pp. 39–52 (49); eadem, ‘Literacy and Administration’, pp. 325–6. 175. Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 14. 176. Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), p. 82. 177. Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 47. 178. Ibid., p. 24. 179. Bucking, ‘Training of Documentary Scribes’, pp. 234, 237.

64

Q in Matthew

Peter van Minnen argues that the works of Greek literature that have been found in excavations in Egyptian villages are to be associated with Egyptian elites – priestly families connected with the temples in the villages of the Fayum.180 Generally speaking, therefore, it is hazardous to assume that administrative scribes had much paideia. c. Scribes and Literary Competencies Nevertheless, unequivocal conclusions and bright lines are impossible to draw. Scribes working in low-status clerical occupations might in some cases possess more advanced literate skills. At the most basic level there is evidence of what Haines-Eitzen calls ‘a more complex scribal multifunctionality’, for instance the ability to move back and forth between bookroll copyist (librarius) and clerical-administrative (notarius) functions.181 A scribe able to write in a good book-hand might also write in the cursive documentary hand used for letters and administrative texts. This attests to what Bilabel calls the ‘doppelte Tätigkeit’ of the librarius occupation.182 Cribiore notes that a certain Philocalus, an elementary teacher in Capua in the first century CE (therefore with some paideia), supplemented his income by providing clerical services, and that in Egypt ‘elementary teachers often offered their services as scribes and notaries’.183 Grammaticus – the instructor at the primary level of education – was a low-status occupation often filled by former slaves perhaps still obligated to render clerical services to their former masters but who had enough education to set up as instructors in basic and intermediate literacy.184 Librarii and notarii, despite their servile or freedman status, might in some cases be educated and exercise scholarly skills. Epiphanius in the Panarion (67.1.1-4; 67.7.9) describes the heretic Hieracas as one 180. Peter van Minnen, ‘Bookish or Boorish? Literature in Egyptian Villages in the Fayum in the Graeco-Roman Period’, JJP 28 (1998), pp. 99–184 (108–9, 136, 168–9). The literary texts on the verso of some of documents from the archive of Menches, the komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris, cannot be connected to Menches (A. M. F. W. Verhoogt, Menches, Komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris: The Doings and Dealings of a Village Scribe in the Late Ptolemaic Period [120–110 B. C.] [Leiden: Brill, 1998], pp. 23, 41). 181. Haines-Eitzen, ‘Scribes’, p. 6086; see also Williams on Jerome’s notarii at a pinch serving as his librarii, taking dictation and copying (Monk and the Book, p. 218, commenting on Letter 155.3, Jerome to Aurelius). The Greek term γραμματεύς does not make the librarius/notarius functional distinction. 182. Bilabel, ‘Librarius’, cols. 137–9. 183. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 60–1. 184. McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying’, p. 479.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

65

who ‘had a sound elementary education, was well versed in all the pagan subjects…was quite skilled in many disciplines, including exegesis… [and who had] memorized the Old and New Testament’, but who also ‘until the day of his death…practiced the copyist’s art’.185 Bilabel cites passages where the term librarius is applied to an Elementarlehrer and to Lehrtätigkeit, and other passages that attribute a measure of learning to a librarius, for example, doctor librarius (Inschr. Dessau 7752); librarii quoque, qui docere possunt (Diog. L. 6,6); litteratus Graecis et Latinis librarius (CIL XI 1236).186 A second-century letter from Egypt referenced by Johnson describes ‘a travelling scribe or book dealer…[who] offers as an ancillary service the opportunity to collate texts in his collection’.187 It is not clear that this travelling scribe assisted in the collation; nevertheless he would seem to be a person with some literary and scholarly competencies. At an even higher level of literary competency, many of the Fachliteratur works, it was noted earlier, were written by individuals of freedman or freeborn but non-elite status who were active in specialized occupations such as architecture and medicine. Coming into view is a category of persons in the Greco-Roman cultural sphere, crossing elite/non-elite lines, that in its advanced literate skills and scholarly pursuits formed a rough counterpart to the skilled scribal classes of the ancient Near Eastern cultures. Given its different political evolution the Greco-Roman sphere lacked the elite scribal classes that served the administrative needs of the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires. For their part, with the incursion of Hellenism with the conquests of Alexander, Near Eastern scribal cultures engaged, in the modes of critical adaptation, accommodation, and resistance, with Greek language and culture. The status of scribes in these cultures was quite different from the status of scribes in Greco-Roman society. Scribal function in these societies combined what in Greco-Roman society tended to be separated: technical scribal and scholarly practices. d. Ancient Scribal Culture Historical scribal practices of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, and the class of their traditional carriers, were hardly washed away in a GrecoRoman tide. ‘Hellenism’ designates not the hegemony of Greek culture but the encounter between Greek culture and the ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, cultures to which the Greeks owed their own

185. Cited by Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, pp. 29–30. 186. Bilabel, ‘Librarius’, cols. 137–9. 187. Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 184 (P.Petaeus 30).

66

Q in Matthew

early cultural development.188 Martin Nilsson describes Hellenism as ‘den gesteigerten Verkehr zwischen allen Völkern und die Vermischung ihrer Kulturen und Ideen’.189 In the sphere of writing practices, marked distinctions between the two spheres persisted. In the Near East cultures to be a well-trained scribe was to be in an elite occupation, and scribal students came from the more privileged strata of society.190 ‘In den frühen Hochkulturen Mespotamiens und Ägyptens’, writes Jan Assmann, ‘bilden die Schreiber eine Aristokratie, in deren Händen cognitive, politische und ökonomische, moralische und juridische Kompetenzen vereinigt sind. Schreiben und Wissen, Schreiben und Verwalten, Schreiben und Herrschen gehen untrennbar Hand in Hand.’191 The students who wrote the Demotic school exercises from the temple scribal schools of Hellenistic Egypt were ‘no doubt scions of families of priests’.192 Ben Sira in his encomium (Sir. 38.24–39.9), Rollston notes, ‘considered the scribal vocation to be a lofty one, a distinct one, and a true vocation’.193 Viewed as a class, Near Eastern scribes were the living bearers of cultural traditions, members of an international community of scholars, with the most capable trained for service in royal and temple administration.194 Seals of some Old Babylonian scribes identified them as ‘servants of a particular king’,195 and cabinet-level Israelite scribes appear to have been called ‘the scribe

188. See Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (trans. Margart E. Pinder and Walter Burkert; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 189. Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der Griechischen Religion. Vol. 2, Die Hellenistische und Römische Zeit (Munich: Beck, 2nd ed., 1961), pp. 16–17. 190. Antoine Cavigneaux, ‘Scribes, Mesopotamia’, in Brill’s New Pauly (ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmut Schneider; 20 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2006), vol. 13, cols. 105–8; Christopher A. Rollston, ‘Scribal Curriculum During the First Temple Period: Epigraphic, Hebrew and Biblical Evidence’, in Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, pp. 71–101 (72–5). 191. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 148–9. 192. van Minnen, ‘Bookish or Boorish?’, p. 110. 193. Rollston, ‘Scribal Curriculum’, p. 73. 194. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, pp. 2265, 2275; Yoram Cohen, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 26–7. Jan Assmann remarks that ‘Schreibenlernen…war die Initiation in die ägyptische Kultur und in die elitäre Klasse ihrer Träger’ (‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, in Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms [ed. A. Loprieno; Brill, 1996], pp. 59–81 [70]). 195. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, p. 2273.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

67

of the king’.196 Egyptian scribes of Hellenistic Egypt, trained in village temples, in addition to mastering the Egyptian cultural tradition also engaged intellectually and adaptively with Greek literature.197 In the overlapping Greco-Roman sphere, however, the scribal occupation remained quite low-status. As Claire Clivaz puts it, ‘it was an idea foreign to Greek culture, and later to Hellenistic culture, to accord to scribes the kind of cultural or social value one finds in Egyptian or Jewish cultures’.198 In elite Greco-Roman circles literati activities and the technical scribal functions were divorced, whereas in the traditional scribal cultures it was not unusual for scribes to combine technical scribal activities such as copying with literary and scholarly activities. The colophons of a Neo-Assyrian palace scribe, Nabu-zuqup-kenu, reveal that he traveled widely to collate texts for the library, copied other texts for his personal study, and that ‘[b]esides being a copyist, [he] authored a mathematical text’.199 Oppenheim notes that ‘[d]espite attested specializations, the Mesopotamian scribes kept the traditional unity of their activities by calling themselves simply “scribes” (tupsarru). In fact, however…these scribes acted in several distinct capacities…for which I am going to use such modern terms as the scribe as bureaucrat, the scribe as poet, and the scribe as scholars.’200 A prosopographic analysis of the colophons of a clan of scribes in Hellenistic Uruk that specialized in copying scholarly and scientific texts shows them engaged in both administrative and scholarly writing, tending more towards the latter as their careers advanced, devoting themselves in retirement more fully to scholarly pursuits.201 With regard to Jewish scribes Tov explains that ‘the term soferim involves the combined activities of the copying of texts, especially of Scripture and other sacred documents, and an intimate knowledge of the documents, and it is often difficult to decide which nuance of the term is intended… [M]ost soferim were skilled in both aspects of their profession.’202 Similarly 196. Rollston, ‘Scribal Curriculum’, pp. 76–7 (2 Kgs 12:11; 2 Chr 24:11). 197. van Minnen, ‘Bookish or Boorish?’, p. 101. 198. Claire Clivaz, ‘The Prose Writer (ΣΥΓΓΡΑΦΕΥΣ) and the Cultures of Author and Scribes: The Examples of Galen and the Anonymous Author of Luke–Acts’, in Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism, and Script (ed. Philip R. Davies and Thomas Römer; Durham: Acumen, 2013), pp. 159–76 (160). 199. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, pp. 2273–4. 200. A. Leo Oppenheim, ‘The Position of the Intellectual in Mesopotamian Society’, Daedalus 104 (1975), pp. 37–46 (38–9). 201. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, pp. 2275–6. Thompson notes that in ancient Egypt ‘many priests were also scribes’ (‘Language and Literacy’, p. 40). 202. Tov, Scribal Practices, p. 12.

68

Q in Matthew

Talmon: ‘One may…presume that a unio personalis was the rule: an author often served…also as the editor, transmitter, scribe, or copyist of his own works or the works of others.’203 The Tanna R. Meir ‘was active both as a creative teacher and as a prodigious scribe… [T]he Tannaitic ‫…ספר‬was…a comprehensive literate who could be author, editor, transmitter, scribe or copyist.’204 ‘In the Palestinian Talmud’, notes Elman, ‘several Amoraim are given the appellation, katova, “scribe” (R. Hanina Katova [PT Sanh 19d=PT Hor 14a], R. Yiitza b. R. Hiyya Katova [PT Ber 6a, Ter 46b, Pes 28b, and elsewhere]’.205 The Islamic scholars described by Rosenthal combined scribal practice and scholarship, including text-critical work.206 Naturally one must avoid generalizations about ‘scribal cultures’ and exaggerating the differences vis-à-vis Greco-Roman practices. Certainly there were differential levels of scribal training and accomplishment in the Near Eastern societies, the caliber of scribal training varied by era, and relatively few scribes could be counted as scholars at high levels of accomplishment. Vanstiphout notes that in eighth-century Assyria, a scribal instructor ‘in presenting twenty of his alumni to the court, mentions only a few among them as being proficient in tupsarrutu, lit. “tablet learning” – which was once the source and pinnacle of all education and learning’.207 There were hierarchies of rank and education and corresponding divisions of labor. Carr remarks that highly educated elites of the scribal cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt ‘performed few, if any, scribal functions’.208 Prosopographic studies of scribal colophons from Late Bronze Age Emar indicate that many scribes were mostly writing

203. Shemaryahu Talmon, ‘The Textual Study of the Bible – a New Outlook’, in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (ed. Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 321–400 (336). 204. Ibid., p. 336. 205. Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 52–99 (56). Noting that this appellation is ‘notably absent in the Bavli’, Elman speculates that in Babylon a stronger distinction was made between the sage function and the technical scribal function. 206. Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (AnOr 24; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1947), pp. 6–40 (23, et passim). 207. H. L. J. Vanstiphout, ‘On the Old Babylonian Eduba Curriculum’, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East (ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald; Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 3–16 (15). 208. David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 99.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

69

administrative genres such as testaments, deeds, and contracts.209 Pearce estimates that just ten percent of cuneiform scribes worked primarily as scholars.210 Scribal education in ancient Egypt may have been occupationally streamed, some scribes being trained in demotic for primarily administrative work, others trained in temples in the hieratic script.211 But given that ancient Near Eastern scribal curricula used cultural works as training materials, even administratively engrossed scribes would have acquired some paideia (to use the Greek term).212 The penetration of Greek cultural practices into the Near East with the Hellenistic kingdoms, followed by Roman imperial administration, further mixes up the picture. One must avoid, moreover, drawing direct lines from the scribal academies of Bronze and Iron Age societies to scribal practices in the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Nevertheless those practices and the institutions that supported them persisted in robust and adaptive forms as evidenced, for example, in the activities of Jewish sopherim in the Second Temple period and their sequel in the rabbinic movement. e. Scribes and Political/Cultural Resistance Not infrequently one finds native scribes active in cultural and political resistance to Hellenism and the Roman Imperium and aligned with popular and prophetic resistance movements. Egyptian temples, centers of scribal activity, while sometimes bestowing legitimacy on Hellenistic rulers, on other occasions served as organizing nodes in resistance and revolt.213 The development of the Coptic script in the late first century CE, which uses Greek letters to write native Egyptian, is a case of scribal cultural resistance. Hopkins explains: Coptic originated as a script of protest. It was obviously first developed by Egyptians who already knew Greek…but who wanted to write in Egyptian in order to communicate with Egyptians… Coptic represents a cultural resistance of native Egyptians against the dominance of Greek speakers and writers; by proxy, it was, presumably, also aimed against the dominance of Roman rule. Coptic was used as a medium of communication among

209. Cohen, Scribes and Scholars, p. 89. 210. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, pp. 2272–3. Seventy percent worked in public administration, twenty percent in the private sphere, and ten percent in ‘scientific and quasi-scientific activities’. 211. Thompson, ‘Language and Literacy’, p. 50. 212.  Eyre and Baines, ‘Orality and Literacy’, p. 94. 213. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 194.

70

Q in Matthew native sub-elites, who knew both Greek and Egyptian but preferred to write in Egyptian, and between them and those Egyptians who did not know Greek…[this] involved interaction, even cooperation, between sub-elites and the underprivileged.214

Here one sees advanced literate skills used in cultural resistance in solidarity with subordinated groups. In Judea alliances of scribes with dissident prophetic movements goes back into pre-exilic times, and the prophet books owe their existence to scribal cultivation of the oracles of the prophet.215 In Roman Judea the so-called Jewish ‘sects’ or parties coalesced around elite leadership cadres with scribal elements that with reference to Israel’s narrative, legal, and prophetic traditions articulated competing agendas for reform and renewal that ran the gamut from accommodation to violent resistance.216 The martyr scribe Eleazar (2 Macc. 6.18) is representative of scribal resistance to the Seleucid regime and the priests allied with Antiochus’s program of Hellenization.217 The post-Seleucid period is marked by scribe- and priest-led movements dissident with respect to the Hasmonean regime and the Temple establishment. Jaffee summarizes: The existence of many texts from the mid-second century BCE and onward that severely criticize the Hasmonean (non-Tzadokite) High Priestly establishment…force the conclusion…that literary scribes worked in a variety of settings beyond the Temple administrative system and its elite culture. Employing genres such as law, visionary writings, history, and hymnody that shaped the work of Temple literary scribes, dissident scribes cultivated a kind of ‘revisionist tradition’ which called into question the legitimacy of the established Hasmonean legal and political order.218

214. Hopkins, ‘Conquest by Book’, pp. 146–7 (emphasis added). 215. Annette Schellenberg. ‘A“lying pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8)? Orality and Writing in the Formation of the Prophetic Books’, in Weissenreider and Coote, eds., Interface of Orality and Writing pp. 285–309 (299); John Van Seters, ‘Prophetic Orality in the Context of the Ancient Near East: A Response to Culley, Crenshaw, and Davies’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 83–8 (87–8). 216. Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era (JSJSup 55; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 45–51; Richard A. Horsley, Revolt of the Scribes: Resistance and Apocalyptic Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), pp. 15, 197–8; Hezser, Jewish Literacy, p. 200. 217. Christine Schams, Jewish Scribes in the Second Temple Period (JSOTSup 291; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 120–4; see 1 Macc. 7.12. 218. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 21.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

71

Scribal writings in the Roman period envisioned the destruction of the imperial order (4 Ezra), and scribes are found in the entourages of the rebel chief Eleazar (Josephus, Ant. 10.9.3, 208) and Bar Kokhba.219 Graffiti and ostraca inscriptions dating from the first and second revolts and found at the Herodian fortress reflect advanced levels of education in Greek literature and the Bible and confirm the involvement of literate strata in these popular movements.220 Likely it is in the proximity of scribal groups of this complexion that the framers of Q and Matthew are to be found.221 f. Greco-Roman Scholars In the Greco-Roman cultural sphere there existed a category of literate individuals who combined writing activity with the study and transmission of cultural tradition and thus formed a rough counterpart to the traditional scribal class of the east. The outlines of this group began to emerge above, in the discussion of that small sub-set of low-status Greco-Roman scribes who nevertheless possessed more advanced literate and scholarly abilities. This group opens up onto wider circles of scholars, Gelehrte, working with texts and writing in various scholarly pursuits. Before the term grammaticus/γραμματικός, or grammarian, was demoted to mean ‘secondary education instructor’, it designated the ‘literary scholar’, a figure – most often not of elite status – active in Rome and the cities of the eastern Mediterranean.222 The most notable were the scholars of the Museum in Alexandria that produced critical editions of Homer, but scholarly activities were widely pursued outside of these elite institutional settings.223 The early Roman scholars, Bonner says, ‘were particularly interested in the Latin poets and, like their predecessors in Alexandria and Pergamum, were much concerned with questions of authenticity and with the accurate transmission and elucidation of their texts’.224 Scholarly projects included writing Bildungsgut for higher education, philological works on Greek grammar, glossaries on rare words, etymologies, collating and engaging in critical analysis of literary texts, writing handbooks and commentaries,

219. Hezser, Jewish Literacy, p. 280. 220. Ibid., pp. 340–1, 415–16. 221. See Sarah E. Rollens, Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project in the Sayings Gospel Q (WUNT 2/374; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014), p. 174. 222. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, p. 49. 223. Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, p. 3. 224. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, p. 54.

72

Q in Matthew

collecting and compiling the work of their predecessors, and the like.225 Here one might also include the disciplinary school tradition discussed by Loveday Alexander and others. Most of these scholars active in Rome were of humble status, freedmen who had received higher education, perhaps as slaves, in the households to which they had been attached as dependents or were educated persons subsequently enslaved, for example, Greek captives brought back to Rome from in the wars in the east. They filled low-status niches and earned their bread as schoolmasters at the primary and grammarian levels and, if they were able and so inclined, devoted themselves to scholarship, in a few cases gaining some repute.226 Quin mentions the case of the scholar Epirota: ‘[H]is name indicates he was the son of a Greekspeaking slave from Epirus; the father was perhaps already in Atticus’ employment as a librarius and in a position to educate his son and set him upon a literary career’.227 Leisured elites such as Varro might of course engage in scholarship, but scholarly activity, though respected, did not necessarily correlate to high status. Like their scribal counterparts in the Near East, Greco-Roman scholars might combine literary activities with technical scribal functions. This is attested, for example, by PLitLond 165, which Dorandi describes as ‘das Werk eines Gelehrten, der über den Text, den er eigenhändig niederschriebt, nachdenkt, und der mit dem Schreiber der Papyrusrolle selbst zu identifiziert ist’.228 Montanari notes that scholars engaged in producing

225. See Quin, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 112; Poynton, ‘Books and Authors’, p. 104; Johannes Christes, Sklaven und Freigelassene als Grammatiker und Philologen im Antiken Rom (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979), pp. 1–2; James E. G. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (New York: Arno, 1981), p. 72; Kaster, Guardians of Language, p. 52; Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, p. 72; also M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991), p. 3. 226. Christes, Sklaven und Freigelassene, pp. 175, 195–202; Quin, ‘Poet and Audience’, pp. 114, 131. Horster says that individuals of slave status active as scholars and grammarians ‘scheint…die große Ausnahme gewesen zu sein’ (‘Literarische Elite?’, p. 183). 227. Quin, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 131. 228. Dorandi, ‘Zwischen und Diktat’, pp. 73–4. The eighth-century scholar Rabanus Maurus ‘explains in his Commentary on St. Matthew: “I myself was all three: dictator, notarius, and librarius” – that is, the one who composed the words (dictator), the one who noted them down on the wax tablet (notarius), and the one who made the fair copy on parchment (librarius)’ (Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, p. 179). The Venerable Bede ‘in the preface to his commentary on Luke describes himself as both

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

73

critical editions used the same diorthosis techniques as scriptoria correctors to collate their texts; they annotated their copies with text-critical sigla and other philological and interpretative comments that often grew into self-standing commentaries.229 5. Scholars and Source-Utilization: Three Case Studies In surviving works of Greco-Roman scholars one finds source-utilization and editorial techniques that provide close analogues to Synoptic source-utilization. a. Apollonius Sophista’s Homer Lexicon Apollonius Sophista was a literary scholar from Alexandria active in Rome in the first century CE. He is known primarily for his Homer Lexicon, ‘a key source of information on ancient understandings of Homer’s vocabulary and how Homer was read in antiquity’.230 Michael W. Haslam has authored a definitive study of Apollonius’s use of his sources in the Lexicon: (1) the D scholia, a tradition of Homer commentary, with origins in classical Greece, transmitted at the oral/written boundary in marginalia and interlinear glosses, and also in compilations;231 (2) an Odysseus commentary by Heliodorus; (3) an earlier Homer lexicon by Apion; (4) an amorphous ‘polysemantic’ source (entries of which survey the different shades of meaning of a Homeric word).232 The principle of order in Apollonius’s Lexicon is of course alphabetization. The Lexicon carries sorting to the second or sometimes to the third letter, for example, ἀγ-, ἀμ-, ἀν-, τε-, φα-. Each word entry is glossed with a short definition, to which is appended a brief quotation(s) from the Iliad or the Odyssey.

author and scribe: Ipse mihi dictator simul notarius et librarius (“Myself at the same time author, stenographer, and scribe”)’ (Fred C. Robinson, The Editing of Old English [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], p. 19). 229. Montanari, ‘Correcting a Copy’, pp. 13–14. 230. Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, pp. 25–6. 231. ‘The term [Scholia Minora, a body of material closely related to the D Scholia] applies to those Homeric commentaries where the Homeric text is divided into lemmata and is accompanied by the corresponding glosses, a very ancient form of Homeric exegesis that can be traced back to at least the fifth century BC’ (Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 50). 232. Michael W. Haslam, ‘The Homer Lexicon of Apollonius Sophista: Part I. Composition and Constituents’, CPh 89 (1994), pp. 1–45; idem, ‘The Homer Lexicon of Apollonius Sophista: Part II. Identity and Transmission’, CPh 89 (1994), pp. 107–19.

74

Q in Matthew

For example, from the ἀγ- sequence: ἀγροτέρας: οὐ συγκριτικῶς εἴρηκεν, ἀλλ’ ἀντὶ τοῦ ἀγρίας· ‘ἠὲ μετ’ ἀγροτέρας ἐλάφους· κέλεται δέ ἑ γαστήρ’ (ζ 133 [i.e. Od. 6.133]), which we can render as follows: ‘ἀγροτέρας: not used comparatively, but in place of ἀγρίας; “…maybe a forest stag, or his belly commands him [to enter a crowded fold and charge at a lamb there”]’.233 Now to Apollonius’s sources. (1) Heliodorus Odyssey Commentary. Of particular interest is Apollonius’s practice of appending blocks of Odyssey words and quotations to the end of the corresponding two-letter alphabetical section. The sequence of quotations within these blocks, moreover, is mostly in the order of their occurrence in the Odyssey.234 The following (in ἀγ-) illustrates: 77 ἀγακλυτά + Od. 3.388 78 ἀγροτέρας + Od. 6.133 79 ἀγλαόκαρποι + Od. 7.115 80 ἀγαπήνορος + Iliad displacement of an original Od. 7.170 81 ἀγνυμενάων + Od. 10.123 82 ἄγρην + Od. 12.330 83 ἀγνοιήσασα + Od. υ 15 [Od. 20.15] 84 ἀγαιομένου + Od. υ 16 [Od. 20.16] 85 ἀγκυλοχεῖλαι + Od. 16.217 86 ἀγνώσασκε + Od. 23.95 87 ἀγνοίησι + Od. 24.218 88 ἀγέρθη + Od. 24.349

The Lexicon then continues with the ἀδ- sequence. Another example is the block of Odyssey words and quotations appended to the end of the ἀμ- sequence: 368 ἀμφιρύτῃ περιρεομένῃ + Od. 1.198 369 ἀμφίς + multiple-quotation from the ‘polysemantic source’ 370 ἀμαλλοδετῆρες + Il. 18.553 371 ἀμύντορας + Od. 2.326 372 ἄμφω ἀμφότεροι + Od. 3.344 373 ἀμφεκάλυψεν + Od. 4.618 374 ἀμφασίη ἀφασιά + Od. 4.704 375 ἄμμορον + multiple-quotation from the ‘polysemantic source’ 376 ἀμφήλυθε + Od. 6.122 377 ἀμφὶς ἔχοιεν + Od. 8.340 233. Translation from Homer: The Odyssey (trans. Edward McCrorie; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 234. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 5.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

75

378 ἀμφιφορεῦσιν + Od. 9.204 379 ἀμησάμενος + Od. 9.247 380 ἀμηχανίη + Od. 9.295 381 ἀμαρτήσεσθαι + Od. 9.512 382 ἀμφιμέμυκεν + Od. 10.227 383 ἀμφοτέρωθεν + Od. 12.58 384 ἀμφιτρίτη + Od. 12.97 385 ἀμφαγαπαζόμενος + Il. 16.192 386 ἀμοιβήν + Od. 12.382 [387–395 all similarly in Od. sequence] 396 ἀμφέθετο + Od. 21.431 397 ἀμφεξεσα + gloss Od. 23.196 398 ἄμπνυτο + Od. 24.349

These blocks of Odyssey words and quotations in ἀγ- and ἀμ-, Haslam notes, ‘are just exceptionally conspicuous representatives of a body of material that was evidently distributed throughout the whole work’.235 The two interpolations from the ‘polysemantic’ source and from the Iliad are, respectively, evidence of ‘interaction with material from another source’.236 The appended Odyssey entries are words that do not occur in the Iliad: this is the rationale for their being aggregated separately at the end of the respective alphabetic sequences.237 Apollonius’s source for these blocks of glosses and quotations is an Odyssey commentary by Heliodorus, whom Apollonius considerately identifies in some of the glosses.238 The point is the following: Apollonius integrates individual lemmata from his source – the Heliodorus commentary on the Odyssey, which naturally follows the Odyssean narrative sequence – into the alphabetical sequence of lexeis in his lexical work. In so doing he creates blocks of material that display the relative order of the Heliodorus commentary. As noted, these are appended in blocks at the 235. Ibid., p. 7. Other clear examples are found in τα-, τε-, φα-, φλ-, φο-. A number of these have fewer items in the appended blocks than the above examples. There does not seem to be a Hauptquelle for the main Iliad/Odyssey sequences of words, unless it be the amorphous D scholia; quotations are pulled from the relevant Iliad/Odyssey passages (mostly the former) not in order. 236. Ibid., p. 6. 237. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 238. Ibid., pp. 13–15; see Andrew R. Dyck, ‘The Fragments of Heliodorus Homericus’, HSPh 95 (1993), pp. 1–64: ‘The fact that Apollonius explicitly ties Heliodorus’ comments to specific passages on a number of occasions makes it clear that he has used a source keyed closely to a text, as a commentary, but not a lexicon, would be’ (3–4).

76

Q in Matthew

end because the word entries do not correspond to the word entries, most of which occur in the Iliad, of the foregoing alphabetical sequence. In other words, where the Heliodoran Odyssey commentary quotations with the pertinent lexical items lack lexical pegs in the preceding alphabetical sequence, Apollonius brings them separately in a block at the end. That this is Apollonius’s procedure is confirmed by his also integrating Heliodorus commentary materials into the foregoing alphabetical sequences through the ‘peg’ method. These Odyssey commentary lemmata are identifiable through introductory formulae such as ὡς Ἡλιόδωρος/ ὁ δὲ Ἡλιόδωρος ἀνάγγελτα…/ ὡς καὶ Ἡλιόδωρός φησιν…/ οὕτως καὶ Ἡλιόδωρος…/ ὁ δὲ Ἡλιόδωρος…οὕτως φησιν κτλ. They are integrated into the existing lexical entries earlier in the alphabetic sequence dominated by Iliad-attested words. For example: 73.5 ἐπιειμένε (Il. 1.149) ἐπημφιεσμένε. ἐπὶ δὲ ι Ὀδυσσείας ‘μεγάλην ἐπιειμένον ἀλκήν’ (Od. 9.214) Ἡλιόδωρος ἀποδίδωσι πεποιημένον [‘Heliodoros has πεποιημένον’ (rather than ἐπιειμένον)] 136.17 πρότυψαν προενέσεισαν, ‘Τρῶες δὲ προ(ύ)τυψαν’ (Il. ter). ὅταν δὲ ἐν τῇ ω τῆς Ὀδυσσείας ὁ Ἡλιόδωρος λέγῃ ἐπὶ τοῦ Λαέρτου ‘μένος προύτυψεν’ (Od. 24.319), προ[σ]έπεσεν, προ[σ]έσεισεν.

In these cases the Heliodoran gloss is ‘simply tacked on to an existent entry, which it has otherwise left unaffected’. Elsewhere ‘the incorporation is effected a little more organically’.239 Two such ‘composites’ by way of illustration, both a discussion of a hapax: 158.8-21 ὑπερικταίνοντο τῶν ἅπαξ εἰρημένων, ἐν τῇ ψ τῆς Ὀδυσσείας, ‘πόδες δ’ ὑπερικταίνοντο’. ὁ γὰρ Ἀρίσταρχός φησιν ἄγαν ἐπάλλοντο,…ἔνιοι δὲ ἐτυμώτερον (ἑτοιμό- cod.) ὑπ{ερ}εσχίζοντο (Lehrs) κατὰ τὴν πορείαν·…ὁ δὲ Ἡλιόδωρος ὑποκατεκλῶντο οὐκ εὐτονοῦντες. ἄλλοι δὲ ὑπερικνοῦντο διὰ τὴν προθυμίαν. 159.27-33 ὑποσταχύοιτο τῶν ἄπαξ εἰρημένων. ὁ μὲν Ἀπίων ἀποδίδωσιν ὑπαύξοιτο, ὁ δὲ Ἡλιόδωρος ὑπογεννῷτο. ‘ὑποσταχύοιτο βοῶν γενος εὐρυμετώ­ πων’. ὑγιῶς μὲν οὖν ἑκάτερος· εἴρηται γὰρ ἀπὸ τῶν σταχύων μεταφορικῶς· ὡσπεροῦν ἐξ ἑνος σπέρματος εἷς πυθμὴν γίνετα, ἀφ’ οὗ πολλοὶ στάχυες, οὕτως ἀπὸ μιᾶς βοὸς πολλοὶ γίνονται· διόπερ ὁ μὲν εἰς τὸ ὑπαύξοιτο μετέφρασεν, ὁ δὲ ὑπογεννῷτο. 239. ‘To the existing entry on the Iliadic occurrence of ἐπιειμένε is added Heliodorus’ gloss for the Odyssean occurrence of ἐπιειμένον; to the existing entry on the Iliadic προύτυψαν are added Heliodorus’ glosses for the Odyssean προύτυψεν’ (Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 16).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

77

In the first example, ‘Apollonius adds Heliodorus’ interpretation to an already complex note’, and in the second, ‘Apollonius opposes Heliodorus’ translation to Apion’s [Apollonius’s second source], and makes comparative judgment’ (both are sound/ὑγιῶς).240 The conflation is a matter of interweaving the quotation from Heliodorus, as a distinct strand, into the materials from other sources. Apollonius’s utilization of Heliodorus provides an analogy to Matthew’s utilization of Q. Where Markan pegs exist, Matthew conflates Q materials with Markan materials; where such pegs are lacking he brings the Q material separately in blocks. Apollonius redistributes Heliodorus’s commentary material, which follows the Odyssey narrative order, into a sequence organized on the alphabetical-lexical principle. Matthew cycles Q sayings-material into his gospel on the principle of Markan narrative order. Each of Matthew’s utilization strategies reproduces the relative forward order of Q. Since they are sorted alphabetically to just the second letter (for example, ἀγ-), the lexeis and their accompanying Odyssean quotations can be gathered for Apollonius’s lexical list in a simple sequential movement through Heliodorus’s commentary. As a Homer scholar, Apollonius would have the Odyssey by memory. He can search the Odyssey forward for lexical items and the accompanying lemmata (or he may just be following a standard scholarly sequence of lexeis). Though Heliodorus’s commentary is not a cultural text like the Odyssey, Apollonius as a specialist likely has a good memory grasp of it, and he can use his memory competence in the Odyssey as a search tool to locate the pertinent Heliodorus commentary material rapidly.241 (2) Apion Lexicon Source.With ὁ Ἀπίων in 159.27-33 (ὑποσταχύοιτο entry above), Apollonius references another of his sources. Apion (late first century BCE/early first century CE) was the author of a Homer lexicon, Γλῶσσαι Ὁμηρικαί, published not too long prior to Apollonius’s work on his lexicon. In composing his lexicon Apollonius frequently pairs Apion with Heliodorus, comparing their interpretations, which ‘never exactly coincide’.242 240. Ibid., p. 17. 241. A similar procedure is attested for Diogenes Laertius’s integration of materi­als from Favorinus’s Apomnemoneumata and Omnigena Historia: where an ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’ exists, Diogenes integrates Favorinus units into the main ‘Grundvita’ sequence of his work; where ‘es in der Grundvita keinen noch so gesuchten Anknüpfungspunkt gab, hat Diogenes am Ende eines Abschnittes oder am Ende der Vita [the Favorinus excerpt] nachgetragen’, and often in blocks of Favorinus excerpts (Mensching, Favorin von Arelate, p. 16, e.g. D.L. 4.5; 5.777; 8.47). 242. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 21.

78

Q in Matthew

(3) Polysemantic Source. Apollonius’s third source is a ‘polysemantic’ lexicon – one which sets out the different shades of meaning of a Homeric word in the pattern: ἐπὶ μὲν…ἐπὶ δὲ…ἐπὶ δὲ…ἐπὶ δε κτλ. This distinctive format makes it easy to spot the polysemantic source, which Apollonius integrates here and there within his alphabetical sequence individually or in blocks.243 The τιμήν and the τιτύσκετο entries illustrate the polysemantic format and how Apollonius integrates materials from this source into his own lexical sequence: τιμήν ἐπὶ μὲν τῆς δόσεως καὶ τῆς συνήθους ἡμῖν, ‘τιμῆς ἧς τέ μ’ ἔοικε τετιμῆσθαι μετ’ Ἀχαιούς’, ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς τιμωριάς, ‘τιμὴν ἀρνύμενοι’, ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ προστίμου, ‘τιμὴν δ’ Ἀργείοις{ιν} ἀποτινέμεν’, ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς ὠνῆς, ‘τιμὴν ἀμφὶς ἄγνοντες ἐεικος{σ}άβοιον’—μήποτε δὲ καὶ τοῦτο ἐπὶ προτίμου λέγεται…| ὁ δὲ Ἡλιόδωρος καὶ τὴν βασιλείαν οὕτως φησὶν εἰρῆσθαι· ‘ἢ ἔτ’ ἔχει τιμὴν πολέεσσι μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι’. τίννυνται τιμωροῦνται τίσιν ἀντέκτισιν τιτύσκετο ἐπὶ μὲν τοῦ ἡτοιμάζετο, ‘ὑπ’ ὄχεσφι τιτύσκετο’, ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ στοχασμῷ χρῆσθαι, ‘Μηριόνης δ’ ἐν τοῖσι τιτύσκετο δουρὶ φαεινῷ’ καὶ ‘ἰοῖσίν τε τιτυσκόμενοι’, καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ ψυχικῶς κατεστοχάζετο, ‘τιτύσκετο δὲ φρεσὶν ἧσιν ἤ τευ ἀκοντίσαι ἠὲ σχεδὸν ὁρμηθῆναι’.

Identification of the polysemantic source presents difficulties. It appears to be extant in a medieval manuscript and fragmentarily in a first-century CE papyrus. These diverge from each other and from Apollonius’s entries considerably, however, in order, phrasing, and formulaic structure; their correspondence is ‘disconcertingly approximate’.244 So great is their divergence that Haslam posits the existence of a ‘body of polysemantic material’ that is realized in different enactments, ‘a floating corpus of interpretative tradition, fundamentally unstable, dynamically transmitted, with no sort of fixity beyond what its many instantiations were momentarily and continually investing it with’.245 He suggests that Apollonius drew upon a written source based upon this body of semantic material, a source not in a direct literary relationship to either the first-century papyrus source or the ancestor of the medieval manuscript. Before leaving Apollonius, we offer a few reflections on his role as a tradent. Apollonius is a compiler and consolidator of a scholarly lexical tradition. ‘The impression he conveys’, Haslam says, ‘is of a humble toiler in the Homeric vineyard, capable of recognizing nonsense when he finds it 243. Ibid., pp. 31–3. 244. Ibid., p. 37. 245. Ibid., p. 40.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

79

but for the most part content to serve as a receiver and transmitter, fulfilling the function of scholarly middleman by assembling the lexical interpretations of others.’246 Where the interpretations of his sources compete, ‘he simply records them both…occasionally he may declare a preference or make a comment, occasionally he may even venture an alternative interpretation himself’.247 Apollonius’s lexicon ‘swept the field’ and effectively ‘buried’ Apion’s lexicon.248 But his project should be taken for what it manifestly is, a consolidation of the scholarly tradition, successful for that reason, not an attempt to suppress earlier lexicographers and imagined rivals.249 b. Source Utilization in Florilegia Transmission Collecting maxims and chreiae of important authors, playwrights, and philosophers and organizing them under various rubrics in florilegia (or anthologies, gnomologia) was a widespread scholarly practice in the ancient world. The lively cultivation and transmission of florilegia began in classical-era Greece and continued into the Byzantine period.250 Old florilegia were cycled into new florilegia, frequently under alternative rubric (topoi) principles. Florilegia transmission is therefore a promising field for studying source-utilization practices: the 2DH posits a collection of topos-organized ethical materials (Q) that is cycled into a work with a modified topoi structure (Matthew). Source-critical analyses that begin with Curt Wachsmuth (1882) have reconstructed the source relationships that connect four generations of florilegia, from tenth- and eleventhcentury Byzantine florilegia all the way back through Stobaeus (fifth century CE) to his sources.251

246. Ibid., p. 26. 247. Ibid., p. 29. Apollonius offers an opinion on Heliodorus’s interpretation seven of the forty-six times he cites him (Dyck, ‘Fragments’, p. 1). 248. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon II’, p. 114; idem, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 28. 249. Even Apollonius’s more extensive criticism of Apion, whose Lexicon, featuring fanciful etymological interpretations, was widely deprecated, is restrained (Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 26). 250. Denis M. Searby, The Corpus Parisinum: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text with Commentary and English Translation (A Medieval Anthology of Greek Texts from the Pre-Socratics to the Church Fathers 600 B.C.–700 A.D., vol. 1 (Lewiston: Mellen, 2007), p. 52. 251. Curt Wachsmuth, Studien zu den griechischen Florilegien (Berlin: Weidmann, 1882), especially Chapter 4: ‘Über das byzantinische Florilegium “Parallela” und seine Quellen’ (pp. 90–161).

80

Q in Matthew

(1) Four Byzantine Florilegia. Comparison of extensive agreements among three tenth-century Byzantine florilegia containing mostly Greco-profane maxims – the Maximus, the Antonius, and the Melissa Augustana – led Wachsmuth to posit a lost, ninth- and tenth-century Vorlage for all three, the ‘Buch der Parallela’. He argued that absolute and relative agreements in (a) topoi order and (b) order of sayings in the three florilegia allowed the reconstruction of this no longer extant Urquelle.252 Wachsmuth’s analysis was path-breaking for source-critical study of the florilegia, but in the matter of the lost source he was mistaken. In 1888 Heinrich Schenkl identified the ninth-century Corpus Parisinum, a large sacroprofane florilegium (Christian and pagan elements) as the major source of the Maximus, and especially of the latter’s third section consisting of 556 Greco-profane maxims. For their part, the Antonius and the Melissa Augustana were dependent not, as the Maximus was, on the CP but on the Maximus.253 In studies published 1892 between 1904 Anton Elter confirmed Schenkl’s results and carried out groundbreaking source-critical work on the Corpus Parisinum.254 One sees some striking parallels here to developments in Synoptic source criticism earlier in the nineteenth century: the initial positing of an Urgospel as the source for Matthew, Mark and Luke, subsequently identified as the Gospel of Mark simpliciter soon after Karl Lachmann, comparing Matthean and Lukan order with Mark’s, showed that Mark’s order best preserved the order of the Urgospel, a characterization that

252. Ibid., p. 90. Wachsmuth adduces a fourth florilegium dependent on the ‘Parallela’, the Laurentianus, but for economy we will limit the comparison to the Maximus, Melissa Augustana, and Antonius. 253. For this survey of late nineteenth-century source criticism on these florilegia I am indebted to Denis Searby’s Introduction to his two-volume critical edition of the Corpus Parisinum, especially vol. 1, pp. 57–66; also to Jens Gerlach’s Gnomica Democritea: Studien zur gnomologischen Überlieferung der Ethik Demokrits und zum Corpus Parisinum mit einer Edition der Democritea des Corpus Parisinum (Serta Graeca 26; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2008), pp. 374–5. I gratefully acknowledge Professor Searby’s kind response to my request for help finding information on post-Wachsmuth source-critical developments. 254. Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, p. 65. As listed by Searby, Schenkl’s analysis was published as: ‘Die epiktetischen Fragmente: Eine Untersuchung zur Ueberlieferungsgeschichte der griechischen Florilegien’, Sitzungsberichte der phil-hist. Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien 115 (1988), pp. 509–14; Elter’s analysis as: De Gnomologium Graecorum historia atque origine commentatio 1–11 (Bonn: C. George, 1892–97, 1892–97); Γνωμικὰ ὁμοιώματα: Socrates, Plutarch, Demophilus, Demonax, Aristonymus u.a. 1–5 (Bonn: C. George, 1900–1904).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

81

mutatis mutandis likewise fits the Maximus.255 This early history of sourcecritical work on the florilegia is also a case of a hypothetical source, postulated from patterns of agreements among extant works, subsequently coming to light.256 Wachsmuth’s meticulous source-critical study, if it is reframed as analysis of the pattern of the independent agreements of the Antonius and Melissa Augustana with their major source, the Maximus, therefore retains much of its value. (2) Utilization of Maximus by Antonius and Melissa Augustana. As noted the Maximus, which drew upon the Corpus Parisinum, in its turn served as the chief source for the Greco-profane materials of the Antonius and Melissa Augustana.257 To illustrate shared order in sequence of sayings within topoi of the three florilegia we reproduce, with simplifications and in somewhat shortened form, Wachsmuth’s tabular comparison of one of their shared topoi, περὶ παιδείας καὶ φιλοσοφίας.258 The florilegia frequently transmit the maxims with author attributions. In some cases, though the maxims are the same, one florilegium has misattributed it, sometimes by assimilation to the preceding author. Περὶ παιδείας καὶ φιλοσοφίας: Antonius Maximus Melissa Augustana 56,14-16 Didymus 583,44-584,3 Didymus, 10 Didymus, (2 sayings) 2 sayings 1st saying ---- 584,4-8 Philo, 2 sayings 11 Philo, 2 sayings 56,17 Plato 584,22-24 Plato ------- 584,25-29 Isocrates 12 Isocrates ---- 584,32-585,3 Aristotle ---56,21 Demosthenes 585,4-5 Demosthenes 14 Demosthenes 56,22 Democritus 585,6-7 Democritus 15 Democritus ---- 585,10.11 Socrates 17 Isocrates 56,24 Socrates 585,12-14 ὁ αὐτός 18 ὁ αὐτός 255. Karl Lachmann, ‘De ordine narrationum in evangeliis Synopticis’, TSK 8 (1835), pp. 570–90; ET: N. Humphrey Palmer, ‘Lachmann’s Argument’, NTS 13 (1966–67), pp. 368–78. 256. Hence the frivolousness of the oft-heard dismissal of Q as a ‘hypothetical source’. 257. See Marcel Richard, ‘Florilèges Grecs’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, vol. 5 (1964) cols. 475–512 (cols. 493–5), and Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, pp. 42–4, for discussion of other sources of the Antonius and Melissa Augustana. 258. For the full tabular comparison see Wachsmuth, Studien, pp. 91–3. The different reference notations are of the critical editions of the Antonius and the Maximus respectively; when Wachsmuth wrote, the Melissa Augustana had not yet appeared in a critical edition.

82

Q in Matthew

56,25 ὁ αὐτός 585,15-17 19 ἄλλος 56,26 ὁ αὐτός 585,18.19 ὁ αὐτός 20 ὁ αὐτός ---- 585,20.21 Demonax 21 ὁ αὐτός 57,3 585,22.23 Diogenes 22 Demonax 56,27.28 Aristippus 585,24-27 Aristippus ---56,29.30 Solon 585,28-30 Solon ---56,31 Kleanthes 585,31-32 Kleanthes 23 τοῦ αὐτοῦ ---- 585,33.34 Glycon ---56,32.33 Empedocles 585,35-38 Empedocles ---…. …. ….259 ---- 585,39-40 Hieron ---56,36.37 Φιλόσοφος 585,46-586,3 Καπιόνου φιλοσόφου 24 Ἱέρων ὁ φιλόσοφος ---- 586,4-7 ὁ αὐτός 25 τοῦ αὐτοῦ ---- 586,8-10 ὁ αὐτός 26 ὁ αὐτός ---- 586,11-19 Philistion (2 sayings) 27 Philistion (1 saying) 56,38 anonymous 586,20-22 anonymous 28 anonymous 56,39 586,23.24 Theocritus 29 ---- 586,25.26 ἐκ τῶν Δημωκράτους....260 ------- 586,27.28 τοῦ αὐτοῦ ------- 586,29.30 30 56,40 Democritus 586,31.32 Aristotle 31 56,41.42 586,33-36 τοῦ αὐτοῦ/Democritus 32 56,43.44 ὁ αὐτός 586,37-39 ὁ αὐτός 33 ὁ αὐτός ---- 586,40-41 ὁ αὐτός ---56,45 Oinopides 586,42.43 Oinopides ------- 586,44-46 ὁ αὐτός 34 Oinopides ---- 586,47-587,2 ὁ αὐτός ---56,46 Socrates 587,3-5 Socrates 35 Socrates ---- 587,6-12 Stilpon 36 Stilpon ---- 587,13-18 ὁ αὐτός ---56,47 Lasos 587,19.20 Lasos 37 Lasos 56,48-57,1 ὁ αὐτός 587,21-25 ὁ αὐτός 38 ὁ αὐτός

A complete analysis would check Wachsmuth’s columnar presentation of parallel maxims against critical editions of all three florilegia, but even without that level of precision, patterns of triple agreement, double agreement, and minor agreements in omission are evident, with the Maximus sequence the middle term. One can also see common order sustained where bundles of two or more maxims are attributed to a single philosopher. 259. We skip this sequence because of a text-critical problem. 260. ἐκ τῶν Δημωκράτους Ἰσοκράτους καὶ Ἐπικτήτου. This is an embedded reference to the so-called DIE source (Democritus/Isocrates/Epictetus) source used by Maximus’s source, the Corpus Parisinum (see below).

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

83

Traces of a common order reappear at the macro-level of sequence of topoi rubrics, though here more freedom is taken, especially by the Melissa Augustana, in rearranging rubric order (as the Maximus does with the CP, see below). Again a simplified example from Wachsmuth’s tabular comparison (numbering for the order of topoi in the Maximus provides the standard for comparison):261 Maximus 1 περὶ ἀρετῆς και κακίας 2 περὶ φρονήσεως καὶ βουλῆς 3 περὶ ἁγνείας καὶ σωφροσύνης 4 περὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ ἰσχύος 5. περὶ δικαιοσύνης 6 περὶ φίλων καὶ φιλαδελφίας 7 περὶ ἐλεημοσύνης .... 13 περὶ αὐταρκείας 14 περὶ προσευχῆς 15 περὶ διδαχῆς κ. λόγων κ. ὁμιλίας 16 περὶ νουθεσίας 17 περὶ παιδείας καὶ φιλοσοφίας 18 περὶ εὐτυχίας καὶ δυστυχίας .... (to 71)

Antonius Melissa Augustana Ι,7 περὶ ἀρετῆς ---Ι,8 περὶ σοφίας 9 περὶ φρονήσεως καὶ φρονήσεως καὶ βουλῆς Ι,10 περὶ βουλῆς262 I,14 περὶ ἁγνειάς 41 περὶ ἁγνείας καὶ καὶ σωφρονσύνης σωφροσύνης Ι,12 περὶ ἀνδρείας 40 περὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ καὶ ἰσχύος ἰσχύος Ι,13 περὶ δικαιοσύνης 5 περὶ δικαιοσύνης Ι,23 π. ἀδελφῶν κ. φιλαδελφίας κ. μισαδελφίας 11 περὶ φίλων Ι,24 περὶ φίλων καὶ φιλαδελφίας Ι,25 περὶ φίλων μοχθηρῶν Ι,27 π. ἐλεημοσύνης κ. 2 περὶ ἐλεημοσύνης εὐποιίας εἰς πτωχούς .... .... Ι,36 περὶ αὐταρκείας ---Ι,46 περὶ προσευχῆς 3 περὶ προσευχῆς Ι,48 περὶ διδαχῆς 16 περὶ νουθεσιάς κ. κ. λόγων κ. ὁμιλίας διδαχῆς Ι,49 περὶ νουθεσίας Ι,50 περὶ παιδείας 38 περὶ παιδείας καὶ καὶ φιλοσοφίας φιλοσοφίας Ι,70 περὶ εὐτυχίας 31 περὶ εὐτυχίας καὶ καὶ δυστυχίας δυστυχίας .... (to II,89) .... (to 56)

261. For the full tabular comparison, see Wachsmuth, Studien, pp. 94–9. 262. The Antonius divides the more comprehensive topos of the Maximus into two topoi.

84

Q in Matthew

The Melissa Augustana diverges significantly in its order of topoi rubrics, while the Antonius tracks the Maximus more closely. The Antonius diverges from the Maximus mostly in small transpositions in order, though in later sequences in Wachmuth’s comprehensive table their divergences are occasionally greater. Above we looked at the topos in bold typeface, περὶ παιδείας καὶ φιλοσοφίας (Max. 17; Ant. I,50; Mel. Aug. 38) to compare its internal sequence of sayings across the three florilegia. Viewing it now in its respective position in the three macro-sequences shows that though the order of topoi among the Maximus, the Antonius, and the Melissa Augustana vary, the order of the sayings that constitute each topos track each other closely. This creates relative agreement in order within a variable overall order. Wachsmuth points out another intriguing phenomenon. The constituent sayings of what in the Maximus is a unified topos are sometimes found in the Antonius distributed among three or four cognate (‘verwandte’) topoi, the sayings of which display relative agreement in order with the unitary Maximus topos. Wachsmuth selects the Maximus 12 topos, περὶ πλούτου καὶ πενίας καὶ φιλαργυρίας, to analyze the phenomenon. Materials from Maximus 12 (568,41–636,15) are found in the Antonius distributed into four cognate topoi that Wachsmuth designates A (I,31), B (I,32), C (I,33), and D (I,34). Here an abbreviated version of Wachsmuth’s full tabular comparison:263 Maximus 12 Antonius I,31-34 568,41-43 Πλουτάρχου ---568,44-46 (Plutarch) ---Neapol (ms. of Max.) (Plutarch) A 1:38, 47 Πλουτάρχου 568,47-569,1 (Plutarch) ---569,2.3 (Plutarch) D 1:42, 30 Πλουτάρχου 569,4.5 (Plutarch) D 2:42, 31 (Plutarch) ---- D 3:42,32.33 (Plutarch) 569,6.7 ---569, 8-11 ---569,12.13 (Metrodorus?) ---569,14-16 ---569,17-20 A 2:39,1.2 569,21-25 (Isok. ad. Dem. 27) ---569,26-29 (Isok. ad. Nik. 25) ---569,30.31 Ἀριστοτέλους C 1:41,46 Ἀριστοτέλους Neapol (ms. of Max) Δημοκρίτου A 3:39,3.4 Δημοκρίτου 569,32-34 (Demokrit) ---263. See Wachsmuth, Studien, pp. 112–14.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

85

569,35.36 (Demokrit) ---569,37.38 (Demokrit) ---569,39-41 (Demokrit) C 2:41,47 Δημοκρίτου 569,42-45 (Demokrit) A 4:39.5.6 (Demokrit) 560,46.47 (Demokrit) ---570,1-3 (Demokrit) A 5:39,7 (Demokrit) 570,4-8 (Demokrit) ---570,9-11 (Demokrit) ---570,12-14 (Demokrit) C 3:42,1.2 (Demokrit) 570,18-22 (Διογένης) ---570,18-22 (Diogenes) ---570,23.24 Σωκράτης A 6:39,8 Σωκράτης 570,25.26 (Sokrates) A 7:39,9 (Sokrates) 570,27-30 (Sokrates) ---570,31-33 (Sokrates) ---570,34-35 (Sokrates) D 5:42,36 Σωκράτης ---- D 6:42,37.38 Διοδώρου 570,36-42 Εὐριπίδου C 4:42,3 Εὐριπίδου …. …. 571,8 (Kleitarch) A 8:39,10 Κλειτάρχου 571,9-11 Κλειτάρχου A 9:39.11.12 (Kleitarch) …. …. …. …. 635,18.19 Πλουτάρχου A 1:95,4 Πλουτάρχου ---- B 1:95,29 Πλουτάρχου 635,20.21 Πλουτάρχου ---635,22-24 anonym C 1:96,19 (either Πλουτάρχου or Πλάτων) 635,25-28 ἐκ τῶν Φαβωρίνου ---635,29.30 Σόλωνος A 2:95,5 Σόλωνος ---- A 3:95,6 Φαβωρίνου 635, 31.32 Διογένης ---635,33-35 (Diogenes) B 2:95,30.31 Διογένης .... (to 636.15) .... (to B 3:95,32.33)

The synoptic comparison shows the distribution of sayings of the Maximus 12 topos into the A, B, C, and D topoi of the Antonius, with the sequence of sayings in each of the four Antonius topoi for the most part reflecting the absolute order of those sayings in the Maximus topos.264 The Melissa Augustana, on the other hand, while diverging from the Maximus in rubric order does not subdivide the rubrics.265 The way in which the absolute 264. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 265. There is one case of a unitary Maximus topos found split in two in the Melissa Augustana, but here the Antonius agrees with the Maximus against the Melissa Augustina (Wachsmuth, Studien, p. 115).

86

Q in Matthew

sequence of the sayings in the Maximus topos is found interwoven into the A, B, C, and D topoi of the Antonius also indicates the priority of the Maximus: the pattern is explicable if one conceives the Antonius successively revisiting and using up, on the topical principle, the Maximus sequence, ‘der Reihe nach’, in building out each of his four sub-topoi. The sub-rubrics supply the Antonius with the topical logic that guides its successive appropriative visits to the Maximus topos. In Chapter 5 we will see that Matthew similarly recycles materials from a number of Q topoi into his own topoi rubrics and modified topoi sequence, sometimes making two or three utilization visits to a Q topos, while maintaining the relative order of his source, which is more consistently preserved in Luke. While the Antonius occasionally breaks down a Maximus rubric (topos) into two or more rubrics, the latter appear mostly in the same position as the Maximus rubric. The Melissa Augustana, on the other hand, does not break out a rubric into sub-rubrics but more freely rearranges the order of Maximus rubrics: procedures that will be seen in Matthew’s utilization of Q. (3) Utilization of the Corpus Parisinum by the Maximus. The Maximus, the main source of which is the Greco-profane section (556 maxims organized under moral topoi) of the Corpus Parisinum (CP), dates to the early-to-mid tenth century.266 The ninth-century CP, reflecting the diverse organizational principles of its sources, has no uniform rubric organization. In some sections its materials are presented under moral rubrics, other sections under author or alphabetical rubrics. The compiler of the Maximus, on the other hand, adopted a consistent moral-rubric principle; to this end he scanned CP multiple times in the course of cycling its materials into his own arrangement of 71 moral topoi. This frequently brought about the relocation and in some cases repurposing of CP sayings, but also, within the sequence of sayings under each topos, it produced a consistent pattern of agreements in relative order between the Maximus and his source, the CP.267 ‘[A]lle Zitate…stehen’, declares Jens Gerlach, ‘auch in exakt derselben Reihenfolge’.268 Owing to its Umgruppierung 266. Richard, ‘Florilèges Grecs’, col. 489. 267. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, pp. 80–1 (‘Auf diesem Wege gelangte die Schlußsentenz des CP in das 52. Kapitel des Max., das den Titel περὶ μνήμης trägt’); idem, Gnomica Democritea, pp. 373, 377–9; also Sibylle Ihm, Ps.-Maximus Confessor: erste kritische Edition einer Redaktion des sacro-Profanen Florilegiums Loci Communes (Palingenesia 73; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), p. xxi. 268. Gerlach, Gnomica Demokritea, p. 379. For Gerlach’s tabular comparison of sayings sequences, see pp. 378–84.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

87

of CP materials in a modified topoi/rubric arrangement, the Maximus offers only a broken view of the literary Gestalt of the CP. Nevertheless, this pattern of agreements unequivocally establishes the source-critical relationship, for the forward sequential agreements are ‘die automatische Folge der Exzerption’; they reflect the usual and most economical means of utilizing a source.269 Source Utilization in the Corpus Parisinum. The ninth-century CP, chief source of the Maximus, itself collates several earlier gnomological and chreiic sources. Surviving manuscript traditions of these sources make it possible to discover the utilization strategies of the CP compiler.270 The original of the CP falls into six large sub-divisions. CP 1-2 consists of patristic/scriptural citations and hermetic oracles, CP 3-5 consists mostly of Greco-profane maxims and chreias from three sources: (a) Stobaeus; (b) DIE (Democritus/Isocrates/Epictetus, a source organized by moral topoi); and (c) a collection of Plutarch sayings. CP 6 draws on a chreiae (apophthegm) collection arranged alphabetically by author, collating it with a source of unattributed sayings known as ΑΠΜ (incipit: Ἄριστον καὶ πρῶτον μάθημα), alphabetized by the first letter of each saying.271 First CP 3-5. CP 3 collates DIE source sayings with Stobaeus source excerpts. CP 4 consists solely of Stobaeus excerpts. CP 5 consists solely of DIE sayings minus the sayings collated with Stobaeus in CP 3:272 CP 3: DIE collated with Stobaeus CP 4: Stobaeus CP 5: DIE (depleted)

The compiler’s procedure of collating DIE sayings with Stobaeus in CP 3, and then incorporating the depleted DIE in CP 5, with a Stobaeus section intervening (CP 4), naturally has aroused the curiosity of source critics. In CP 3 the compiler conflates DIE with Stobaeus by appending (under the respective rubrics) a sequence of sayings excerpted from DIE to the sequence of Stobaeus excerpts. For example (from Gerlach): περὶ φθόνου περὶ πλούτου

CP 700-707 aus Stob CP 739-744 aus Stob

& &

CP 708-11 aus DIE CP 745-55 aus DIE

269. Ibid., p. 377. 270. Denis M. Searby, ‘Non-Lucian Sources for Demonax, With a New Collection of “Fragments” ’, SO 83 (2008), pp. 120–47 (123). 271. Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, pp. 9–10, 22–7. 272. Ibid., p. 66.

88

Q in Matthew

περὶ βίου

CP 759 aus Stob

&

CP 760-65 aus DIE273

Why has the compiler pulled these DIE sayings forward, appending them to similarly themed blocks of Stobaeus excerpts, and then utilized the remainder of DIE by itself in CP 5? ‘Ganz offensichtlich deshalb’, points out Gerlach: where DIE topoi and Stobaeus topoi overlap, the CP compiler integrates their materials on the common-topos or ‘peg’ principle, appending DIE sayings to the corresponding topical block of Stobaeus sayings. The remaining DIE materials are those that have no topical ‘peg’ connection to the Stobaeus materials. They are therefore gathered separately in their own block in CP 5. By this economical strategy the compiler is not only able to consolidate similarly themed materials from his two sources, but he also avoids creating sayings-doublets and topoidoublets (an issue when two sources overlap). By coming back with the remainder of DIE in CP 5 after the block of distinctive topoi Stobaeus materials in CP 4, the compiler effectively unites his two sources, bringing them ‘in einen besonders engen Redaktionszusammenhang’,274 the effect of which is to create coherence and a unified literary Gestalt across the three sections CP 3-5. Similarly for his compilation in CP 6 of the (a) alphabetically organized (by author) chreia source and (b) the alphabetically organized (by initial letter) ΑΠΜ source of unattributed sayings. The CP compiler takes the chreia source as his ‘Leitquelle’. To the end of each of the alphabetical blocks of chreiae he appends the correspondingly alphabetized blocks of ΑΠΜ sayings.275 For example, the ‘Mu’ section: 118. Menander, asked the difference between Sophocles and Euripides, said, ‘Sophocles pleases the crowds, Euripides makes the audience gloomy’. 119. When an incompetent painter said to him, ‘Plaster your house so I can paint it’, he answered, ‘No, paint it first so I can plaster over it’. 120. The same man was asked which is a bad science, and he said, ‘Vanity’. 121. Metrodorus said, ‘As soon as one makes a promise, one’s contribution should be made, for by putting off a promised contribution every sign of graciousness is lost’. 122. We are born but once. Nor can we be born a second time. Our life is necessarily over. But you, not being master over the morrow, postpone the occasion. Everyone’s life is wasted by procrastination, and, therefore, each one of us dies while still caught up in our affairs.

273. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, p. 87. 274. Ibid., p. 87; also Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, p. 66. 275. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, pp. 82–3.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media

89

123. Do not look (Μὴ ζήτει κτλ.) for events to happen as you want. Instead, wish for them to happen in whatever way they do happen. 124. Do not reject (Μὴ φεῦγε κτλ.) small favors. Otherwise, people will suppose that you will do the same in the case of greater ones. 125. Do not draw near to or support any wicked deed (Μηδενὶ πονηρῷ πράγματι προστῇς κτλ.). For you yourself will appear to do such things as you help others do.276

The chreia source is attested in 118-122 (122, which begins with Γ – Γεγόναμεν ἅπαξ κτλ. – is a comment on the Metrodorus saying in 121), the ΑΠΜ source in 123-125. As in CP 3, the compiler follows the topos/ rubric principle in coordinating his sources, in this case the alphabetical rubrics of his two sources. One also sees here the integration of chreiic – hence narrative – materials with sayings materials, a narrative source with a sayings source, though to be sure, the chreias in the chreia source are not organized relative to one another into any coherent narrative arc. With these strategies the CP compiler solves the problem of coherent integration of heterogeneous, differently organized, sometimes overlapping sources into a coherent work while achieving maximal incorporation of their constituent elements.277 The CP compiler’s project is ‘nicht die bloße Reihung von Sammlungen, die ihre Identität und Autonomie wahren, sondern die Überführung in einen neuen, übergreifenden Redaktionszusammenhang, die selbstverständlich zu Veränderungen hinsichtlich der Organisation des Spruchmaterials führt’.278 This will be Matthew’s project as well, executed with uncannily similar source-coordination strategies. c. Stobaeus’s Utilization of Ps.-Plutarch and Arius Didymus The ninth-century CP incorporates extensive topoi sequences from Stobaeus, the great fifth-century anthologizer.279 Stobaeus’s Anthology and Florilegium in turn draw from ‘a long anthological tradition, building on the work of many predecessors’.280 Stobaeus organizes his Anthology (philosophical-doxographic materials) and Florilegium (ethical materials) respectively under conventional philosophical and moral topoi, for

276. Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, pp. 372–4; vol. 2, pp. 796–7. 277. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, pp. 78, 88–9; Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, p. 66. Searby and Gerlach credit Anton Elter with the pathbreaking work on CP’s source-utilization procedures. 278. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, p. 85. 279. Wachsmuth, Studien, p. 152. 280. Searby, ‘Non-Lucian Sources’, p. 122.

90

Q in Matthew

example, On Friendship; On Enemies; On Righteousness; On Speech; On Family Relationships; On Wealth and Poverty, On the Cardinal Virtues, and the like.281 As noted, Stobaeus himself appropriated earlier anthologies, including collections organized by alphabetized author rubrics, cycling these materials into philosophical and moral rubric (topoi) arrangements, while retaining vestiges of the sequences of his sources and of their different rubric organization.282 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat carries out a synoptic analysis of Stobaeus’s use, in the doxographic Anthology, of two of his primary sources, PseudoPlutarch De Placitis and Arius Didymus. He sums up Stobaeus’s use of Ps.-Plutarch as follows: Stobée…a dans le livre I manifestement beaucoup réordonné, découpé et rassemblé des morceaux de la source commune… Stobée lui-même a pris pour canevas les têtes de chapitre des Placita, en a probablement rajouté certains, et en a visiblement ôté d’autres ou les a fondus, fondant également certains chapitres et parfois certains notices… Par ailleurs, il est certain que Stobée, en utilisant Arius Didyme comme autre source doxographique, a également remanié le matériel qu’il avait à sa disposition.283

In other words, Stobaeus takes over but adapts the rubric/topoi design of his source – which, after all, is conventional – carrying out changes in order and making additions within that sequence. His topoi rearrangements of Ps.-Plutarch in the opening part of the Anthology can be displayed as follows:284 Topos Stobaeus Ps.-Plutarch -Dieu 1.23-51 ----Ceux qui disent qu’il 2.51-52 ---n’y a pas de providence 281. See Searby, ‘Intertitles in Stobaeus’, pp. 57–70. Originally together, the Anthology and the Florilegium became separated in the manuscript tradition. 282. Ibid., pp. 54–5. Wachsmuth states: ‘[S]o hat er für die Pythagorassprüche eine alphabetisch geordnete Sammlung benutzt…und auch bei ihm tritt flor. I 19–28, V 28–30, VI 467.48 die alphabetische Anordnung noch zu Tage’ (Studien, p. 147). 283. Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, ‘Aëtius et Arius Didyme sources de Stobée’, in Reydams-Schils, ed., Thinking Through Excerpts, pp. 142–201 (188–9). 284. The notation system (e.g. 1.23-51), is page number + line numbers from the critical edition, Joannis Stobaei Anthologium (ed. Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense; Berlin: Weidmann, 1884). Gourinat’s full synoptic comparison of Books 1–5 of the Anthology with its sources can be found in Gourinat, ‘Aëtius et Arius Didyme’, pp. 191–201.

2. Source Utilization Practices and Ancient Media -Justice divine -La nécessité divine -Le destin -Le hasard -Le mouvement de destin… -Le temps et l’éternité -Aphrodite, Ourania, Erôs -Les éléments et l’univers -La matière -Les idées -Les causes

3.52-70 4.70-74 5.74-83 6.83-89 7.90-93 8.93-111 9.111-118 10.118-130 11.130-134 12.134-137 13.137-140

91

---1.7.1-13 1.27.1-28.5 1.29.1-2 1.29.3-4 1.21.1-22.3 ---1.2-3 1.9.1-6 1.10 1.11.1-4

It is impossible to make exact determinations of Stobaeus’s modifications to Ps.-Plutarch, since the latter survives only in epitome. But while keeping that caveat in mind, it can be seen that Stobaeus introduces some of his own rubrics into the sequence, shuffles around the rubric-order of Ps.-Plutarch, but at the same time maintains a steady forward movement through the source. Stobaeus’s rearrangements of topos-order are more frequent toward the beginning of the Anthology, with its more transcendent topics; they decrease once he hits Book 3 with its more mundane headings like la voie lactée, les vents, la mer, la generation des animaux, parties du corps, and so forth. Stobaeus rearranges the global order of Ps.-Plutarch, however, by inverting the position of Ps.-Plutarch Books 4 and 5. Within each rubric Stobaeus generally follows the sequence of his source, though with transpositions and additions from other sources. Again a diagnostic example (adapted from Gourinat): Rubric Stobaeus Ps.-Plutarch La matière 130.24-25 1.9.1 131.9-19 1.9.2-5 132.9–133.11 133.12-15 1.9.6 133.16 133.17-23

Arius Didymus Fr. 2 (Aristotle) + Fr. 20 (Zenon, Chrysippus) Fr. 20 (Poseidonius)

Stobaeus follows – as he generally does within each rubric – the Ps.-Plutarch order, thus creating extensive agreements in relative order, though it is not exceptional for him to transpose order within these sequences, or, less often, to pull materials forward from a different rubric into the sequence. Gourinat summarizes: ‘Stobée ne suit que partiellement le même plan global que le Pseudo-Plutarque, il le suit plus fidèlement

92

Q in Matthew

pour des séquences de chapitre’.285 Modifications of the individual units are occasionally attested for Stobaeus. In the doxographic Anthology, for example, he eliminates from the source materials the name of the philosophical school, retaining the names of its leading philosophers.286 On occasion he modifies the sayings in his Florilegium to adapt them to the surrounding didactic context, in Wachsmuth’s words, ‘um…einen für den Inhalt seiner Kapitel geeigneten Sinn hervorzubringen’.287 Parallels with Matthew’s patterns of Q utilization are obvious and will not be further remarked on here. For now we simply note that these case studies show the utility of looking beyond the narrow range of elite Greco-Roman authorial and rhetorical practices for comparative materials for Synoptic source criticism. This chapter has directed attention to the scribal Sitz, with crossover into Greco-Roman scholarly activities, for utilization practices that bear upon the Synoptic Problem. We are not quite ready, however, to turn to Matthew and the Q materials. More needs to be said first about how these practices, and the corresponding Sitze, relate to the oral/written interface, the leading concern of the first chapter, and to memory as the medium for the cultivation and transmission of a cultural tradition.

285. Gourinat, ‘Aëtius et Arius’, 190. 286. Ibid., p. 189. 287. Wachsmuth, Studien, p. 146. Wachsmuth gives the following example: Euripides, Heraclidae 297–99 reads as follows: οὐκ ἔστι τοῦδε παισῖ κάλλιον γέρας//ἢ πατρὸς ἐσθλοῦ κάγαθοῦ πεφυκέναι//γαμεῖν τ’ ἀπ’ ἐσλῶν κτλ: ‘There is no finer honor for children than this //to be born of a noble and brave father// [and to marry into nobility…]’ (trans. David Kovacs; LCL). Stobaeus brings this under the rubric ὅτι χρὴ τοὺς γονεῖς τῆς καθηκούσης τιμῆς καταξιοῦσθι παρὰ τῶν τέκνων καὶ εἰ ἅπασιν αὐτοῖς πειστέον. But for the third line he substitutes: καὶ τοῖς τεκοῦσιν ἀξίαν τιμὴν νέμειν.

Chapter 3 M a n us c r i p t a n d M e mory

In this chapter we analyze the intimate relationship between manuscript and memory and the instrumental role of this relationship in scribal source-utilization. 1. Memory in Near Eastern Scribal Education and Greco-Roman Education Near Eastern scribal and Hellenistic education followed similar curricular tracks. Training of memory was the foundational principle of both and remained so through late antiquity into the Middle Ages. Memory, says Cribiore, was ‘the “storehouse of education”…the foundation of all knowledge in a world that could not rely on easily consulted books, tables of contents and indexes, library catalogues, and electronic search tools’.1 Carruthers and Ziolkowski add that memory played ‘an important role in all aspects of schooling and exercised major effects on the production and reception of texts – and the manuscripts in which the texts were conveyed’.2 An essential connection existed between the exercise of memory and the acquisition of literate skills, and at the more advanced levels of Hellenistic education, between memory and rhetoric.3 Copying, recitation, and memory assimilation of moral maxims formed part of entry-level education in both the Near Eastern and Hellenistic worlds.4 1. Cribiore, Writers, Teachers, p. 42; eadem, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 166–7, citing Quintilian, Inst. 1.1.19; Ps.-Plutarch, De liberis educandis 9e. 2. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 17. ‘Classical traditions of memory and memorization’, they continue, ‘were diminished but by no means lost in the transitional period known as late antiquity’ (ibid.). 3. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 144, citing Libanius, Letters 419.1. 4. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 126–37.

94

Q in Matthew

In ancient Egyptian education, notes Williams, ‘the text was [first] written by a teacher…and then copied by the students. Later they would write from dictation and eventually from memory… [P]assages were recited in concert by the class and committed to memory by pericopes.’5 Learning included the standard administrative genres; students in Mesopotamia, for example, copied model letters and contracts in order to master epistolary and contractual styles.6 Through impressing materials upon memory the student internalized a repertoire of genres, acquiring models and diction for the composition of fresh works. Egyptian scribal education, Eyre and Baines observe, ‘was based on the additive learning of set literary texts… [T]he best scribes were familiar with the major works, quoting them, or rather echoing their phraseology in the composition of formal and official texts.’7 Scribes at Ugarit were competent in the classic works of Babylonian literature, including the Atrahasis-Gilgamesh cycle and wisdom literature.8 Through their memory assimilation of a cultural tradition, students deeply internalized the corresponding cultural and ethical norms. a. Cultural Texts and Memory Education was matter of moral and cultural formation; accordingly it was primarily cultural works that were grist for memory. ‘Man ging davon aus’, says Jan Assmann, daß man Schreiben am besten an solchen Texten übt, die man aufgrund ihres Inhalts auswendig lernt, an kulturellen Texten also. Im Rahmen der Schreiber-Unterrichts…entwirft man, nach dem Vorbild der im Gedächtnis tradierten kulturellen Texte…neue Texte, die auswendig gelernt werden, um den Geist zu schulen, Wissen zu vermitteln, soziale Einstellungen, Haltungen und Normen einzuüben und in der Niederschrift des Auswendiggelernten die Schrift zu praktizieren.9

‘Cultural texts’ are works foundational to a community’s social, moral, and cultural identity; their cultivation and transmission is crucial to reproducing that identity across generations. Cultural texts transmit a 5. Ronald J. Williams, ‘Scribal Training in Ancient Egypt’, JAOS 92 (1972), pp. 214–21 (219); also Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 213. 6. Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, p. 2271; Cavigneaux, ‘Scribes’, col. 107. 7. Eyre and Baines, ‘Orality and Literacy’, p. 94; also Vanstiphout, ‘Memory and Literacy’, p. 2189. 8. Anson F. Rainy, ‘The Scribe at Ugarit’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3 (1969), pp. 126–46 (131). 9. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte im Spannungsfeld’, p. 280.

3. Manuscript and Memory

95

community’s master narratives and the corresponding ethical norms. They claim ‘eine gesamtgesellschaftliche Verbindlichkeit, sie bestimmen Identität und Kohärenz einer Gesellschaft. Sie strukturien die Sinnwelt... und das Bewußtsein von Einheit, Zusammengehörigkeit und Eigenart.’10 Memoria as a cultural practice, Johnson notes, ‘is not simply “memory”, but “what is worth remembering from the past”: individuals and families, of course, but also historical and cultural traditions, including those linguistic, literary, and ethical’.11 Hence the privileged place occupied by the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek education and in scribal education by Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature. Likewise for traditions formative of sub-cultural or counter-cultural identities: the Kyriai Doxai was memorized and cultivated in Epicurean communities,12 the Torah and Mishnah in rabbinic circles. Cultural works constituted and perpetuated a cultural identity; the principal medium for their cultivation and transmission therefore could scarcely have been other than memory, or to put it differently, through the fusion of cultural memory with neurobiological memory. By means of its literal incorporation in memory, a tradition formed the individual at a deep, existential level, assimilating him or her to an ‘übersubjektive’ cultural identity.13 ‘Kulturelle Texte’, says Assmann, ‘werden nicht “gelesen” sondern “gelernt” ’.14 The need to ground cultural tradition in memory meant that its modes of transmission were hardly a matter of indifference.15 Its typical forms – epic, legends, genealogies, maxims, poetry, chreiai, and the like – were apt for mnemonic assimilation and transmission.16 Over against cultural works stood the great mass of contingent and incidental texts that had no claim on memory. Writing in fact was devel­oped to cope with the growing of masses contingent documentary data – accounts, archives, letters, contracts, and the like – that no memory 10. Ibid., p. 273; for a summary in English, see idem, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, pp. 67–82 (76). See also Aleida Assmann, ‘Was sind kulturelle Texte?’, in Poltermann, ed., Literaturkanon, pp. 232–44 (242). 11. Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 118. 12. Snyder, Teachers and Texts, pp. 53–4. 13. A. Assmann, ‘Was sind kulturelle Texte?’, pp. 241–2. 14. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, p. 69. 15. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments’, in Die Macht der Erinnerung (ed. O. Fuchs and B. Janowski; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 131–67 (165). 16. J. Assmann, ‘‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, p. 66.

96

Q in Matthew

could encompass anyway and for which external storage media sufficed. Cultural traditions continued to be transmitted solely by memory even long after the advent of writing; centuries passed before they began to appear in ‘schriftliche Überlieferung’.17 Literature written for entertainment, as well as Wissensliteratur written for consultation (handbooks of rhetoric, medicine, mathematics, administration, commentaries, histories, and the like), likewise were not per se objects for deep memory assimilation, though specialists in a field – a Livy, a Galen, or an Apollonius Sophista – might have a thorough memory grasp of their contents. Galen enjoined upon medical students the constant re-reading of essential texts in the Hippocratic tradition ‘so as both to understand them thoroughly and to set them in memory’.18 A given work might of course eventually be received into the narrow stream of cultural texts.19 b. Memory and Moral Formation Cultural works were appropriated into memory by means of ruminative reading and recitation: in ancient and medieval pedagogy reading and memory assimilation were not regarded as separate activities.20 Quintilian describes ruminative reading as follows: Reading…does not hurry past us with the speed of oral delivery; we can re-read a passage again and again if we are in doubt about it or wish to fix it in the memory. We must return to what we have read and reconsider it with care, while, just as we do not swallow our food till we have chewed it and reduced it almost to a state of liquefaction to assist the process of digestion, so what we read must not be committed to the memory for subsequent imitation while it is still in a crude state, but must be softened and, if I may use the phrase, reduced to a pulp by frequent re-perusal. (Inst. 10.1.19)

17. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte im Spannungsfeld’, pp. 278–9. Roger Chartier notes that a distinction persists into the early modern period ‘between an “intensive”, reverential, and respectful reading of a small number books that relies on hearing and memory and an “extensive” reading that consumes many texts, passes nonchalantly from one text to the next, and holds less sacred what is read’ (The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries [trans. Lydia G. Cochrane; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994], p. 17). 18. Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 92. 19. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, p. 80; A. Assmann, ‘Was sind kulturelle Texte?’, p. 242. 20. Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 140–1; also Thomas, Literacy and Orality, pp. 91–2; Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, p. 220.

3. Manuscript and Memory

97

‘Diese Methode [meditatio]’, Butzer explains, ‘setzt die Internalisierung des “Schrift-Bildes” voraus… Im murmelnden Vor-sich-hin-Sprechen wird er visuell, artikulatorisch und auditiv angeeignet.’ The goal is ‘die Ausrichtung des Lebens nach ethischen Normen’.21 Memory competence formed the core of the scribal, and more broadly, educational ethos, according to which a cultural work was not truly learned unless thoroughly internalized in memory.22 To be sure, cost and scarcity of copies, as well as scroll and script formats, made memory a pragmatic means for appropriating and accessing a book’s contents.23 ‘The layout of the ancient text’, Small notes, ‘virtually forces the reader to rely on memory for cues to content rather than on visual display, as today’.24 The need to hunt around in a scroll, or marking up the text to facilitate reading, indicated that one had only an inchoate knowledge of the work.25 But memory internalization was not just a practical matter of solving utilization problems. It had a pronounced ethical complexion: memory was instrumental in the project of moral transformation that Carr describes as ‘the cognitive internalization of “wisdom”…on the heart of the student’.26 c. Memory and Tradition Cultivation Memory competence in cultural works served pragmatic and moralformation ends, but it also gave mastery of a store of materials that one could draw upon to formulate new writing and speech. In short, memory was the instrument for the activation of a tradition. In the Greco-Roman sphere training of this sort took place most intentionally at the tertiary, rhetorical level of education, where students continued the program of memorization begun at the grammarian level. In examining his incoming 21. Günter Butzer, ‘Meditation’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 5 (ed. Gerd Ueding et al.; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 1016–23 (1017); also Carruthers and Ziolkowski: ‘The mechanism for attaining the desired knowledge of the principal authors was to read them and reread them – in medieval terminology, to “ruminate” on them… The goal was memory, which…Augustine had called venter animi, “the stomach of the mind” ’ (Craft of Memory, p. 23). 22. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 209; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 11, 202–3; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 178–9. 23. ‘Galen’s common injunction…to read Hippocrates and Aristotle and other essential texts “again and again” so as both to understand them thoroughly and to set them in memory, takes on new meaning in a world where access to technical works could be difficult’ (Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 92). 24. Small, ‘Artificial Memory’, p. 161. 25. Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 31; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 11, 104. 26. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 210; also J. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 136.

98

Q in Matthew

students, Libanius was impressed by ‘a young boy’s ability to produce from memory passages from the orators’, and he praised him ‘because of the Demosthenes he had “stored up in his soul” ’.27 The progymnasmata trained in the use of memory materials for inventio in oral and written composition; they ‘encouraged an attitude towards the texts of the c­lassical canon as an open source of tradition, part of a student’s cultural property, with which he was expected to engage, and not as a static, untouchable monument’.28 The exercises amounted to a comprehensive program for the cultivation and transmission of Greco-Roman cultural tradition. In scribal education the ideal (of course only fully realized in scribes who progressed to advanced stages of formation) was similarly the scribe as sage, the living embodiment of the cultural tradition of a society, ‘merged with the tradition and subsumed in it’.29 Egyptian scribes, says Assmann, ‘bildeten keine Zunft für sich, sondern repräsentierten stellvertretend für all das Ägyptertum’.30 Permutations of this scribal-scholarly ideal were found in rabbinic culture, and later among Muslim scholars and in the manuscript culture of medieval Europe. The rabbis famously exercised memory control over large bodies of Scripture and rabbinic tradition. Fraade notes that ‘to become a Rabbinic master is to master the words of Torah, scriptural and oral, internalizing both in one’s mind and heart through the labors of repetition and recitation that eventually produce an intimate and seemingly effortless proficiency in these nowembodied utterances’.31 Muslim scholars memorized the Qur’an and ‘vast quantities’ of traditions that included the matns (works composed by a legal, grammatical, or theological school’s founder or otherwise elements of its formative tradition).32 So deeply had Augustine internalized the Psalms, Carruthers notes, that his very diction was ‘imbued…with their phrasing and vocabulary’.33 Proficiency in a cultural tradition was a memory proficiency, acquired in the course of advancing through the educational curriculum and exercised in the everyday activities of scribal 27. Cribiore, School of Libanius, p. 122, citing Letter 119. 28. Webb, ‘Progymnasmata’, p. 314; also Robbins, ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition’, pp. 119–21. 29. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 33. 30. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte’, p. 281. 31. Steven D. Fraade, ‘Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 33–51 (45). 32. Rosenthal, Technique and Approach, p. 6; see also Dale F. Eikelman on malaka l-ḥifḍ, or ‘mnemonic domination’, of the tradition (‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and its Social Reproduction’, CSSH 20 [1978], pp. 485–516 [489]). 33. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 112; also Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 201.

3. Manuscript and Memory

99

and educated elites. This repertoire became an internalized, habituated language of tradition activated across the spectrum of scribal activities. Carr describes how this played out in Near Eastern scribal composition: [T]he scribe was composing a new work out of a store of older works that constitute the authorized building blocks of the new… [T]he scribe was trained from the outset to think by means of blocks of tradition and express himself through these tools… [The educational system] gave him…a set of broader textual chunks, templates, and motifs. When a scribe reached a high level of mastery of the tradition, he could then use this memorized compositional lexicon to create new works. Such use of previous tradition meant that these new works were not just new but were continuous enough with the scribal tradition to become a part of it.34

One sees the extent to which the practices of the Near Eastern scribal curriculum and Greco-Roman education overlapped with each other. The cultural encounter zone opened up by the penetration of Hellenism into the eastern Mediterranean cultures doubtless gave rise to all sorts of hybridized expressions of these media and memory practices. d. Manuscript–Memory Fusion Cultural works were transmitted in manuscript artifacts, in antiquity principally the bookroll. One sometimes hears it said that writing was ‘ancillary’ to memory. There is some truth to this, but if pushed too far it erroneously marginalizes the written artifact. Rather, manuscript and memory, cultural memory and neurobiological memory, entered into cognitive fusion with each other. Through ruminative and recitative rehearsal the written artifact was assimilated – as Butzer puts it, ‘einverleibt’ – into memory. This was an ‘Akt geistig-körperlicher Aneignung des Textes’: the bodily, cognitive, existential assimilation of the written work.35 Assmann’s aphorism, ‘[k]ulturelle Texte werden nicht “gelesen”, sondern “gelernt” ’, gets at this essential point.36 The written artifact was regarded, not as books are today as providing convenient access to their externally stored information, but as a means for stocking memory.37 ‘Merely running one’s eyes over the written pages is not reading at all’, Carruthers 34. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 35–6; similarly Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, p. 2275. 35. Butzer, ‘Meditation’, p. 1018. Butzer is describing monastic practices of the early Middle Ages, but these go back into antiquity. 36. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle und literarische Texte’, p. 69. 37. Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 8–11; Andersen, ‘Oral Tradition’, p. 51; Snyder, Teachers and Texts, p. 54.

100

Q in Matthew

remarks, ‘for writing must be transferred into memory, from graphemes on parchment or papyrus…to images written in one’s brain by emotion and sense’.38 But the written artifact was not merely a utility for provisioning memory. Rather, the work took on actual neural existence as a memory artifact; it was inscribed on the mind. In Carr’s words, ‘both sorts of inscription – inscription on humans and tablets – were key parts of the scribal task’.39 Christian Jacob observes that in the Greco-Roman sphere, ‘[a] recurring metaphor represents the mnemonic encoding as writing on wax tablets or on the papyrus rolls of the mind and the mnemonic retrieval of the text thus “written” ’.40 Pelliccia adduces Socrates’ conversation with Phaedrus, who is memorizing a speech by Lysias: Socrates notices a presumably cylindrical object under Phaedrus’s cloak and demands to see it (Phaedrus 228d6-e3)… [Socrates states:] ‘my guess is that it is the actual speech itself…Lysias, too, is here’. Socrates seems to conceive of the text as being potentially available in several forms: the written one (textw); the one reproducible by Phaedrus had he completed the memorization process (textm), and a defective version of the text…representing the uncompleted memorization.41

Wifstrand comments on Galen’s insouciance about the fate of a work on mental illnesses he had written and deposited in the Ars Pacis library in Rome, destroyed in a fire in 192 CE: ‘He says he hopes some student made a copy that he might eventually come across, which is why, he says, he still had not bothered to rewrite the book again. A modern scientist, not having the subject matter in his head in the same way…would have been considerably more upset about such a loss.’42 The manuscript, in other words, was the correlate of the memory-based tradition (and vice versa). 38. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 11. 39. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 18; also Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, pp. 124–5, and Claudia Rapp on the indissoluble connection in late antique monasticism between copying and memorization (‘Holy Texts, Holy Men, and Holy Scribes: Aspects of Scriptural Holiness in Late Antiquity’, in The Early Christian Book [ed. William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran; Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007], pp. 194–224 [206–7]). 40. Jacob, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, p. 109; also Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 18–25. 41. Hayden Pelliccia, ‘Two Points About Rhapsodes’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; JSRC 2; Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 97–116 (109–10). 42. Wifstrand, Epochs and Styles, p. 227, referencing Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ Epidemics (Galen, de comp. med. I.1).

3. Manuscript and Memory

101

e. Brain–Artifact Interface This fusion of manuscript and memory is a diagnostic case of what cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind call cognitive-cultural coupling, or brain–artifact interface: shorthand for the ways in which neurobiological cognition co-opts cultural artifacts and media to extend its capacities markedly.43 The work, as a manuscript-based artifact, is appropriated right into the internal cognitive apparatus: it takes on a cognitive existence and functionality. In its assimilation to memory, the cultural artifact acts directly upon the neural plasticity of the brain, bringing about, in Lambros Malafouris’s words, an ‘extensive structural rewiring either by fine-tuning of existing brain pathways or by generating new connections within brain regions’.44 The cognitive effect is to ‘drive, sculpt, and discipline the internal representational regime’.45 The work, internalized in memory in the stabilized form afforded by the written medium, is now immediately accessible to cognitive operations. ‘When a material structure becomes very familiar’, Edwin Hutchins explains, ‘it may be possible to imagine the material structure when it is not present in the environment…[and] to imagine systematic transformations applied to such a representation’.46 Through its neural assimilation, the work is now operationalized in memory – immanent to cognitive operations in the representational format afforded by its cultural mediation.

43. John Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary; Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010), pp. 189–225; Lambros Malafouris, ‘The Brain–Artefact Interface (BAI): A Challenge for Archaeology and Neuroscience’, SCAN 5 (2010), pp. 264–73; Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), passim. 44. Malafouris, ‘Brain–Artefact Interface’, p. 266; similarly John Sutton, ‘Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris; New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 37–55 (37–8); Andy Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More’, Theoria 54 (2005), pp. 655–68 (264). 45. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche’, p. 264. 46. Edwin Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, JoP 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77, esp. 1575; also Clark, Being There, pp. 198–9; Lambros Malafouris, ‘The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate’, in Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (ed. Eliza­ beth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004), pp. 53–62 (57).

102

Q in Matthew

f. Memory–Manuscript Fusion and Scribal Utilization Practices Memory–manuscript fusion is the cognitive basis for scribal sourceutilization. We will have more to say about this later in the chapter. But one already sees why access difficulties presented by the scroll format are irrelevant: the scroll functions perfectly well as external scaffolding for a work’s existence in memory. Johnson remarks that ‘those with deep knowledge of a book, who have read the text again and again, hardly needed to use the bookroll as a reference’.47 The integration of memory with cultural artifact in the ancient world was more than just a matter of solving access problems; it provided the genres and materials for new acts of composition.48 It was instrumental in cultural and ethical formation. Conversely, providing memory with a stabilizing material substratum in external media was a strategy for ensuring the cross-generational transmission of formative cultural traditions. The memory medium mediated scribal interaction with written tradition. But as we saw in Chapter 1, memory is also – virtually by definition – the medium of oral tradition. Oral and written tradition, oral and written media, interface in scribal memory. To grasp this we must probe more deeply into the intimate relationship of orality with writing in the ancient world. 2. Written Works at the Boundary with Orality In low-literacy cultures, not only are language skills associated with the mouth and ear, but written artifacts are aligned to the dominant modalities of orality and aurality.49 Hence ‘die Mündlichkeit war und blieb die Grundkonstante antiker Kommunikation...die mündliche Verbreitung schriftlicher Texte hatte und behielt weit über Antike hinaus einen nicht zu überschätzenden Rang. Sie blieb das grundlegende Medium der Vermittlung des Textes während seiner Entstehungsphase wie nach seinem Abschluß.’50 In the Greco-Roman world, the spoken word infused the creation and the utilization of written artifacts.

47. Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 201. 48. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte’, p. 280. 49. See Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 59; Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, pp. 94–5; Macdonald, ‘Literacy in an Oral Environment’, p. 88. 50. Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers, ‘Auribus excam oder Der intendierte Rezitator – Produktions- und rezeptionsästhetische Aspekte der Mündlichkeit antiker Texte’, ScriptOralia Romana: Die römische Literatur zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (ed. Lore Benz; Tübingen: Narr, 2001), pp. 11–42 (20, emphasis added); also Knoop, ‘Zum Verhältnis’, pp. 221–2; Valette-Cagnac, La Lecture, p. 307.

3. Manuscript and Memory

103

a. Oral Actualization of Written Texts Ancient reading typically involved some level of text vocalization. Reading ‘silently’ was certainly practiced, but as pointed out in Chapter 1, this cannot be identified simpliciter with modern silent reading. In her definitive study of Roman reading, Valette-Cagnac rejects the silent/vocalized binary.51 Tacita lectio better signifies ‘lecture à voix basse que de lecture muette… Dans la lecture, il y a toujours du son, même s’il est plus or moins audible.’52 The principal distinction was not, like today, between silent and vocalized reading, but between a sub-vocalized solitary reading on the one hand and an audience-directed, fully vocalized (‘à voix haute’) reading on the other, between ‘la lecture reflexive et la lecture communicative’.53 Orality permeated the encounter with the written word.54 The bookroll’s design, with its unbroken script running continuously forward in unrolling sequential format, was the artifactual counterpart of the work’s oral enactment. Johnson notes that ‘[t]he bookroll’s lack of structural devices that might assist in reference consultation mirrors the ancient reader’s apparent indifference to the use of books for random retrieval of information’.55 In other words, the scrolling format of the bookroll aligned with the oral mode of its enactment; it was ‘ “played” much in the way that we play a videotape or witness a stage performance… [N]othing in the ancient bookroll was designed to facilitate retrieval in any other way.’56 The written scroll was the material counterpart of an oral/ aural event and the means for the latter’s actualization. The ‘work’ was not the written artifact but something that came into existence at the interstices of the written text and what Zumthor calls the ‘socio-corporeal conditions’ of its oral and aural realization.57 51. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 50. 52. Ibid., p. 70. 53. Ibid., pp. 68–9. Reading without oralization at all, in Latin ab oculo legere, applied to a limited number of cases, e.g. to the rapid reading of every-day, routinized texts (their function not connected to oral realization); to conceal the contents of a document from those around; to avoid a linguistic performative act, such as uttering a vow. 54. Ibid., pp. 306–8. In early Islamic writing, ‘[o]ral and written modes interact and exchange with any act of reproduction of a text’ (Mirza, ‘Oral Traditions and Scribal Conventions’, p. 128). 55. Johnson, ‘Sociology of Reading’, p. 616. 56. Ibid., p. 620; similarly, Kenney, ‘Books and Readers’, p. 12; Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 90; Thomas, Literacy and Orality, p. 4; Snyder, Teachers and Texts, p. 2. 57. Zumthor, ‘Body and Performance’, p. 221. Mirza refers similarly to the ‘aural, material, and symbolic aspects’ of the early prophetical documents of Islam (‘Oral Tradition and Scribal Conventions’, p. 214).

104

Q in Matthew

Bookrolls were read; one errs in regarding them merely as aides mémoires, transcripts and the like, marginal to the spoken word.58 Never­ theless the encounter with the written word in scriptio continua in a bookroll was markedly different from the modern encounter with print, not just in the visual presentation of the script but in the oral/aural aspects of its realization. Ancient readers certainly had an objective grasp of the word as a unit; if nothing else the centuries-old lexicological scholarship on Homer attests to that. Primary school teachers trained students to recognize the elements of the written sentence by writing out model passages with words separated, sometimes by dots.59 But even in the teaching of reading, the aural dimension of the word remained at the forefront: ‘words’, says Cribiore, ‘were conceived as chains of syllabic units…a word was conceived as a “piece of speech” rather than a single independent entity’.60 Visual and aural aspects of the written word were not cleanly distinguished.61 Primitive punctuation marks such as the paragraphus (horizontal stroke in the margin) and pronunciation aids such as the dieresis are evidence of the resistance the script offered to quick visual comprehension. Aids such as these facilitated voiced decoding and delivery.62 Greek accents were developed in Alexandria to assist in voiced decoding of Buchstabeketten.63 As Wolfgang Raible explains, the reader of scriptio continua relied on acoustic as well as visual decoding: Scriptio continua stellt nun besondere Anforderungen an die visuelle Dekodierung insofern, als wir die richtigen Buchstabengruppen erst abgrenzen müssen. Die typischen Saccaden der Augen sind beim Lesen von Scriptio continua dementsprechend wesentlich kleiner, unruhiger und rascher als bei Texten in Scriptio discontinua, wo der Leser sich mit wenigen Fixierungen 58. Hurtado, ‘Oral Fixation’, pp. 328–9. 59. Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, p. 87; Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, p. 172. 60. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 174. 61. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 20; also Corbier, ‘L’écriture’, p. 113; David R. Olson, The World On Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 196. 62. William A. Johnson, ‘The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose’, ZPE 100 (1994), pp. 65–8; Hurtado, ‘Earliest Christian Manuscripts’, p. 189; Klaus Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken und Schreibergewohnheiten in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Textüberlieferung’, in New Testament Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis (Festschrift Bruce M. Metzger; ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee; Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 277–95 (283). 63. Wolfgang Raible, ‘Zur Entwicklung von Alphabetschrift-Systemen’, in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991), pp. 5–42 (13).

3. Manuscript and Memory

105

[of the eyes] pro Zeile begnügen kann. Weiterhin fällt uns [readers of scriptio continua] die visuelle Speicherung der erkannten Einheiten wesentlich schwerer. Wir nehmen deshalb, in dem wir laut dekodieren, den akustischen Speicher – und damit einen zweiten ‘Kanal’ – zu Hilfe und behalten so akustisch den im auditiven Bereich selbstverständlichen Überblick über die zu analysierende Kette von Buchstaben. Vor allem haben wir durch die Übersetzung der Buchstabenkette in eine Lautkette einen direkten Zugang zu unserem ‘semantischen Speicher’.64

Reading in the way taken for granted today – rapid scanning of the text through instantaneous visual discrimination of words and sentences – was out of the question, which is not to say that readers could not become proficient in scriptio continua, aided by conventions such as the visually and cognitively convenient line-lengths of literary bookrolls.65 Reading was a more protracted process of acquiring a deepening familiarity with a text by sounding it out, rereading it, and internalizing it.66 Proficient reading was grounded in an aural, internalized knowledge of the text. Different from today, reading was an element of memory work; it was the means of getting the contents of a work into memory. Text markings to aid reading comprehension contributed to this end. Hippocratic medical treatises were provided with syntactic, verbal, topical, and visual (paragraphos, ekthesis, eisthesis, blank spaces) markers and separators to assist the reader. But the purpose of these aids was not to overcome the access difficulties of scroll and script, to render the treatises user-friendly for consultation, but to facilitate the provisioning of memory: their readers ‘went slowly through text, attempting to memorize as much as they could’.67 With their challenging scroll and script formats, works were disseminated aurally (and therefore socially). Ambient orality likewise infused their creation.68 Ancient writers attuned their composition ‘to an audience… rather than a readership’.69 Redford says that the ancient Egyptian scribe 64. Ibid., p. 8. 65. Johnson, ‘Sociology’, pp. 609–11 66. Ehlers, ‘Auribus excam’, p. 17; Cribiore, Writing, Readers, p. 148. AngloSaxon scribes ‘necessarily brought a great deal of predictive knowledge to the text to be read, precisely because the manuscripts were low both in orthographic redundancy and in graphic cues’ (O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 21). 67. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 231. 68. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 307. 69. Tomas Hägg, ‘Orality, Literacy, and the “Readership” of the Early Greek Novel’, in Contexts of Pre-novel Narrative: The European Tradition (ed. Roy Eriksen; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 47–81 (59–60); similarly Starr, ‘Lectores and Roman Reading’, p. 338; Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 85 n. 32.

106

Q in Matthew

‘literally conceived and created his work orally, with oral modalities in mind’.70 It was through recitation to an audience that a work was made ‘verständlich’ and ‘vermittelt’.71 The written artifact mediated a work’s oral/aural dissemination and appropriation. Kahn points out that in the Phaedo, ‘Plato’s Socrates claims to have first heard Anaxagoras’ ideas from someone reading the book aloud (like Zeno reading his texts to a small circle in the Parmenides)’.72 Even for literate elites reading was often a matter of listening to a lector.73 Written works could be disseminated to sub- and non-literate groups aurally along social networks.74 The ‘work’, in other words, was a multi-media reality, diffused into oral, aural, and corporeal media as well as the manuscript medium. The effect was to take away from the written work, as Valette-Cagnac puts it, ‘un peu de son caractère définitif (et de sa stabilité)’.75 The genre, Sitz, and pragmatic function of a work affected the mode of its oral enactment and its position vis-à-vis the boundary with orality. Poetry and rhetorical pieces had a particularly close connection to an aesthetic and Sitz of oral performance that ought not to be imputed to all species of texts. Galen’s oral wissenschaftliche materials that he worked over extensively for publication and wider dissemination remained close to the oral instructional Sitz and its speech-forms, as did the various works comprised by the Hippocratic Corpus.76 Works of Galen of this kind are exemplary of ‘oral-derived’ texts: works whose origins and utilization lie in close connection with a body of oral tradition. On the other hand, though a work such as Herodotus’s Histories is often linked to public recitation, it did not originate in oral performance, and it depends upon the 70. Donald B. Redford, ‘Scribe and Speaker’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 145–218 (205); also Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 245. 71. Ehlers, ‘Auribus escam’, p. 20; also Johnson, Reading Cultures, pp. 148–9; Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 82. Quinn suggests this is the reason the codex was slow to catch on. 72. Charles H. Kahn, ‘Writing Philosophy: Prose and Poetry from Thales to Plato’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 139–61 (141). Alexander notes that ‘Lucian…speaks of an audience “hearing” the latest histories read’ (‘Ancient Book Production’, p. 86, re. Lucian, How to Write History 5). 73. Starr, ‘Lectores and Roman Reading’, p. 343; Quinn, ‘Poet and Audience’, p. 82. 74. Hägg, ‘Orality, Literacy’, p. 66; Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 305. See also Floyd, on the oral dissemination of wisdom literature (‘ “Write the revelation!” ’, p. 137). 75. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 156, suggesting though that this is part of what gives the ancient work its ‘force’. 76. Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit’, pp. 200–201, 208–9.

3. Manuscript and Memory

107

written medium for its complex literary realization.77 Thucydides explicitly distanced his work from the crowd-pleasing rhetorical performance pieces popular in fifth-century Athens, anticipating the contrast Aristotle (Rhetoric 3.12) drew between a ‘writerly’ (graphike) style and a competitive performance (agonistike) style.78 But their compositional complexity notwithstanding, literary works like these were read and disseminated in oral utterance.79 b. Irreducible Effects of the Written Medium Given the tendency in some circles of scholarship to dissolve writing into orality, it bears emphasizing again that the media vectors moved in both directions: the material, spatial, and visual properties of the written artifact affected and reacted upon the oral enactment and oral utilization of the work. Valette-Cagnac describes the written work paradoxically as ‘cette parole qui emprunte à l’écriture la plupart des ses caractéristiques’.80 A number of these effects were laid out in our discussion of ‘oral-derived’ texts in Chapter 1, and need not be rehearsed here. The important thing to keep in mind moving forward is that writing with its irreducible properties had determinative effects upon the transmission and utilization of the work. c. Permeability of the Oral/Written Media Boundary The indistinctness of the boundary between the written medium and the oral medium was emblematic of manuscript culture, or as Elsner et al. put it less abstractly: ‘Schrift [wird] wieder zum Ausgangspunkt von [mündlicher] Interaktion’.81 ‘[O]ral et écrit’ in Galen, says Boudon-Millot, ‘entretiennent des relations autrement plus complexes basées sur la réciprocité et la complémentarité’.82 The ratios of media interaction from case 77. William A. Johnson, ‘Oral Performance and the Composition of Herodotus’ Histories’, GRBS 35 (1994), pp. 229–54 (245–53). 78. Andrew Ford, ‘From Letters to Literature: Reading the “Song Culture” of Classical Greece’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 15–37 (33–4). 79. Thomas, ‘Prose Performance Texts’, p. 163; Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, ‘Look and Listen: History Performed and Inscribed’, in Between Orality and Literacy: Communication and Adaptation in Antiquity (ed. Ruth Scodel; OLAW 10; Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 175–96 (183); also Vanstiphout, ‘Memory and Literacy’, p. 2193. 80. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 307. 81. Monika Elsner, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Thomas Müller, and Peter M. Spangenberg, ‘Zur Kulturgeschichte der Medien’, in Merten, Schmidt, and Weischenberg, eds., Die Wirklichkeit der Medien, pp. 163–87 (171–2). 82. Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit’, p. 204; similarly Alexander, ‘The Living Voice’, p. 231.

108

Q in Matthew

to case cannot be a priori stipulated; as noted, it is contingent on a work’s genre and Sitz as well as its pragmatic and cultural function. But particularly close to the boundary are found the just-mentioned ‘oral-derived’ texts: works whose origins lie in connection to a body of oral tradition and in projects of shifting oral materials into the written medium. Galen, for example, shifted his oral instruction into writing, often revising it extensively, to facilitate its memory appropriation and to secure its wider dissemination. The oral ‘Hippocratic’ tradition of medical diagnoses and recipes found its way into loose, catalog-like pericope collections to assist its incorporation into memory and to further its oral dissemination. These materials were originally passed orally from practitioner to practitioner (and to their students). The Κνίδιαι γνῶμαι, Wittern explains, ‘repräsentieren diese letzten Stadien, mit denen wir offenkundig die früheste Form Medizinischer Fachprosa, das heißt die erste schriftliche Fixierung eines traditionellen Wissensschatzes greifen’.83 The transmission and cultivation of this body of written materials remained close to its originating oral utilization environment and to the ontology of oral tradition. For another cultural sphere entirely Westenholz demonstrates both the oral-traditional origins of the written ‘historical epic’ genre of the ancient Near East and its on-going interface with the oral register in its transmission.84 By the same token traditions might move back and forth across the boundaries of written work along the course of its transmission. As Stemberger puts it, ‘verschriftlichte Texte entfalten ihr Leben weithin in mündlichem Vortrag, der immer wieder…auch auf die Schriftfassung zurückwirkt’.85 The prophetic books, in the course of their transmission, absorbed oral interpretative traditions of scribal literati.86 The rabbinic compilation, according to Jaffee, [is] a convenient storage system for loosely formed intermediate literary units known widely from the oral-performative tradition. At the very moment that it transforms oral texts into fixed texts destined for rote mastery, this storage system sends its written versions back into the ether of oral transmission and performance. The anthologies that reflect the written pole of this process function both as mnemonic aids in the preservation of the material and as springboards for restoring textually fixed traditions to the aural/oral world of analysis and debate.87 83. Wittern, ‘Gattungen im Corpus Hippocraticum’, p. 24. 84. Westonholz, ‘Oral Traditions’, p. 127. 85. Stemberger, ‘Mündliche Tora’, p. 223. 86. Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction’, pp. 22–3. 87. Jaffee, ‘Rabbinic Authorship’, p. 34.

3. Manuscript and Memory

109

Practices associated with the Mishnah and Talmud push the fusion of memory, artifact, and oral actualization to its limits. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander argues that the Mishnah sustains the oral deliberative events from which its material emerged: ‘The modes of thinking [halakhic deliberation] that lie behind the composition of the materials are also perpetuated through oral reenactment of the written materials [in the discipleship circles]… [W]e can…read the textual artifact as an invitation to reenact the exercises.’88 The boundless number of additional examples of Elsner et al.’s maxim, ‘Schrift [wird] wieder zum Ausgangspunkt von [mündlicher] Interaktion’, that could be adduced shows that this is a phenomenon inherent to manuscript culture. Ptolemaic papyri of Homer’s Iliad display variant readings (‘variant’ relative to the Vulgate text established 150 BCE by the Alexandrian critics) attesting to a living tradition of rhapsodic performance of the epic that interacted with its written transmission.89 The oral Sitz for written anecdote collections such as Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Simon Goldhill argues, was the symposium: ‘The anecdote is an oral form that can be written down, or it can be written down and then re-circulated orally. It crosses the boundaries between oral and literate in a way that shows the interdependence of both spheres.’90 Christine Thomas observes that the Apocryphal Acts (as well as ancient novels such as the Alexander Romance) ‘suggests some interaction between scribal tradition and continuing oral storytelling’.91 The spoken language of eighth-century Irish scribes filtered into their copying of Irish manuscripts, for example in their representation of words in close syntactical connection graphically as a single unit.92 They handled their Latin manuscript tradition differently, introducing graphic conventions such as word spacing to facilitate its visual appropriation. As these examples show, the ancient media interface was not an automated, abstract cultural process. It involved human agency: authors; readers; reciters; scribes. For our purposes the scribe is of particular interest.

88. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169. 89. Graeme D. Bird, Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: The Witness of the Ptolemaic Papyri (Hellenic Studies 43; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 58. 90. Goldhill, ‘The Anecdote’, p. 111. 91. Thomas, ‘Word and Deed’, p. 162. 92. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers, p. 4.

110

Q in Matthew

3. Scribe as Tradent Only small subsets of scribes possessed the full tradent competencies here described, and that at varying levels. Nevertheless the scribal tradent is well-attested figure, found in different cultural permutations along a chronological axis that runs from the ancient Near East into Roman antiquity and through the Middle Ages to the advent of print. a. Scribal Embodiment of Tradition Through memory assimilation a written cultural tradition was internalized cognitively, affectively, and ethically in the scribe. Its transmission, even in simple copying, was a sensory-kinetic act, mediation through a socially and existentially situated human being. Scribal transmission, in Junack’s words, was a ‘Rezeptionsprozess’, in which ‘die individuellen Voraussetzungen und Eigenheiten des Abschreibenden, seine geistige und rezeptive Kapazität wirksam [werden]’.93 For the ancient user of a written work, the distinctions among visual, aural, and memory-based cognition of the text were already blurred. In contrast to the visual, silent, detached reading of the modern reader, voicing the script gave the work a tangible, sensory presence in the body of the ancient reader.94 In addition, the scribe might identify existentially and ethically with the tradition being transmitted. As Byrskog points out for the scribal circles of the Matthean community, transmitting the tradition was also a matter of ethically embodying the tradition.95 With print, on the other hand, ‘[e]s ist nicht mehr der Körper des Schreibers, der als materielle Quelle und Träger des Sinns in einem Manuskript beim Vorgang des Schreibens seine Spur hinterläßt, sondern die Druckerpresse, die sich zwischen einen Autor als intellektuelle Quelle des Sinns und die gedruckte, abstrakte Schriftlichkeit stellt’.96 In other words, this nexus of memory, embodiment, ethos, and manuscript is broken up with the advent of print. b. Scribal Actualization of Tradition The scribal tradent does not function mechanically but as a historically and socially situated embodiment of a written tradition. Scribal transmission of a written tradition is therefore perforce an actualization of the tradition 93. Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken’, p. 288; also Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, pp. 80, 143; Tim William Machan, ‘Editing, Orality, and Late Middle English Texts’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 229–45 (43). 94. Valette-Cagnac, La lecture, p. 32. 95. Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher, p. 329. 96. Elsner et al., ‘Zur Kulturgeschichte der Medien’, pp. 72–3, original emphasis; similarly Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 22.

3. Manuscript and Memory

111

within an environing present. Interpreters such as Hans-Jürgen Becker have in fact gone so far as to reject any sharp distinction between copyist and redactor.97 Even basic copying shaded into text-criticism, editing, and emendation, substantive as well as stylistic, with the scribe seeking to bring the meaning of the work to expression.98 Rosenthal notes that in the manuscript age, ‘the difficult distinction between the best and the most genuine text was hardly ever made’.99 This is because the manuscript work was a living tradition, and, as noted, the scribe might identify at a deep ethical and existential level with the materials under transmission. Brooke points out that the Qumran scribes who copied scrolls were also students of the works; they were ‘actively interested transmitter[s] of the text’.100 The scribal circles that wrote down and transmitted prophetic oracles also cultivated and composed them, regarding this as inspired activity continuous with the original prophetic revelation.101 The scribes of the early Christian manuscript tradition, Haines-Eitzen says, ‘were also the users of this literature…[who] formed private networks for [its]…transmission’.102 While 97. Hans-Jürgen Becker, ‘Texts and History: The Dynamic Relationship between Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah’, in Cohen, ed., Synoptic Problem, pp. 145–58 (154); also O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 117; George J. Brooke, ‘The Qumran Scrolls and the Demise of the Distinction between Higher and Lower Criticism’, in New Directions in Qumran Studies: Proceedings of the Bristol Colloquium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. J. G. Campbell, W. J. Lyons, and L. K. Pietersen; London: T&T Clark International, 2005), pp. 26–42 (30–1); Thomas Römer and Philip R. Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism, and Script (ed. Thomas Römer and Philip R. Davies; Durham: Acumen, 2013), pp. 1–9 (3). 98. See Vanstiphout, ‘On the Old Babylonian Eduba Curriculum’, pp. 7–8; Royse, Scribal Habits, pp. 358, 544 (on 𝔓46 and 𝔓66); Beit-Arié, ‘Scribes and Copyists’, pp. 48–50. Haines-Eitzen cites Jerome’s exasperated comments on copyists ‘who write down not what they find but what they take to be the meaning’ (‘ “Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing”: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity’, JECS 6 [1998], pp. 629–46 [645 n. 62], from Letters 17). 99. Rosenthal, Technique and Approach, p. 34; also Beit-Arié, ‘Scribes and Copyists’, p. 5. 100. Brooke, ‘Qumran Scrolls’, p. 37; also idem, ‘Some Scribal Features of the Thematic Commentaries from Qumran’, in Römer and Davies, eds., Writing the Bible, pp. 124–43 (124–5). 101. Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction’, p. 13; Schellenberg, ‘A “lying pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8)?’, p. 306; Floyd, ‘ “Write the Revelation!” ’, p. 143; Brooke, ‘Some Scribal Features’, p. 140. See also Michael Fishbane, ‘From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism’, in Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 64–78 (66). 102. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, p. 16.

112

Q in Matthew

it is important not to abandon the distinctions among the scribal tasks of copying, editing, compiling, and composing, for such users scribal transmission was not just a matter of passing on a textual trace from the past but of actualizing the written tradition in the present. Scribally transmitted cultural works were, in O’Brien O’Keefe’s apt formulation, ‘realized texts’ that in an act of memory brought the tradition to bear upon the present realities of the tradent community.103 Scribal activity of this sort was driven by the concern of any enactment of tradition, namely, to engage the chirographic tradition with the exigent realities of the historically situated community and by this means maintain the latter’s vital connection with its foundational tradition.104 The didactic and the tradent vectors of the scribal ethos converged in this activity. The written tradition’s oral, aural, memory-mediated embodiment conduced to its sensitive interactivity with the realities of a community.105 This active engagement of the manuscript tradition fed back into its scribal transmission, giving it a dynamic quality. In Jaffee’s words, ‘To the degree that a book was its oral declamation and aural appropriation (rather than its mere material copy), the manuscript substrate of the book often bore the influence of the performative contexts in which it was shared’.106 From his comparison of parallel exegetical traditions in Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon b. Yohai and Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael David Nelson concludes that ‘the written preservations of these traditions chirographically mirror and mimic the oral milieu within which these traditions thrived’.107 Scribes of the later rabbinic academies added Ishma’el (i.e. Islam) after Se‘ir (i.e. Edom = Rome) in the list of nations ruling over the Jews in Lamentations Rabbah 1.14, reflecting the changed political frameworks of the community.108 The 103. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 116. 104. Kelber, ‘Generative Force of Memory’, p. 21; Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 412–13; J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte’, pp. 284–8; A. Assmann, ‘Was sind kulturelle Texte?’, pp. 242–3. 105. Matthew Innes notes that scribal tradition was addressed not to an abstract literary public but to a live audience (‘Memory, Orality, and Literacy’, p. 14). 106. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 18. 107. David W. Nelson, ‘Oral Orthography: Early Rabbinic Oral and Written Transmission of Parallel Midrashic Tradition’, AJS Review 29 (2005), pp. 1–32 (25). 108. Paul Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 74–106 (95). A more prosaic case is an administrative scribe’s correction of the original of a tax-determination document, in the genitive absolute phrase, of Λογγαίου Ῥούφου ἡγεμόνος to Λογγαίου Ῥούφου

3. Manuscript and Memory

113

scribal expansions found in 4QpaleoExodm heighten the conflict between Yahweh and the Egyptian deities and sharpen the focus upon the victory of Yahweh. The origin of these modifications, Judith Sanderson suggests, lies in liturgical enactments of the Exodus narrative, a performance setting that favored the heightening of dramatic tension.109 The context for the transmission of the prophetic books was a scribe rehearsing the text to a group, mostly illiterate, assembled to hear.110 At least some Qumran scribes were teachers of the texts they copied.111 Claudia Rapp summarizes Cassiodorus’s (sixth-century CE) declaration to the monks of Vivarium, ‘that the act of copying allows the scribe not only to immerse himself in the scriptures but also to disseminate them to a larger public by the work of his hands’.112 This is the scribal ethos in its monastic permutation: meditative internalization of the tradition combined with its didactic dissemination that contests Satan’s domain and brings about the moral transformation of the wider Christian community. The scribal tradent’s activities were oriented to a wider public, to a community the very life of which depended upon the actualization of its tradition.113 The scribe constituted the living nexus where the normative cultural tradition intersected with the exigencies of the community. Scribal transmission of a tradition was essential to the reproduction of the cultural and moral identity of the community. ‘Vom Schreiber-Tradenten wird erwartet’, says Assmann, ‘daß er den Überlieferungsprozeß in Gang hält’.114 This ran the spectrum of scribal activities: copying texts threatened by deteriorating clay and papyri, making text-critical judgments, γενομένου ἡγεμόνος, T. Longaeus Rufus being the acting prefect of Egypt in 185 CE when the document was issued, but no longer in 188 CE, when the subject of the tax document required a copy (P. J. Sijpesteijn, ‘A Scribe at Work’, BASP 16 [1979], pp. 277–80 [277–8]). The appearance of tradition-actualization in routine administrative writing confirms that the phenomenon is innate to manuscript culture; it follows from the scribe’s being the living medium of the tradition. 109. Judith Sanderson, An Exodus Scroll from Qumran: 4QpaleoExodm and the Samaritan Tradition (HSS; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), p. 204. 110. Michael H. Floyd, ‘The Production of Prophetic Books in the Early Second Temple Period’, in Prophets, Prophecy, and Prophetic Texts in Second Temple Judaism (ed. Michael H. Floyd and Robert D. Haak; London: T&T Clark International, 2006), pp. 276–97 (290). 111. Brooke, ‘Scribal Features’, p. 133. 112. Rapp, ‘Holy Texts, Holy Men’, p. 212, citing Cassiodorus, Institutiones 1.30.1. 113. John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), pp. 210–11. 114. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle Texte’, p. 284.

114

Q in Matthew

clarifying difficult passages, bringing latent meaning to fuller expression, all the way to carrying out large-scale consolidations and reconfigurations of the tradition that deploy it authoritatively within altered historical horizons. c. Scribes at the Oral/Written Interface We see that in its cultivation and transmission a written tradition comes to display some of the qualities of an oral tradition. The oral vector and the written vector intersect in the scribe, more precisely, in scribal memory. Transmission of the written tradition occurs at the boundary with orality. Scribes are media boundary figures, directing traffic in both directions so to speak: converting oral traditions into the written medium, and cycling written traditions back into the oral register. Sumerian scribes entered into alliance with oral poets, converting the songs of the poets into writing so that they ‘may never pass from memory’, and then reading them to the poet who in turn chanted them, a media symbiosis captured by the following incipit: ‘Let the scribe come, let him take them [the tablets] in his hands!/Let the bard come, and let him chant them there!’115 The prophet books of the Hebrew Bible emerge from scribal cultivation of prophetic oracles. Administrative scribes in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom town of Deir el-Medina took down depositions and oaths from judicial proceedings and converted them into written records using standardized scribal formulae.116 The editors of Talmud Yerushalmi collected oral traditions from the networks of the rabbis and their disciple circles.117 Our discussion of ‘oral-derived texts’ in Chapter 1 cited additional examples of this core scribal function. In transmitting written tradition the scribe perforce participated in both media. Manuscript tradition and oral tradition interfaced in scribal memory. Trained scribal memory was a competence in a cultural repertoire of oral and written tradition that Dagenais refers to as a scribe’s ‘oral-memorial register’ (corresponding to Foley’s ‘traditional register’).118

115. Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions’, p. 148, citing Shulgi B. 311–15; see also van Seters, ‘Prophetic Orality’, p. 86. For similar scribal functionality in the textualization of Irish oral materials, see Joseph Falaky Nagy, ‘Representations of Oral Tradition in Medieval Irish Literature’, LangCommun 9 (1989), pp. 143–58 (147). 116. Donker van Keel and Haring, Writing in a Workmen’s Village, pp. 167–72. 117. Hezser, ‘Codification of Legal Knowledge’, p. 617. 118. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 145; Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, pp. 26–31, 89–90; idem, Singer of Tales, p. 138. See also Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, pp. 106–7.

3. Manuscript and Memory

115

Memory-based manuscript tradition might react associatively with this traditional register. Dagenais gives examples from the manuscript tradition of the medieval Libro de buen Amor: for one element of the text a scribe substitutes, consciously or unconsciously, a variant version from the oral tradition, ‘producing a passage that has the sense but not the text or rhyme of the exemplar’;119 in another case the scribe’s insertion of a perhaps more familiar variant of the proverb transmitted in the text displaces a rhyming word with a non-rhyming synonym.120 But one also observes the effects of the written medium: the incorporation of these variants hews to the order of the written work. d. Oral Utilization Practices Scribal interface with orality included the application of oral utilization practices in the cultivation and transmission of manuscript tradition. The scribal tradent was functionally equivalent to the oral poet of pre-literate societies. ‘Der Sänger und der Schreiber’, says Assmann, ‘sind zunächst beide nichts anderes als Tradenten, Träger der Überlieferung, lebendige Verkörperungen der zerdehnten Situation. Beide haben die Aufgabe, den kommunikativen Prozeß in Gang zu halten, der in der Kodierung, Speicherung und Wiederaufnahme der zu “Texten” geronnenen sprachlichen Äußerungen besteht.’121 As it was with the ancient oral performer, scribal competence in the tradition was a memory-based competence. The oral/aural element was already present in the embodied, sensory engagement of scribes with a manuscript tradition. Doane describes ‘[t]he performing scribe’ as producing the text ‘in an act of writing that evoked the tradition by a combination of ear and eye, script and memory’.122 Anglo-Saxon scribes transmitting Caedmon’s Hymn brought oral-formulaic techniques

119. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 137. 120. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, pp. 145–6. Another example of an infiltrating memory field of this sort, noted by O’Brien O’Keefe, is ‘the importation of Old Latin readings into the copying of the Vulgate Bible’ (Visible Song, p. 41). William L. Petersen calls attention to how the older Diatessaronic readings enter, via scribal memory, into the Syriac four-gospel tradition (Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship [VCSup 25; Leiden: Brill, 1994], p. 140). 121. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 136–7; also Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 17; Thomas, Literacy and Orality, pp. 69–70, and numerous others. 122. A. N. Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer’, OT 9 (1994), pp. 420–39 (432–3).

116

Q in Matthew

and conventions into their copying practices, thereby creating numerous variants in the manuscript tradition. They ‘appl[y] oral techniques…to the decoding of a written text… [T]he scribe has read “formulaically” and has become a participant in and determiner of the text.’123 In the early period of its written transmission, moreover, the Caedmon tradition as ‘graphic representation’ had not yet individuated itself from the tradition as ‘sound stream’.124 Its scribal transmission was ‘somewhere between the formuladefined process which is an oral poem and the graph-bound object which is a text’.125 In the variability in its manuscript tradition one sees the ongoing effects of the original, ‘purely oral’ condition of the materials.126 Like the eighth-century Irish scribes referred to earlier, these Anglo-Saxon scribes treated their Latin literary tradition differently, giving the script and words much greater visual, graphic objectification. David Carr argues that a significant quotient of the variation in the Hebrew Bible manuscript tradition is ‘memory variants’, arising from memory-based performative utilization of the works. This phenomenon, he says, ‘points to how the writing of long-duration, literary-theological texts [i.e. cultural texts] was integrally interwoven in ancient Israel, as in other parts of the ancient world, with ongoing oral performance and mental internalization’.127 Another example from a different sub-cultural niche: the tannaitic materials consolidated in the Mishnah. The Mishnah collection of rabbinic tradition, while transmitted by memory, was the product of literate circles. Regardless of whether its redaction was wholly by memory or supported by writing, its utilization sustained the oral deliberative events in which the material originated; ‘[t]he [halakhic] modes of thinking that lie behind the composition of the materials are also 123. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 191; similarly Doane, ‘Ethnography’, pp. 421–2. 124. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 127. 125. Ibid., p. 40. Examples of variation are the following: nu/nu we; weorc/wera/ weoroda; wuldorfaeder/wuldorgodes; wundra/wuldres; gehwaes/fela; or/ord; scoep/ gescop. 126. Ibid. 127. David M. Carr, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory: The State of Biblical Studies’, in Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, pp. 161–73 (169). Examples of ‘memory variants’ include ‘the exchange of one word for a synonym with the same meaning [e.g. “Yahweh” for “Elohim”, and vice versa; different Hebrew words for “maidservant” being exchanged], the rearrangement of poetic lines or lists at points where the meaning is not altered by such rearrangement, the insertion or excision of minor particles that are not semantically or grammatically necessary’; also the exchange of what for the scribe amounted to semantically equivalent phrases, for example, ‘the fear of Yahweh is a well of life’ changed to ‘the teaching of the wise is a well of life’, which for the scribe ‘reproduces the semantic content of the text’ (p. 166).

3. Manuscript and Memory

117

perpetuated through oral reenactment of the written materials’.128 This symbiosis of cultural text and oral enactment is clearly a definitive element of ancient scribal cultures. e. Custodians of a Cultural Tradition Scribal transmission of a cultural work was conceived not merely on technical lines of textual reproduction but on moral lines as the authentic realization of a normative tradition. Authenticity in manuscript transmission was a moral category, an ethical commitment to the tradition. It is the presence of this commitment that distinguished the ethical scribe from the careless or falsifying scribe.129 Like the oral-traditional performer, the scribal tradent was bound to the tradition (traditum) even while actualizing it (traditio): the traditum ‘dominates the traditio and conditions its operations’.130 Assmann expresses this principle as follows: ‘Das Berufsethos der Schreiber-Tradenten begreift das Geschäft der Überlieferung in den Kategorien rechtförmiger Verbindlichkeit. Tradieren heißt eine Verpflichtung gegenüber dem Text eingehen, die den Charakter einer vertragsartigen Bindung hat.’131 Developments in the Hippocratic tradition, laid down in different redactional layers preserved in works now found in the Hippocratic Corpus, are recognizable, says Jacques Jouanna, precisely ‘à cause de leur caractère conservateur; car l’innovation, tout au moins dans les premiers temps, a dû s’insérer dans les cadres de la tradition’.132 Eugene Ulrich characterizes Jewish scribes of the Second Temple period as ‘repeating it [the written tradition] faithfully but reshaping it creatively in the light of the exigencies of their current cultural situation’.133 The scribal obligation to preserve and transmit a normative tradition conjoined with the didactic obligation to make it responsive to contemporary contexts.134 Transmission and cultivation converged; it is the differential interaction of these two vectors that is constitutive of manuscript tradition, giving rise to its patterns of variation and agreement.135 128. Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah, p. 169. 129. See Jan-Dirk Müller’s clear statement of this principle (‘The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to Print’, in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., pp. 33–44 (40–1). 130. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 87. 131. J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 104, original emphasis. 132. Jacques Jouanna, Hippocrate: Pour une archéologie de l’École de Cnide (Collection d’Études Anciennes 141; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2nd ed., 2009), p. 24. 133. Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 74. 134. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 583. 135. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 18.

118

Q in Matthew

The traditio worked with the materials of the traditum. The shorter and longer scribal expansions in 4QpaleoExodm are constituted of words, phrases, and fragments of episodes from other parts of Torah (Deuteronomy or elsewhere in Exodus, and possibly from Job and Ezekiel).136 ‘Whatever creativity was involved’, Sanderson comments, ‘consisted in putting together in a new combination words and phrases that were already in the parallel passage’, carrying out such modifications as were necessary to accommodate transposed traditions to their new syntactic and didactic contexts.137 Fishbane labels this the ‘taxemic form’ of scribal exegesis, that is, ‘the creative combination or recombination of elements of the tradition’.138 The Deuteronomistic scribes followed set rules of reasoning by analogy to generate new law from older legal strata.139 Deuteronomy’s revision and expansion of the Exodus code is an instance of a more ambitious scribal enterprise: grounding a new work for altered social and historical horizons in an older tradition, such that the earlier sources are incorporated into the new work and authorize it. William Morrow remarks that ‘the Dtn writer seems to go out of his way to demonstrate continuity with the older traditions’.140 Transmission qua cultivation entails that scribes participate in the on-going formulation of a work and its constituent traditions, what Sanderson describes as ‘continuing participation in the work of revelation’.141 It also accounts for scribal anonymity: the scribe embodies the tradition; the scribe’s identity recedes behind the tradition. At the same time the scribe contributes, as ‘a participant in and a determiner of the text’, to the tradition’s historical unfolding.142 f. Scribal Memory Proficiency and Source-Utilization Memory was the operational factor in scribal cultivation of tradition at the oral/written interface. The instrumental role of memory becomes particularly evident in more ambitious scribal undertakings. The anonymous scribes who fashioned Bavli sugyot (sequences of halakhic argumentation fashioned from heterogeneous traditions) are a case in point. The scribes of Kiddushin 34a–35a, the sugya analyzed by Rovner, combined a Mishnah 136. Sanderson, Exodus Scroll, pp. 285, 299–300. 137. Ibid., p. 271. 138.  Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 430. 139. William S. Morrow, ‘Mesopotamian Scribal Techniques and Deuteronomic Composition: Notes on Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation [Bernard Levinson, Oxford, 1997]’, ZARG 6 (2000), pp. 303–13 (308–9). 140. Ibid., p. 313. 141. Sanderson, Exodus Scroll, p. 318. 142. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 191.

3. Manuscript and Memory

119

ruling, a baraita of examples and exceptions, four traditions on tefillin, a midrash of Rav Aha bar Yaakov on Exod. 13.9, and other traditions to compose a ‘very complex pattern’ of halakhic argumentation.143 The picture is one of ‘anonymous authors who were extremely conservative regarding their traditions, yet unabashedly creative in their overt manipulation of them’.144 They drew these traditions from their vast ‘memory thesaurus’ of scriptural and rabbinic sources, guided by associative connections. Rovner explains: A consequence of the roll format…is that it would be extremely difficult to locate a passage of the Bavli and impossible to refer to more than one locus at a time in any roll. Long after writing had been adopted, memory would be an indispensable aid in the learning of texts and in accessing them… No wonder our authorships [of the Bavli sugyot] performed their exhaustively creative exercises on material that was not so much culled from a concordance-like search of their sources, as it was collected and collated by means of intertextual suggestion, recollection, and association.145

The selection and arrangement of the traditions of Kiddushin 34a–35a reveal that Deut. 22.1-12 is constructively the mnemonic spine of the sugya. In effect the scribes are ‘building new texts out of the language and structure of old, familiar ones’.146 The scribe of 4QpaleoExodm likely relied upon the assistance of memory to transpose materials from remote contexts in Deuteronomy and elsewhere, and also from within Exodus, for example, Exod. 4.22 to Exod. 11.4 (a retrieval maneuver), and Exod. 14.12 to Exod. 6.9 (pulling material forward). Similarly, the composers of the Temple Scroll follow Deuteronomy as their base text while pulling in topically related laws from Exodus and Numbers by memory.147 Carruthers says in reference to a homily in which Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century CE) adapts scriptural materials to his didactic context: ‘Such adaptive freedom is enabled by complete familiarity with the text, the shared memory of it on the part of both audience and author, and hence a delight both in recognizing the familiar words and the skill with which they have been adapted to a new context’.148 There will be more to say about memory and sourceutilization practices later in the chapter. 143. Jay Rovner, ‘Rhetorical Strategy and Dialectical Necessity in the Babylonian Talmud: The Case of Kiddushin 34a–35a’, HUCA 65 (1994), pp. 177–231 (220). 144. Ibid., p. 186. 145. Ibid., p. 219. 146. Ibid., p. 192. 147. Carr, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory’, pp. 167–8. 148. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 116.

120

Q in Matthew

g. Scribal Memory Proficiency in Oral and Written Tradition As the reference above to the scribal ‘oral-memorial register’ betokened, scribes exercising tradent functions were competent not only in written but also in oral, memory-based tradition. This is not surprising, given the already indistinct boundaries between the two media. Evidence for this competence can be found from all eras. Alongside written cultural texts in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, notes Assmann, ‘die mündliche Überlieferung der Mythen und Legenden fortbesteht’.149 Mesopotamian scribes sometimes explicitly attributed their material to oral tradition.150 For scribal circles of the Neo-Assyrian period Elman posits that the term sa pî ummâni in some contexts designates an authoritative oral tradition.151 Westenholz shows that in unique manuscript versions of various literary works from the Old Babylonian period, ‘[i]t is apparent that the scribe has in his head an oral legendary tradition or song as his model’.152 Steele argues that widespread tablet attestations of the ziqpu-star list from the Late Babylonian period are distinct written realizations of a body of memorybased astronomical knowledge, ‘part of a wider tradition of remembered knowledge that was known to the scribes’.153 This raises the question of ‘how much of the Babylonian astronomical tradition existed mainly in the memories of the practitioners, only occasionally, or sometimes never, being written down’.154 From the Mesopotamian evidence Morrow argues that the Israelite written tradition ‘was likely accompanied by an extensive (though only partly recoverable) oral tradition’ that scribes drew upon, in addition to the Exodus code, for the composition of Deuteronomy.155 Marginalia indicate that Alexandrian scholars controlled extensive bodies of Homeric scholarship, in significant measure transmitted orally, known now as the Scholia D and the Scholia Minora.156 Haslam traces the

149. J. Assmann, ‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, p. 71. 150. Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions’, p. 243. 151. Yaakov Elman, ‘Authoritative Oral Tradition in Neo-Assyrian Scribal Circles’, JANESCU 7 (1975), pp. 19–23 (30–1). 152. Ibid., p. 155. 153. John M. Steele, ‘Late Babylonian Ziqpu-star Lists: Written or Remembered Traditions of Knowledge?’, in Traditions of Written Knowledge in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (ed. Dahlia Bawanypeck and Annette Imhausen; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2014), pp. 123–51 (133). 154. Ibid., p. 134. 155. Morrow, ‘Mesopotamian Scribal Techniques’, p. 313. 156. Dyck, ‘Fragments of Heliodorus Homericus’, p. 51; Montanari, ‘Correcting a Copy’, p. 3.

3. Manuscript and Memory

121

‘polysemantic’ material in Apollonius Sophista’s Homer Lexicon back to a ‘floating corpus of interpretative tradition, dynamically transmitted’.157 The works now comprised by the Hippocratic Corpus evoke a wider sphere of oral instruction and actual practice; they ‘leave out more than they expose…the missing elements had to be supplied by the reader’;158 in numerous passages in these texts, ‘sehr spezifische Vorkenntnisse vorausgesetzt werden’.159 Later redactions of the early Hippocratic ‘Sentences cnidiennes’ (Κνίδιαι γνῶμαι) feature a stratum of humoral etiological speculation (for each malady) absent from earlier redactions (which are focused pragmatically on diagnosis and therapy). Yet ‘cela n’implique pas que les Cnidiens de la période ancienne n’avaient pas parfois une idée plus ou moins nette de la cause des maladies qu’ils décrivaient’.160 The ‘so-called procedures texts of mathematical astronomy do not provide a full explanation of how Babylonian astronomy operated’. Accordingly, Steele says, there must have existed an oral and memory-based tradition of knowledge alongside the written astronomical texts that explained the basic principles of calculating using the techniques of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. Similarly, there must have been a tradition of knowledge of how to make astronomical observations…which finds expression in the consistent style and accuracy of observations recorded over more than seven hundred years. An awareness that this tacit astronomical knowledge existed is essential when trying to reconstruct the history of astronomy – and scholarship more broadly – in Mesopotamia.161

In Amoraic and post-Amoraic rabbinic circles, and subsequently in Islamic scholarship, scribal competence in oral, memory-mediated tradition morphs into an intentional transmitting of a body of oral interpretative traditions alongside a written tradition, a practice that in the rabbinic sphere gave ideological grounding to rabbinic authority.162 Sayyed Nasr points out that the Fusus al-hikmah, a work of the philosopher al Fārābi, was

157. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 40. 158. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 244. 159. Wittern, ‘Gattungen im Corpus Hippocraticum’, p. 25. 160. Jouanna, Hippocrate, p. 148. 161. Steele, ‘Late Babylonian Ziqpu-star Lists’, p. 134. 162. Talya Fishman, ‘Guarding Oral Transmission: Within and Between Cultures’, OT 25 (2010), pp. 41–56 (43); Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Gender and Otherness in Rabbinic Oral Culture: On Gentiles, Undisciplined Jews, and Their Women’, in Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, pp. 21–43 (27, 42).

122

Q in Matthew

‘accompanied by an oral as well as a written tradition of commentaries’, with the oral and written traditions constituting a cognitive unity.163 The dede (official teacher) tradent of the Buyruk catechetical texts within the Alevite Shi’ite sect was also ‘Träger der mündlichen Tradition’; part of his interpretative task lay in aligning the written with the oral tradition, the effect of which was to produce patterns of variation in the written transmission of the Buyruk texts.164 The scribe therefore moved in a field of tradition more encompassing than that defined by the boundaries of the written work. Conversely, the written artifact of a cultural tradition, and especially works with origins in connection with an oral tradition, existed within a larger interactive field of memory and tradition.165 The oral and aural dimensions of a work’s existence, moreover, conduced to its opening out into the wider field of tradition. The connectivity of works like these into a wider network of memory and tradition shows how anachronistic it is to view them through the lens of modern literary criticism as ‘an autonomous arrangement of words’, the artifact of print culture,166 or as Byrskog puts it in his pointed critique, as ‘closed, symbolic universe[s] of meaning’.167 Rather, in its actualization the work summoned up, pars pro toto, the ambient memory field of tradition.168 It is on this point that Nasr makes his

163. Sayyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Oral Transmission and the Book in Islamic Education: the Spoken and the Written Word’, in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (ed. George N. Atiyeh; Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 57–70 (60). 164. Anke Otter-Beaujean, ‘Schriftliche Überlieferung versus mündliche Tradition – zum Stellenwert der Buyruk-Handschriften im Alevitum’, in Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East (ed. A. Otter-Beaujean, K. Kehl-Bodrogi, and B. Kellner Heinkele; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 213–26 (223–5). 165. See Hezser, ‘Codification of Legal Knowledge’, p. 617; Boudon-Millot, ‘Oral et écrit’, pp. 201, 209; Otter-Beaujean, ‘Schriftliche Überlieferung’, pp. 213–26; Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory, p. 214. 166. Joyce Tally Lionarons, ‘Textual Appropriation and Scribal (Re)Performance in a Composite Homily: The Case for a New Edition of Wulfstan’s De Temporibus Anticristi’, in Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context (ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons; Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2004), pp. 67–93 (67). 167. Byrskog, ‘Century with the Sitz im Leben’, p. 12. 168. Foley, Immanent Art, p. 7. For a clear statement of this as it applies to the gospels, see Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory, p. 214; also Kelber, ‘Case of the Gospels’, p. 75: ‘[T]he gospels are compositions with deep diachronic roots in oral and written traditions. From the perspective of both production and of consumption, they open out to realities outside their narrative boundaries.’

3. Manuscript and Memory

123

sharp protest against Western scholarship’s positivist reduction of Islamic texts to their written elements lacking cognitive connections into the wider memory matrix of tradition.169 The Middle Platonic Didaskalikos, or Epitome of Platonic Doctrines, composed by Alcinous in the first or second century CE, is an instructive case in point. John Whittaker has demonstrated the influence at a number of points in the Didaskalikos of an ambient, evidently memory-based tradition of Platonic scholarship. For example, Alcinous’s definition of philosophy, φιλοσοφία ἐστὶν…λύσις καὶ περιαγωγὴ ψυχῆς ἀπὸ σώματος (Did. 152.2), conflates Phaedo 67d8-10 (λύσις καὶ χωρισμὸς ψυχῆς ἀπὸ σώματος) with Plato’s definition of philosophy in Republic 7.521c6-8 (ψυχῆς περιαγωγὴ ἐκ νυκτερινῆς τινος ἡμέρας εἰς ἀληθινήν κτλ.), substituting περιαγωγή for χωρισμός. One might at first be inclined to put this down to a reminiscence, perhaps unconscious, of the Republic passage. But Iamblichus, in his definition of philosophy in Protrepticus 13, conflates the same texts and with the same conjoining of λύσις and περιαγωγή. Accordingly, says Whittaker, ‘[s]ince there is no likelihood that Iamblichus knew the Didaskalikos, we have to suppose that the conflation was a constant ingredient of the Platonic scholastic tradition, one aim of which was to demonstrate that Plato was coherent with himself by bringing together compatible δόγματα from different dialogues’.170 This scholarly tradition was itself affected by its contact with the traditions and jargon of other philosophical schools.171 Incidentally, the effect of this and other instances of influence from the ambient field of the scholarly tradition was to create minor agreements between Alcinous and other Middle Platonic authors. 4. Mouvance: Variation in Manuscript Tradition Above it has been seen how variation can be introduced into a manuscript tradition through scribal tradent practices. Variation, the index feature of oral tradition, persists into manuscript tradition, though modified and controlled by the properties of the written medium. To capture this property of manuscript tradition Paul Zumthor coined the term mouvance.172 Dagenais refers 169. Nasr, ‘Oral Transmission’, pp. 57–61. 170. John Whittaker, ‘The Value of Indirect Tradition in the Establishment of Greek Philosophical Texts, or the Art of Misquotation’, in Editing Greek and Latin Texts: Papers given at the Twenty-Third Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 6–7 November 1987 (ed. John N. Grant; New York: AMS, 1989), pp. 63–95 (89–90). 171. Ibid., pp. 85–6. 172. Zumthor, Oral Poetry, pp. 103, 203.

124

Q in Matthew

to it as the ‘indeterminacy’ of manuscript tradition, Doane as its ‘emergent’ quality.173 To be sure, some manuscript variation is random and incidental, arising from the contingencies of reading, copying, vocalization, memory, stylistic preference, and whim. In copying, for example, harmonistic, stylistic, and unmotivated word-order modifications, as well as synonym substitutions, might arise as the aurally activated textual trace makes its associative transit through the scribe’s memory.174 Changes of this kind are in many cases not conscious, though it takes a particularly modern, printculture mentality to classify them all without nuance as corruptions.175 These ad hoc factors, however, cannot account for the pervasiveness of variation in manuscript tradition, which is caused by its reaction with the historical realities of a tradent community. Because the scribe worked at the interstices of orality and writing, scribal enactment of the tradition left a material trace in the written medium: oral variation became visible. a. Contingent Factors Affecting Manuscript Variation The proneness of a given work to variation in its manuscript transmission is contingent upon a number of factors: its genre, contents, pragmatic and cultural functions, and Sitz of utilization. Zetzel summarizes: ‘What happened to grammars is different from what happened to cookbooks, and what happened to legal texts is different again. Nor did the literary texts undergo anything like the wholesale revision that happened to practical works.’176 Works whose origins and ongoing cultivation lay in close connection to an oral tradition were particularly open to variation, as the practices associated with the cultivation of oral tradition persisted into its manuscript transmission. Ritual texts, the efficacy of which depended upon fixed wording, were transmitted with greater exactitude.177 AngloSaxon and Irish scribes had different ground rules for vernacular texts and Latin texts. The latter, besides having ‘a highly codified prescriptive grammar’ and authorial ‘auctoritas’, had no living vernacular counterpart.178 173. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 80; Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, pp. 423–4. 174. See John Henry Chaytor, ‘The Medieval Reader and Textual Criticism’, BJRL 29 (1941–42), pp. 49–56 (55); also Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, pp. 145–6, and Carr, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory’, p. 166. 175. On this point see Machan, ‘Editing, Orality’, p. 241; Lionarons, ‘Textual Appropriation’, pp. 67–8. 176. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism, pp. 250–1; similarly Kenney, ‘Books and Readers’, p. 27. 177. Westenholz, ‘Oral Traditions’, p. 132. 178. Machan, ‘Editing, Orality’, pp. 230–2, 243.

3. Manuscript and Memory

125

Anthologies might have a high level of variability in transmission and a highly interactive relationship with ambient oral tradition. This is certainly the case for the Hippocratic recipe collections.179 Yet even compilationtype works were found in a range of genres and pragmatic functions that differentially affected the coherence of their compositional organization and level of variation in transmission. Jaffee points out that the ‘mishnaic tractates routinely stand on the more ‘highly composed’ end of the spectrum’, whereas the Tosefta (collections of tannaitic materials like those found in the Mishnah) ‘seem rather more loose in structure and “unfinished” ’, and Bavli tractates are more organized than Yerushalmi tractates.180 Some Hellenistic Jewish wisdom works were loose paratactic collections, others were organized around topoi and tightly knit sequences of deliberative argumentation. b. Mouvance and Source Criticism Manuscript tradition’s property of mouvance complicates source-criticism, to say the least. Stemberger, analyzing the source relationship of Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael and Mekhilta of Rabbi Simon b. Yakkai, characterizes them as ‘Texte, die zwar schriftlich vorliegen, aber dennoch eine gewisse Variationsbreite in der Formulierung aufweisen…die engen Beziehungen miteinander und zugleich die zahlreichen Abweichungen [aufweisen], die nicht immer einfach auf editoriale Prozesse zurück zu führen sind’.181 Variation in common materials can be such that it raises questions about whether the relationship between two works is literary or mediated by oral tradition. Nelson concludes from analysis of [5A], [5F] – [5J] in Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishamael and [A1] – [A6] in Mekhilta of Simon b. Yohai, two exegetical sequences on Exod. 12.1 that ‘display some striking similarities and some pronounced differences’, that, at least in respect to this sequence, the relationship of the two Mekhiltas is mediated by oral tradition: ‘Represented in these two parallel presentations are dual manipulations of a common body of tradition, a shared nucleus of lore frequently associated with this particular point in Scripture’.182 Peter Schäffer argues that variation among the different works of the Hekhalot literature is so great that it is impossible to fix source relations among them. Indeed, so divergent are extant versions of individual works such as Hekhalot Rabbati and Hekhalot Zutarti that it is difficult to fix a minimal redactional identity 179. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, p. 298. 180. Jaffee, ‘Rabbinic Authorship’, pp. 33–4. 181. Stemberger, ‘Mündliche Tora’, pp. 235–6. Baum makes the same point about Synoptic variation (Der mündliche Faktor, p. 54). 182. Nelson, ‘Oral Orthography’, p. 25.

126

Q in Matthew

for them in the first place.183 Divergences in wording, content, order, and syntactic patterns among the manuscript and papyri attestations of the ‘polysemantic’ material in Apollonius Sophista’s Homer Lexicon lead Haslam to conclude that its provenance is a floating body of scholarly tradition.184 These particular source-critical judgments are sound. But variation in manuscript tradition, even significant variation, does not per se rule out written source relationships. The belief that it does rests on the mistaken notion that orality and writing are exclusive modes of transmission, that variation is the index property of the former, close agreement the index property of the latter, that once rendered in writing, tradition crosses what Doane sardonically calls ‘the “impermeable barrier” ’ – sealed off from orality and subject now to the strictly literary operations of copying and editing.185 ‘In the three chief scripta [manuscripts] of the Libro [de buen Amor’, writes Dagenais, ‘we have at least three distinct Libros… [The Libro] is a dynamic process of change of emphasis, of old or new reading, a continuing, evolving gloss.’186 Yet, he cautions, the indeterminacy of its manuscript tradition ‘is not an argument for ceasing production of critical editions’.187 Ulrich notes that notwithstanding the fluid transmission of biblical texts during the Second Temple period, ‘the base text of most books remained relatively stable’.188 In other words, in making source-critical judgments evidence for the effects of the written medium must be weighed. It is necessary to recognize, as O’Brien O’Keefe puts it, ‘the material aspects of a literary text…that a text exists in the world as a written object, that important elements of its meaning are fixed in the 183. Peter Schäffer, ‘Aufbau und redaktionelle Identität in der Hekhalot Zutarti’, in idem, Hekhalot-Studien (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1988), pp. 50–62 (58); idem, ‘Zum Problem der redaktionellen Identität von Hekhalot Rabbati’, in idem, HekhalotStudien, pp. 63–74 (74). 184. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, pp. 36–7. 185. Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, p. 424. Shamma Friedman challenges this notion as it appears in rabbinic scholarship (‘The Primacy of Tosefta to Mishnah in Synoptic Parallels’, in Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual, and Intertextual Studies [ed. Harry Fox and Tirzah Meacham; Jerusalem: KTAV, 1999], pp. 99–121 [102–3]). Homeric scholarship has typically assumed that an archetype of the epics was written sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, ‘perhaps by way of dictation by an ἀοιδός’, after which ‘the practices of oral performance…either died out…or that such practices continued but were irrelevant to the subsequent history of the Homeric text’ (Bird, Multitextuality, pp. 40–1). 186. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 128. 187. Ibid., p. xviii. 188. Ulrich, Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 109.

3. Manuscript and Memory

127

visual array by which it is presented on a page, and that each realization of the text depends on a unique act of scribal reception’.189 Though the mouvance phenomenon makes source-critical analysis more interesting, it also entails that one cannot make a priori appeals to variation to call in question documentary source relationships. c. The Written Medium and Manuscript Variation The inscription of tradition is a Verfestigung, a strategy to ensure the Sicherung of a body of formative cultural tradition.190 Tradition is materialized in an external artifact which – unlike oral tradition – exists autonomously of its tradents and any act of performance. Though activated at the interface with orality, the text remains a ‘graph-bound object’.191 Moreover, with its properties of material and spatial extension, the written medium provides ‘eine Basis zur Konstitution übergreifender Sinnzusammenhänge’192 – the creation of stabilized networks of connections among constituent elements of a work, connections that are constitutive of the work itself and its intelligibility. Whatever developments works such as Genesis Rabbah and Talmud Yerushalmi might undergo in their transmission, the decisive factor in their genesis as works is ‘the determination of the commentary structure as the ordering principle for diverse traditions’.193 Even the midrashic works analyzed by Nelson possess lightly sketched editorial frameworks, an ‘editorial design and purpose that is independent of, or greater than, the traditions themselves’.194 The effects of scribal consolidation of tradition were discussed in Chapter 1, and it is helpful to review the most salient points briefly. Nissenen summarizes the salient features of Mari oracle collections thus: ‘The editorial activity is visible in the standardized design of the collections, all of which follow roughly the same format… [T]he editor of the collections has attempted a standardized manner of representation, which has required at least a slight stylization of the reports [ironing out idiosyncrasies of constituent oracles], which were originally separate.’195 Evident are scribal concerns for systematic concatenation and standardization of multiple, multi-sourced, and originally distinct oracles, to the 189. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 190. 190. J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 165; see Byrskog, Story as History, pp. 122–3. 191. O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song, p. 40. 192. A. Assmann, ‘Schriftliche Folklore’, p. 176. 193. Becker, ‘Texts and History’, p. 158. 194. Nelson, ‘Oral Orthography’, p. 28. 195. Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted’, p. 250.

128

Q in Matthew

end of constructing a cohesive work. In place of the distinctive marks of their originating oral performances, this format substitutes a uniform organization, ‘adjusted to necessary scribal conventions and stylized according to the prevailing customs’.196 Recurrent organizational patterns like this depend on the written medium and are a reliable indicator of scribal activity. Scribal activity is similarly evidenced by the appearance of constituent materials in closely configured elaborative or deliberative patterns. This was seen in Rovner’s analysis of the Bavli sugya, and Heszer likewise comments that ‘the Yerushalmi stam molds traditions of generations of earlier scholars into a new argumentative structure’.197 Because structures such as these bring heterogeneous traditions into precise sequential and elaborative connections to one another, they are not apt for free transmission in the oral medium. A tightly knit sequence of argumentation requires the support of the written medium for its transmission. This is particularly the case for sequences of wisdom sayings organized in deliberative patterns, for the autonomy of the saying, combined with its semantic openness, makes it apt for new contextualizations. Memory comes into play here as well. Cultural-formative works are assimilated to memory. This cognitive fusion of memory and manuscript bears upon source-critical analysis in an important way. It entails that a source, in its utilization, cannot be casually dissolved into orality and its elements reconstituted or rearranged willy-nilly. Utilization actions will necessarily follow the writing-enabled networks of connections among the elements of a work. Not only are these networks constitutive of the work itself, they are the mode of its existence in memory and its oral enactment. They correspond to the memory networks that support its utilization. d. The Written Medium and Arguments from Order Because of its spatio-material properties the written medium enables traces of a stable order to persist across a work’s contingent history of transmission. This is crucial to source-critical analysis. The common order of units in sequences now found differently redacted in separate treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus permit the reconstruction of the non-extant source ‘Sentences cnidiennes’ (Κνίδιαι γνῶμαι).198 Elman applies the criterion of common order to analysis of the source-critical relationship between the Babylonian Talmud and the Tosefta. In Bavli passages parallel to the Tosefta Elman looks for residues of patterns fashioned by the editors of the Tosefta in their project of bringing heterogeneous Tannaitic traditions into 196. Ibid., p. 244. 197. Hezser, ‘Codification of Legal Knowledge’, p. 611. 198. Jouanna, Hippocrate, pp. 2, 105, 115, 133.

3. Manuscript and Memory

129

cohesive, stable arrangements, in his words, ‘adjacent baraitot containing heterogeneous material which does not follow the order of the Mishnah or one dictated by the nature of the material…[which] might then indicate that the arrangement of material in the Bavli was determined by that in the Tosefta’.199 In short, Elman looks for survivals of Toseftan order in Bavli baraitot parallels – ‘the recurrence of identical sequences of heterogeneous materials, covering disparate subjects’.200 Taking Tosefta redactional patterns as his criterion, Elman comes to the negative conclusion that the Tosefta does not stand in a source relationship to the Bavli: ‘[N]o convincing juxtapositions of baraitot dealing with heterogeneous materials arranged in the same order in both the Bavli and the Tosefta were observed’, and no traces of the Tosefta’s larger patterns of cohesion can be detected in the Bavli’s parallel traditions.201 The appearance of such would have supported either the Bavli’s direct dependence upon the Tosefta or that both drew upon a common source, but as it is, neither source relationship can be posited. The Bavli and the Tosefta come by their common traditions independently.202 It is instructive to compare Elman’s negative results with Paul Mandel’s positive results from his source-critical analysis of the BabylonianShephardic and Palestinian-Ashkenazic recensions of Lamentations Rabbah. These recensions diverge to such an extent that the relationship between individual elements in each manuscript tradition seems to…reflect the more fluid, oral transmission of typical of the early period… Nevertheless, a comparison between the two manuscript traditions demonstrates that they constitute exactly the same work. Almost all the passages found in one recension are found in the other, in similar language, and in approximately the same order.203

Earlier it was noted that variants incorporated into the manuscript tradition of the Libro de buen Amor hewed to the order of the work. Shared order, variation notwithstanding, points to a documentary relationship. On the other hand, disagreements in order, phrasing, and syntactic structure are such as to leave the correspondence among surviving witnesses to 199. Yaakov Elman, Authority and Tradition: Toseftan Baraitot in Talmudic Babylonia (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1994), p. 21. 200. Ibid., p. 39. The Tosefta organize non-Mishnaic tannaitic traditions (baraitot) in a recurrent pattern that takes the Mishnah as its point of reference. 201. Ibid., pp. 8–9; also pp. 263–6. 202. Ibid., pp. 51, 60. 203. Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 80, original emphasis.

130

Q in Matthew

the ‘polysemantic’ materials used by Apollonius Sophista in his Lexicon ‘disconcertingly approximate’. Thus in this case Haslam rejects written transmission for these materials and posits instead a body of oral tradition separately realized in overlapping written attestations.204 The oral medium is certainly capable of sustaining order, which is an effective mnemonic. Comparison of parallel versions of orally transmitted Hippocratic recipes shows that the order of ingredients remained very stable. Totelin surmises that this is because this was the order in which the medicinal recipe was to be prepared hence essential to its efficacy (like cooking recipes). Comparison of the wording and syntax of the parallels, however, shows a high level of instability: ‘Infinitives are often substituted for participles, indicatives for infinitives, etc.’, and verbatim repetition is unknown.205 These features confirm the oral transmission of these particular parallels.206 On the other hand, since the individual recipes themselves are selfcontained and autonomous, cases of common order in sequences of recipes give unimpeachable evidence for a literary relationship between parallel sequences of two or more recipes. Nature of Women 109 and Diseases of Women 1.78 are parallel sequences of six self-contained recipes. Syntactic and lexical variation between the individual parallel recipes is present but attenuated compared with that found in parallels related by oral tradition. We illustrate with a section of the sequence: Nature of Women 109 1. Ἕτερον· τὸ ἀμπέλιον τρίβων χλωρὸν ἐν μέλιτι, ἐς εἴριον ἐνελίξας, προστιθέναι τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον. Another: crush fresh vine in honey; wrap in wool, apply in the same way. 2. Ἕτερον· τῆς κυπαρίσσου τὸν καρπὸν καὶ λιβανωτὸν τρίψας ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ, ῥοδίνῳ μύρῳ διεὶς καὶ μέλιτι, ἐς εἴριον ἐνελίξας, προστιθέναι.

Diseases of Women 1.78 1. Ἢ τὸ ἀμπέλιον τρίβειν χλωρόν, καὶ μέλιτι μίσγων, ἐς εἴριον ἐνειλίξας, προστιθέναι τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον. Or crush fresh vine; mix with honey; wrap in wool, apply in the same way 2. Ἢ τῆς κυπαρίσσου τὸν καρπὸν καὶ λιβανωτὸν τρίψας ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ, ῥοδίνῳ διεὶς καὶ μέλιτι, ἐς εἴριον ἐνειλίξας, προστιθέναι.

204. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, pp. 36–7. An example of the syntactic, or ‘formulaic’, differences: in Apollonius Sophista the elements in the polysemantic entries are structured ἐπὶ μὲν…ἐπὶ δὲ…ἐπὶ δὲ…ἐπὶ δε… In another witness, the syntax is ὅταν μὲν...ὅταν δὲ…, while in another witness the elements are introduced by ὡς. 205. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, pp. 37–8. Totelin leaves open the question of possible literary mediation between parallel recipes, noting the highly oralized utilization environment in which written recipe collections circulated (40–1). 206. Ibid., pp. 40–1.

3. Manuscript and Memory Another: crush together seed of cypress and frankincense; soak with rose perfume and honey. Wrap in wool; apply. 3. Ἕτερον· ἀβροτόνου ὅσον τριώβολον τρίψας ἐν μέλιτι, ἐς εἴριον ἐνελίξας, προστιθέναι. Another: crush wormwood, in the amount of three oboloi, in honey. Wrap in wool; apply.

131

Or crush together seed of cypress and frankincense; soak with rose and honey. Wrap in wool. Let her apply it. 3. Ἢ ἀβρότονον ὅσον δραχμήν, καὶ σικύης ἐντεριώνην ὅσον ὀβολὸν τρίψας ἐν μέλιτι, ἐς εἴριον ἐνειλίξας, προστιθέναι. Or wormwood, in the amount of one drachma, the inside of a bottle gourd, in the amount of one obolos; crush in honey. Wrap in wool; apply.207

Both sequences are organized topically under the rubric of feminine purgatives (after childbirth): A: Γυναικεῖα καθαρτήρια, ἢν μὴ πορεύηται ἡ κάθαρσις//B: Ἢν μὴ κατίῃ ἡ κάθαρσις ἡ λοχείη. Totelin concludes that these two sequences are parallel redactions of a self-contained collection of recipes, and that the parallel redactions were subsequently swept up into Nature of Women and Diseases of Women respectively, along with much other Hippocratic tradition.208 Given the variability of a manuscript tradition, as well as the oral medium’s capacity to sustain a modicum of cohesion in the materials it transmits, making determinations of written mediation requires the judicious weighing of evidence, as Elman, Mandel, Haslam, and Totelin do in these cases. 5. Writing, Cognition, and Topoi-Organized Manuscript Tradition a. Topoi as Memory Strategy The written medium, with its materiality and spatial extension, supports the transmission of stable sequences of heterogeneous materials. These properties, moreover, are the basis of the fusion of manuscript and memory. The ars memoriae were a species of spatial mnemonics, assimilation of texts to memory was understood on analogy with writing on wax tablets, and in rhetoric the loci, or topoi – ‘places, locations’ – were essential to the discovery and ordering of materials as well as gaining control of them in memory.209 ‘[I]f our structure be what it should’, Quintilian 207. Ibid., pp. 69–70. 208. Ibid., p. 71. 209. Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 28–35; Corbier, ‘L’écriture’, p. 113; Small, Wax Tablets, p. 100; see Cicero, de Oratore 2.354-355; Quintilian, Inst. 11.2.

132

Q in Matthew

says, ‘the artistic sequence will serve to guide the memory’ (Inst. 11.39). The strategy, as Carruthers puts it, was ‘to “divide” the material to be remembered into pieces short enough to be recalled in single units and to key these into some sort of rigid, easily reconstructable order’.210 Order served as a meta-mnemonic, giving navigational orientation by means of topical landmarks in the work and cues for the retrieval and enactment of the material. The ordering principle in forensic rhetoric was the arrangement (dispositio) of the elements of the speech. The standard divisions of the dispositio were called loci, but the term loci also applied to category-keyed memory ‘search formulas’ for discovery and organization of forensic and deliberative arguments or materials for an encomium.211 As Lausberg explains, ‘[t]he principle of dividing a variety of phenomena into loci for the purpose of easier retrieval and constant availability connects the loci of memory with the loci of argumentation’.212 In short, the topoi technique, whatever its permutation, was a memory search strategy. b. Topoi and Topoi Sequences as a Cultural Repertoire For present purposes the most pertinent application of the loci/topoi strategy was as organizing rubrics for the ethical or doxographic materials collected in anthologies, florilegia, and other genres of this kind. Both (a) the topoi and (b) the topoi sequence of these genres were conventional, thus a form of tradition, and the progression of a topoi sequence might itself display a deliberative or otherwise intelligible logic. The scientific genre peri physeōs (On the nature of things), Kahn remarks, ‘often deal[s] with a standard set of topics in an established order, beginning with first principles and the origin of heaven and earth and ending with the formation of human beings’.213 The topoi sequence of Stobaeus’s scientific anthology (from Gourinat’s tabular presentation) begins with Dieu, and continues down through le temps et l’éternité, les principes, les elements et l’univers, la matière, generation et corruption, comment le monde s’est constitué, l’essence du ciel, l’essence et la figure des astres, le soleil, la lune, nuages, pluie, grêle, les vents, la terre, la mer, la generation des animaux, la nature

210. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 8; see Quintilian, Inst. 11.27-28. 211. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study (trans. Matthew T. Bliss; ed. Annemiek Jansen and David E. Orton; Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 171 (§373); see also pp. 119–20 (§§260-262), pp. 171–204 (§§373– 430), pp. 209–14 (§§443–452), and Quintilian, Inst. 5.10.20; Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, p. 253; Damm, Ancient Rhetoric, pp. 38–45. 212. Lausberg, Handbook, p. 479 (§1087). 213. Kahn, ‘Writing Philosophy’, p. 146.

3. Manuscript and Memory

133

de l’homme, l’intellect, de l’âme, and so forth214 – a sequential logic that moves down an ontological axis from God to human and a spatial axis from heaven to earth. One Hippocratic gynecological collection organizes its pharmacological recipes loosely in what Totelin calls ‘a ‘chronological’ order from menstruation to [child]birth’, while another organizes them by themes.215 Still another organizes its recipes along the bodily axis from head to toe.216 Moral topoi in particular were conventional: wealth and poverty; speech; friendship; women; family; justice; oaths; flattery; anger; education; fate; self control; work; mortality, and the like. Morgan finds that the materials in the diverse gnomic school texts from Egypt ‘can be broken down into about thirteen major topics’.217 Hellenistic paraenetic works frequently opened with the descending hierarchy of relationships: obligations to the gods, to parents, to friends. The Pythagorean Golden Verses commences with this moral hierarchy, then proceeds to precepts collected under the four cardinal virtues: moderation, justice, moral insight (φρόνησις), and courage.218 Hellenistic Jewish sapiential works took over many of these conventions while incorporating distinctive topoi grounded in Torah and Jewish ethics. The opening sections of Ben Sira, for example, feature the topoi ‘fear of the Lord’ (1.11–2.17), ‘honoring parents’ (3.1-16), ‘the poor and hungry’ (3.30–4.10), before moving to ‘proper speech’ (4.20–6.1), ‘friends and enemies’ (6.5-17) and other conventional moral topoi.219 214. Gourinat, ‘Sources de Stobée’, pp. 191–201; see also Small on the topoi sequence in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Wax Tablets, pp. 215–16). 215. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, pp. 85–6. 216. Ibid., pp. 230–1. 217. Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 124–5. For example, ‘[w]ealth, virtue, logos… and speech, intellect, letters and education, women, family, friends and associates, old age, the gods, tyche, and self control’. She observes that ‘it is the connections made between topics which are among the most interesting aspects of these texts’. 218. Johan C. Thom, The Pythagorean Golden Verses with Introduction and Commentary (RGRW 123; Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 64–5. Stobaeus’s moral anthology begins with the antithetical organization virtue/vice, proceeds through the cardinal virtues and their antitheses, and then on to the individual virtues (Searby, ‘Intertitles in Stobaeus’, p. 35). 219. See Beate Ego, ‘Im Schatten hellenistischer Bildung: Ben Siras Lern- und Lehrkonzeption zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, in Schaper, ed., Die Textualisierung der Religion, pp. 203–21 (212). For discussion of the topoi conventions of Jewish sapiential texts see A. Kirk, ‘Some Compositional Conventions of Hellenistic Wisdom Texts, and the Juxtaposition of 4:1-13; 6:20b-49; and 7:1-10 in Q’, JBL 116 (1997), pp. 235–57.

134

Q in Matthew

Pseudo-Phocylides opens with a sapientialized Decalogue, proceeds to the four cardinal virtues, and then continues with various social relationships and personal responsibilities.220 c. Topoi Sequences as Cognitive Schemata Τopoi rubrics and topoi sequences are ‘cognitive schemata’221 that operate at the ‘brain–artifact interface’ discussed earlier in this chapter. The pragmatic function of works of ethical precepts brought together under topical rubrics was to provision the memory. ‘A florilegium’, writes Carruthers, ‘is basically the contents of someone’s memory, set forth as a kind of studyguide for the formation of others’ memories… The most familiar variety brings together ethical topics, vices and virtues and socially useful habits.’222 Arrangement of materials into topoi exploited the mnemonic principle of ‘chunking’: dividing a work into shorter segments (Stücke) easily learned as individual units and in turn reproduced in an ordered sequence.223 Medieval florilegia rubrics such as ‘Justice’, ‘Wifely Chastity’, or ‘Disgraced Husbands’, Carruthers continues, function ‘as labels, the mnemonically necessitated listing of the memorial chest’, places where sayings and stories related to the particular topics can be collected and cued.224 That topoi rubrics and topoi sequences were cultural conventions enhanced their mnemonic effects. Ordering topoi relative to one another in coherent sequences ratcheted the mnemonic effect up to the next level: a habituated, intelligible sequence cues each of its units in order. Commenting on Quintilian’s instructions to make judicious division and coherent ordering the basis for mastering a work (Inst. 11.2.36-39), C. Julius Victor, a fourthcentury Latin rhetorician, says that ‘[i]f the first, second, and so on connect, nothing can be omitted through forgetfulness, because the context of the 220. Walter T. Wilson, The Mysteries of Righteousness: The Literary Composition and Genre of the Sentences of Pseudo-Phyocylides (TSAJ 40; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1994), p. 134. Pascale Derron identifies in Pseudo-Phocylides the following conventional moral rubrics: περὶ πλούτου, περὶ φρονήσεως, περὶ φθόνου, περὶ σωφροσύνης, περὶ θανάτου καὶ ψυχῆς, περὶ τύχης, περὶ λόγου καὶ σοφίας, περὶ ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας, περὶ ἐργασίας, περὶ γάμου, περὶ παίδων καὶ γονέων, περὶ δεσποτῶν καὶ οἰκετῶν (PseudoPhocylide Sentences [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986], pp. xxvi–xxvii). 221. Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, p. 8; see also Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 90–1. 222. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 218. 223. Quintilian, Inst. 11.2.27: ‘If a long speech is to be retained in memory, it will be of advantage to learn it in parts, for the memory sinks under a vast burden laid on it at once’. See also Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft, pp. 296–7, citing the fourth-century Latin rhetorician Consultus Fortunatianus, On Memory. 224. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 225.

3. Manuscript and Memory

135

successive elements will itself serve as reminder’.225 The organization of the Mishnah by halakhic topoi assisted its mastery by memory, and the Mishnah’s topoi sequence in its turn became the ‘mnemonic spine’, the ‘organizing set of textual cues’, for the Talmuds.226 The cognitive basis of these mnemonic effects is well understood. ‘[O]rganized information’, Worthen and Hunt explain, ‘is easier to remember than unorganized information…and…instructions [to subjects of experiments] to organize information enhances memory even in the absence of instructions to memorize’.227 The cognitive basis for ‘chunking’ is the limited holding capacity of short-term memory, or ‘working’ memory, which carries out the relaying function in storage as well as search-andretrieval actions.228 The forward cuing effect of a conventional sequence also has a simple cognitive explanation. The brain encodes sequences of information as multiple nodes in a neural network. Frequent rehearsal of a sequence reinforces the neural, associative connections between the nodes. The result is ‘retrieval via spreading activation’.229 The conventionality and habituation of a sequence, as well as its coherence, reinforce its activation pattern, which accordingly will generally be forward through a given sequence.230 A familiar example of this is the recitation of the alphabet.

225. C. Julius Victor, On Memory, in Rhetores latini minores (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863), translated by Ziolkowlski in Craft of Memory, p. 298. Williams cites the ‘sarcastic words of a teacher in a Nineteenth Dynasty [Egyptian] text: “You tell me a saying of Hardjedef, but do not know whether it is good or bad. Which chapter precedes it? What follows it? You are, of course, a skilled scribe at the head of his fellows, and the teaching of every book is incised in your mind!” ’ (‘Scribal Training’, p. 219). 226. Martin S. Jaffee, ‘The Oral-Cultural Context of the Talmud Yerushalmi: Greco-Roman Rhetorical Paideia, Discipleship, and the Concept of Oral Torah’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 27–73 (28, 45). 227. J. B. Worthen and R. R. Hunt, ‘Mnemonics: Underlying Processes and Practical Applications’, in Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference. Vol. 2, Cognitive Psychology of Memory (ed. Henry L. Roediger; Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), pp. 145–56 (146). 228. David Klahr, William G. Chase, and Eugene A. Lovelace, ‘Structure and Process in Alphabetic Retrieval’, JExpPsy 9 (1983), pp. 462–77 (462). 229. Eliot R. Smith and Sarah Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, in Social Cognition (ed. Marilynn B. Brewer and Miles Hewstone; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 5–27 (13). 230. One need not look far to find this in personal experience. Prompted by authentication protocols to give the ‘last four digits’ of my U.S. Social Security number, I find that I typically work forward from the beginning of the nine-digit sequence to locate and retrieve the last four digits.

136

Q in Matthew

Narrative sequence has similar mnemonic cuing effects, especially since it tolerates only limited reordering before its narrative coherence is destroyed. Mandler and Johnson refer to this as ‘story schema’, that is, ‘a set of expectations about the internal structure of stories which serves to facilitate both encoding and retrieval’.231 Tonkin gives the example of the traditional narrative of Kru migration into Liberia: ‘The narrative proceeds over more than twenty “stages”…to bring its subjects from Ivory Coast till they win their settlement at Filorkli… The stages of the story…are likewise an itinerary, which may act as a checklist for its recall that also provides a spatial framework for duration and change.’232 The topoi sequences that organize instructional genres are much more tolerant of re-ordering, for – as we saw for the florilegia studied in Chapter 2 – a number of coherent topical orders are conceivable, and maxims, proverbs, and chreiai are inherently apt for recontextualizations. But even here cultural convention, connectional coherence (for example, obligations to gods, to parents, to friends, to subordinates), the fixing effects of the written medium, and habituation of a given topoi progression place limits on free play in transmission and utilization. A topoi sequence might itself follow an implied narrative line. The topoi progression in Syriac Menander, for example, traces an implicit biographical arc from birth to death, with its topoi organized around the rites of passage that mark the major life transitions.233 This is similar to the ‘life script’ cognitive schema that experimental psychologists have shown organizes autobiographical memory.234 d. Item Arrangement as Cognitive Strategy So far our focus has been upon the superordinate, horizontal topoi-sequence of a work. We must also attend to the vertical mnemonic connection of the individual topoi rubrics with the actual items arranged under them. Conventional rubrics such as ‘wealth and poverty’, or ‘friends and enemies’, are symbolic markers for heterogeneous items collected into the category; they serve as cues, or memory addresses, for locating and retrieving those materials.235 Working memory, with its limited capacity, cannot cognitively 231. Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, CognPsych 9 (1977), pp. 111–51 (112). 232. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p. 30. 233. See A. Kirk, ‘The Composed Life of the Syriac Menander’, SR/SR 26 (1997), pp. 169–83. 234. Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory’, MemCogn 32 (2004), pp. 427–42 (427). 235. Alan D. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1999), pp. 170–1.

3. Manuscript and Memory

137

encompass all the diverse materials in, for example, a florilegium. But it is an easy matter for it to scan topoi rubrics, all the more so if these are sequenced intelligibly, and then drill down and retrieve the individual items, or segments of items, constituting the sequence.236 These items may be very loosely organized, but diverse ethical materials – proverbs, maxims, and the like – collocated in a particular topos can themselves be arranged into a coherent sequence of deliberative argumentation. The effect is to reduce the cognitive load significantly by converting the constituent items into a single cognitive entity – the cognitive equivalent to exchanging ten pennies for a dime.237 If a pattern of deliberative argumentation is recurrent, its mnemonic effect is multiplied. Though not as prescriptive as narrative coherence, bringing heterogeneous elements together into chains of deliberative argumentation has a stabilizing effect on their transmission, since the coherence of the argument depends on the position of constituent units in the sequence.238 e. Topoi and the Cognitive Fusion of Manuscript and Memory The spatial-material properties of the written medium support the transmission of stable, extended sequences along the horizontal axis of topoi and the vertical axis of deliberative elaborations among constituent items. Here the fusion of memory and written artifact becomes particularly evident. Written works (possessing the requisite cultural status) were assimilated to memory, a process conceived metaphorically as writing on the wax tablets. Florilegia were prominent in the educational Sitz where the object was paideia: moral and cultural formation through internalization of wisdom. The written artifact took on cognitive existence as a memory artifact; conversely, memory was instrumental in the artifact’s utilization. The schematic organization of the work emulated the neural encoding and retrieval systems of memory;239 conversely, the artifactual form of the work shaped and stabilized the corresponding neural architecture. The written work was not cleanly distinguished from its memory 236. George Miller, ‘Information and Memory’, SciAm (August 1956), pp. 42–6; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 105; Worthen and Hunt, ‘Mnemonics’, pp. 150–1. 237. Miller, ‘Information and Memory’, p. 44. 238. For an indispensable theoretical discussion of the mnemonic effects of coherent topoi organization see Mitchell Rabinowitz and Jean M. Mandler, ‘Organization and Information Retrieval’, JExpPsy 9 (1983), pp. 430–39 (432). 239. Alan Baddeley, ‘Psychology of Remembering and Forgetting’, in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (ed. Thomas Butler; Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 33–60 (55); see Cribiore on students’ use of simple alphabetical and topical strategies to master lists of maxims (Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 167).

138

Q in Matthew

counterpart. Indeed, a work’s divisions and transitions were minimally if at all represented in the undifferentiated script of the manuscript. Instead, its pericopes and sequences were mnemonically marked and traversed. The manuscript artifact, that is to say, had only a weak representational correspondence to the work that it transmitted. In an era in which memory was the storehouse of knowledge, writing could only be, in David Olson’s words, ‘reminder not representation’.240 It was in memory that works were indexed and operationalized, regardless of whether the cultural medium was ancient scroll or a medieval codex. Clanchy points out that ‘[b]ecause readers indexed texts in their minds, medieval copies of the most studied books often have no contents tables…and no key-words or chapter numbers at the heads of the pages’, and according to Carruthers, a thousand years passed between the adoption of a numerical grid for dividing Scripture and its first representation in writing.241 Nor was the work cleanly differentiated from its performance, the acoustic channel for its appropriation to memory. On the other hand, it was only by virtue of the material, spatially extended properties of the written medium that the network of relationships among constituent elements of the work could be plotted, stabilized, cognitively assimilated, and enacted.242 Manuscript was therefore (to borrow Andy Clark’s apt expression) the ‘external cognitive scaffolding’ for memory.243 f. Cognition and Source Utilization The alert reader will have noted that elements of the cognition/artifact interface bring to mind the Synoptic source-critical phenomena of order and the forward directionality of source-utilization. Works are enacted in order forward, an activation pattern reinforced in repeated performance of a work in a tradent community. Through rehearsal and repetition, Estes explains, ‘the inhibitory tendencies [later items in a sequence cognitively inhibited while preceding items are outputted] required to properly shape the response output become established in memory and account for the long-term preservation of order information’.244 Habituated, coherent 240. Olson, World on Paper, p. 196. 241. Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, p. 178; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 126. On the Mishnah see Jacob Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 39–40, and Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, pp. 16–17. 242. See Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1562. 243. Andy Clark, ‘Material Symbols’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 291–307 (293); also Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity’, p. 205. 244. W. K. Estes, ‘An Associative Basis for Coding and Organization in Memory’, in Coding Processes in Human Memory (ed. A. W. Melton and E. Martin; Washington,

3. Manuscript and Memory

139

sequences are cued in order forward because their neural activation is a matter of pattern completion triggered by the first item in the sequence: ‘like a connected chain of paper clips, successful retrieval of one item should result in the successful retrieval of all items’.245 In the Middle Ages the incipit of a passage – beatus vir for example – was used to cue its recollection.246 Carruthers notes that ‘[t]he Benedictine Rule required that each brother be given a codex at the start of each Lent, which he was to read “in order from the beginning”. Reading in order is a mnemonic requirement… As he makes the book his own in his memory, each monk must give particular care to its starting points, for these are the key to its order, and thus to his ability to recall it.’247 A work’s coherence and its order go hand in hand: intelligibility unfolds in order forward. This is obvious for narratives, but it also applies to topoi sequences, if these have been coherently ordered, and for sequences of deliberative argumentation subordinated under topoi rubrics. Being neither habituated nor coherent, reverse reproduction of a sequence is more difficult, and in memory ‘elements [in a sequence] are linked only to their successors’.248 Experiments confirm what is in any case obvious: intelligible sequences are much more easily absorbed into long-term memory than random sequences.249 When considering the mnemonic organization of topoi-sequenced works, it is important to be aware of the distinction between schematic and taxonomic organization. Taxonomic organization simply collects items into a topical bin without establishing relations among them. Schematic organization establishes logical, causal, or narrative relations among constituent items; it unifies them into an intelligible order by some principle DC: Winston, 1972), pp. 160–90 (183), cited by Robert A. Bjork, ‘Retrieval Inhibi­tion as an Adaptive Mechanism in Human Memory’, in Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (ed. Henry L. Roediger III and Fergus I. M. Craik; Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 309–30 (323–4). 245. Worthen and Hunt, ‘Mnemonics’, p. 150; also Smith and Queller: ‘After the network learns a set of patterns…flows of activation cause the network to reconstruct the entire pattern as output’ (‘Mental Representations’, p. 10). 246. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 126. 247. Ibid., p. 109. 248. Klahr, Chase, and Lovelace, ‘Alphabetic Retrieval’, p. 465; also Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory, p. 24. Klahr et al.’s experiments find that times for reverse-searching for a target letter from a given point in the alphabet are significantly greater than times for forward-searching for a target letter. 249. Twenty words arranged in a coherent sentence can be quickly recalled verbatim, but drops to six if these words are randomly arranged; see Anders K. Ericsson, ‘Superior Memory of Mnemonists and Experts in Various Domains’, in Roediger, ed., Learning and Memory, pp. 809–17 (813–15).

140

Q in Matthew

of coherence.250 The mnemonic effect of schematic organization is much higher. Establishing relations of coherence among individual items creates an information-dense cognitive unity, significantly reducing the cognitive load, a strategy that, as noted earlier, is the cognitive equivalent to exchanging ten pennies for a dime or five pennies for a nickel.251 Moreover, it supplies an associative set of search and retrieval cues ‘so strongly interlinked that activating any one of them necessarily activates them all’,252 producing ‘a high degree of correspondence between input and output order’.253 Applied to ancient instructional genres, one should conceive a spectrum running from taxonomic organization at one end (simple collections) to fully articulated schematic organization at the other, with different genres and individual works falling at different points on the spectrum. The case studies in Chapter 2 provided an example of a topos sequence that mixes taxemic and schematic organization: 118. Menander, asked the difference between Sophocles and Euripides, said, ‘Sophocles pleases the crowds, Euripides makes the audience gloomy’. 119. When an incompetent painter said to him, ‘Plaster your house so I can paint it’, he answered, ‘No, paint it first so I can plaster over it’. 120. The same man was asked which is a bad science, and he said, ‘Vanity’. 121. Metrodorus said, ‘As soon as one makes a promise, one’s contribution should be made, for by putting off a promised contribution every sign of graciousness is lost’. 122. We are born but once. Nor can we be born a second time. Our life is necessarily over. But you, not being master over the morrow, postpone the occasion. Everyone’s life is wasted by procrastination, and, therefore, each one of us dies while still caught up in our affairs. 123. Do not look (Μὴ ζήτει κτλ.) for events to happen as you want. Instead, wish for them to happen in whatever way they do happen. 124. Do not reject (Μὴ φεῦγε κτλ.) small favors. Otherwise, people will suppose that you will do the same in the case of greater ones. 125. Do not draw near to or support any wicked deed (Μηδενὶ πονηρῷ πράγματι προστῇς κτλ.). For you yourself will appear to do such things as you help others do.254

250. Rabinowitz and Mandler, ‘Information Retrieval’, pp. 431–8; Worthen and Hunt, ‘Mnemonics’, pp. 150–1. 251. Miller, ‘Information and Memory’, p. 44. 252. Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 21. 253. Rabinowitz and Mandler, ‘Information Retrieval’, p. 438. 254. Searby, Corpus Parisinum, vol. 1, pp. 372–4; vol. 2, pp. 796–7.

3. Manuscript and Memory

141

The topos organizational principle (Section 6 of the Corpus Parisinum) is alphabetical, and this is the Μ sequence. The collocation of the materials gathered under Μ is mostly taxemic: nothing connects the items other than their all beginning with μ. Items 121 and 122, however, have a schematic relationship: 122 (which begins with γ instead of μ) elaborates on the Metrodorus saying in 121. The first three sayings could be seen as having a weak schematic relationship, since they are all Menander sayings. g. Cognitive Retrieval Strategies and Topoi-Organized Works Schematic organization of a topoi-organized work, assimilated to memory, creates a hierarchical cognitive system that serves as an efficient search tool, moreover one that harnesses the brain’s ordinary search protocols. Klahr et al.’s study of simple alphabetic retrieval clarifies the basic cognitive processes. The alphabet is sub-grouped into multi-letter segments, a pragmatic but also cultural convention internalized in the rhythms of the ‘alphabet song’. The first letter in each segment, for example, ‘A’ in ABCDEFG, or ‘Q’ in QRSTUV, serves as the rubric, the ‘entry point’, for search operations within each segment. The segmentation of the alphabet, each segment with its incipit letter, provides several direct entry points across the twenty-six letter sequence. Experiment subjects fed a ‘probe’ letter, such as ‘S’, and instructed to identify the next letter, or the prior letter, report first locating the ‘entry point’ of the segment (in this case, ‘Q’), moving forward in sequence to ‘S’, and then performing the commanded next (‘T’) or prior (‘R’) operation. The ‘entry point’ letter, in other words, serves as the ‘internal address’ for the segment, allowing the subject to access the home segment of the sought-for letter rapidly, and then locate the latter by means of ‘a simple forward-search’ through the letters of the segment.255 ‘A serial, self-terminating search is first performed at the top level in the hierarchy followed by a serial search at the subgroup level’.256 This simple cognitive search algorithm works for any sequence of items capable of being subdivided into segments, and topoi-organized works make particularly obvious use of it. Topoi mark the major segments, or sub-groupings, of a sequence. To borrow Clark’s words, topoi sequences ‘shrink enormous search spaces to manageable size’.257 A retrieval action searches first across the superordinate topoi sequence, and then forward (or viewed hierarchically, down) through the sequence of individual items 255. Klahr et al., ‘Alphabetic Retrieval’, p. 469; see also Jean Matter Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984), 12. 256. Klahr et al., ‘Alphabetic Retrieval’, p. 462. 257. Clark, Being There, p. 201.

142

Q in Matthew

that constitute the segment. The superordinate topoi also serve as a set of navigational landmarks, orienting to position in the sequence, making it possible to depart from, and return to, an absolute position in the order of a work.258 This enables ‘random access’ to a topoi-organized work, but it is a controlled random access, one that follows a work’s organizational network of cues constitutive, moreover, of the work’s coherence.259 The numerical grid employed in the Middle Ages for students of the Bible ‘provides random, multiple access points to material already in memory… The mnemonic cue, which is the incipit of the verse, crucially provides the starting point for recollection of each rote-retained textual chunk. And if a text has been retained with care and frequently practiced (conditions provided by the divine office), each cue will reliably call forth the whole.’260 Memory-based source utilization therefore will not be random and haphazard. Rather, it will necessarily conform to the patterns of cues that are the mode of the work’s existence in memory, and more to the point, essential to its recollection and generation out of memory. Because cuing sequences operate through forward activation, memory-based composition will predictably reproduce materials forward in the order of the source. In short, retrieval movements about a work must be explicable with reference to its constitutive organizational network. This is what solves access problems presented by the scroll – or by ancient codices for that matter, which despite providing multiple physical openings to the text offered no uniform organization or subdivided script to facilitate visual searching. 6. Memory in Composition a. Discovery and Ordering of Materials The unknown author of the polysemantic source used by Apollonius Sophista for his Homer Lexicon ‘set about systematically collating the Homeric occurrences of the various forms of a given word’; this required ‘an enviable command of the totality of the Homeric text (no concordances or databanks to provide short-cuts)’.261 The scribal composers of Kiddushin 34a–35a exercised memory control over a wide range of scriptural and rabbinic sources. Cicero composed his Topica, an adaptation of 258. Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Craft of Memory, p. 5. 259. To pick up Derrenbacker’s apt analogy, a compact disk enables random access to any song or scene in any order, but once selected, a particular song or scene will be played forward (Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 197). 260. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 103. 261. Haslam, ‘Homer Lexicon I’, p. 41.

3. Manuscript and Memory

143

Aristotle’s Topica, from memory while on a voyage and away from his library.262 Memory was the repository (thesaurus) of knowledge in antiquity and the Middle Ages. ‘Thesaurus’ designates both ‘the contents of such memory and…its internal organization’.263 It follows that memory was also instrumental in search and retrieval operations (inventio) for compositional enterprises, which worked from predecessor materials (from memoria). Furnishing memory with cultural materials in education, therefore, not only served the ends of moral and cultural formation (paideia) but also supplied the resources for composition.264 Butzer neatly enumerates memory’s three-fold activity of ‘individuelle Aneignung’ of cultural materials, ‘Seelenführung’, and ‘Gedankenfindung im Rahmen der rhetorischen inventio’.265 Scribal education similarly focused on the assimilation of culturally foundational works to memory. From this ‘memorized compositional lexicon’, scribes produced new works. The outcome, Carr points out, was to give the new works continuity with the scribal tradition, to make them in effect reactivations of the tradition.266 Memory was also instrumental in the arrangement of materials, though this did not make writing just a matter of final transcription. When Porphyry says of Plotinus that ‘he worked out his train of thought from beginning to end in his own mind, and then, when he wrote it down, since he had set it all in order in his mind, he wrote as continuously as if he was copying from a book’ (Life of Plotinus 8.9-12), he is singling this out as worthy of note, as evidence that Plotinus was ‘wholly concerned with thought’.267 Nevertheless, and not unlike the rabbis, Plotinus is simply pushing the 262. Cicero, Topica 1.5. 263. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 37. 264. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (CSML 34; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–23; eadem, Book of Memory, pp. 107–9, and Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, pp. 1–10. As Carruthers and Ziolkowski, point out (p. 17), memory practices of antiquity were mediated to medieval monasticism by Augustine, John Cassian, and Jerome, and by late antique writers on rhetoric such as Julius Victor. 265. Butzer, ‘Meditation’, p. 1016. 266. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 35–6; similarly Pearce, ‘Scribes and Scholars’, p. 2275; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 136. 267. Porphyry, Ennead. Vol. 1, Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus (trans. A. H. Armstrong; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969): συνεῖρεν οὕτω γράφων ἃ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ διέθηκεν, ὡς ἀπὸ βιβλίου δοκεῖν μεταβάλλεν τὰ γραφόμενα. Porphyry also suggests Plotinus’s procedure had some connection to his poor eyesight, which made reading and writing difficult (8.1-7). Incidentally, we learn that Plotinus did his own writing: ‘In writing he did not form the letters with any regard to appearance or divide his syllables correctly, and he paid no attention to spelling’ (8.5-7).

144

Q in Matthew

range of a trained memory’s instrumentality in the discovery (recollection) and setting in order of materials. Normally, a work was drafted out and given a further revision after its provisional form had been worked out through memory activity.268 Wax tablets or notebooks could be used in the process, though ‘depending on one’s experience, this process could, like invention, be completely mental’.269 The genre of a work doubtless also affected how memory and writing might interact in inventio. It is absurd to think, for example, that Apollonius Sophista drafted his Homer Lexicon wholly in memory, though his memory expertise in the semantic source, the scholia, the Heliodorus commentary, and naturally in Homer is essential to his execution of the project.270 Whatever its precise relationship to writing in any given project might be, memory played the instrumental role in composition, and any drastic revisions or rearrangements after the writing out of the provisional form were evidence of sloppy inventio. b. Topoi Organization and Inventio Retrieval and arrangement of materials required that the educated memory not only be well-stocked but well-ordered: an inventory. Through assimilation to memory, topoi-organized works came to exist as stabilized neural networks that replicated normal cognitive search protocols. They could be efficiently scanned and accessed, assisted by the acoustic channel as the composer murmured and ‘listened’ his or her way through the memorybased material. In antiquity, says Carruthers, the proof of a good memory was ‘the ability to move about it instantly, directly, and securely’.271 More to the point, stable organization of topoi-organized works made possible not just access but also the configuration of their materials into new compositional arrangements. Carruthers describes this as ‘combining, or “laying together”, in one place or compositive image or design, divided bits previously filed and cross-filed in other discrete loci of memory’.272 Topical 268. For example, Pliny the Younger, Letters 9.36: after provisionally working out a section of a work in memory, he dictates ‘what I have put into shape’, and then repeats the process. 269. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 241; see Quintilian, Inst. 10.3.17; 10.6.17, and Jocelyn Penny Small’s comments in ‘Memory and the Roman Orator’, in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric (ed. Jon Dominik and Jon Hall; Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 195–207. 270. Rosalind Thomas criticizes Small for overstating the scope of memory’s role in composition (Review of Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity, CPh 95 [2000], pp. 486–90 [488]). 271. Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 21–2. 272. Ibid., p. 244.

3. Manuscript and Memory

145

arrangements, in other words, were not just strategies for assimilation of a work to memory but for its utilization in new compositions. A source could be scanned and its materials shifted into different topoi arrangements, a procedure Carruthers describes as ‘readers “slipping” the material into their own heuristic schemes’.273 The Mishnah, itself a memory-mastered text, becomes the ‘organizing set of textual cues’ for the vast amounts of rabbinic tradition collected in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds.274 These gathering-and-combining activities of inventio exploit the associative propensities of neural networks in order to bring together topically cohering materials from different memory locations. c. Scroll Artifact and Memory-based Composition The instrumental role memory played in discovery and arrangement of materials does not render the scroll artifact superfluous or even marginal to the compositional scene. The scroll itself was certainly ill-suited to the compositional enterprise, but one must here think of manuscript and memory in an operational fusion. Source utilization was memorygrounded, whatever the interplay of memory and manipulation of a scroll might be in particular cases. Galen, for example, gives the following directions to a less knowledgeable interlocutor to help the latter find his way about in a bookroll on the circulation of the blood: But you, so that you do not get confused, take up the book of Archigenes and read it to them, first the part having this title (ἐπίγραμμα) for the chapter heading (κεφαλαίου), On the Size of the Heart Beat… Next, rolling the book up a bit (μικρὸν ἐπειλίξας τὸ βιβλίον), read again the section On Intensity [of the heart beat]… Now roll the book up a little [more] and read the beginning of the section On Fullness [of blood in the arteries]. (de puls. diff. 8.591-92K)275

Of interest is not just Galen’s evident memory-based control of the work, but also his use of his memory as an index to give his interlocutor, who does not know the work so well, directions on where to unroll the scroll to find the desired passages. On the other hand, it is in the nature of the scroll artifact that Galen’s directions for scrolling are serial, and the locational information he gives is rather approximate.

273. Ibid., p. 221. 274. Jaffee, ‘Oral-Cultural Context’, p. 28. 275. Cited from Johnson, Reading Cultures, p. 95.

146

Q in Matthew

d. Memory – A Performative Competence Scribal memory was not a rote but a performative competence. Memorybased source utilization had a performative dimension, noted above in our discussion of oral utilization practices in scribal actualization of written tradition. This was especially the case for source utilization of oral-derived works – close to and indeed bearing a living cultural tradition. ‘Whenever scribes who are part of the oral traditional culture write or copy traditional oral works’, writes Doane, ‘they do not merely mechanically hand them down; they rehear them, “mouth” them, “reperform” them in the act of writing in such a way that the text may change but remain authentic, just as a completely oral poet’s text changes from performance to performance’.276 The ‘work’ was not only a visual script but an entity that came into existence at the interstices of writing, orality, aurality, and memory, enacted within the shifting social and historical horizons of the tradent community. Practically speaking, this would make small-scale conflation of sources (or conversely, ‘de-conflation’), already unlikely because of difficulties, exacerbated by scriptio continua, in the comparing two scrolls, an even more improbable proposition. What Neusner calls ‘cognitive units’, namely, ‘the smallest whole units of discourse’,277 would have been the basic memory units of a source – recollected and produced from memory by virtue of their properties as coherent, intelligible sequences of words and phrases. Consequently, they were not easily dissected into their component lexical elements, which in disconnection from their cognitive script context lack the capacity to be remembered anyway.278 It is as complete cognitive sense units that component elements of a work would have been utilized. Small-scale conflation, when it occurs, is likely a matter of reminiscence. e. Scribal Memory as Expert Memory Scribal memory practices were not evidence of a special precocity but an acquired set of skills that marshalled the ordinary cognitive resources of the brain. Research has shown that what appear to be exceptional memory 276. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 81. 277. Neusner, Oral Tradition, p. 61. 278. Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 185–6. For example, it is an easy matter to reproduce out of memory either my nine-digit U.S. Social Security number (AAA-BB-CCCC) or my nine-digit Canadian Social Insurance number (DDD-EEE-FFF), but difficult for me to conflate the individual letters in memory, for example, ADA-BE-FCF. The following, which works with the ‘chunk’ cognitive structure of the sequences, is a bit more manageable: AAA-DDD-BB-EEE-CCCC-FF, or, AAA-DDD-CCCC-FFF.

3. Manuscript and Memory

147

capabilities – chess masters playing games blindfolded, and the like – are in fact domain-specific abilities, that is, developed by anyone who acquires expertise in a particular field.279 Ericsson explains from his experiments that ‘[t]he ability required to maintain chess position in memory during blindfolded play [does] not appear to reflect a basic memory capacity to store complex images, but a deeper understanding of the [intelligibility] structure of chess’.280 Squire and Kandel put this principle as follows: ‘[E]xpert knowledge depends not on the prowess of some general memory talent, but on highly specialized abilities, acquired through experience, to encode and organize particular kinds of information’.281 Scribal memory expertise relies upon the fusion of the manuscript work with memory. Writing enables the mapping of complex conceptual relations among constituent elements of a work onto a material (manuscript) medium. This dramatically stabilizes these elements and the pattern of relations among them while offloading onto the external cultural medium the cognitive effort needed to hold these relations in place unaided.282 The written artifact, in turn assimilated to memory, acts upon the neural plasticity of the brain.283 The manuscript artifact becomes a cognitive, neural artifact, its internalized cognitive presence deepened by its existential convergence with the scribe’s moral and cultural formation. Through its neural assimilation the work is now operationalized in memory – open for cognitive navigation and utilization in the stabilized representational format afforded by its cultural mediation. In Hutchins’ words, ‘[a] mental space is blended with a material structure that is sufficiently immutable to hold conceptual relationships fixed while other operations are performed’.284 This is the cognitive basis for scribal memory expertise. There is nothing savant about it. It is a trained memory, to be sure, but this is simply a matter of harnessing memory’s ordinary cognitive capabilities through their fusion with the manuscript medium.

279. Ericsson, ‘Superior Memory of Mnemonists’, pp. 809–10. 280. Ibid., pp. 810–11. 281. Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 73. 282. Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, pp. 1562, 1574–5. 283. Malafouris, ‘Brain-Artefact Interface’, p. 266 n. 80; Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche’, p. 264 n. 84; also Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 74; Sutton, ‘Exograms’, pp. 211–13. 284. Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1562.

148

Q in Matthew

7. Memory, Manuscript, and Synoptic Source-Utilization The reader will no doubt have seen lurking below the surface problems connected with Matthew’s organization of double tradition materials. In comparison with Chapter 2, we have had little to say in this chapter about contemporary Synoptic source-critical scholarship. In Synoptic scholarship one finds quite a few recent applications of material media formats (scrolls, scripts, codices, tablets, notebooks) to utilization questions, but less attention to the interactivity of oral and written media with each other and with memory. This one-sided interest in material formats is an indication of how difficult it has been for Synoptic scholarship to conceive source-utilization as something that might go beyond the visual spectrum. To be sure, appeals to memory have surfaced now and again throughout the history of Synoptic Problem scholarship. But these are usually ad hoc and almost always see in ‘memory’ an error-prone faculty responsible for introducing variation into the tradition at points where the script is not acting as a visual prompt.285 ‘Modern scholars’, Carruthers observes, ‘tend to assume that accuracy of reproduction is a function of continual access to written texts, and thus that the extent of an author’s reliance upon his memory can be gauged in inverse proportion to the fidelity of his quotations’.286 For their part, appeals to oral tradition have an honored place in Synoptic source criticism going back to its origins. Synoptic scholarship has not found an adequate model, however, for the relationship between the orality and writing, which usually are viewed as autonomous modes of transmission, with variability being the index property of oral tradition, close agreement the index property of writing. Hence the on-going conundrum presented by Synoptic patterns of variation and agreement. Nevertheless there have been important advances in understanding media relationships in the Synoptic tradition. In Samuel Byrskog’s work, for example, one finds a clear understanding of the interaction of memory, orality, and writing, though Byrskog has not made applications to the Synoptic Problem. John Kloppenborg has appealed to the interaction of scribal and rhetorical practices to account for oral factors in the transmission and utilization of the written tradition. Alex Damm

285. Similarly for Homeric scholarship: instances in which ‘an ancient author such as Plato or Aeschines had quoted a passage of Homer in a way that differed in unusual ways from the “received” text…were usually put down to faulty memory by the author’ (Bird, Intertextuality, p. 61). The subsequently discovered Ptolemaic papyri show that Plato and Aeschines were in fact quoting variant traditions (p. 71). 286. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 111.

3. Manuscript and Memory

149

applies Greco-Roman rhetoric fruitfully to the problem of determining the directionality of Synoptic source-utilization. Other examples could be cited.287 On the FGH side Francis Watson has invoked the interactive relationship between writing and orality to answer the criticism that the FGH cannot give a plausible media-utilization account of Luke’s use of Matthew, a problem hanging over the FGH since Goulder’s failure to explain Luke’s utilization plausibly as a series of scrolling actions. Goulder’s attempt to do so was commendable, first because it was an acknowledgment that there was a serious issue at stake, and secondly because it attempted to reconcile the FGH to the constraints of ancient media. Poirier takes a stab at the problem by attributing wax tablet usage to Luke, but we saw that his proposal suffers from serious difficulties. Watson at first takes a similar line, suggesting that Luke used a ‘notebook’ to copy Sermon on the Mount materials down for subsequent utilization.288 More recently, however, he appeals to orality to explain Luke’s use of Matthew. Written texts were scripts for oral enactment, he notes; therefore the written tradition participated in the dynamism of its oral utilization and rich interpretative engagement with the life of the tradent community. Luke’s rearrangement of Matthew is just such a creative oral-interpretative use of his source.289 As Watson applies it, orality is a wand that allows him to wave away difficulties in Luke’s utilization of Matthew. In his scenario, the Matthean source is dissolved temporarily into orality and reconstituted in Luke. Orality amounts here to a kind of black box: Matthew goes in as input, Luke comes out (somehow) as output. Any utilization hypothesis can conjure away its utilization problems this way. But more to the point, Watson’s account fails to recognize that oral utilization of a source was constrained by the properties of the written medium, that any oral, memory-based use of Matthew had to be enabled by Matthew as a coherent written entity. Utilization actions will follow the writingenabled networks of connections among the elements of a work. As the basis of its existence in memory and in oral enactment, these networks are the basis for its utilization. Luke’s movements around Matthew must

287. Some will be discussed in the next chapter. Baum’s Der mündliche Faktor also comes to mind, though Baum appeals more to statistical analysis than to media properties in his interesting and informed attempt to revive the Traditionshypothese. 288. Francis Watson, ‘Q as Hypothesis: A Study in Methodology’, NTS 55 (2009), pp. 397–415 (406). 289. Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 118–19, 158.

150

Q in Matthew

be shown to accord with how the latter would have been activated and traversed in his memory. A survey of Luke’s use of Matthew in the Travel Narrative gives a rough count of 17 backward and 23 forward movements, randomly interspersed, that sometimes entail, moreover, breathtaking leaps across the source.290 There is little correlation between this pattern and a memory-based competence in Matthew as a habituated, intelligibly performed cognitive script. The 2DH, however, is not necessarily in any better shape, particularly in the matter of Matthew’s utilization of Q. In the next chapter we turn to this issue.

290. E.g. (1) Lk. 11:34-36/Mt. 6:22-23 (Sound Eye); Lk. 11:37-54/Mt. 23:1-29 (Woes); (2) Lk. 12:33-34/Mt. 6:19-21 (Treasures in Heaven); Lk. 12:39-48/Mt. 24:42-45 (Watchful Servants); Lk. 12:49-53/Mt. 10:34-36 (Houses Divided).

Chapter 4 T he 2D H ’ s I n c on ven i ent P r oble m : M at t h ew ’ s Q U t i li zati on

In Chapter 3 we examined oral and memory-based cultivation of written artifacts. This clearly has relevance for chronic problems in Synoptic source-criticism. Chief among these are unresolved difficulties in 2DH attempts to explain Matthew’s utilization of his Q tradition, difficulties that critics of the 2DH never fail to point out. Upon examination, the standard 2DH accounts of Matthew’s procedure turn out to be mostly ad hoc and quite weak. The question is whether these difficulties are resolved or made more acute when measured against ancient media practices. 1. Sub-Literary Q? Ironically, though the 2DH is a documentary hypothesis, 2DH scholarship has wavered over whether Q is a ‘stratum of tradition’ or a demarcated, cohering literary work. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it has had difficulties coming up with a good account of Matthew’s Q utilization. a. Q as Kleinliteratur In 2DH scholarship one quickly encounters an entrenched conception of Q as a loose collection of traditions that lack significant literary formation. This already appears in Streeter’s claim that Matthew gave topical arrangement to materials which he found ‘scattered in his source’,1 and that Q was ‘plainly only a loose collection of sayings’.2 Harnack, taking the Matthean order of the double tradition to be the more original, estimated Q’s literary formation at a somewhat higher (a ‘prevailing arrangement… according to subject-matter’) but nevertheless still sub-literary level: it ‘occupies the mean position between an amorphous collection of sayings 1. B. H. Streeter, ‘On the Original Order of Q’, in Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 141–64 (151). 2. Ibid., p. 146.

152

Q in Matthew

of our Lord and the definite literary form of the written gospels, and so prepared the way for the latter’.3 The sub-literary Q conception received powerful impetus from form criticism and from Bultmann and Dibelius in particular, who made Q out to be a specimen of Kleinliteratur: a non- or sub-literate form of expression supposedly indigenous to the enthusiastic life of primitive Jesus communities. Bultmann simply assimilated Q to his model for the history of the Synoptic tradition, regarding it as a growing aggregate of tradition that like the Synoptic tradition itself could be broken down into layers. The Kleinliteratur category has been recognized as a dubious formcritical construct and abandoned. One of the curiosities of Synoptic scholarship, however, is the persistence of the sub-literary conception of Q after the destruction of its theoretical foundations, and especially after studies such as John Kloppenborg’s Formation of Q brought to light evidence of significant scribal activity in the double tradition m­aterials.4 Of course there is more to the persistence of the ‘sub-literary Q’ conception than just the residual influence of form criticism. In the nature of things it is difficult to bring to the literary contours of a non-extant source, postulated from its redacted elements in two extant sources, into completely clear resolution. The risk though is that a methodological limitation becomes an ontological description of Q itself. That said, there is no doubt that there are difficulties (though not to be overstated) in getting a clear picture of the organization of Q materials after Q 12:39. This likely has something to do with Matthew’s pulling quite a bit of this material forward into the Sermon on the Mount and to Luke’s intermingling of Q materials with his special materials in the Travel Narrative; nevertheless, this has contributed to the belief that Q is very loosely organized. Luz thinks that ‘after Lk. 14,1 there is hardly any trace of composition or redaction’ – though he is not able to explain why the definite thematic organization he sees in the first half of Q and in its overall arc dissipates 3. Adolf Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus: The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Lk. (trans. J. R. Wilkinson; London: Williams & Norgate; New York: Putnam, 1908), p. 228. 4. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987). See also Ronald A. Piper, Wisdom in the Q-Tradition: The Aphoristic Teaching of Jesus (SNTSMS 61; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997); and also the published version of my doctoral dissertation, The Composition of the Sayings Source (NovTSup 91; Leiden: Brill, 1998).

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

153

between 14:1 and 17:23.5 Be that as it may, when one adds to this the complex patterns of variation and agreement in the double tradition, one can see why many scholars might simply be wary of claiming more for the literary status of Q than they think the evidence permits. b. Q a ‘Layer of Tradition’/‘Überlieferungsschicht’ The sub-literary Q conception has appeared in a number of forms. Hahn and Beare liken Q to the pre-Markan collections of materials, unstable, with virtually nothing distinguishing them from oral tradition, that are sometimes proposed as written sources for Mark.6 Hahn takes the view that Q ‘zunächst mündlich zustandegekommen war’.7 In fact one very frequently sees Q described as an ‘Überlieferungsschicht’, or ‘stratum of tradition’. Tödt takes over whole cloth the form-critical view, as Dibelius expressed it, that Q was ‘rather a stratum…than scriptum’.8 For Grundmann, Q ‘wäre eine wachsende, sich durch Austausch ergänzende und auch sich aktualisierende Traditionsschicht gewesen’.9 Even interpreters inclined to regard Q as written and unitary sometimes use ‘tradition’/‘Überlieferung’ rather than ‘work’ to describe its mode of existence and ‘Überlieferungsstadien/stufen’ to describe its history, treating its shift to writing as simply one stage in its tradition-history. Against this tendency Schröter argues that, no differently from the Gospel of Mark, the shift into the written medium entailed a programmatic act of redaction that brought traditions under a guiding literary and rhetorical conception and connected them into the Gestalt of the text itself, constituting Q as a work.10 This is not to 5. Ulrich Luz, ‘Looking at Q Through the Eyes of Matthew’, in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg, and Verheyden (eds.), New Studies, pp. 571–89 (573). 6. Francis W. Beare, The Gospel According to Matthew: A Commentary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 20; Hahn, ‘Zur Verschriftlichung’, p. 313. 7. Ibid., p. 313. B. W. Bacon construed ‘S’ (‘Second Source’, roughly corresponding to Q) as a ‘collection of loosely attached sayings…not far removed from catechetic oral tradition’, and he posited a genre parallel in the Oxyrhynchus Λόγοι (Studies in Matthew [New York: Henry Holt, 1930], p. 91). 8. H. E. Tödt, The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition (trans. Dorothea M. Barton; Philadelphia: SCM/Westminster, 1965), p. 235, citing Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (trans. Bertram Woolf; Cambridge: Clarke, 1934), p. 237. 9. Walter Grundmann, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1971), p. 22. See, more recently, Wolfgang Wiefel, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (ThHK 1; Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1998), p. 161, though Wiefel holds that Q was ‘fest formuliert’. 10. Schröter, Erinnerung, pp. 59–60 (‘auf das Konto eines bewußt arbeitenden Verfassers zurückgeführt werden müsse’). See also Christoph Heil, ‘Antike

154

Q in Matthew

deny the coalescence of traditions around nuclei such as the Beelzebul Accusation chreia and motifs such as mission, which then are grist for Q (and Markan) redaction.11 Manuscript-based traditions – ‘oral-derived’ works in particular – were transmitted at an active oral/written interface. That a work in its transmission might look like a loosely cohering, open ‘stratum of tradition’ is attested by the collections of pharmacological lore now found in the Corpus Hippocraticum.12 Redaction itself is an act of transmission.13 But the ‘stratum of tradition’ designation for Q, when it appears, is usually accompanied by a failure to reckon with the effects of the written medium as a distinctive mode of transmission. c. Matthew Brings Order to Q Materials Sub-literary Q also surfaces in statements to the effect that Matthew brought order to the ‘scattered’ or ‘dispersed’ sayings in his source, as Streeter put it above. Fitzmyer says that ‘Matthew has topically arranged otherwise scattered but related sayings’, Bruner that in the Sermon on the Mount Matthew gives ‘an ordered memorandum of Jesus’ scattered ethical teaching’.14 Wiefel puts the point starkly: ‘Mehr als zwei Drittel des aus der Redeüberlieferung übernommenen Stoffs sind in die strukturbildenden Zusammenhänge des Evangeliums (Bericht von Anfang, fünf Reden) eingegangen. Dabei erscheint beispielhaft, wie Matthäus mit dem weithin wenig geordnet zu denkenden Q-Stoff umgeht.’15 Davies and Allison suggest that Matthew gives thematic organization to Q sayings, which are collocated on the primitive catchword principle. The cluster of sayings in Q 11:33-36, they argue, is held together by little more than the catchword ‘lamp’. ‘When we turn to Matthew [however]…these types of Textverarbeitung: Zum Verhältnis von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit bei Homer und im Spruchevangelium Q’, in Das Spruchevangelium Q und der historische Jesus (SBAB 58; Stuttgart: KBW, 2014), pp. 27–40, who compares Q with Homer: orally activated, with significant local variations, but nevertheless a cohering work. 11. Schröter, Erinnerung, p. 216. 12. See Wittern, ‘Gattungen im Corpus Hippocraticum’, pp. 22–4. 13. On gospel redaction as a mode of traditio-historical transmission see Kari Syreeni, The Making of the Sermon on the Mount: A Procedural Analysis of Matthew’s Redactoral Activity. Part 1, Methodology and Compositional Analysis (Helsinki: Soumalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987), p. 10. 14. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (I–IX) (AB 28; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), p. 628; Dale Frederick Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary. Vol. 1, The Christbook: Matthew 1–12 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2004), p. 370. 15. Wiefel, Evangelium, p. 8, emphasis added.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

155

word associations are hardly if ever to be found. In the First Gospel every single saying is in its proper thematic place.’16 In Luz’s view, ‘[v]ielmehr war sie [Q] für ihn [Matthew] eine Materialsammlung mit Worten des Herrn… Ihre Komposition und Anordnung war für ihn…nicht wichtig.’17 Kloppenborg, his recognition of scribal formation in Q notwithstanding, describes Matthew’s appropriative activities in Q as a matter of ‘collecting sayings that he thought were related and might fit together well… It is much simpler to suppose that Matthew collected and organized sayings than to think that Luke broke up originally unified clusters and used the debris.’18 Here it seems that the effects of the Lukan distribution of Q materials affect Kloppenborg’s picture of the organization of those m­aterials in Q. A contra Griesbach and contra FGH argument – why would Luke ‘break up’ coherent Matthean sequences? – feeds back subtly into the Q-conception itself.19 In any case, Kloppenborg’s characterization of Matthew’s utilization actions is still influenced by notions of Q’s primitiveness that his own work has contributed to overthrowing. For example, he has Matthew forming 10.24-30 by collecting ‘ten Q sayings’ from Q 6.40 to Q 17.33.20 But his tabular presentation of this utilization action shows that the last nine of these ten sayings are comprised by three topically coherent Q sequences (12.2-9, 49-53; 14.26, 27/17.33). Moreover, with the first element (Q 6.40) Matthew retrieves the one remaining saying from a coherent Q Sermon cluster (Q 6.37-42) he had utilized in the Sermon on the Mount. There are indications, that is to say, that Matthew’s utilization actions here owe something to the organization of these materials in Q.

16. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Vol. 1, Introduction and Commentary on Matthew I–VII (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), p. 87. More recently, Andrew J. Doole: Matthew gives ‘shape and thematic order to his collected sayings material’ (What Was Mark for Matthew? An Examination of Matthew’s Relationship to His Primary Source [WUNT 344; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2013], p. 70). 17. Ulrich Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, in Von Jesus zum Christus: Christologische Studien (Festschrift Paul Hoffmann; ed. Rudolf Hoppe and Ulrich Busse; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 201–15 (212). 18. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 89. 19. Along the same lines Christopher Tuckett says that ‘Matthew takes these sayings from his source, and puts them together whilst preserving their relative order, and there is a clear theme linking them’ (The Revival of the Griesbach Hypothesis: An Analysis and Appraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], p. 39, emphasis added). 20. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 89.

156

Q in Matthew

d. Atomization of Double Tradition Materials The sub-literary Q conception is reinforced by the practice of reducing the double tradition to its individual sayings and pericopes preliminary to its analysis. There is much to be gained from this way of examining double tradition materials. But often this procedure just follows upon a subliterary Q assumption. Characterizations of Q issuing from the procedure reinforce that conception; Hawkins, for example, describes Q as ‘seventyfour separate or separable passages’.21 Chopping the double tradition up into independent units preparatory to its study obscures, before analysis even gets under way, a leading indicator of the written medium: its capacity to create durable, coherent order among discrete units. Dunn, followed by Mournet, breaks Q materials down into isolated form-critical entities – parables, a thanksgiving, a story, a lament, a prayer and so forth – and then based on level of variation assigns them to ‘Q’ (written) or ‘q’ (oral) provenances.22 In destroying Q sequences this procedure wipes out potential evidence for the effects of the written medium and thus begs the question of oral provenance. The Critical Edition of Q (CEQ) isolates the Beatitudes from one another, breaks up the Love Your Enemies sequence into five fragments, Judge Not into four fragments, and so on through the entire double tradition.23 In his two subsequent books on Q, James M. Robinson takes what for the CEQ is an analytical expedient and hypostasizes it into a literary profile for Q: a collection of individual sayings, each supplied with a separate topical heading, for example: Being Full of Pity Like Your Father (Q 6.36); Not Judging (Q 6.37-38); The Blind Leading the Blind (Q 6.39); The Disciple and the Teacher (Q 6.40); The Speck and the Beam (Q 6.41-42), and the like.24 This serves Robinson’s interest in 21. John Hawkins, Horae Synopticae: Contributions to the Study of the Synoptic Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd ed., 1909), p. 110. 22. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 231–7; idem, ‘Altering the Default Settings: Re-envisioning the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 139–75; idem, ‘Q1 as Oral Tradition’, in The Written Gospel (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald Hagner; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 45–69; Terence C. Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q (WUNT 2/195; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2005), pp. 205–7. 23. James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John S. Kloppenborg (eds.), The Critical Edition of Q (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress; Leuven: Peeters, 2000). 24. James M. Robinson, Jesus According to the Earliest Witness (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), pp. 241–53; see also idem, The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 27–54. Robinson invokes Kloppenborg’s authority for Q’s sapiential character but ignores the composite instructional speech forms Kloppenborg showed were formative in Q.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

157

aligning Q with the Gospel of Thomas.25 In short, whether the atomization of the double tradition serves pragmatic analytical ends or metatheories of Christian origins, its effect is to perpetuate sub-literary notions of Q. e. Written and Oral Double Tradition? The persistence of the sub-literary model for Q also owes something to what seem to be contrary media indicators in the double tradition – extensive variation, a marker of oral transmission, commingled with extensive agreements in wording and order, markers of written transmission. In Synoptic scholarship this has led to attempts to parcel out the double tradition into oral and written sources, Dunn’s ‘Q’ and ‘q’ being only the most recent. One of the problems for this approach is the Synoptic tradition’s curious admixture of agreement and variation – its remarkable range from almost zero to almost one hundred percent agreement, while touching virtually every point in between. This makes it impossible to determine thresholds for assigning materials to oral or written provenance respectively. Kloppenborg’s critique of the Dunn/Mournet ‘Q’/‘q’ binary shows that ancient writers manifestly varied their written sources.26 Elsewhere, however, Kloppenborg distinguishes sharply between Q as a rhetorical resource and Q as a source for copying: ‘Ironically, although Q might initially have been conceived as a resource for re-oralization and performance, Matthew and Luke employed it as a source to be copied’.27 Kloppenborg is seeking a model for how a work’s oral utilization feeds 25. Richard Valantasis’s division of the Q materials into 88 ‘Sayings’, and then commenting on each ‘Saying’, even more arbitrarily forces Q into a Gospel of Thomas format (The New Q: A Fresh Translation with Commentary [New York: T&T Clark International, 2005]). 26. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, p. 112. 27. John S. Kloppenborg, ‘Oral and Literate Contexts for the Sayings Gospel Q’, in Built on Rock or Sand? Q Studies – Retrospects, Introspects, and Prospects (ed. C. Heil, G. Harb, and M. Hölscher; BETL; Leuven, Peeters, forthcoming), pp. 1–24 (22) (cited in typescript). Robert Derrenbacker invokes Kloppenborg’s distinction between Q as ‘resource for rhetorical emulation’ and ‘source to be copied’ to characterize Q as sub-literary and assign it to the ‘transitional’ medium of the ‘proto-codex’ (‘ “The Medium is the Message”: What Q’s Content Tells Us about its Medium’, in Metaphor, Narrative, and Parables in Q [ed. Dieter T. Roth, Ruben Zimmermann, and Michael Labahn; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014], pp. 207–19 [218]; see the discussion of Derrenbacker below); also Daniel A. Smith: ‘Q was continuing to evolve as something of a rhetorical resource, or an expanding script for oral performance’ (‘From Parable to Logion: Oral and Scribal Factors in the Composition of Q’, in Heil, Harb, and Hölscher, eds., Built on Rock or Sand, pp. 1–33 [33], typescript).

158

Q in Matthew

back into its written transmission.28 But this distinction between a work’s written transmission and its oral utilization is artificial. Variation supervenes upon the transmission of manuscript tradition; it is one of the latter’s emblematic properties. Variation per se does not tell against documentary status for the double tradition.29 The unpredictable patterns in which Synoptic agreements in wording and order occur, however, might seem to preclude all but the most qualified of claims about the documentary mediation of the double tradition and make it difficult to rule out multiple-source and oral tradition scenarios. It is on this point that agreements in order in the double tradition assume their particular importance. Shared order is a leading indicator of documentary mediation. Because of its spatio-material properties, the written medium supports the creation and transmission of a durable order among heterogeneous materials, one capable of persisting across oral-performative enactments, indeed, that as a script is generative of its own repeated performance. This is why detecting shared order is a staple of sourcecritical analysis. Where Synoptic scholarship has had difficulties, however, is in squaring indications of a common order in the double tradition with the latter’s remarkable range of variation. Going back at least as far as Streeter and Allen, and again more recently in Bergemann, Dunn, Mournet, Wedderburn, and others, the practice has been, first, to set variation in the double tradition in tension with indications of a common order, and then second, to make close agreement in wording the sine qua non for positing a written source or sources behind the double tradition.30 Dunn veers very close to making verbal agreement the sole criterion for positing written mediation: ‘[T]he impetus to a hypothesis of literary dependence is precisely the closeness of literary parallel. Without that degree of parallel, the evidential 28. Kloppenborg, ‘Oral and Literate’, p. 9 n. 6; idem, ‘Variation’, p. 100. 29. Barry Henaut makes this point, noting the evidence text criticism gives of manuscript variation (Oral Tradition and the Gospels: The Problem of Mark 4 [JSNTSup 82; Sheffield: JSOT, 1993], p. 130), but he goes too far and discounts the orality factor entirely, attributing all variation to ‘theological redaction’ and stylistic modifications. 30. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1930), pp. xiv–xv, 237–38; Willoughby C. Allen, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), pp. xli–xlii, 72–3; Thomas Bergemann, Q auf dem Prüfstand: Die Zuordnung des Mt/Lk-Stoffes zu Q am Beispiel der Bergpredigt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), p. 48; Alexander J. M. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians (WUNT 269; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), pp. 243–6; for Dunn and Mournet see n. 22.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

159

basis for literary dependence disappears.’31 Most interpreters adopt more tentative positions, recognizing that traces of a common order in the double tradition point to documentary mediation but perplexed by what seems the counter-indicator of variation. Luz is a case in point. After identifying the criteria for assigning pericopes to a written Q as (1) ‘Übereinstimmung im Wortlaut’, and (2) a ‘Q-Reihenfolge’, he notes, with reference to the Sermon in particular, that ‘diese beiden Kriterien nicht immer miteinander kombinieren lassen’, reckoning this ‘eine große zusätzliche Schwierigkeit’.32 More recently, and influenced by Dunn’s approach, Luz has tried to resolve this conundrum by assigning high variation Q passages that cannot be positioned in a Q ‘thematic block’ (the written medium sustains the order of the block) to oral tradition.33 At this point it suffices to repeat that variation is a property of manuscript tradition. Its appearance in the double tradition does not per se call into question Q’s documentary status (though configured with other indicators it might). Nevertheless, what seem confusing media signals in the double tradition doubtless contribute to the persistence of the subliterary Q conception. f. ‘Sub-literary Q’: Consequences for the 2DH To be sure, it is possible that Q is sub-literary, but this assumption, when it has been made, lacks adequate grounds. ‘Sub-literary Q’, moreover, is not just a quirk of 2DH scholarship, otherwise neutral in its effects. It has deleterious consequences when it comes to accounting for Matthew’s utilization actions and thus for the 2DH itself. Conceiving Q as a minimally cohering collection of sayings makes it impossible to describe Matthew’s utilization actions in anything other than ad hoc terms. In the ancient media context the problem becomes even more acute, for the format and organization of a source were indissolubly connected to the possibilities and strategies for its utilization. Hence the typical 2DH representation of Matthew laboriously scrolling forwards and backwards, ‘scanning’ for sayings in this undifferentiated and disorganized collection. Among 2DH scholars Luz and Derrenbacker are almost alone in recognizing the gravity of this problem and proposing media-grounded solutions (see below).

31. James D. G. Dunn, ‘Matthew as Wirkungsgeschichte’, in Neutestamentliche Exegese im Dialog: Hermeneutik – Wirkungsgeschichte – Matthäusevangelium (Festschrift Ulrich Luz; ed. Peter Lampe, Moises Mayordomo-Marin, and Migaku Sato; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 149–66 (133, emphasis added). 32. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 202. 33. Luz, ‘Looking at Q’, pp. 574–6.

160

Q in Matthew

The sub-literary Q model, moreover, entails a pronounced Q subordinationism that in 2DH accounts turns the Gospel of Mark into virtually the sole determinative factor in Matthew’s utilization actions. Luz states this programmatically: ‘Ihre [Q’s] Komposition und Anordnung war für ihn [Matthew]…nicht wichtig; er gab Markus sogar bei der Einfügung seiner Reden den Vorrang und respektierte die Anordnung von Q fast nur, soweit es sich von seiner Markusquelle her nahelegte’.34 Matthew is viewed as the ‘redactor’ who brings shape and coherence to the Q ‘tradition’. Might the intractable problems in 2DH accounts of Matthew’s source-utilization strategies owe something to this complete marginalization of Q as a utilization factor? The sub-literary, low-coherence Q conception makes it difficult to prevent Q from dispersing into vaguely defined bodies of tradition and multiple oral and written sources; it creates inviting openings for mul­tiplesource hypotheses of all descriptions. Dunn and Mournet revive the expedient of splitting the double tradition into ‘Q’ and ‘q’, and there are numerous scholars prepared, like Wedderburn, ‘to use the siglum “Q” in a looser sense to indicate a more variegated stream of material shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by Matthew and Luke, material available to them in either a written or an oral form’,35 or like Beare, to think it likely that Q ‘is not to be understood as a more or less fixed unitary source but as the aggregate of a number of sources which have been used by Matthew and Luke independently of one another’.36 Construing Q as a vaguely defined body of tradition renders, in Grundmann’s words, Q’s ‘Umfange…nicht genau abgrenzbar’.37 In consequence it becomes more difficult to draw distinct boundaries between ‘Q’ materials and other bodies of tradition, M materials in particular, again giving opportunities for alternative source hypotheses. The strategy of maintaining unitary documentary status for Q by positing QMt. and QLk. is defensible in itself, given the contingencies of a work’s separate lines of transmission, but if asserted in a blanket, ad hoc way it will fail to answer Wedderburn’s question: ‘why one should separate “QMatthew” from the rest of Matthew’s special material and “QLuke” from the rest of Luke’s.’38 34. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 212. Donald Hagner’s statement that his commentary ‘presupposes that Mark was Matthew’s major source’ (Matthew 1–13 [WBC 33A; Dallas: Word, 1993], p. xlvii) illustrates the point. 35. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians, p. 243. 36. Beare, Gospel According to Matthew, p. 46. 37. Grundmann, Evangelium, p. 21. Grundmann connects his suggestion that Mt. 5:17-19; 10:5b-7, 23; 11:12-15 are Q materials directly to his view that Q ‘wäre dann eine wachsende, sich durch Austausch ergänzende…Traditionsschicht gewesen’ (p. 22). 38. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians, p. 245.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

161

It is important not to overstate the difficulties here for the 2DH. Statistically, ratios of agreement and variation in the double tradition do not differ meaningfully from the triple tradition, where the documentary status of the source is not in question. Those who disperse Q into oral tradition and multiple sources predictably work with a defective media binary that assigns high-variation materials to oral tradition and high agreement materials to written tradition, and they usually neglect the argument from order. The phenomenon of order is a strong suit for the 2DH and for the documentary status of Q. It certainly ought to raise questions about the ‘sub-literary Q’ conception. How could independent utilizations of a minimally cohering collection of sayings, a ‘stratum of tradition’, create such extensive agreements in relative order, especially since, as Kloppenborg notes, ‘nothing in the sayings requires a particular ordering relative to other sayings’?39 One can question the regnant assumption of Q’s weak literary coherence without denying significant contingency in its transmission. 2. Problems in the 2DH Argument from Order Problems in the 2DH account of the common order in the double tradition materials therefore become all the more pressing. In contrast to their use of the triple tradition, Matthew and Luke diverge sharply in their disposition of the double tradition. Tyson, for example, has Matthew and Luke agreeing almost sixty percent of the time in their Markan sequences, but only eleven to twelve percent in the order of their Q materials.40 There are problems with Tyson’s derivation of these figures – his way of dividing up the Q materials treats topical sequences of sayings as single pericopes and ignores the paraenetic coherence of sequences themselves, thereby obscuring significant agreements in order. He is also methodologically inconsistent in treating narrative units, such as pronouncement stories, form-critically as single pericopes, the individual sayings on the other hand in bulk as clusters. Nevertheless, any method of reckoning yields low levels of Matthew/Luke agreement in absolute order, and it might seem that such indications of a common order as exist can be accommodated by different source hypotheses.41 Given the equivocal nature of the evidence, it is perhaps not to be wondered at that some scholars do

39. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 59. 40. Joseph B. Tyson, ‘Sequential Parallelism in the Synoptic Gospels’, NTS 22 (1975–76), pp. 276–308 (297). 41. Robert Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 3.

162

Q in Matthew

not assign the phenomenon of order much of a role in their analysis of the double tradition, that others conclude that the double tradition existed as disconnected units in oral tradition or in a plurality sources, and that some are cautious about asserting anything more for Q than that it was a ‘stratum of tradition’. The different dispositions of the double tradition in Matthew and Luke must be faced by any utilization hypothesis; this is not just a problem for the 2DH. But accounting for Matthew’s significant rearrangement of the Q materials constitutes a particularly daunting challenge for the 2DH. According to the 2DH, Matthew collates materials from his non-narrative source, Q, on a topical, ‘peg’ principle at locations deemed appropriate in the Markan narrative sequence. ‘Wenn Matthäus seine Reden komponiert’, writes Luz, ‘so ist fast immer eine Textpassage im Markusevangelium seine “Aufhänger” für die Rede, die ihren Anfang dominiert’.42 Streeter sums up Matthew’s utilization strategy as follows: [Matthew’s] narrative framework is necessarily that of Mark, and the problem of how to distribute so much discourse and parable in this short story was not easy. He solves it, partly by interpolating parables or sayings in the Marcan outline wherever they seemed appropriate, partly by massing them according to subject in these five great compilations… The Great Sermon in the shorter form as found in Q gave him both the pattern and the first opportunity of forming a cento of our Lord’s sayings on related topics by expanding a given nucleus… The nuclei of the subsequent discourses are given, and their context fixed by discourses in Mark, i.e. the Mission of the Twelve in Mk vi. 7-13, conflated with the Mission Charge of Q (cf. Lk x); Mark’s Parable-chapter, iv. 1-34; Mark’s Discourse, ix. 33-7, 42-50; Mark’s anti-Pharisaic verses, xii. 38-40; and the Apocalypse of Mk xiii. The nuclei of the first two of these centos (ch. v–vii and ch. x) occurred early in Q; if therefore he wanted to expand them with other Q matter he could only do so by anticipating matter which occurred later in that document.43

This procedure accounts for why a significant proportion of Matthew’s Q materials (about forty percent or 27/67 pericopes on Kloppenborg’s reckoning) maintain a common relative order with respect to their parallels in Luke, who seen from the 2DH vantage point for the most part appropriates Q serially in blocks. The case studies we cited earlier, particularly those at the end of Chapter 2, give extensive corroboration for this source-utilization strategy and the phenomenon of relative agreements in order that it produces. Nevertheless 42. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 209. 43. Streeter, Four Gospels, pp. xiv–xvii.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

163

certain issues remain unresolved. Not infrequently Q materials gathered into Matthean locations anomalously fail to fall into a common relative order. Additionally, the rationale for Matthew’s movements within Q to bring materials together from widely separated Q locations into a given discourse is often completely obscure. As a result, the 2DH interpretation of common relative order in the double tradition must be propped up by recourse to complex accounts of Matthew’s Q-utilization that are often strained, ad hoc, and almost never measured against ancient media realities for their feasibility. Given the close connection between the lineaments of a source and its utilization, these explanatory difficulties are greatly exacerbated by the ‘sub-literary Q’ conception. a. Taylor’s Multiple Scans Solution Vincent Taylor’s ‘multiple scans’ theory still stands today as the landmark 2DH attempt to account for Matthew’s Q-utilization. Prior to Taylor, Streeter had highlighted the agreements in order by dividing the double tradition into five blocks, each subdivided into four or five subsections, for a total of twenty-two units that apart from four transpositions fell into the same absolute order in Matthew and Luke. Other than these transpositions, Streeter argued, the only anomalies were a few miscellaneous sayings and a number of units found concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Mission Instruction. While falling out of absolute order, these materials nevertheless frequently displayed a common relative order.44 It is nevertheless problematic, however, that Streeter’s solution cannot encompass the Matthew 5–7 and Matthew 10 materials. Moreover, as Kloppenborg points out, Streeter’s grouping of Q materials into large subsections ‘disguises some disagreements within these units’, and Streeter’s explanations for the unaccounted materials never go beyond arguments from general probability, for example Matthew’s general tendency to conflate and rearrange his sources.45 Taylor recognized that the disagreements in absolute order, and in particular the anomalies left by Streeter’s explanation, posed a problem for the 2DH.46 Kloppenborg summarizes Taylor’s solution:

44. See Streeter, ‘Original Order of Q’, pp. 143–5. 45. ‘[E.]g. in the woes against the Pharisees and in the mission speech. His group­ing also hides the fact that, for example, Luke’s woes precede the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven, while Matthew’s woes follow them’ (Kloppenborg, Formation, p. 68). 46. Vincent Taylor, ‘The Order of Q’, in idem, New Testament Essays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 90–4 (90), reprinted from JTS ns 4 (1953), pp. 27–31.

164

Q in Matthew Rather than comparing Matthew and Luke in two parallel columns, Taylor offered the brilliant solution of dividing Matthew into six components [i.e. columns]: the five large sermons [Matthew 5–7; 10; 13; 18; 23–25] and the remainder of the Gospel. When this was done, Taylor was able to show that there is a large measure of agreement in order when one compares each of the six Matthean columns with Luke. In effect, Taylor suggested that Matthew scanned Q several times, removing material appropriate to each of the five sermons, and reproducing these smaller sets of sayings in Lucan order.47

Taylor isolated within these six columns a total of fifteen such sequences of relative agreement with Luke’s order, which could be taken as meaning that Matthew made fifteen passes forward through Q. The insights from Taylor’s mapping of the data are indispensable. The multiple-scans procedure is attested in some of the case studies from Chapter 2. As a solution to problem of Matthew’s utilization strategy visà-vis the double tradition, however, it leaves much to be desired; in fact, it puts these difficulties in even sharper relief. Simply put, Taylor’s analysis does not translate into a compositionally feasible account of Matthew’s use of Q. Yet it remains the default account for the 2DH.48 Kloppenborg points out that ‘[g]iven a sufficient number of scannings, any two lists of common elements can be reconciled in order’, and ‘[g]iven the initial common order, it is hardly surprising that 15 scannings can reconcile the other disagreements’.49 Further, in intractable cases of Matthew’s departure from Luke’s order Taylor is forced to argue that Matthew adverted to the order of an overlapping written source, M, an ad hoc expedient particularly strained in its application to the Woes (Mt. 23.1-39) where he has Matthew shifting six times between this M-source and Q.50 Taylor also excludes some troublesome cases from the data set by assigning some

47. Kloppenborg, Formation, p. 68. Streeter had already suggested with respect to some of the materials in the Mission Instruction that as Matthew ‘read through Q to find suitable matter…he would naturally add such passages one by one as he came across them…and they would therefore naturally appear in the order in which they stood in Q’ (‘Original Order of Q’, pp. 161–2). 48. See e.g. Christopher M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), pp. 36–7 (with reservations). 49. Kloppenborg, Formation, p. 69. 50. Vincent Taylor, ‘The Original Order of Q’, in New Testament Essays, pp. 95–117 (112); first published in New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of T. W. Manson (ed. A. J. B. Higgins; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 95–118.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

165

high variation passages to M.51 As regards the analysis itself, Taylor’s columnar representation of the data brings out, as it was designed to do, important correspondences between Matthew’s and Luke’s respective dispositions of the double tradition. But it conceals the extent of disagreements in order and therefore serious flaws in the proposed compositional scenario. His vertical lines that trace sequences of relative agreement in order suggest forward, material-gathering passes through Q. Upon examination, however, materials that in the Lukan order are not contiguous are often seen to intrude amongst the points that define a given sequence. One such sequence Taylor identifies is Mt. 6.9-13 (Our Father) and 7.7-11 (Ask, Seek, Knock; Child’s Requests for Food). While this indeed corresponds to the absolute Q order 11.1-4 and 11.9-13, in the Sermon on the Mount these passages are separated by an extensive sequence of materials from Q 12, Q 11, and Q 16. If composition is conceived to be dependent upon visual contact with the source, presumably in scroll format, the operation required to produce this passage is difficult to execute, not to say curious. It requires first scrolling forward from Q 6 (see Mt. 5.43-48) to Q 11, forward to Q 12, back to Q 11, forward to Q 16, back again to Q 11, and from there back to Q 6 (see Mt. 7.31), in each case performing the difficult operation of visually locating and picking out the desired passages from a scriptio continua text – but then copying them out with varying degrees of inexactitude! Robinson draws attention to the problem: ‘One need only survey the sequence of the Q material brought into the Sermon on the Mount from elsewhere in Q…to see the patent improbability of Taylor’s theory: Q 16:17; Q 12:57-59; Q 16:18; Q 11:2-4; Q 12:33-34; Q 11:34-36; Q 16:13; Q 12:22-31; Q 11:9-13; Q 13:23-24, 25-27’.52 Though particularly concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount (which itself begs for explanation), configurations of Q materials that entail odd utilization maneuvers of this sort are found in other places in Matthew where Taylor identifies agreements in relative order. Furthermore, though the usual view is that Matthew is scanning Q to collect materials on a given topic, it is not always possible to correlate Taylor’s sequences of relative order with any principle of topical coherence. In short, Taylor’s 51. These include ‘The saying on the Signs of the Times… The saying on the narrow Gate… The saying on the Shut Door… The parable of the Great Supper… The parable of the Lost Sheep…The parable of the Pounds’ as well as ‘some short, isolated sayings… Here again in some cases the use by Matthew of another source than Q… may also be a disturbing factor’ (Taylor, ‘The Order of Q’, pp. 90–1). 52. James M. Robinson, ‘The Matthean Trajectory from Q to Mark’, in Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Bible and Culture (Festschrift Hans Dieter Betz; ed. Adela Yarbro Collins; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 122–55 (135–6).

166

Q in Matthew

individual scan lines cannot be said to represent discrete compositional actions. All they do is map certain formal correspondences between Luke’s order and Matthew’s order.53 It is in this latter respect, however, that Taylor’s analysis remains invaluable to the 2DH. It shows that there is a regularity to Matthew’s utilization of Q, the absolute order of which is best preserved in Luke. Matthew’s appropriative movement through Q is consistently forward – forward in the macro sense from Q’s beginning to its end, forward through Q’s larger composite sections such as the Q Sermon and the Q Mission Instruction, and forward through the topos-organized deliberative sequences that constitute Q at its basic organizational level, regardless of whether Matthew appropriates these sequences whole or in parts. As Luz comments, ‘das Einarbeitungsverfahren des Matthäus gegenüber der Logienquelle bemerkenswert homogen ist’.54 What is needed is a utilization model that accounts for the generally forward directionality of Matthew’s utilization actions with respect to Q, but at the same time for the collocation of material within Matthew’s topical sequences from different, at times seemingly random locations in Q, while mostly maintaining, as Luz points out, the original internal order of the thus transposed material.55

53. Kloppenborg breaks the double tradition down into 106 units and identifies 38 of these already agreeing in absolute order. To the remainder he applies the following principles: (1) When a Q unit is conflated with a Markan story, or (2) when a Q unit is placed in such a way that it fulfills a specific function in the Markan framework or among Markan materials, it may be assumed that the Matthean setting is secondary if no reason exists for Luke to have moved it. This accounts for an additional 24 units. For 44 other units cogent redaction-critical arguments can be given for the Matthean placement being secondary. This leaves just 16 units, or 15 percent, without a rationale for the primacy of their Lukan order other than appeal to general probability (Formation, pp. 72–80; also Excavating Q, pp. 89–90). These are mostly concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount, the epicenter of the problem of Matthew’s Q-utilization. Kloppenborg’s response to the limitations of Taylor’s account is to give strong redaction-critical grounding to the 2DH argument from order. What the redaction-critical angle cannot get at is the reconciliation of Matthew’s proposed utilization with the constraints of his media environment – something Taylor’s account at least purported to do. When the issue surfaces now and again in his analysis of specific units, Kloppenborg has Matthew scanning Q (e.g. Formation, p. 78). He follows the usual practice, moreover, of treating the problem of order at the level of individual units. 54. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 211. 55. Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary (trans. James E. Crouch; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 61. Luz observes this for Mt. 10, but the phenomenon is pervasive.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

167

b. Luz’s Q-Notebook/Excerption Proposal Luz attempts to fill this gap with his Q-notebook proposal: corresponding to its status as a sub-literary collection and subsidiary source, Matthew had Q in a multi-leaved notebook format, Mark in a literary codex format, and he accessed Q sayings through excerption. ‘[O]ne might assume the collection [Q]…was a rather large notebook, bound together with strings on the margin. It permitted an insertion of new leaves at any time. The Gospel of Mark, however, was a solidly bound codex and therefore a literary work which for this reason continued to be handed down even after its expansion by Matthew.’56 Elsewhere Luz says, ‘[Q] hatte die Gestalt einer Zettelsammlung oder eines fadengebunden Notizheftes’, and that Matthew ‘paläologisch Q in Gestalt von Einzelblättern vor sich liegen hatte, die er nebeneinander legen und einzeln verwenden konnte’.57 Not only do these media designations codify Q’s sub-literary and subsidiary source status vis-à-vis Mark (flexible notebook vs. ‘solidly bound codex’), they are Luz’s solution to the difficulties for the 2DH raised not only by the distribution of the Q materials in Matthew, but also by Matthew’s transpositions of Mark in Matthew 8–12, for if Matthew had the random access to Q and Mark facilitated by these media formats, these difficulties seem to be mitigated. Luz is notable among 2DH scholars for his recognition of the need to ground Matthew’s source-utilization actions in ancient media realities, but it is evident that the expanding-notebook format for Q is simply the media corollary of the sub-literary model for Q and thus contingent on the latter’s viability.58 Indeed, Luz directly annexes his notebook proposal to the old form-critical narrative of aggregative growth of the Q traditions: [W]e observe with the Sayings Source a process of expansion which began with smaller collections, as, e.g., the Sermon on the Plain, and proceeded by way of different steps of redaction as far as the version of the Source which 56. Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Continental Commentary (trans. Wilhelm C. Linss; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), pp. 46–8. 57. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 209. As noted in Chapter 2, classical scholar George Kennedy made a suggestion along these lines a number of years ago, though for Kennedy the source would have been in notebook format because it was a transcript – ὑπομνήματα – of apostolic preaching (‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, p. 153). 58. Derrenbacker calls it the ‘rationalization’ of the sub-literary Q conception, in context referring to Migaku Sato’s more detailed correlation of Q’s redaction history to the expanding-notebook format (Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 11). See Migako Sato, Q und Prophetie: Studien zur Gattungs- und Traditionsgeschichte der Quelle Q (WUNT 2/29; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1988), pp. 16–66.

168

Q in Matthew can be reconstructed from Matthew and Luke, and from there led on to the very much enlarged version, QLk. QMt is a version of Q which is altered and enlarged only minimally. The so-called ‘final redaction’ of Q has to be distinguished fundamentally from the redaction of the Synoptics. In intensity and dignity it was not different from earlier redactions of the source. It did not make a literary document from the collection of Q material.59

This also matches the standard Matthean utilization scenario – Matthew brings order to a loose collection – to a corresponding media format: it is hard to imagine how Matthew might manage access to such a collection other than by flipping through it to locate desired sayings. At the same time it solves the problem, left hanging by Taylor’s analysis, of rationalizing Matthew’s movements around Q locating desired sayings. Despite its being derivate of the sub-literary Q conception, the notebook proposal is not inherently implausible, notwithstanding that notebooks were almost always employed for writing of the ephemeral, transitory sort: school exercises, drafts, transcripts, and the like (see above Chapter 2). In view of these typical usages, however, it is difficult to conceive of the notebook as the preferred format for transmitting and disseminating a community’s formative moral traditions, though the appearance of pieces of literary works of various sorts on the verso of used papyrus indicates that the possibility cannot be ruled out. The more basic difficulty is that the notebook, with its random-access format, is an ad hoc response to the problem of Matthew’s practice of accessing some his Q materials out of their absolute order in the source. The notebook proposal, that is to say, is narrowly tailored to a particular utilization anomaly. But overall there is a logic and order (absolute and relative) to Matthew’s utilization of Q. If the loose notebook format conduced to random utilization and traditionhistory expansion, why are the elements of the order of the source so conspicuous in Matthew’s utilization of it? The notebook format expedient, moreover, given the limitless flexibility it allows, can be put to use to overcome difficulties in any utilization hypothesis; indeed, Poirier’s attribution of wax tablet usage to Luke is simply a variant of Luz’s proposal. Luz supplements the notebook scenario by likening Matthew’s Q-utiliza­tion to ancient excerption practices. Matthew ‘hat zwei grundsätzlich verschiedene Techniken für die Einarbeitung von Q. Er konnte entweder ganze Q-Abschnitte blockweise übernehmen… Oder er hat Q-Abschnitte exzerpiert, d.h. seine Einzellogien in eigene Kontexte eingearbeitet.’60 Actually these amount to the same technique, the distinction being the length of the sequences excerpted, and Luz immediately adds 59. Luz, Matthew 1–7, p. 46, emphasis added. 60. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 209; also idem, Matthew 8–20, p. 61.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

169

that Matthew ‘Q-Blöcke fortlaufend exzerpiert, d.h. die Q-Reihenfolge ganz oder weitgehend beibehält’. Can Matthew’s Q-utilization plausibly be connected to ancient excerption practices? Excerpting in the course of reading through a work was a well-attested practice in antiquity. Anthologizers excerpted sources to create florilegia, and modern source critics who work on florilegia often refer to the ‘excerpting’ of older florilegia into destination documents with their own topoi arrangement. Given the forward directionality of excerption entailed by the scroll format, excerpted materials tended to reproduce the source document’s order, and Matthew displays a generally forward progression through Q. This latter point though puts excerption into tension with Luz’s note­book proposal; moreover it was more usual for notebooks to be used as temporary collection expedients rather than sources for excerpts. Excerption itself was generally speaking a copying practice. This is difficult to square with the patterns of variation in the double tradition. Luz’s work-around – the QMt. and QLk. expedient – does not get at what is driving variation in the double tradition, given that excerption typically produces little variation. An author might collect excerpts and then transform them in working them up into a draft of a work, but this does not describe Matthew’s project. Varro’s use of two of Theophrastus’s works shows that excerpts could be significantly modified when integrated into a new work along with other sources, but in other respects Varro’s project has little in common with Matthew’s (see Chapter 2). These are perhaps not serious objections. Luz may be using ‘excerption’ not in its technical sense but as a convenient term for Matthew’s transferring Q materials to their location in his gospel, though this leaves Matthew’s utilization still without firm grounding in ancient media practices. More revealing is Luz’s explicit correlation of the ‘excerption’ method to his view that Matthew exploited Q with no regard for its form: ‘By completely destroying the order of “wholeness” of Q, and taking excerpts from it, Matthew was exploiting what was offered him by the very genre of the document… Matthew reserved no dignity for Q as a literary document – so much so that he cut it in pieces. It was simply a collection of material.’61 Excerption, in other words, is the appropriate method for cutting up and dispersing into the Markan narrative framework a ‘mere collection of materials’.62 61. Luz, ‘Looking at Q Through the Eyes of Matthew’, pp. 583–4, original emphasis. 62. Ulrich Luz, ‘Intertexts in the Gospel of Matthew’, HTR 97 (2004), pp. 119–37 (127) (‘[Matthew] disrupted its compositional integrity and inserted its individual elements into new contexts… The Sayings Source was a mere collection of materials that he freely excerpted’).

170

Q in Matthew

The notebook media proposal and the excerption procedure are not only tied to the sub-literary Q conception but also to a strictly visual model for source utilization: the work ‘Q’ is identified with the external artifact and script, and Matthew’s access to it can only be conceived as being mediated principally through the visual channel. In addition, it is not clear that even taken on its own terms the notebook/excerption model deals with the problems left over from Taylor’s analysis of Matthew’s Q-utilization. Gamble points out that codices did not give easy access to their contents: ‘Features that might have provided ease of reference were as rare in the codex as in the roll. Neither had divisions of chapters or verses, and pagination was not common in ancient codices.’63 Moreover, Q in notebook format is ex hypothesi little organized. It is not clear, therefore, that invoking a notebook format for Q goes all that far towards resolving the problems in Matthew’s Q-utilization. Even granting that Matthew had a loosely organized Q in notebook format still does not explain his disposition of the double tradition. Why is his reordering of the double tradition not more pervasive than it in fact is? Why is it concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount and the Commissioning Instruction and not more evenly distributed? Why is the reproducing of Q’s relative order along with the arc of its absolute order, so clearly demonstrated by Taylor, such a striking feature of Matthew’s use of this non-narrative source? Because the notebook proposal is narrowly tailored to the problem of Matthew’s access to the reordered Q materials, it has difficulties supporting a comprehensive explanation of Matthew’s utilization patterns. c. Derrenbacker’s Codex/Memory Proposal Derrenbacker recognizes the need to reconcile Matthew’s Q-utilization with the constraints of the ancient media environment; in this connection he adduces the memory factor. This is not the first time memory has been invoked to solve this problem. In 1911 Streeter argued: ‘Matthew could never have made the elaborate rearrangement of his sources that he has unless he had known his materials almost by heart’.64 Streeter, however, never pursued this angle, and memory plays only a marginal role in The Four Gospels, occasionally invoked to explain variation between what Streeter considered to be orally transmitted parallels. Hawkins inferred 63. Gamble, Books and Readers, p. 56; also Small, Wax Tablets, p. 16. 64. Streeter, ‘Original Order of Q’, p. 155. In 1930, in regard to Matthew’s ‘proleptic employment’ of Mark, Bacon suggested that Matthew exercised memorycontrol over his sources, and accordingly, ‘the contents of Mk and S…could therefore be introduced at any point, with whatever verbal modification seemed advisable’ (Studies in Matthew, p. 98).

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

171

from certain phrases appearing in Matthew’s gospel prior to where they occurred in his source that ‘Matthew drew them from his memory of his sources and not from documents before him’.65 Like Streeter, however, Hawkins associated memory with oral transmission, which both of them distinguished from written transmission. The form-critical approach that then came to dominate scholarship completely eliminated memory as a factor in the tradition. In 1978 the classical scholar George Kennedy again pointed to the possible source-critical significance of memory, suggesting that ‘it would not have been necessary for [an Evangelist] to engage in a conscious editorial process based on a written text, because he could have relied on his memory’.66 Writing a few years later, Downing, while noting the role memory played in Plutarch’s compositional procedures, concluded that it was not a factor in Synoptic source criticism, because ‘the frequent verbatim and near-verbatim identity’ in many parallel passages requires ‘the presence of the actual document before the dependent writer’.67 In 1994 Byrskog argued that Matthew’s sources Mark and Q ‘were not present as external sources of reference only, but as living traditions he had actively internalized’, though he did not apply this insight to source-critical problems.68 Derrenbacker’s study of ancient source-utilization conditions leads him to recognize that the disposition of the double tradition in Matthew poses a feasibility problem for the 2DH. Matthew’s integration of Mark and Q passages departs from the practice, evident in Greco-Roman historians and in Luke, of using two sources in alternating blocks, and Matthew’s rearrangements of Q’s order are hard to square with the difficulties of gaining random access to materials given the mechanics of the scroll format.69 Derrenbacker urges that memory be taken into account to develop utilization scenarios not predicated upon Matthew’s maintaining constant visual contact with his sources: ‘In theory Matthew’s use of Mark and Q both visually and mnemonically could allow his greater freedom to deviate from the order of his written sources, and thus help to begin to solve the problem

65. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, pp. 171–2. 66. Kennedy, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, p. 143. 67. Downing, ‘Compositional Conventions’, p. 75. 68. Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher, p. 349. 69. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 257–8; idem, ‘GrecoRoman Writing Practices and Luke’s Gospel’, in The Gospels According to Michael Goulder (ed. Christopher A. Rollston; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 61–83.

172

Q in Matthew

of Matthew’s reworking of the order of Mark and Q’.70 The difficulties in Derrenbacker’s solution arise from his underestimating the memory factor and – not unrelatedly – not quite breaking with the visual utilization assumptions that usually guide the assessment of Synoptic source-critical problems. Accordingly he adverts like Luz to the expedient that Matthew had Q in codex format, going so far as to hazard that this is required to sustain the viability of the 2DH.71 Derrenbacker’s solution combines a (weak) memory factor with codex utilization to produce an account not only of Matthew’s Q-utilization but also of differential levels of variation in the materials. Estimating a Q codex of about fifteen leaves, he comes up with a ‘deviation factor’ scale of 0–15, a measure of how far in given cases Matthew has departed from Q’s absolute order, that is, from where he presumably has visual contact with the source. Using Morgenthaler’s statistics, he suggests a correlation between high levels of variation and a high deviation factor, moving from an average of 58 percent agreement on the lower end of the deviation scale to an average of 38 percent agreement on the higher end of the scale. The reason is that Matthew is relying on memory rather than visual contact to access the materials.72 David Carr has recently suggested the correlation of differential variation in the Temple Scroll with the variable of the writer’s visual contact with his sources (high agreement levels with the Hauptquelle Deuteronomy, higher variation in Numbers and Leviticus passages presumably accessed by memory), though he does not work out the differentials.73 But there are difficulties in Derrenbacker’s application of this solution. Derrenbacker assigns codex format to Q to account for how Matthew gains visual access to Q materials out of Q order, but here he conceives of Matthew producing out-of-order passages from memory, oddly not making use of the random access capability of his Q codex. This is not a serious criticism, for the model would also work on the assumption that Matthew is working from a Q scroll: he scrolls through Q while pulling forward (or retrieving) out-of-order passages by memory. A more serious objection is that actual variation levels correlate poorly with whether or not Matthew has visual contact with the source. The respective levels of agreement of 58 percent and 38 percent are averages. When pericopes are examined individually 70. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 234 (‘If Matthew’s use of Q whose order is best reflected by Luke is to be taken seriously, one is compelled to imagine Matthew’s Q in the form of a codex’); also pp. 254–5. 71. Ibid., p. 253. 72. Ibid., pp. 238–9. 73. Carr, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory’, pp. 167–8.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

173

one finds little correlation between deviation factor and variation level. In Mt. 6.24, for example, the deviation factor is 15, the highest possible, but agreement is 98%. The Baptist’s speech (Q 3.16-17) has a deviation factor of 0 and agreement level of 88%, but the Temptation also has a deviation factor of 0 but an agreement level of 51 percent, a drop of 37 percent in conjoined passages. Matthew 5.31-32 has a deviation factor of 15, an agreement level of 47 percent, Mt. 5.38-42 a deviation factor of 0, an agreement level of 43 percent. The relationship between rate of variation and Matthew’s deviation from Q’s order turns out to be quite random. It seems, therefore, that variation in the double tradition has to do with factors other than whether or not Matthew has visual contact with the source. Revisiting the issue not long after Ancient Compositional Practices was published, Derrenbacker seemed to conceive a more robust role for memory: ‘We need to assume that Matthew knew his sources extremely well… [Like Paul the Jewish Scriptures,] Matthew may be recalling the written text from Q in his memory.’74 In a recent renewed defense of his Q-codex hypothesis, however, he references memory only in a passing characterization of Q as an aide-mémoire, while identifying the ‘protocodex’ hypothesis more unequivocally with a sub-literary Q conception, arguing that this view of Q and its medium fits the ‘village scribe’ Sitz that has been proposed for Q.75 Like the proto-codex (essentially a papyrus notebook) itself, a medium utilized for preliminary, transitional stages of a composition, Q is a ‘transitional’ text, ‘on a trajectory between orally transmitted logia and a written bios of Jesus’.76 Its primitive sayings-collection genre coheres with its transitional, proto-codex medium. So closely does Derrenbacker correlate ‘medium’ and ‘message’ that it is hard to disentangle whether he argues for Q’s low level of literary formation on the basis of its putative village scribe Sitz and proto-codex medium, or vice versa. In any case, the source-critical payoff is that the proto-codex medium ‘would 74. Robert A. Derrenbacker Jr., ‘The “External and Psychological Conditions Under Which the Synoptic Gospels Were Written”: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem’, in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg, and Verheyden, eds., New Studies, pp. 435–57 (452–3). 75. Derrenbacker, ‘ “Medium is the Message” ’, p. 216. Kloppenborg originally postulated the village scribe Sitz on the basis of his modest estimate of the level of Q’s literary formation (e.g. Excavating Q, p. 200). 76. Derrenbacker, ‘ “Medium is the Message” ’, pp. 217–18. There are elements here of the form-critical evolutionary history of the tradition that has it evolving from sayings toward narrative; it is also evocative of Kennedy’s ὑπομνήματα characterization of Q.

174

Q in Matthew

have afforded Matthew (and Luke) relatively easy access to the sayings of Jesus contained therein, allowing Matthew (and perhaps Luke) to more easily incorporate this material in their gospel texts’.77 Derrenbacker’s position here is virtually indistinguishable from Luz’s notebook/excerption proposal, and as such it is subject to the same criticisms. But it is problematic on an additional count. In Ancient Compositional Practices, Derrenbacker argued incontrovertibly that Luke’s alternating-block usage of Q reflects the constraints of the scroll medium – a utilization pattern incommensurate with Luke having Q in codex format. The codex proposal was tailored to Matthew’s different utilization pattern. When it comes down to it, on this point Ancient Compositional Practices put the 2DH in the disadvantageous position of having to defend two different media formats for Q. But now Derrenbacker argues that Q’s sayings-collection genre has a close, virtually necessary affinity to the proto-codex medium. Accordingly he must attribute a Q-codex – and the same possibilities for flexible usage – to Luke as well. But this is to kick away one of the major supports for the documentary status of Q, namely, that Luke’s order best reflects the order of the source. Unconstrained by a scroll format, why could Luke not have used his Q materials in any way and order that he likes? Poirier makes a media argument of exactly this sort on behalf of the FGH – Luke uses the transitional wax-tablet format to reorganize Matthean materials. Casey invokes tablet usage in support of his breaking the Q materials up into multiple sources.78 Derrenbacker’s work on ancient compositional practices has altered the way we think about the Synoptic Problem, but for the 2DH the problem of Matthew’s utilization of Q still stands in need of resolution. 3. Scribal Mediation of Q Materials Various studies have brought to light evidence of significant scribal activity in the double tradition. The written medium stabilizes traditions within ordered, editorially conceived relationships with other traditions. This is the case even when editorial policy is limited to collecting and anthologizing: even in the florilegia one sees the ‘Ausdruck eines gestalterischen Willens, eines Konzeptes’.79 At work in scribal projects of this sort are concerns for concatenation of heterogeneous materials in standardized formats to the ends of constructing a cohesive work. Their effect is to bring materials into precise sequential and elaborative connections to one 77. Ibid., p. 218. 78. Casey, Aramaic Approach, p. 48. 79. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”?’, p. 76.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

175

another, rendering them in configurations that serve as scripts for enactment that, as such, make them more resistant to the variability-producing effects of oral transmission. In particular the recurrence of organizational and elaborative patterns across a body of materials points to scribal standardization and to the stabilizing effects of the written medium. a. Recurrent Deliberative Patterns and Scribal Formation The practice in 2DH scholarship of breaking down the double tradition into isolated ‘pericopes’ has had a blinkering effect, hindering interpreters from looking for coherent paraenetic schemata in the materials. Recurrent patterns of deliberative argumentation using heterogeneous materials would be compelling evidence of scribal mediation. Not only is the written medium required to hold heterogeneous units in durable semantic relationships to one another, but the sequences thus created cannot be significantly varied without destroying the deliberative logic that holds them together. The chreia elaboration in Hermogenes discussed by Robbins is a simple case in point: an Isocrates chreia supplies a thesis that is supplied with rationales and supportive arguments. Though drawn from different genres and sources, these constitute a unified, advancing argument in which order is non-negotiable and the whole depends upon the arrangement of the parts: The saying attributed to Isocrates is a striking, succinct formulation that encapsulates the gist of Isocrates, Ad Demonicum 45–47. The rationale and the contrary have been formulated in a similar manner. The remaining arguments that are based on farmers, Demosthenes, and quotations from Hesiod and Epicharmus come from outside the language field of the topic itself, and each is a reperformance of tradition generally known in Mediterranean society.80

In principle the script could be performed extempore from a rhetorically trained memory. But were the sequence to occur in two written sources, the question of its written mediation would arise, all the more so since unlike narrative, the deliberative logic of the sequence is not inherent to its constituent materials. Coherence among the elements emerges from the overall, ad hoc structure of the argument. Given the potential source-critical significance, it is remarkable that the deliberative materials that dominate the double tradition have attracted little analysis of this sort, or more accurately, that the good work that has been done remains unexploited in source-critical debates, where ‘sub-literary Q’ remains entrenched. 80. Robbins, ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition’, p. 129, on Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 1.10–8.14.

176

Q in Matthew

Much of the double tradition consists of extended chains of deliberative argumentation that has genre parallels in Greco-Roman rhetorical and eastern Mediterranean wisdom traditions. Its analysis against these cultural horizons began in the 1980s. Mack and Robbins established the presence of chreia elaborations in the double tradition.81 Mack says in reference to Q 12.22-31: ‘Scholars have usually regarded such a block as a cluster of independent, free-floating sayings collected by thematic association. The rhetorical approach looks for a unit of argumentation.’82 While the chreia elaborations show influence from Greco-Roman rhetoric, the bulk of studies have pointed to a wisdom and scribal setting for the mediation of the double tradition. In the late 1970s Dieter Zeller isolated a recurrent paraenetic pattern in several double tradition clusters: an opening programmatic imperative followed by a motive clause, in turn followed by a ‘Mittelstück’ consisting of two rhetorical questions, and rounded off by a culminating pronouncement.83 The pattern’s recurrence is an indicator of scribal formulation and standardization. Ronald Piper’s 1989 analysis was especially important in this regard. Analyzing four Q clusters (6.27-35; 11.9-13; 12.2-12, 22-31), Piper uncovered a recurrent paraenetic pattern: (1) a general aphoristic saying, followed by (2) a general maxim in close support of the opening aphorism, followed by (3) two rhetorical questions employing striking images illustrative of the inaugural maxims and narrowing their application to a specific issue, and (4) a concluding saying that draws together the argument of the cluster and gives it a specific application, with closure signaled by its forming an inclusio with the opening maxims.84 The opening aphorism and maxim identify the paraenetic topos of the sequence. Piper summarizes: ‘Far from their being loose or haphazard collections of aphorisms built simply around catchwords and common themes, a clear design of argument [is] evident’, a pattern, moreover, that is ‘distinctly associated with the double-tradition material’.85 Piper draws the correct inference: this recurrent pattern lays down unimpeachable evidence for scribal activity in the double tradition.86

81. See, in addition to Robbins’s ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition’, also ‘Rhetorical Composition and the Beelzebul Controversy’, pp. 161–93. 82. Burton L. Mack, Rhetoric and the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), pp. 50–1. 83. Dieter Zeller, Die weisheitliche Mahnsprüche bei den Synoptikern (FzB 17; Würzburg: Echter, 1977), p. 142. 84. Piper, Wisdom in the Q Tradition, pp. 35–6, 61–3, 72–3, 193. 85. Ibid., pp. 193–4. 86. Ibid., pp. 64–8, 161.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

177

Zeller and Piper worked with small samples of materials. In Formation of Q (1987), John Kloppenborg showed the formative influence upon the Q materials of the instructional speech genre found in Near Eastern wisdom and scribal settings: Four of the speeches begin with a programmatic pronouncement in the form of a wisdom saying or a declaratory sentence… The core of the speeches consists of imperatives and instructions. But they are presented not as a set of unstructured commands or assertions, but in the form of balanced and developed arguments, using symmetrical assertions, rhetorical questions, qal wehomer arguments and appeals to nature and human experience… [S]everal speeches conclude with a warning or description of what might occur if the teacher’s counsel is not followed.87

In sum, much of Q is constituted of serialized instructional speeches that treat conventional moral topoi and develop deliberative arguments in recurrent patterns that incorporate techniques attested in ancient paraenetic genres. Its redaction, Kloppenborg infers, occurred in a scribal setting. In a major work on Q, Thomas, and Mark published in 1997, Jens Schröter showed that Q clusters such as 11.14-26 and 12.2-12 are carefully organized sequences of argumentation: ‘Deutlich ist vielmehr, daß 11,14-26 einen geschlossenen Text darstellt, in welchem der Vorwurf der Gegner Jesu in aufeinander aufbauenden Argumentationsschritten widerlegt wird und schließlich in den Aufruf zur unbedingten Gefolgschaft mündet’.88 The present author’s Composition of the Sayings Source (1998) built upon Kloppenborg’s work on the instructional speech in the double tradition, but adopting a synchronic (Endgestalt) rather than diachronic (redaction-history) approach to Q, it identified twelve serialized sequences treating conventional moral topoi: (1) 6.27-36 (Love Your Enemies); (2) 6.37-42 (Judge Not); (3) 6.43-45 (Trees, Fruit, and Speech); (4) 11.2-13 (Prayer); (5) 11.14-23 (Beelzebul Controversy); (6) 11.29-35 (Request for a Sign); (7) 12.2-12 (Courageous Witness); (8) 12.22-31, 33-34 (Do Not Be Anxious); (9) 12.35-46 (Watchful and Ready); (10) 12.49-59 (Discerning the Times); (11) 13.24-30; 14.11, 16-24, 26-27; 17.33; 14.34-35 (Enter the Narrow Door); (12) 17.23-37 (Day of the Son of Man). Each displays a recurrent elaborative pattern that follows the conventions of ancient 87. Kloppenborg, Formation, pp. 242–3; see also p. 318. The instructional speeches Kloppenborg identifies are: (1) 6.20-23b, 27-49; (2) 9.57-62; 10.2-11, 16, 21-24; (3) 11.2-4, 9-13; (4) 12.2-12; (5) 12.22-34; (6) 13.24-30, 34-35; 14.16-24, 26-27; 17.33; 14.34-35. 88. Schröter, Erinnerung, p. 269.

178

Q in Matthew

paraenetic speech genres: a programmatic admonition, usually a maxim or a chreia, articulating the topos of the sequence, followed by a course of argumentation motivating response to the programmatic topos, using forms such as parables, rhetorical questions, paradigms, exempla, promise clauses, threats of sanctions, and supportive maxims and aphorisms. Each sequence progresses (confirming Piper’s insight) from the general and metaphorical to the specific and concrete. Each enacts a focused rhetorical strategy related to conventional ethical topoi (treated idiosyncratically, to be sure): friendship, reciprocity, treatment of enemies, education, gaining wisdom, speech, prayer, courage, self-provision, servants and masters, messenger instructions, household affairs, status relations, family relations, discerning times, banqueting and hospitality.89 In sum, this line of analysis points to the scribal mediation of the double tradition. To be sure, there is much about the Q materials that remains unclear and under debate. But one need not subscribe to any particular genre proposal or redaction history to recognize the pervasiveness of deliberative elaborations treating moral topics in the double tradition. Evidence of recurrent patterns that bring diverse materials into alignment with a standard instructional speech format in particular points to scribal formation. The 2DH can easily accommodate these findings. But advocates of other utilization hypotheses can readily interpret the evidence of a writingmediated double tradition in a manner congruent with their views, while pointing to uncertainties in the reconstructions of Q order upon which much of the genre analysis is predicated, for example, that a number of the so-called Q speeches occur in Matthew broken up and dispersed. The question for the 2DH, therefore, is whether the scribal artifact it reconstructs – serialized instructional speeches treating moral topoi in recurrent sequences of deliberative argumentation – renders Matthew’s ordering of the double tradition more intelligible and aligns his utilization of Q with ancient media constraints and practices. b. Overlap Passages and Oral Tradition The findings summarized above make it difficult to hold that Matthew and Luke accessed the double tradition, in whole or in part, from oral tradition. The latter’s defining characteristic is multiformity, arising not just out of its actualization only in utterance but also its reaction with the exigencies of performance contexts. Wisdom forms are particularly prone to fresh contextualizations. Hence the sequences of deliberative argumentation in recurrent patterns across the double tradition are a strong indicator of documentary mediation. 89. Kirk, Composition, pp. 268–72.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

179

To be sure, one should not overestimate the so-called fluidity of oral tradition, as if it were constantly forming and dissolving ephemeral bonds with other isolates. Composite deliberative elaborations cohering around thematic and genre conventions are manifestly transmittable in the oral medium. Can such be distinguished from parallel materials transmitted in the written medium? In studies surveyed in Chapters 2 and 3, scholars such as Elman, Mandel, Haslam, Nelson, and Totelin grappled with this problem. The issue is especially pressing because of the overlap passages in the double and triple tradition. Like the overlap passages, the overlap baraitot traditions in the Tosefta and the Bavli studied by Elman display not just parallel baraitot but occasionally ‘clusters’ of baraitot in the same order.90 Elman’s finding – these baraitot parallels are not mediated by writing – confirms that genre conventions and topical cohesion operate in oral tradition, as they do in writing, to hold together composite formations of materials.91 How did Elman make his determination? The oral medium has difficulty sustaining larger sequences of agreement. Accordingly, the parallel clusters of baraitot displaying agreements in sequence tend to be short, and in the overlap tradition as a whole, ‘recurrence of identical sequences of heterogeneous materials, covering disparate subjects’ is absent.92 What is required to make a determination of written mediation is ‘the existence of clusters of baraitot, covering diverse subjects, arranged in a distinctive pattern, and common to both’.93 This describes the paraenetic sequences in the double tradition almost exactly. Elman’s analysis gives leverage on the Mark/Q overlap traditions. These turn out to exemplify the distinction between parallel sequences mediated by oral tradition and those mediated by the written medium. The Beelzubul Accusation (Mk 3.22-27/Luke 11.14-23/Mt. 12.22-30) is the diagnostic example. In vocabulary and word order the Mattthew/Luke parallels track each other closely while departing from Mark frequently in both respects. Particularly striking is the correspondence in their syntactic profiles and their contrast with the syntactic profile of the Markan version, which differs even where the materials crisscross. The Markan and double tradition parallels have a common motif sequence: Βεελζεβούλ – βασιλεία – οἰκία – ἰσχυρός with the corollary verbs μερίζεσθαι/σταθῆναι, but they give it completely different verbal and syntactic articulation. The overlaps are like multiforms of a chreiic core and short elaboration of 90. Elman, Authority and Tradition, p. 28; also pp. 38–9. 91. Ibid., pp. 50–1, 57–8, 102 n. 91. 92. Ibid., p. 39, emphasis added. 93. Ibid., p. 28.

180

Q in Matthew

the sort that could collocate and exist in the oral medium.94 In contrast, the Matthew/Luke parallel displays the verbal and syntactic tracking that indicates a common script, with variation arising from their independent rendering of that script. The deliberative argument developed in the double tradition version is comparatively lengthy. Its six constituent items (Mt. 12.22-24/Luke 11.14-15; Mt. 12.25-26/Luke 11.17-18; Mt. 12.27/Luke 11.19; Mt. 12.28/Luke 11.20; Mt. 12.29/Luke 11.21-22; Mt. 12.30/Luke 11.23) fall into an identical sequence. It is unlikely that this agreement in sequence – or the verbal and syntactic agreements – could be independently sustained apart from the support of a script.95 Matthew’s and Luke’s different versions of the ‘Strong Man’ (Mt. 12.29/Luke 11.21-22) appear at the same point in the sequence. Matthew or Luke substitutes another version of the saying while hewing to the script, an operation consistent with the cultivation of manuscript-based tradition at the boundary with an ambient oral tradition. This comparison of a Q/Mark parallel makes it possible to reconstruct the scribal actions that brought the Q instruction into existence in the first place. Schröter describes it thus: ‘[I]m Bereich der mündlichen Überlieferung der Jesusstoffe bereits gewisse “Verdichtungen” existierten, die…zu Komplexen wie den Missioninstruktionen und der BeelzebulPerikope geführt haben…[und] von Mk und Q unabhängig voneinander aufgegriffen wurden.’96 In the double tradition of the Beelzebul Accusation, a core chreia elaboration is taken from the anterior oral tradition (which also mediates it to Mark) and supplemented with additional materials to fashion a lengthy sequence that conforms to a deliberative pattern attested in other Q clusters. Q’s version is in fact more finely wrought than Mark’s – rather ironic for a source regarded as ‘sub-literary’ in contrast to the ‘literary’ Mark! 94. In arguing for the literary dependency of the Markan Beelzebul Accusation upon the Q version, Harry Fleddermann overestimates the fluidity of oral tradition, regarding merely the common sequence of sections and the absence of non-Q material in the Markan passage sufficient indicators of written mediation (Mark and Q: A Study of the Overlap Texts [BETL 122; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1995], pp. 61, 73). Rodríguez, on the other hand, argues that Matthew and Luke are accessing common oral material (Structuring Early Christian Memory, pp. 176–7). In this he is affected by a media binary that associates performance variation with oral tradition. 95. What Carr says of the early biblical manuscripts, which ‘though fluid, betray a level of widespread verbatim agreement atypical of transcripts of purely oral performance traditions’ (‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory’, p. 171), applies here. 96. Schröter, Erinnerung, p. 448.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

181

4. Topoi Organization in Q Materials Q’s constituent speeches form a catena of moral topoi. Topoi – the moral rubrics giving topical coherence to collocations of ethical materials – were cultural conventions, that is, commonplaces (loci communes). With the exception of materials that pertain to concerns indigenous to the tradent communities, for example, the John/Jesus passages (3.7-9, 16-17; 7.18-35), Q’s constituent speeches are permutations of traditional moral and prudential topoi: friends and enemies (6.27-35); competent judging (6.37-42); speech (6.43-45); prayer (11.2-4, 11-13); courage (12.2-12); wealth and poverty (12.22-31, 33-34); work (12.22-31, 33-34); masters and servants (12.35-46); family relationships (12.51-53); messenger and hospitality instructions (Mission Instructions). Even the controversies – Beelzebul Accusation (11.14-23) and Request for a Sign (11.28-36) – make use of political, household, and medical topoi and sustain the deliberative rhetoric that marks the other speeches. Schröter rightly identifies Q 12.2-12 as a specimen of ‘Martyriumsparänese’ with parallels in 2 and 4 Maccabees and Wisdom of Solomon 2–3.97 Q 12.2-12 organizes ‘[d]ie einzelnen Logien der Komposition…unter einer gemeinsamen Perspektive’.98 A number of parallels to Q topoi can be found in Pascale Derron’s list of topoi in Ps.-Phocylides, described by Derron as ‘les thèmes fondamentaux de toute gnomologie’.99 Among the traditional topoi of the Byzantine Maximus florilegium one finds the following: περὶ βίου ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας (the inaugural topos), περὶ φρονήσεως, περὶ ἁγνείας καὶ σωφροσύνης, περὶ φίλων καὶ φιλαδελφίας, περὶ προσευχῆς, περὶ πλεονεξίας, περὶ τιμῆς γονέων καὶ φιλοτεκνίας, περὶ ὅρκου, περὶ νόμου.100 It is the conviction of the impending crisis of the Kingdom of God and corollary sense of alienation from normative society that renders Q’s treatment of these topoi so idiosyncratic. Topoi sequences facilitated memory competence over a body of material (see Chapter 3). Multiple topoi, placed in a series, constitute an efficient memory network that runs across the body of material and down through each of its component clusters. The mnemonic effect is heightened when the sequence itself is conventional or intelligible. The system capitalizes upon the brain’s ordinary cognitive encoding and search protocols in order to achieve control over extensive bodies of material. In other words, Q is 97. Ibid., p. 358. 98. Ibid., p. 349. 99. Derron, Pseudo-Phocylide Sentences, pp. xxvi–xxvii (see Chapter 3 n. 220, for a list) 100. Ihm, Loci communes, passim.

182

Q in Matthew

calibrated for assimilation to memory – and not as a loosely aggregated mass of material, but as a sequence of deliberative speeches cohering around topoi. Instructional genres in scribal and educational Sitze served moral formation through assimilation to memory. Q’s iterative enactment in its tradent communities was a matter of habituated reactivation of this network across the sequence of topoi and down through the individual speeches. This convergence of memory, manuscript, and enactment formed the nexus of its transmission. Given contextual exigencies in different tradent communities, and doubtless some interactivity with the ambient oral–traditional register, Q would come to display multiformity and develop toward versions. But its written mediation would make it resistant to dissolution into the flux of orality. The situation is similar to what Mandel describes for Lamentations Rabbah, two divergent versions of which arose in the Palestinian and the Babylonian rabbinic communities respectively.101 QMt. and QLk. are not distinct ‘editions’ or ‘recensions’, but versions emerging from the interface of Q’s scribal transmission and its actualization in different tradent communities.102 But by the same token, QMt. and QLk. cannot be invoked – as they often are – in ad hoc, question-begging ways to dispense with source-critical difficulties arising from the dissimilar profiles and utilization patterns of the double tradition materials in Matthew and Luke. 5. Q as a Cultural Work: Memory/Manuscript Fusion As the bearer of a comprehensive array of ethical materials formative of the moral identity of its tradent communities, Q is a cultural text, and thus grist for memory assimilation. Instructional genres in scribal and educational Sitze served moral formation through assimilation to memory. In antiquity memory was instrumental not just in moral formation but in composition. Works assimilated to memory provided resources for composition, and their cycling into new compositions corresponded to their existence as normative traditions. A gauge of a work’s cultural authority was its capacity to generate further texts, from its own augmentation in the course of its transmission all the way to its transformation into another work.103 Trained scribal memory was an active performative competence in the repertoire of a tradent community’s oral and written tradition. Q is not a 101. Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, pp. 92–4. 102. Syreeni gives an excellent description of the processes that would give rise to distinct versions of Q (Making of the Sermon, p. 161); see also Luz, ‘Q Through the Eyes of Matthew’, p. 578. 103. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 18; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 236.

4. The 2DH’s Inconvenient Problem

183

rudimentary ‘sayings collection’ but an intelligible sequence of composite deliberative speeches organized in accordance with conventional moral topoi. As noted its organization corresponds to normal cognitive search protocols: across the horizontal axis of topoi sequence and down the vertical axis through constituent speeches. Its topoi rubrics and topoi sequences serve not just literary but mnemonic ends: they are ‘cognitive schemata’,104 emulations of the encoding-and-retrieval systems of memory, realizations of the brain–artifact interface. Its speeches conform to deliberative patterns that bring individual maxims and admonitions into ordered elaborative relationships to one another. The constituent elements of its topoi are organized schematically rather than taxonomically. Whereas taxonomic organization simply collects members of a topical category, schematic organization establishes intelligible relations among constituent items. Schematic organization has powerful mnemonic effects; it creates a cognitive unity out of multiple items. It supplies a set of search and retrieval cues ‘so strongly interlinked that activating any one of them necessarily activates them all’,105 producing ‘a high degree of correspondence between input and output order’.106 Topoi-organized works for the cultivation of ethical traditions belonged to the educational and scribal Sitz. Matthew, ‘a scribe trained for the Kingdom of Heaven, who brings out of his thesaurus things old and new’, has operational control of Q in memory. For Matthew, ‘Q’ exists at the nexus of its memorial, artifactual, ethical, and oral-performative actualizations.107 Matthew’s Q utilization, accordingly, will follow the network of signs that are the mode of its existence in memory and the basis for its enactment. Does Q so conceived clarify Matthew’s utilization procedures, precisely where difficulties remain? Does it reconcile the utilization actions the 2DH must attribute to him with ancient media constraints and practices? The Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew’s interventions into Q materials are unusually concentrated, will test this approach.

104. Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, p. 8. 105. Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 21. 106. Rabinowitz and Mandler, ‘Organization and Information Retrieval’, p. 438. 107. ‘[B]ehavioral tradition and transmission interact with verbal tradition and transmission’ (Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher, p. 329).

Chapter 5 S ou r c e -U t i l i z at i on i n the S e r mon on t h e M ou n t

The 2DH has not come up with a satisfactory account of Matthew’s utilization of Q in the Sermon on the Mount. The Matthean and Lukan Sermons have a common macro-sequence: (1) Beatitudes (Mt. 5.3-11/Lk. 6.20-23); (2) Love of Enemy (Mt. 5.38-48/Lk. 6.27-36); (3) Judge Not (Mt. 5.1-5/Lk. 6.37-42); (4) Trees and Fruit (Mt. 7.15-20/Lk. 6.43-45); (5) Two Builders (Mt. 7.21-27/Lk. 6.46-49). But it is in the wording of their common-sequence materials that Matthew and Luke often diverge most markedly. In Matthew, moreover, one finds a great deal of additional double tradition material that, on the 2DH, he must have pulled forward from later sections of Q. 1. Theories of Sermon Origins Not a few interpreters have found these realities difficult to reconcile with a unitary, documentary Q, which would seem to require, in Streeter’s words, ‘an almost incredible amount of editorial freedom in rewriting portions of the original’.1 If reluctant to abandon the 2DH, they posit two editions of Q, assign non-Q literary origins to the Sermon, or like Streeter disperse ‘Q’ into oral tradition and written sources. Dunn, in accord with the prominence he gives close verbal agreement in establishing literary dependency, leans toward assigning the Sermons their provenance in oral tradition, shared order notwithstanding. The Sermons are enactments of a ‘shared collection of material in the teaching resources of many early churches’ that had a ‘grouping…regular and firm – a standard repertoire for teachers’.2 Here Dunn revives what Streeter described as ‘the hypothesis of a summary of Christian teaching…current in oral tradition in more than one form [that] has often been invoked to account for the combined 1. Streeter, Four Gospels, p. 250. 2. Dunn, ‘Q1 as Oral Tradition’, p. 53.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

185

phenomenon of resemblance and difference between the versions of the Great Sermon in Matthew and in Luke’.3 The difficulty is that while Dunn locates the proximate origins of the Sermons in orality owing to their high levels of variation, he posits for this oral collection some overall fixation in order. It seems odd that a common order should be maintained where there is little concern to preserve the wording and even content of the materials themselves, especially given that hortatory materials do not stand in any necessary relationship to one another. It is particularly inexplicable that the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant (Mt. 8.5-13/Lk. 7.1-10) should follow directly upon the Two Builders (Mt. 7.24-27/Lk. 6.47-49), since the former falls outside of the Sermon.4 Their catchword and motif connections are not of the sort that could fix the sequence in multi-locale oral transmission. Streeter resolves this difficulty in his typical way – by invoking two documents: ‘The difficulty disappears if…we suppose that Matthew had before him two documents, Q which contained both the Sermon on the Plain and the Centurion’s Servant, and M which gave a substantially different version of the Sermon, but did not include the Centurion’s Servant’.5 The QMt. and QLk. expedient resolves the variation in the two Sermons into two written sources. ‘The variations between Mt 7.9-10 and Lk 11.11-12’, Davies and Allison argue, ‘are inscrutable unless one postulates that the two evangelists had slightly different sources before their eyes; that is, redactional contributions do not suffice to explain either Mt 7.9-10 or Lk 11.11-12 on the assumption… that both depend upon the exact same source (Q)’.6 This proliferation of ad hoc utilization hypotheses around the Sermon on the Mount (SM) shows the problem it poses for the 2DH. Source-critical uncertainty is echoed in uncertainty about the history of the SM itself. One tendency is to see the Sermon as the product of an extended tradition history. To account for what in his view is ‘the chaotic Q sequence in the second half of the Sermon’, Robinson falls back on an uncontrolled history of layering and interpolation analogous to the formcritical account of the Synoptic tradition itself.7 H.-T. Wrege alleges a tension between the ‘Erfüllungsdenken’ of the Matthean testimonia and 3. Streeter, Four Gospels, p. 252. 4. ‘The hypothesis of a summary of Christian teaching current in oral tradition in more than one form…goes shipwreck’ on this detail (Streeter, Four Gospels, pp. 252–3). Dunn appeals weakly to Dodd’s ‘kerygma sequencing of the tradition’ to account for the Centurion pericope (‘Altering the Default Setting’, p. 174). 5. Streeter, Four Gospels, p. 253. 6. Davies and Allison, Matthew I–VII, p. 667. 7. Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 137.

186

Q in Matthew

the Torah ‘Aufhebung’ of the Antitheses and attributes the latter to ‘ein vormatthäisches Stadium der Überlieferung’.8 Lambrecht asks, ‘Does not the Matthean text witness to a slow evolution so that different stages may be distinguished in the history of the tradition?’ He sees this tradition history as Matthew bringing together and combining Q and Sondergut traditions, elements of the latter perhaps already combined into sources, while remaining impressed by indications of a ‘somewhat more complex transmission history’.9 H.-D. Betz, believing that the divergences between the two Sermons require a tradition-history explanation, argues that Matthew took over the SM from QMt., and that it was the work of more than one ‘preSynoptic’ redactor.10 It has proved impossible, however, to distinguish the redaction of the pre-Matthean Sermon from the redaction of the Evangelist.11 This and other tradition-history and redaction-history scenarios for the origins of the Sermon typically have difficulty explaining the Sermon’s coherent fit with the Gospel.12 Conspicuously absent is any reckoning with source-utilization factors in Matthew’s shaping of the SM. Lurking here is the assumption that Q is unformed ‘tradition’ that Matthew ‘redacts’ and orders. Many would not go so far as Hagner does and declare that ‘the sermon consists of an arbitrary gathering of ethical materials available to the evangelist’,13 but Hagner’s view is not an outlier. Matthew, says Guelich, ‘has considerably changed the extent and profile of the Sermon tradition… With this extensive modification of the underlying Sermon tradition arises the natural question about Matthew’s organizing principle or principles.’14 Bornkamm regards Q as ‘Spruchgut’, and Matthew as having carried out an ‘Aus- und Umgestaltung der Tradition’.15 According to Broer, it has 8. Hans-Theo Wrege, Die Überlieferungsgeschichte der Bergpredigt (WUNT 9; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1968), pp. 2–3. 9. Jan Lambrecht, The Sermon on the Mount: Proclamation and Exhortation (GNS 14; Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985), p. 38. 10. Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, including the Sermon on the Plain (Matthew 5.3–7.27 and Luke 6.20–29) (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), pp. 43–5. 11. Luz, Matthew 1–7, p. 213 n. 4; Graham N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), p. 295. 12. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 164. 13. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, p. 84. 14. Robert A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco: Word, 1982), p. 36. 15. Günther Bornkamm, ‘Der Aufbau der Bergpredigt’, NTS 24 (1978), pp. 419–32 (422). On the other hand, Bornkamm describes Q materials as ‘die vorgegebene Spruchkomposition’, and he considers ‘die Möglichkeit vormatthïscher Redaktion’.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

187

proven difficult to identify the unifying theme of the SM because ‘Mt hier ganz unterschiedliches Material, das auch unterschiedlichen Situationen der Entstehungsgemeinde entstammt, verarbeitet’.16 Quoting Fitzmyer to the effect that the sayings between Mt. 6.19–7.27 are ‘loosely related’, and Stanton that Mt. 6.19–7.11 ‘seems to be a “ragbag” of sayings’, Mark Goodacre suggests that the first interpreter to have had difficulty seeing coherence in the Sermon was Luke himself, who accordingly moved many SM materials to other locations in his Gospel and gave them his own organization.17 Allison argues that Matthew organizes the Sermon in a hierarchy of triads, but he makes no correlation to Matthew’s sourceutilization.18 Numerous commentators confuse analysis of the ‘organization’ or ‘structure’ of the SM with its thematic progression, working out the latter to impressive two- or three-level homiletic outlines. One finds little interest in source utilization procedures, at most gestures made towards the origins of the Sermon in amorphous traditions, a descriptor explicitly or implicitly applied to Q itself.19

16. Ingo Broer, ‘Die Antithesen der Bergpredigt: Ihre Bedeutung und Funktion für die Gemeinde Matthäus’, BK 48 (1993), pp. 128–33 (128 n. 2). 17. Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 99–100, citing Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, p. 629, and Stanton, Gospel for a New People, p. 289. Goodacre can be forgiven for putting a bit of FGH spin on these quotations. In context Fitzmyer actually has just described the SM as ‘relatively well-constructed’ with a simple order, and Luke’s Sermon as ‘loose and rambling’ with a number of its sayings ‘only loosely related’ to its topics (pp. 628–9). Stanton with his ‘ “rag-bag” of sayings’ characterization is not expressing his own opinion, and indeed points to progress on the problem of the SM’s coherence made by Bornkamm and others. 18. Dale C. Allison, ‘The Structure of the Sermon on the Mount’, JBL 106 (1987), pp. 423–5 (438–9); similarly Hubert Frankemölle, Matthäus Kommentar I (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1994), p. 284. Allison counts multiples of 3 (9 Beatitudes; 6 Antitheses) as triadic structures, and he is unable to accommodate 6.25-34 and 7.11, which he labels ‘appended words of encouragement’. It is hard to go along with his division of 7.1-2/2-5/6 into a triad. 19. See Wiefel’s helpful survey of Matthean scholarship, ‘Die Arbeit am Matthäus­ evangelium in den letzten Jahrzehnten’, in Evangelium nach Matthäus, pp. 14–22: form and redaction criticism dominate in the 1950s–60s, along with interest in Matthew’s theology, Scripture interpretation, and the like. Ethical concerns move to the fore in the 1970s–80s, in connection with ethics and justice debates in Europe and elsewhere. To this we can add that the view of some that redaction criticism somehow supersedes source criticism likely has an effect.

188

Q in Matthew

The most fruitful attempt to explain the redaction of the SM is Bornkamm’s proposal that Matthew correlates the diverse materials in 6.19–7.11 to the sequence of petitions of the Our Father (6.9-13). The three-part sequence 6.19-24 (Treasures in Heaven; Eye Light of the Body; God and Mammon), he argues, is determined by the first three petitions of the Prayer: the concluding phrase of the third petition, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς, is echoed in the θησαυρὸς ἐπὶ γῆς/ἐν οὐρανῷ in 6.19, and the God and Mammon saying (6.24) reflects the orientation of the first three petitions to God. The next unit, Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34), correlates to the fourth petition, for daily bread, and the next, Judge Not (7.1-5), to the fifth petition’s plea for forgiveness ‘as we forgive our debtors’. Pearls Before Swine (7.6) spells out the consequences of disobedience and thus identifies the evil from which the last petition seeks deliverance. The last unit in the sequence, Ask Seek Knock (7.7-11), does not correlate to a petition but in its opening αἰτεῖτε and its concluding τοῖς αἰτοῦσιν αὐτόν to the αἰτῆσαι αὐτόν of the M prayer instruction 6.8.20 Bornkamm recognizes Matthew’s redactional hand at work in the organization of these materials and that the Prayer is a leading factor in the arrangement. But his is not a sufficient account of the sequence, nor will any account that relies solely on redaction-criticism. Treasures in Heaven/ Treasures on Earth (6.19-21) has no motif connection to any petition of the Prayer, notwithstanding its certainly redactional echoing of the third petition’s ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς. Instead it seems to look back to the Almsgiving M unit (6.1-4). Its intimate connection to the Eye the Lamp of the Body (6.22-23) is difficult to explain on the basis of the Prayer.21 Bornkamm’s association of Pearls Before Swine (7.6) to the last petition is strained. He acknowledges that Ask Seek Knock/Child’s Request for Food (7.7-11) has no connection to any petition, and that its αἰτεῖτε/τοῖς αἰτοῦσιν ἀυτόν motif corresponds not to the Prayer but to the M unit that prefaces it (6.7-8). As Syreeni observes in his critique, the M cult piety units seem to be playing a big role in the placement of the Prayer.22 Bornkamm 20. Bornkamm, ‘Aufbau’, pp. 426–30. 21. The three units in the 6.19-24 sequence correlate only broadly to the first three petitions, but the 7.1-6 units correlate in turn to each one of the last three petitions. As Allison points out, this casts in doubt on Bornkamm’s claim that the petitions are the major factor in the collocation of the material (‘Structure’, p. 426); similarly Frankemölle, while agreeing that the themes of the Prayer are programmatic for the Sermon (Kommentar I, p. 285). 22. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, pp. 172–3. Bornkamm is forced to assert, despite its placement in the cult piety M units, that the Our Father ‘ein deutliches Eigengewicht erhalten hat und sich darum auch nicht mehr einfach unter die Überschrift: “Gebt acht

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

189

acknowledges, moreover, that his proposal does not account for the first half of the Sermon or for the Sermon’s concluding sequences.23 2. Matthew’s Source Strategy in the Sermon on the Mount: Summary In short, there must be additional factors at work in the arrangement of the SM. We will argue that these are source-utilization factors. These are not to be placed in opposition to redaction-critical factors. Rather, Matthew will emerge as a redactional opportunist, seizing on ways of combining his sources such that his leading theological and didactic concerns are brought to expression. Matthew’s source utilization becomes intelligible when analyzed in the framework of ancient scribal practices. Matthew takes over the topoi sequence of the Q Sermon and makes it foundational for his Sermon while augmenting it with topoi of his own. These topoi activate and guide the appropriation of materials from elsewhere in Q. Each Matthean topos enables search and location operations in his Q source, itself a topos-organized work. Consistently with this search protocol, the Q deliberative sequences are reproduced in Matthew’s topoi sequences mostly in their relative order. Moreover, with some exceptions Matthew does not alter order within these sequences of Q materials. That their retrieval is memory-based is corroborated by the integration of Q units into the Matthean settings as integral cognitive units, which is to say that one sees no true micro-conflation of Q materials with Markan or M materials. The difficulties associated with coordinating two scrolls is here a contributing factor as well.24 Variation arises because memory-supported source appropriation is not a rote but performative mode, sensitive to the exigencies of the impinging social context and the stylistic habits of the scribe. One must also reckon with the need to redact source materials to fit the didactic context of the SM and to ensure coherent joints with materials from other sources or with other Matthean materials. Much more is at work, however, than just redactional expansion of the Q Sermon owing to Matthew’s theological and ethical preoccupations. The Q units that Matthew pulls forward into his Sermon for the most part are materials without obvious ‘pegs’ in the subsequent Markan narrative sequence. It follows that Matthew must address this problem – crucial auf eure Gerechtigkeit” (6.1) rücken läßt’ (‘Aufbau’, p. 426). In other words, he must weaken the connection of the Prayer to the leading Matthean redactional motif of the Sermon. 23. Bornkamm, ‘Aufbau’, pp. 430–1; see Betz, Commentary, p. 48. 24. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 257–8.

190

Q in Matthew

to the coherent combination of his two sources – near the beginning of his Gospel, that is, before advancing very far into the Markan sequence. He manages this by expanding the Q Sermon, which occurs early in that source, with topoi designed to pull forward later Q materials difficult to correlate topically with the still-to-be-traversed Markan narrative sequence. In short, Matthew’s collocation of double tradition into his Sermon is part of a comprehensive strategy for solving the technical problem of combining two sources coherently into a new work.25 3. Source-Utilization in Sermon on the Mount: Analysis Though the two strands of analysis are in the end impossible to separate from each other, the focus in what follows will be on scribal source-utilization strategies rather than interpretation of the Sermon, for which there is a rich scholarly tradition. a. Beatitudes (Matthew 5.3-12/Luke 6.20b-23) The shared Matthean and Lukan Beatitudes look like oral variants. More­ over, Matthew has nine beatitudes to Luke’s four. Those who question the documentary model for the double tradition therefore point to the Beatitudes as prima facie evidence. Behind these criticisms is the printliteracy assumption that written source utilization is a matter of copying with some narrow margin for editorial modification. Hence Bergemann declares that these ‘aufallend große Abweichungen’ cannot be solely of ‘redaktionelle Herkunft’,26 and Dunn posits different editions of the Sermon.27 Streeter thinks that these are different oral versions of the Beatitudes, since their divergence ‘is not plausibly explained as the result of editorial modification of a written source’.28 Scribal transmission and cultivation of a written tradition, however, can encompass the patterns of variation in the Beatitudes. Three of the four double tradition Beatitudes (‘Blessed are the poor’; ‘Blessed are the 25. That Matthew’s pulling of Q materials forward into the Sermon (and the Commissioning) is a practical strategy for efficient combination of his two sources was recognized by Streeter (Four Gospels, pp. xvi–xvii; see also Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, pp. 209–10). 26. Bergemann, Q auf dem Prüfstand, p. 98. 27. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 233 n. 253. 28. Streeter, Four Gospels, p. 250. Streeter assesses the ‘Lord, Lord’ and the Non-retaliation/Love Enemies pericopes similarly: ‘Indeed, there are only two con­siderable passages…Judge not…and the House on the Sand…which can, without postulating a good deal of editorial modification, be explained as being entirely derived from a single common written source’ (p. 251).

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

191

hungry’; ‘Blessed are the abused/hated’) appear in common relative order. The ‘mourn/weep…comforted/laugh’ (Mt. 5.4/Lk. 6.21b) Beatitude has been transposed, likely because it follows better upon Matthew’s ‘poor in spirit’ than the πεινῶντες Beatitude. Further, the first (‘Blessed the poor’) and the fourth (‘Blessed the abused/hated’) Q Beatitudes serve as the framework units in both the Lukan and Matthean Beatitude sequences. It is perhaps not impossible to conceive this core sequence being sustained in oral transmission in different tradent communities. However plausible one may judge that to be, it is helpful to recollect that in manuscript culture the boundary between written and oral transmission was indistinct. Scribes with the requisite training cultivated written works as performative traditions. The history of the Q Sermon’s enactments in the Matthean community would have fed back into its manuscript transmission, with the Sermon continuing to act as the enabling script. It is not difficult to see how the Beatitudes might come to display variation, given their transmission in two different communities, while at the same time sustaining agreements in sequence that suggest written mediation. Nevertheless there is quite a bit more to it than that. Matthew is engaged in a meditated act of redaction, under the aegis of Matthean redactional motifs, not just woodenly registering changes that may have accumulated in the course of the cultivation of the source in the Matthean community. Redactional intent is evident in the fact that the M Beatitudes anticipate distinctively Matthean Sermon topoi, that is, topoi Matthew himself will fashion out of M, Q, and on occasion Markan materials. These Matthean topoi are constituted of Q materials that are either not elements of the original Q Sermon, or Q Sermon topoi reworked by Matthew to align them with his redactional concerns, notably On Retaliation (5.38-42) and Love of Enemies (5.43-48), which Matthew has worked up from the Q Love of Enemies sequence (Q 6.27-36; see below). The first M Beatitude, μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, Goulder points out, associatively invokes the simple trust and liberality that Psalm 37 predicates of the πραῦς and thus anticipates the leading ethical motifs in Matthew’s entire second course of topoi (6.19–7.11).29 With the exception of 7.1-5 (Judge Not), the latter is a sequence consisting of materials Matthew brings into the Sermon from elsewhere in Q. ‘Blessed are the merciful/ἐλεήμονες’ anticipates the Almsgiving/ἐλεημοσύνη M cultpiety unit (6.2-4),30 though naturally Judge Not (7.1-5) would also come under its purview. The third M Beatitude, μακάριοι οἱ καθαροὶ τῇ καρδίᾳ, 29. Michael D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974), pp. 263–4. Goulder offers a fine analysis of how the M Beatitudes correlate to SM topoi. 30. Ibid., pp. 260–1.

192

Q in Matthew

ὅτι αὐτοὶ τὸν θεὸν ὄψονται, anticipates the uniquely Matthean correlation of ethical purity with the Eye metaphor in the Adultery/Divorce Antitheses (5.27-32) and the Treasures/Eye Lamp of the Body/God and Mammon sequence (6.19-24). All these are Q (on a rare occasion Markan) materials that Matthew has pulled forward into the baseline Q Sermon. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ anticipates the Antitheses on Reconciliation (5.21-26), Non-retaliation (5.38-42), and Love of Enemies (5.43-48). The ὅτι αὐτοὶ υἱοὶ θεοῦ κληθήσονται that the seventh Beatitude predicates of οἱ εἰρηνοποιοί correlates to the emphatic second position Matthew will give ὅπως γένησθε υἱοὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς in his re-ordering of the Q Love Your Enemies sequence in the last Antithesis. ‘Blessed are the persecuted (δεδιωγμένοι)’ resurfaces in the Matthean rendering of Love Your Enemies: προσεύχεσθε ὑπὲρ τῶν διωκόντων ὑμᾶς (5.44). In other words, Matthew fashions M Beatitudes out of the normative tradition transmitted by his sources. He invents – in the sense of inventio – the M Beatitudes from memoria, that is, from his competence in the Q and Markan tradition as well as in the Jewish cultural tradition and its genres.31 In contrast to the Q Beatitudes, therefore, the M Beatitudes conspicuously correlate to Matthean aspects of the SM. In Q, with the exception of the last Beatitude (μακάριοί ἐστε ὅταν μισήσωσιν ὑμᾶς οἱ ἄνθρωποι), which has the function of seguing to Love Your Enemies (Q 6.27-36), the Beatitudes do not correlate to any specific topos in the Q Sermon. Rather, their horizon is the Q materials more broadly. The Q Beatitudes’ programmatic wideness makes complete sense for Q, an instructional work from beginning to end. Matthew, on the other hand, has pulled a great deal of this later Q material forward into the SM, adapting the remainder through Markan ‘pegs’ to the Markan narrative. The Sermon on the Mount constitutes Matthew’s programmatic collection of Jesus’ ethical teaching. Congruently with this redactional shift, the M Beatitudes not only correlate internally to specific SM topoi, but even more precisely, to topoi that owe much to Matthean compositional activity, in particular the Antitheses and the Matthean configurations of Q materials pulled forward into the Sermon. The expanded Q/M Beatitude sequence in the SM is therefore the product, not of a contingent tradition history, but of a premeditated scribal enterprise that has brought the SM as such into existence.32 The 31. ‘[T]he Beatitude form has its most obvious model in the Psalter (cf. Ps. 119.1,2), and the Matthaean additional Beatitudes have their roots in such psalms as 24, 34, and 37’ (Michael D. Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm, vol. 2 [JSNTSup 20; Sheffield: JSOT, 1989], p. 357). 32. See Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, pp. 163–4.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

193

Q Beatitude sequence supplies the base structure that accommodates M Beatitudes, analogously to how the macro-sequence of the Q Sermon supplies the infrastructure for the supplementary Matthean topoi. b. Salt of the Earth; Light of the World (5.13-16) These two units constitute a unified topos on doing good works (καλὰ ἔργα), the first Matthean topos in the SM. They form an apt preface the Law topos (5.17-20) and the specific moral topoi that follow. Though both sayings have Markan parallels (Mk 9.49-50; Mk 4.21), Matthew has fashioned the sequence from the Salt saying in Q 14.34-35 and the Light saying in Q 11.33, prefacing the latter with M material. There is no micro-conflation (meditated combination of elements from both versions) with the Mark parallels. Nothing in Matthew’s Salt saying is distinctive to the Markan version except ἁλισθήσεται where Luke has ἀρτυθέσεται.33 Similarly for Q 11.33: it is possible Matthew has incorporated the ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον of Mk 4.21 into his version of the saying (compare Luke’s εἰς κρύπτην) that otherwise in its syntactic and semantic patterns conforms to the distinctives of the Lukan parallel. The Q sayings have been reproduced in their syntactically articulated form as cognitive units, with transformations and substitutions occurring largely within the shared structural and semantic framework. For source-utilization what is entailed? It is unlikely Matthew has scrolled ahead to Q 14 to pick out a single saying visually, copy it imperfectly, then back to Q 11 to copy another sloppily (then ahead to Q 16 for his following topos on the Law), much less coordinated these movements with side consultations with Mark 9 and then Mark 4. Rather, his topos conception guides his access to Q, itself a topoi-controlled, memory-based source, for the sayings for this sequence. The M saying, ὑμεῖς ἐστε τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου; οὐ δύναται πόλις κρυβῆναι ἐπάνω ὄρους κειμένη, is drawn from Matthew’s wider competence in the tradition associatively cued by the motifs οὐδεῖς...εἰς κρύπτην and φῶς of Q 11.33, or it is worked up for the topos in a bricolage combining these Q-saying motifs with other traditional elements. This gives Matthew the elements of this short sequence, 33. The CEQ judges ἀρτυθέσεται to be the Q reading (p. 458). Matthew’s ἁλισθή­ σεται suggests a reminiscence of Mark, whose opening phrase πᾶς γὰρ ἁλισθήσεται in Mk 9.49 is absent from the Matthean and Lukan versions, or he might just be increasing the parallelism with τὸ ἅλας in the first part of the clause. Matthew and Luke agree against Mark in their final clause and in lacking Mark’s final clause; also in μωρανθῇ and the passive form of ἁλισθήσεται/ἀργυθήσεται. In short, they agree in the major syntactic and structural divergences from the Markan saying. Matthew passes over both sayings when he comes to Mk 4 and Mk 9.

194

Q in Matthew

which he brings to its deliberative point with οὕτως λαμψάτω τὸ φῶς ὑμῶν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ὅπως ἴδωσιν ὑμῶν τὰ καλὰ ἔργα. The Q sayings are reproduced as whole cognitive units, accordantly with memory-based activation. This accounts for the absence of micro-conflation with the Markan parallels, which would require side-by-side comparison of the sources. The variation between the Matthew and Luke versions of the Q sayings is not because memory retrieval is unreliable. Memory was not a rote but a performative competence; it permitted the adaptation of sayings to new redactional and didactic settings. c. Endurance of the Law (5.17-20) The double tradition element in this topos is Q 16.17. The parallels share the operational words: ‘the law’, ‘heaven and earth’, ‘pass away’, ‘one serif’, as well as (with different usage) the conjunction ἤ. Luke’s version uses the infinitive form παρελθεῖν, Matthew’s the subjunctive παρέλθῃ. In Luke the saying is self-contained, in a series beginning with the John the Baptist/Kingdom and Violence saying (16.16) and ending in the Divorce saying (16.18), whereas in Matthew it is integrated into the compositional setting (5.17-20). The serialized Q sayings in which this saying is found (Q 16.16-18) are unified – as is Mt. 5.17-20 – around the topos of ‘the Law’. In their juxtaposition the two sayings Q 16.16-17, again like the Matthean topos, treat the question of the enduring validity of the Law in light of the change in epochs marked by the advent of the Kingdom of God. Arguably the Q topos begins with 16.13, God or Mammon (vv. 14-15 being Luke’s interpolation). The explicit Law sayings (16.16-17), that is, are framed by a saying against avarice (16.13) and a saying against divorce and adultery (16.18). In Jewish paraenesis idolatry, greed (covetousness), and immorality were the three cardinal vices that stood contrary to the Law.34 The Mammon saying Q 16.13 treats avarice and idolatry in combination, and the Divorce saying references adultery while engaging a crux Torah-interpretation debate, one that Syreeni points out epitomizes Jesus’ distinctive approach to the Law.35 The sequence Q 16.13, 16-18 incorporates both the horizontal axis and the vertical axis of the covenant: do 34. Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese (WUNT 2/28; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987), pp. 63, 107. Johannes Thomas points out the centrality of the triad εἰδωλατρία, πορνεία, πλεονεξία to Jewish paraenesis (Der jüdische Phokylides: Formgeschichtliche Zugänge zu Pseudo-Phokylides und Vergleich mit der neutestamentlichen Paränese [NTOA 23; Freiburg: Universitäts Verlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992], p. 92). 35. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 193.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

195

not covet (Mammon; your neighbor’s wife); worship God alone (God vs. mammon). Thus it is a conventional paraenesis: a coherent sequence of four sayings setting out the enduring validity of the Law and referencing the three cardinal vices addressed by the Law.36 While taking over the whole sequence, Luke exploits only the Mammon saying (Unrighteous Steward; Avaricious Pharisees; Rich Man and Lazarus), leaving the other elements of the cluster unassimilated to the Lukan context. This confirms that we have here a coherent Q topos.37 There are clear indications Matthew has visited this Q topos – moving forward to the Q Law topos and then successively utilizing its constituent sayings. Q 16.17, on the enduring validity of the Law, provides the integrating saying (Mt. 5.18) for the Matthean topos composition. That Matthew has moved forward in Q to the Law topos and then, having found this cognitive ‘address’, down in sequence through Q 16.16 to retrieve the Q 16.17 saying is suggested by the presence of the phrase τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας in Mt. 5.17, that is, by the surfacing of ‘the Prophets’ in a Matthean topos composition. The equivalent ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται occurs in Q 16.16, appropriately since the saying references John the Baptist. But ‘the Prophets’ plays no further role in Matthew’s topos, which is singularly focused on the Law, in preparation for the Antitheses.38 Of course, the presence of τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας in Q 16.16 is hardly required to explain its occurrence in Mt. 5.17, since it forms the first member of the inclusio with ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται in Mt. 7.12. Nevertheless it is notable that Matthew shortly returns to pick up Q 16.18 (Divorce and Adultery) for his second Antithesis (Mt. 5.32) and Q 16.13 (God or Mammon) for a subsequent Sermon topos (Mt. 6.24). This evinces not only a recognition of the paraenetic coherence of the Q topos and use of it to navigate the source, but also a corresponding concern to use up its constituent sayings systematically, so far as these can be fitted to the redactional concerns of the Sermon. The Q topos, that is, influences Matthew’s utilization actions.39

36. Luz concludes that Q 16.16-18 is a ‘small Q-block’, though he does not perceive the coherence of the Mammon saying (16.13) with these sayings on the Law (‘Looking at Q’, p. 575). 37. This is informative, incidentally, for Luke’s Q-utilization: taking over Q in sequence even when he is not able to manage its complete integration. 38. Matthew in fact picks up Q 16.17 in his treatment of John the Baptist in Mt. 11.12-13, integrating it into the Q 7 Baptist material he takes over there. 39. ‘The Q section as a whole provided Matthew with an ideational and linear model’ (Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 194).

196

Q in Matthew

M materials (Mt. 5.17, 19-20) supplement the core Q saying to make a coherent M topos. Whether adapted from the wider oral-traditional repertoire or fashioned out of traditional motifs (both fall within scribal competence),40 the M sayings owe much to Matthew’s redactional interests in the Sermon. They center upon ἡ δικαιοσύνη, and in their theme and form of expression they anticipate the Antitheses. Variation in Matthew’s rendering of the Q saying vis-à-vis Luke’s version is from Matthew’s shaping it to this new redactional context and, by extension, from the exigencies that have induced him to mobilize the tradition in this new scribal enterprise. d. Murder, Anger, and Reconciliation (5.21-26) This Matthean topos comprises three units that form a unified deliberative argument. The first unit (5.21-22), the Antithesis proper, condemns anger towards and degradation of others as morally equivalent to the crime of murder singled out by the Law. Verse 22b is focused on degrading speech (ῥακά, μωρέ), v. 22a on πᾶς ὁ ὀργιζόμενος τῷ ἀδελφῷ, but they constitute a single unit connected by ἔνοχος…ἔνοχος…ἔνοχος and the forensic coloring of the whole. The backdrop of the second unit (5.23-24) is cultic, making acceptance of one’s gifts by God conditional upon reconciliation with ὁ ἀδελφός. The topos moves, in other words, from identification of the moral problem to its rectification: reconciliation. Verses 25-26, the Q unit (12.5859), with its ‘make friends with your opponent’ (εὐνοῶν τῷ ἀντιδίκῳ) admonition, sustains the deliberative focus of the topos by urging on prudential grounds restoration of relationships broken by conflict. It is the reconciliation element of Q 12.58-59 that attracts it to this Matthean topos. Moreover, Matthew’s Antithesis saying (5.21-22) and the Q unit both feature forensic settings (ἔνοχος ἔσται τῇ κρίσει.../παραδῷ [ὁ ἀντίδοκος] τῷ κριτῇ). But in re-situating the Q saying Matthew has redirected its deliberative focus. In Q it is the final element in the sequence 12.49, 51, 53, 54-56, 58-59, which coheres around the sapiential topos of discerning the times and taking correspondingly prudent action. The earlier units of the Q sequence identify the present as the crisis time of impending eschatological judgment. Q 12.58-59 is a prudential maxim that counsels settling with one’s opponent before the action gets to court to escape the catastrophic effects of a contrary judgment. The Q topos harnesses its prudential force to urge seizing the brief opportunity for repentance before 40. ‘If Matthew had not received a fixed logion, he nonetheless had to work on existing language material and use available techniques in creating 5,17’ (Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 175).

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

197

eschatological judgment.41 In Matthew’s contextualization, however, its sapiential logic supports the exhortation to reconciled relationships, which is part of a broader program of ethical formation (eschatologically grounded, to be sure). Accordingly, and at the cost of introducing some tension with the saying’s focus on a debt action, Matthew has redacted its original pragmatic concern to ‘settle with; be released from’ (ἀπηλλάχθαι ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ) into an admonition to ‘get on friendly terms with’ (εὐνοῶν τῷ ἀντιδίκῳ σου) one’s opponent and promoted the latter phrase to the lead position in the saying. This shifts emphasis away from the impending judgment, which has first position in the Q saying, putting it instead upon the relationship between the contending parties.42 Other variations in the parallels are not so consequential as to suggest conscious redaction or even paraphrase of the source. They are variants of the kind that might arise from the generation of the saying out of memory in a media environment of blurred boundaries between oral and written enactment – substitution of synonyms, alterations in word order, in mood and voice of verbs, and the like.43 The history of the M units cannot be determined, though the antithetical structure of the first unit (5.21-22) points to Matthew’s scribal competence in composing out of traditional motifs and materials. e. On Adultery (5.27-30) This short topos connects the M Antithesis saying with the Scandals saying of Mk 9.43-48. In Mark the saying is found in a loosely aggregated sequence of paraenesis cohering around the theme of community relations (9.33-50), and culminating in Mark’s version of the ‘Salt’ saying (9.49-50). Mark signals the paraenetic unity of vv. 33-50 in their concluding element: καὶ εἰρηνεύετε ἐν ἀλλήλοις, which closes an inclusio with the opening unit on disputes among the disciples over rank (9.33-37). It also sums up the paraenetic arc of the cluster: the first unit on competition over rank, the second on factional competition (9.38-40, 41), and third on offenses against others in the community (9.42). To this is attached, through the 41. For analysis see Kirk, Composition, pp. 235–40; also Kloppenborg, Formation, pp. 152–3. 42. Εὐνοῶν can appear in contracts and treaties but it is less fitting for debt actions. Sarah Rollens shows how Matthew’s switch in figure from ‘accuser’ to ‘brother’ creates tension with the saying’s court-action metaphor (‘ “Why Do You Not Judge for Yourselves What Is Right?” A Consideration of the Synoptic Relationship Between Mt 5,25-26 and Lk 12,57-59’, ETL 84 [2010], pp. 449–69 [451–3]). 43. In the CEQ’s judgment, in a number of these variants Matthew more closely reflects the prior Q version (pp. 394–5).

198

Q in Matthew

catchword σκανδαλίζῃ, the ‘scandals’ saying on one’s hands, feet, and eyes being the causes of stumbling (9.43-47). Matthew has brought this latter saying into a topos composition on adultery, narrowing its deliberative focus to sexual temptation. His associative cue for the Markan saying is not just its suitability for the adultery topos, but also the motif connection of πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα in the Antithesis with the εἰ δὲ ὁ ὀφθαλμός of the saying, with εἰς φυλακὴν βληθήσῃ of the preceding passage (Mt. 5.25) and the repeated βληθῆναι εἰς τὴν γέενναν of Mk 9.45, 47 perhaps also a factor. For its new deliberative context of sexual temptation, where it follows directly upon ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα of the M Antithesis, Matthew has transposed the ὀφθαλμός clause from final to first position and eliminated the πούς clause from the Markan triad χείρ, πούς, ὀφθαλμός altogether. These are simple maneuvers requiring no micro editing, since the constituent clauses of the tripartite Markan saying are structurally identical and interchangeable. The incorporation of ἓν τῶν μελῶν σου and ὅλον τὸ σῶμα σου likewise serves the deliberative shift to sexual temptation and produces the differences between the Matthean and Markan final clauses. Matthew’s ἔξελε αὐτόν καὶ βάλε...ἔκκοψον αὐτὴν καὶ βάλε ἀπὸ σοῦ are inconsequential, likely stylistic variations on Mark’s ἔκβαλε αὐτόν...ἀπόκοψον αὐτήν (see Mt. 18.8-9), increasing the parallelism and perhaps heightening the dramatic effect. In sum, Matthew reenacts the Markan saying in a way that shapes it for the new didactic context and leaves on it the individual impress of his style. f. On Divorce (5.31-32) These verses actually form the second part of the Adultery Antithesis that begins in 5.27-28. Matthew introduces the Q Divorce saying (Q 16.18) with a resumptive ἐρρέθη δέ κτλ. (Mt. 5.31a). Here he returns to the Q topos on the Law (16.13, 16-18) from which he had just appropriated Q 16.17 for his topos on the endurance of the Law (Mt. 5.17-20). He continues to distribute sayings from the Q 16.13, 16-18 sequence among his Sermon topoi, two in this topoi sequence on the Law. The Divorce saying is fittingly connected to the preceding Adultery saying not just by thematic congruence but also lexically by μοιχεύσεις (5.27), ἐμοίχευσεν (5.28), μοιχευθῆναι (5.32), μοιχᾶται (5.32). The M οὐ μοιχεύσεις Antithesis, in other words, serves to coordinate the Mark and Q sayings. Though ὃς ἂν ἀπολύσῃ (Mt. 5.31) echoes Mk 10.11 (ὃς ἂν ἀπολύσῃ), Matthew does not conflate the Q divorce saying with the Markan, which he picks up in Matthew 19 when he reaches that point in the Markan narrative. Other than the possible substitution of μοιχᾶται (see Mk 10.12) for what the CEQ deems Q’s μοιχεύσει in the final line, Mt. 5.32 does not display

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

199

anything distinctive of the Markan version. Matthew generates the Q saying as it would have been grounded and habituated in memory: as a cognitive unit that has developed variations in the course of its cultivation in the Matthean community. In sum, Matthew’s topos conception guides his discovery and collocation of fitting sayings from his two sources: the Scandals saying from Mark 4, and the Divorce saying from Q 16. These he shapes to his own deliberative context. g. On Oaths (5.33-37) The Oaths Antithesis is put together from Matthew’s own traditional materials and compositional competence; no parallel exists in Q or Mark. Matthew works on the basis of his wider scribal competence in the tradition, integrating the material into his macro Antithesis framework. h. On Retaliation (5.38-42) and Love Enemies (5.43-48) For present purposes these two Antitheses should be analyzed together. Most likely Luke has preserved the original order of a unified Q topos on Love of Enemies (Q 6.27-36), a permutation of the conventional ‘friendship’ and ‘reciprocity’ topos that in its other occurrences in sapiential and gnomological literature often touched on relations with enemies as well.44 Matthew has broken a single Q topos into two Antitheses, in the process somewhat artificially imposing his Antithesis structure upon the materials. This cycling of the topos-organized materials of a source into a modified topoi sequence, already seen in Matthew’s utilization of the Q 16.13, 16-18 Law topos, is well attested in the transmission of ethical materials (see Chapter 2).45 What at first looks like a complicated breaking down and reordering of the elements of the Q Love Your Enemies sequence perhaps seems difficult to reconcile with memory-grounded utilization practices, especially since it is the sequences of a source that support its assimilation to memory and hence ground its utilization. That Matthew here for the first time since the Beatitudes is at his absolute position in Q and therefore may have visual contact with his source is irrelevant. It is a mistake to think that visual engagement was necessary for effective source-utilization and that the ancient composer would turn to it with relief when the opportunity 44. See A. Kirk, ‘ “Love Your Enemies”, the Golden Rule, and Ancient Reciprocity (Luke 6.27–35)’, JBL 122 (2003), pp. 667–86. The CEQ’s presentation of the order of this section reflects the lack of consensus among the editors. 45. The Antonius’s distribution of the sayings of a single topos from the Maximus into four topoi offers a particularly good analogy to Matthew’s procedure here.

200

Q in Matthew

afforded. Though Matthew hardly would have abjured visual contact with his source, is unlikely that he changed utilization modes depending upon his location in Q, which is at any rate belied by the significant variation in these parallels. Is it possible to reconstruct how Matthew, working at the nexus of manuscript, memory, and orality, might have formed the two Antitheses topoi from the single Q topos? His cognate topoi rubrics are the key, each a Torah-dictum foil: the first on non-retaliation (ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ), and the second on love of enemy (ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον). These rubrics guide Matthew’s appropriation of the corresponding materials from the Q topos. For non-retaliation (5.38-42) Matthew picks up the admonitions in Q 6.29-30, with their variation arising from their adaptation to, and perhaps history of oral enactment within, the Matthean social and didactic framework. He reproduces the three admonitions – ῥαπίζει εἰς τὴν δεξιὰν σιαγόνα; τὸν χιτῶνά σου λαβεῖν; τῷ αἰτοῦντί σε δός – in forward sequence and renders the constituent Q elements as single cognitive units with distinct form-critical boundaries vis-à-vis other sayings in the sequence. In other words, his reproduction of these units corresponds to how they would have been activated in memory. The sequence of Q materials in the conjoined Love Your Enemies Antithesis (5.43-48) is: Q 6.27-28; 6.35; 6.32-34; 6.36. Of these, 6.35 appears out of its Q order and 6.31 (Golden Rule) is passed over for the time being. Fashioning this second topos entails traversing the Q sequence twice: starting at the beginning with Q 6.27-28, going forward through the Q sequence to 6.35, then forward again from the beginning to pick up in order Q 6.32-34 and Q 6.36. As with Mt. 5.38-42, Q materials are brought into this Antithesis as integral sayings: one sees no conflation of units, no literary integration of the kind one might expect from close editorial reprocessing of the Q sequence into separate Matthean topoi. Notably, the final clause of Mt. 5.42, τῷ αἰτοῦντί σε δός, καὶ τὸν θέλοντα ἀπὸ σοῦ δανίσασθαι μὴ ἀποστραφῇς, urging unsecured loaning to debtors and unrestricted giving to beggars, stands in tension with the retaliation motif articulated programmatically in the inaugural ὀφθλαλμὸν ἀντὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ καὶ ὀδόντα ἀντὶ ὀδόντος...μὴ ἀντιστῆναι τῷ πονηρῷ (5.38-39) of the Antithesis. This indicates that the M antithesis rubric (5.38-39) is secondary and artificial.46 In contrast, all the admonitions of Mt. 5.38-42 cohere with the reciprocity motif that controls the unitary Lukan sequence (Lk. 6.27-35). The imposition of Matthew’s antithesis structure on the Q materials creates thematic tensions that even splitting the Q sequence up 46. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 138.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

201

into two Antitheses has not eliminated. Similarly, the Q unit on the benefitbestowing God (Q 6.35b), moved forward to a position of prominence in the Matthean Love Your Enemies Antithesis (Mt. 5.45), in that position follows awkwardly as a result clause after ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑμῶν καὶ προσεύχεσθε ὑπὲρ τῶν διωκόντων ὑμᾶς, though it is apt in its final position in the Lukan sequence (6.35), where it follows upon benefit-bestowals (6.33-34). The αὐτοὶ υἱοὶ θεοῦ κληθήσονται of the M Beatitude helps explain why Matthew pulls Q 6.35b (γένησθε υἱοὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν ούρανοῖς) forward to an emphatic position in this Antithesis. The program of Matthew’s Antithesis meta-structure is to connect the Q materials to specific Torah dicta. This is what brings him to break the Q Love Your Enemies sequence into two topoi, creating these inapt juxtapositions. That the latter come into being evinces not only how habituated the Q sequence is to Matthew, but also how much it controls his utilization actions. Matthew 5.48, ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν, marks a caesura, or better, a hinge in the SM. It sums up not only the Love Your Enemies Antithesis but the whole Antitheses sequence. By the same token, with its call to be ‘perfect’, it recapitulates Mt. 5.20 with which the sequence begins: ἐὰν μὴ περισσεύσῃ ὑμῶν ἡ δικαιοσύνη πλεῖον τῶν γραμματέων καὶ Φαρισαίων, οὐ μὴ εἰσέλητε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. On the other hand, it connects forward to the so-called Cult Didache, introduced by: Προσέχετε τὴν δικαιοσύνην ὐμῶν μὴ ποιεῖν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων πρὸς τὸ θεαθῆναι αὐτοῖς (Mt. 6.1). Matthew 5.17-20, on the enduring validity of the Law and the righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees, and Mt. 5.13-16, Salt and Light, culminating in οὕτως λαμψάτω τὸ φῶς ὑμῶν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ὅπως ἴδωσιν ὐμῶν τὰ καλὰ ἔργα (5.16), for their part act as the double rubric for the entire sequence of moral topoi extending down to 7.12 (Golden Rule). The Golden Rule then encapsulates the entire sequence, as underlined by its M conclusion, οὗτος γάρ ἐστιν ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται, which forms an inclusio with 5.17: Μὴ νομίσητε ὅτι ἦλθον καταλῦσαι τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας· οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι ἀλλὰ πληρῶσαι. The point of going over this well-trodden ground is to grasp the intelligibility of Matthew’s topoi sequence, as the key to his utilization of his Q source. The δικαιοσύνη motif and the bracketing motif ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται, along with the latter’s juxtaposition with the Golden Rule, are especially illuminating in this regard. In Jewish antiquity the Golden Rule or its variants epitomized the requirements of the Law and the Prophets.47 47. Klaus Berger, Die Gesetzesauslegung Jesu (WMANT 40; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1972), pp. 133–5; Hans-Peter Mathys, ‘Goldene Regel (Judentum)’, TRE, vol. 13, pp. 570–3; Betz, Commentary, pp. 514–18.

202

Q in Matthew

The ‘Law and the Prophets’ were distilled in the two greatest commandments: love toward neighbor and love toward God (see Mt. 22.25-40). Matthew uses these to organize the long topoi sequence from 5.13 to 7.12.48 The first course of topoi (the Antitheses) coheres around relations with one’s neighbor, and it culminates with explicit citation of ‘You shall love your neighbor’ (Lev. 19.18) in the Love Your Enemies Antithesis. The second topoi sequence, which begins with the so-called Cult Didache and runs through to the ‘Ask and it shall be given you’ sequence (Mt. 7.7-11), coheres around the vertical God/human relationship. Its controlling motif is prayer and the profound trust that is to define this relationship, with the God and Mammon pericope (6.24) explicitly urging undivided loyalty to God. i. Almsgiving (6.1-4) This is the first in a three-unit sequence on Almsgiving (6.1-4), Prayer (6.5-15), and Fasting (6.16-18).49 The Almsgiving instruction is fittingly positioned. It picks up the motif of unconditional giving the final Antithesis has just identified as the basis for renewed human relations (5.45) and – sounding the note for the following units – as emblematic of God’s character (5.48). At the same time, it manages the shift in the topoi sequence from human (5.21-48) to renewed divine–human relationships (6.1–7.11) grounded in God’s own gracious giving. Along with prayer and fasting, almsgiving was regarded as a primary expression of one’s service to God – a surrogate sacrifice with atoning effects (Sir. 3.30; Tob. 4.7-11) and a gift to God (Prov. 19.17) that, as Mt. 6.4 affirms, God would reciprocate (ὁ πατήρ σου...ἀποδώσει σοι). As noted, Almsgiving picks up the theme of generous giving that the fifth and sixth Antitheses had just identified as the grounds for renewed human relationships. This moral convergence of the horizontal and vertical axes of covenant is already signaled in the stipulation of the first Antithesis that the relationship with God, signified in the δῶρον brought to the θυσιαστήριον (5.23-24), is contingent upon reconciled human relationships. The first line, ‘Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be seen by them; otherwise, you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven’ (6.1), serves as the rubric for all three of the Almsgiving, Prayer, and Fasting units.50 The Almsgiving instruction itself unfolds 48. See Goulder, Midrash and Lection, pp. 271–5. 49. ‘Cult Didache’, the label often given to this sequence, smuggles in the notion that this is a distinct source. 50. Frankemölle describes Mt. 6.1 as ‘ein Scharniervers’ that ‘erfüllt rhetorisch die Funktion einer Überschrift zu den nun folgenden antithetischen Beispielen’ (Kommentar I, p. 239).

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

203

in an outer/inner contrastive pattern that is replicated in the Prayer and Fasting instructions, namely, a description of the exclusively outward way of carrying out the cult practice, exemplified by ‘the hypocrites’, counter-posed to which is the acceptable cultic practice that actualizes a truly reciprocal relationship with God. This is a simple permutation of the Antithesis pattern, the distinction being that the Antitheses center on Torah dicta pertaining to human relationships, these on the principal cult practices which, accordingly, are introduced by ὅταν κτλ. The ‘Cult Didache’ is no source: its units are formed on the same redactional pattern as the Antitheses. Correspondingly, the prominence of the pattern in the Sermon as a whole and its programmatic function in many of the topos compositions explains why in each case one is in contact with M material. Matthew composes the Almsgiving topos by weaving almsgiving motifs drawn from the Jewish cultural tradition together with motifs definitive for the deliberative concerns of his Sermon, such as δικαιοσύνη; ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων; μισθός; πάτηρ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς; ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν; ἀποδίδωμι; οἱ ἐλεήμονες, and enacting the whole on the antithetical pattern. j. Prayer (6.5-15) Prayer is the prototypical cult activity. The Prayer sequence maintains the orientation of the second course of topoi to the God-human relationship. To the theatrical but ineffectual prayers of οἱ ὑποκριταί, the first unit (6.5-6) counterposes a sequestered practice of prayer. This conforms to the antithetical pattern, and the origins of this M unit are the same as that of its Almsgiving counterpart. The second M unit (6.7-8) falls into the same antithetical pattern, this time with οἱ ἐθνικοί as foil, who think repetition and proliferation of words obtain a hearing for their prayers. The Matthean supplicants are assured that God anticipates and is ready to act upon their petitions. Thereupon follows the Our Father, which is notable for its simplicity and supplies the ‘righteousness’ antithesis to the morally deficient or even execrable practices just described. Though it is impossible to determine the provenance of all the elements of the two M segments (6.5-8) of this second cult topos, in addition to προσεύχησθε/προσεύχεσθαι/προσεύχῃ/πρόσευξαι/προσευχόμενοι and πατήρ, which come from the Q Prayer, they consist mostly of semantically prominent elements from two of the double tradition instructions that follow in the sequence. The reference to the prayers of οἱ ἐθνικοί and οἶδεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὧν χρείαν ἔχετε (6.7-8) anticipates πάντα ταῦτα τὰ ἔθνη ἐπιζητοῦσιν and οἶδεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὅτι χρῄζετε τούτων ἁπάντων (6.32) in Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34). Aἰτῆσαι (6.8) is attested five times in Ask, Seek,

204

Q in Matthew

Knock (7.7-11).51 As we have seen in other M units that initiate Sermon topoi, this is a case of scribal composition out of traditional elements and formulas, here mostly out of Q tradition. These M Prayer units (6.5-8) signal Matthew’s strategy for collocating Q material in the Sermon, for they map out the second course of his topoi sequence, consisting mostly of Q speeches. The Prayer, as the first Q unit adduced (Mt. 6.9-13), is programmatic for the following deliberative topics, which cohere around the God–human axis. Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34) and Ask, Seek, Knock (7.7-11) are thematically akin to the Prayer and share a number of its motifs (seeking the kingdom; subsistence needs; πατήρ-address). The concluding section of Do Not Be Anxious (6.3233) is an all but explicit urging to prayer. Do Not Be Anxious occupies an intermediate position in the topoi sequence, while Ask, Seek, Knock, with its direct exhortation to prayer, brings it to its climactic conclusion. The correlation of these two instructions to the Prayer is signaled by the M antithetical lead-in to the Prayer (6.7-8), which incorporates elements from τὰ ἔθνη ἐπιζητοῦσιν and οἶδεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὅτι χρῄζετε τούτων ἁπάντων (Do Not Be Anxious) and the operator verb αἰτῆσαι (Ask, Seek, Knock) – in the order, furthermore, in which these two speeches follow. Together these three Q instructions hold the second course of Sermon topoi together, giving it its structural and thematic delineation. In Robinson’s words, the M-prefaces to the Q Prayer form a ‘shared framing inclusio’ with the Q instructions.52 Here we again see M materials functioning in the Sermon to integrate Q and (more seldom) Markan units into a coherent topoi sequence (which explains why these materials do not show up in Luke). Indeed, the Matthean Prayer topos, which contains a Markan unit (Mt. 6.14-15/Mk 11.25), models on a small scale Matthew’s larger scribal strategy for bringing his two sources into coherent combination. For its part the Almsgiving M composition (6.1-4) has its thematic counterpart in Lay Up Treasures (6.19-21), and the οἱ ὑποκριταί present in all three introductory M units (Almsgiving; Prayer; Fasting) picks up the ὑποκριτά of the Judge Not instruction (7.5). In other words, these inaugural M units map out virtually the entire second course of topoi in the Sermon. Like the other M units they belong to the redactional enterprise that has brought the Sermon on the Mount into existence. The Our Father (6.9-13) follows immediately upon the M units. It dominates the topos – the two M units simply set it up – and through its coordination with Do Not Be Anxious and Ask, Seek, Knock it strikes the 51. See Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 139. 52. Ibid., p. 140.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

205

Leitmotif of the entire second course of topoi, in particular sounding the notes of loyalty to God, subsistence needs, asking, mercy, sharing, and giving. To label it as Robinson does an ‘interpolation’ is therefore off the mark, symptomatic of the scholarly habit of thinking of gospel formation reflexively in tradition-history terms. As Robinson (and Bornkamm) in fact recognizes, the Prayer orchestrates all that follows down to 7.11.53 In fact, Matthew’s second course of topoi takes its alignment from the Q prayer topos (Q 11.2-4, 9-13), the beginning and ending elements of which are positioned as the Matthean sequence’s framework units (6.9-13; 7.7-11). Moreover, the petition ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν, conjoins the leading concern of the first course of topoi (5.21-48) to the renewed human–God relationship enacted in the Prayer and definitive of the following topoi. The Sermon’s first and second course of topoi – the twin axes of the covenant relationship – intersect in this petition. In short, the Prayer is the nerve center of the moral life that the Sermon seeks to inculcate in its tradents.54 Matthew brings the constituent units of the Q Prayer topos into their positions in his topoi sequence with order and cadence of their elements intact, congruently, that is, with its existence in the source as a memorybased enactment script. Matthew’s utilization procedure corresponds to what we have already observed: a Q topos gives Matthew his orientation, and he returns to it to finish using it up. The parallel to the final unit (6.14-15) in the Matthean prayer topos is Mk 11.25, which Matthew omits later in his forward progress through Mark (Mt. 21.21-22). The Q and Mark parallels share the operational words ἀφῆτε/ἀφίετε (2×), τὰ παραπτώματα, ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν, and οὐράνιος/ οὐρανοῖς. The connection between divine and human forgiveness is core to the saying in both cases. Mark’s version expresses this with an imperative followed by result clause (ἀφίετε...ἵνα ἀφῇ), Matthew in two balanced conditional clauses (ἐὰν γὰρ ἀφῆτε...ἀφήσει/ἐὰν μὴ...οὐδὲ ἀφήσει, a syntactic inflection arising from Matthew’s re-contextualization of the saying as commentary (ἐὰν γὰρ κτλ.) to the ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφελήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν petition of the Prayer. The Markan unit also helps Matthew reinforce the bond between the second course of topoi (human–God relationship) and the Antitheses (reconciled human relationships). 53. Ibid. 54. The centrality of the Prayer to the Sermon is widely recognized; see e.g. Betz, Commentary, p. 64, and as we saw above, Bornkamm regards the Prayer as the structuring principle of the Sermon’s second section.

206

Q in Matthew

In Mark the saying is the last item in a sequence of four sayings (Mk 11.22-25), loosely associated by catchword, appended to the Fig Tree wonder. As its opening admonition ἔχετε πίστιν θεοῦ (Mk 11.22b) indicates, the deliberative focus of the Markan sequence is not so much the practice of prayer as it is faith able to work wonders. Hence the catchword connectors of the first three of the four constituent sayings: πίστιν...πιστεύῃ...πιστεύετε (Mk 11.22b-24). The Markan forgiveness saying (11.25) has no lexical connection with the πίστις motif. Rather, it is connected into this chain of sayings by the catchword association of its ὅταν στήκετε προσευχόμενοι with the ὅσα προσεύχεσθε of the penultimate saying, though to be sure, it suits the association of πίστις with prayer in the Markan sequence. The deliberative context in which Matthew places the saying, the Prayer topos and more proximately the ἄφες…ἀφήκαμεν petition of the Our Father, is directly accordant with the saying’s thrust and lexical profile.55 One hardly need think of Matthew painstakingly scrolling through Mark to find and then copy and edit this single saying. The Prayer topos and the key words ‘pray’ (προσευχόμενοι), ‘forgive (ἀφίετε), and ‘father’ (πατήρ) are sufficient to cue the Markan saying. It is also clear why Matthew has not attached Q Prayer materials to what at first glance might seem an inviting Markan topical ‘peg’ in Mark 11. The focus of Mk 11.22b-25 is in the first instance not prayer, but πίστις and wonder-working. Hence Matthew attaches the Markan saying to the Q prayer topos. The latter, in accord with Matthew’s source-coordination strategy, is pulled forward from Q 11 into the Sermon, since no workable topical peg exists for it in Mark. Matthew leaves the truncated Mk 11.22b24 πίστις sequence and picks it up as such when he gets to Mark 11. He therefore utilizes this Markan sayings sequence in the same way we have seen him utilize Q topoi: pulling forward in this case one of its constituent sayings into his own topos, returning in due course to the Markan sequence for its remaining elements. Matthew composes his Prayer topos drawing upon his sources, Mark and Q, and his wider memoria competence in the cultural tradition, r­eenacting these materials in the manuscript medium. He works up its opening M units out of elements of the Q traditions that follow. His practice is consistent with what can be observed elsewhere in the Sermon. The Prayer topos sequence M + M + Q + Mk is similar to that of the Anger (M + M + Q), Adultery (M + Mk), Divorce (M + Q), Non-Retaliation (M + Q), and Love Your Enemies (M + Q) Antitheses. 55. The FGH will credit Luke with a sharp source-critical eye in discerning Mk 11.25 lurking behind Mt. 6.14-15.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

207

k. Fasting (6.16-18) This M unit follows the antithetical pattern of its counterparts. It rejects the ineffectual fasting practice of οἱ ὑποκριταί – for status display rather than from the devotion to God that issues in the moral transformations stipulated in other Sermon topoi. Together with On Almsgiving and On Prayer, On Fasting engineers this topoi sequence’s shift to the other axis of δικαιοσύνη: the renewed covenant with God. Fasting and prayer were elemental practices in this relationship, offerings that God would reciprocate (ἀποδώσει σοι). Like Almsgiving (and the Oaths Antithesis), the Fasting topos consists of a single M unit. The verb ἀφανίζουσιν reappears as ἀφανίζει in 6.19; thus it helps cue the next topos, Treasures in Heaven (6.19-21). l. Treasures/Sound Eye/Mammon (6.19-24) The four units that follow seriatim, Treasures in Heaven (6.19-21); the Sound Eye (6.22-23); God and Mammon (6.24); Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34), are distinct Q units that when pulled together into the Sermon elaborate on the motifs of giving, subsistence provision, prayer, and trust found in the three M-introduced topoi on cult practice. A coherent elaboration develops along their sequence, one that identifies the profound trust expressed in the Prayer as the heart of the renewed covenant relationship with God. The first three – Treasures in Heaven (Q 12.33-34); the Sound Eye (Q 11.34); God and Mammon (Q 16.13) – are taken from three Q topoi. Out of them, however, Matthew fashions what amounts to a unified Matthean topos: Mt. 16.19-24.56 We will take each Q unit of this topos in turn. (1) Treasures in Heaven (6.19-21) . This Q sequence (Q 12.33-34) consists of two distinct components sharing the key word θησαυρός: the first a double admonition to ‘store up treasures in heaven’, sapientially grounded in a contrast of perishable earthly and imperishable heavenly treasures, the second a self-standing maxim that correlates one’s judgments of value with one’s inner moral orientation. Together they maintain the deliberative focus on the God–human relationship that controls the second Matthean course of topoi. The programmatic admonition, θησαυρίζετε δὲ ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς ἐν οὐρανῷ, is transparently a reference to almsgiving, the conversion of one’s wealth into a gift to the poor and an offering that God will reciprocate. Jesus will tell the rich man in Mt. 19.21 to πώλησόν σου τὰ ὑπάρχοντα καὶ δὸς πτωχοῖς, καὶ ἕξεις θησαυρὸν ἐν οὐρανοῖς. Luke with δότε ἐλεημοσύνη (12.33) clearly sees in this Q saying a reference to almsgiving. 56. As recognized by Goulder (Midrash and Lection, pp. 263–4) and Bornkamm (‘Aufbau’, pp. 426–7).

208

Q in Matthew

Treasures in Heaven (Mt. 6.19-21) therefore picks up the topic stated programmatically in the M Almsgiving topos (6.1-4). The connection of Treasures in Heaven back to the Almsgiving unit is confirmed by each being positioned first in their respective sequence. Almsgiving initiates the cult triad that stands at the head of the macro-sequence; Treasures in Heaven initiates the sequence that runs down to Mt. 7.11 and develops the themes articulated in the cult triad. Again we see how the M cult units map out the second course of topoi. In Q, Treasures in Heaven is contiguous to Do Not Be Anxious (Q 12.22-32), most likely immediately following as Luke has it (12.33-34). The lead position of Almsgiving in Matthew’s topoi sequence accounts for his transposing it: he adjusts Q order to the order of his cult topoi. The CEQ’s view is that Matthew represents the Q order. What the truth might be matters little, since Matthew is working from topoi-guided, memorybased source appropriation, not by the scrolling order of Q. The Matthew and Luke versions of the ‘treasures in heaven’ admonition diverge like oral variants while in the climactic aphorism they display near-verbatim agreement. Obviously this has nothing to do with memory’s putative unreliability when unsupported by visual contact with the source. It is a matter rather of memory-based enactment – and perhaps a history of enactment – that is, some combination of flexibility and stability responsive to contextual and idiosyncratic factors bearing upon the scribal tradent. Absent a secure Q reconstruction, the extent of Matthew’s modifications is difficult to assess, but in view of the antithetical cast of his M units and his similar treatment of the Mk 11.25 saying on forgiveness (Mt. 6.1415), the antithetical paralleling of this admonition (μὴ θησαυρίζετε ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς…θησαυρίζετε δὲ ὑμῖν θησαυρούς) is likely from Matthew’s hand. The variant word order and possessive pronouns in the final aphorism (6.21) can be put down to performative variation. To these factors it can be added that the maxim form is more resistant to variation, the admonition, which gives examples of perishability, less so. (2) Eye the Lamp of the Body (6.22-23). This short sequence (Q 11.3436) correlates the state of inner illumination or inner darkness with the condition of ὁ ὀφθαλμός, viewed as a lamp, the source of the body’s interior light. The saying is used in Q 11 and now here in the Sermon to correlate certain actions to sound or impaired moral perception and therefore to sound or impaired moral condition. Taken alone the saying is meaningless; it requires a deliberative context that plugs its symbolic potential into specific moral applications. In Q it is a component of the Demand for a Sign topos (Q 11.29-36), where it follows on Lamp on a Lampstand (11.33) and depicts those demanding a sign ironically as suffering from defects of perception. Since Matthew has utilized Q 11.33

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

209

in his Light and Salt topos (5.14-16), and thus broken up the deliberative connections of the ὀφθαλμός saying in Q, he brings it into another deliberative framework for which it is symbolically suited. In the SM, therefore, Eye the Lamp of the Body is not an isolated unit but connects to what precedes in 6.19-21 (Treasures in Heaven) and to what follows in 6.24 (God and Mammon). The concluding maxim of Treasures in Heaven, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (6.21), also turns on the outer–inner correspondence – between what one ascribes worth to and the orientation of one’s καρδία. God and Mammon (6.24) makes this moral point of the admonition/maxim combination of Treasures in Heaven explicit – laying up possessions on earth and service to God are incommensurable commitments. ‘Mammon’ echoes ‘Treasures on earth’, and ‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’ echoes ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. These units frame Eye the Lamp of the Body. As such they supply its deliberative application: desire towards possessions, which quite literally involves the eye, is a defect of moral perception symptomatic of a defective moral disposition. That Matthew intends this application is confirmed by his parallel invoking of the offending ὀφθαλμός in the Adultery Antithesis (5.27-30), for adultery is likewise a moral failing inseparable from the visual faculty. This essential relationship of inner with outer, heart with sight, is directly akin to the sixth Beatitude: μακάριοι οἱ καθαροὶ τῇ καρδίᾳ, ὅτι αὐτοὶ τὸν θεὸν ὄψονται. It can scarcely surprise that this is an M Beatitude, anticipating Matthewconceived topoi, this one culminating in God and Mammon (6.24).57 (3) God and Mammon (6.24). The sequence Treasures in Heaven, Eye the Lamp of the Body, and God and Mammon (Mt. 6.19-24) forms a single topos that works out a unified deliberative argument. Matthew fetches God and Mammon from the Q 16.13, 16-18 Law topos, where it likewise warns against the cardinal vices of avarice and idolatry. Matthew adduces it here to make the moral conditions symbolized in the sound eye and the bad eye, and in fact the deliberative point of the whole topos, explicit: ‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’. Thereby he aligns the topos to the prevailing concern of the second course of topoi: the renewed relationship with God, clarified as monotheistic devotion manifested in renunciation of possessions. In its identification of ‘laying up treasures on earth’ and ‘Mammon’ with idolatry, the topos takes on the cultic hue of the inaugural M units. 57. One observes further parallels between the Adultery/Divorce Antitheses and this topos: both begin with a καρδία unit; both have an ὀφθαλμός unit in second position; both conclude (viewing the Adultery/Divorce Antitheses together) with a saying from the Q 16.13, 16-18 Law topos, one on the vice of adultery, the other on the double vice of avarice and idolatry.

210

Q in Matthew

The mnemonic effect of the topos helps Matthew discover and pull together its materials from Q 12.33-34, 11.34-36, and 16.13. Each of its constituent segments is produced in forward order, as it would be generated out of memory. In his utilization movements Matthew navigates by the Q topoi. In appropriating Q 11.34-36 and 16.13 he does not go looking around in Q for individual sayings but goes back to and picks up remaining elements of Q topoi he has already used in the Sermon. With his next topos, Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34), Matthew moves back along the superordinate Q topoi sequence from Q 16 to Q 12, in fact to continue to work his way through the Q 12.22-32, 33-34 topos that he had just used for the Treasures in Heaven component of Mt. 6.19-24. Once past the opening Treasures in Heaven element, the variation levels in this three-unit Matthean topos drop. A number of the variants are of the unpremeditated sort that suggests memory-based, oralized utilization of the source: changes in word order, substitution of synonyms, changes in verb tense and voice, with some redactional adaptation to the deliberative setting. As noted, the highest variation is in Mt. 6.19-20. Not coincidentally, this is the joint between the final M unit in the tripartite cult sequence and the Q materials, that is, where Matthew connects this topos, consisting of three discrete Q units, into the deliberative framework and antithetical redactional patterns of the Sermon. Once the redactional connection is established, the unbroken sequence of Q units that follows can proceed with minor variation. Close agreement indicates that a wellknit sequence of sayings is apposite to its new didactic setting. m. Do Not Be Anxious (6.25-34) If the previous topos warns away from pursuit of false goods and the attendant vices, this topos that Matthew takes over intact from Q 12.22-32 sets the compass needle for the corresponding moral reorientation: pursuit of the Kingdom and a daring trust in God for subsistence. Matthew reproduces the tightly knit Q instruction in forward sequence. Most of the variants are of the incidental sort that would occur in generating the source tradition at the oral, written, and memorial boundary. A few, though, are adaptations to the Matthean deliberative setting. Matthew renders the ὁ θεὸς τρέφει αὐτούς of Q 12.24 as ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τρέφει αὐτά (Mt. 6.26). This is a semantically significant adaptation that tethers the instruction, with its urging to radical trust, to the Matthean Prayer topos (πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς/ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος) that stands programmatically at the head of this course of topoi. By the same token it assists Matthew’s integration of Q 11 and Q 12 materials into a single topoi sequence, the same end served by his converse strategy of working elements of Do Not Be Anxious (πάντα ταῦτα τὰ ἔθνη ἐπιζητοῦσιν...οἶδεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

211

οὐράνιος ὅτι χρῄζετε τούτων ἀπάντων) into the M unit (6.7-8) that sets up the Prayer. With the expansion of Q’s ζητεῖτε τὴν βασιλείαν (Q 12.31) by καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ (Mt. 6.33), Matthew works the Q sequence into the redactional macro-framework of the Sermon. As the 2DH would predict, Luke lacks precisely these elements which connect the Do Not Be Anxious instruction to the wider didactic frameworks of the SM. Finally, in picking up Q 12.22-32 after using Q 12.33-34 at Mt. 6.19-21, Matthew continues his practice of returning to and finishing off a Q topos. n. Judge Not/Beam in the Eye (7.1-5) At first glance this instruction seems to make an awkward fit with the schema of the second course of topoi. Its sanctioning, warning tone seems dissonant with the themes of prayer, trust, and provision prevalent in this section of the Sermon. One might conjecture this is simply because Matthew with Judge Not (Q 6.37-42) picks up where he had left off in Q 6 at Love Your Enemies (Q 6.27-36/Mt. 5.43-48) in his absolute forward progress through the Q source. It would be wrong, however, to explain its appearance here simply as Matthew’s concession to the sequence of his source – as though he were unable to adjust all the elements of the Q Sermon to the didactic framework of the SM. The key is again the programmatic Matthean Prayer topos (6.5-14). Following the Prayer with its petitions, first for subsistence and second for forgiveness ‘as we forgive our debtors’, is the Markan reciprocity saying: ‘For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive men, neither will your heavenly father forgive your transgressions’ (6.14-15). This saying finds a counterpart in Mt. 7.1-2: ‘Judge not, lest you be judged; for by the measure you judge you will be judged’, which is simply the ethical converse of ‘forgive, that you may be forgiven’.58 Judge Not is in fact reminiscent of the Anger Antithesis (5.21-26), for the latter similarly makes release from ἡ κρίσις, ὁ κριτής and God’s acceptance of one’s offering conditional upon reconciliation with one’s ἀδελφός. Judgment, moreover, is the negative mode of the God–human reciprocal relationship that is the subject of this course of topoi, κριθήσεσθε being the flip side of ἀποδώσει σοι. Matthew reproduces the Q speech in order, passing over, however, Blind Leading the Blind (Q 6.39) and Disciple and Teacher (Q 6.40). The reason is clear enough: these sayings position the Q 6.37-42 instruction in the conceptual field of ancient pedagogy and moral training.59 The judging 58. Bornkamm, ‘Aufbau’, pp. 427–8. 59. Betz, Commentary, pp. 82, 491, 620–5; also Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 137.

212

Q in Matthew

topos in fact frequently occurs in such contexts, as it does in Q and, for example, in the Rom. 2.1-6 sequel. But Matthew’s topoi sequence alters the deliberative framework of the Q Judge Not topos. To bring the latter into line with the moral foci of his second topoi sequence he passes over Q 6.39-40 – for the time being. o. Defiling the Holy (7.6) The origins of this M unit (the first since Mt. 6.16-18) are unclear. The crux challenge, however, is determining how it coheres within the topoi sequence.60 The saying belongs in the semantic field of ritual holiness. An oppositional correlation between τὸ ἅγιον and τῶν χοίρων structures its first half, and the saying admonishes to keep the sphere of τὸ ἅγιον unpolluted. The second course of topoi takes its point of departure from what not without reason has been called the Cult Didache. These M units feature sacrifice and prayer, the location for which is the cult, the sphere of activities that enact the reciprocal relationship with the deity. The ritual quality of this sphere is ἅγιος; hence the inaugural petition of the Prayer: ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου. The subsequent topoi take their point of departure from the Prayer and the cult M units; by extension therefore they are pulled into the sphere of the cult. Consequently, a saying on not defiling τὸ ἅγιον in this topoi sequence is hardly anomalous. This line of analysis can be pressed further. Cult holiness has an ethical dimension grounded in Torah. Leviticus 19, a Torah epitome that warns against idolatry and prominently features ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19.18), unfolds under the rubric, ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy’ (Lev. 19.2), which is echoed in the Sermon by ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν (Mt. 5.48/Q 6.36). As in Leviticus 19, the ethical topoi of the Sermon demarcate the sphere of the holy within which the cult activities of prayer and 60. ‘[I]ts application and its sense in the Matthean context are a complete mystery’ (Luz, Matthew 1–7, p. 354). Guelich and Allison suggest that it sets limits on the Judge Not exhortation, recommending the appropriate exercise of moral discernment (Guelich, Sermon, p. 353; Allison, ‘Structure’, p. 427). Goulder rejects this interpretation because 7.6 lacks a contrasting particle, but nevertheless agrees in relating it – with reservations – to Judge Not as follows: ‘[D]on’t expose what is precious, your brother’s character, to the malice of the godless’ (Midrash and Lection, pp. 265–6). Betz thinks that 7.6 has ‘little connection’ with 7.1-5 (Commentary, p. 494), and Bornkamm similarly that ‘zwischen 7.1ff. und 7.6 sich kein überzeugender Sinnzusammenhang herstellen läßt’ (‘Aufbau’, p. 428; also Luz, Matthew 1–7, p. 356). Some commentators conclude that recovering the meaning of 7.1 in context is no longer possible (e.g. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, p. 171; Betz, Commentary, p. 499).

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

213

offerings occur. The Sermon is insistent that the renewed relationship with God, the purest actualization of which is the cult activity of prayer, entails renewal of human relationships. To vitiate those relationships is to defile the sphere of the holy. Thus the Anger Antithesis admonishes, ‘If you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go, first (πρῶτον) be reconciled with your brother (διαλλάγηθι τῷ ἀδελφῷ), and then (τότε) come and offer your gift’ (5.24). It is in this sense that ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs’ (7.6) follows upon ‘Judge not’ (7.1-5) where the violator is told to ‘first (πρῶτον) remove the log from your own eye, and then (τότε) you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye (ἐκ τοῦ ὀφθαλμοῦ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ)’ (7.5).61 Defiling the Holy in its position after the Judge Not sequence reinforces the point that the violation of human relationships described in Judge Not desecrates the sphere of the holy defined by the Prayer. Morally impairing the cult relationship with God brings dire consequences, a prophetic theme of long standing. Hence the label ὑποκριτά (7.5) applied here and in the Almsgiving, Prayer, and Fasting M units (οἱ ὑποκριταί) to those whose cult practices are futile. Conversely, the 7.6 saying aligns ritual purity with ethical transformation.62 It therefore plays an intelligible, even crucial role in the Sermon. That it is an M unit coheres with its direct connection to the macro-redactional themes of the Sermon on the Mount and its function to integrate Q materials into that framework. p. Hearing of Prayer (7.7-11) This sequence, made up of Ask, Seek, Knock (7.7-8) and Child’s Request for Food (7.9-11), corresponds to Q 11.9-13, where it is appended as commentary to the Our Father (Q 11.2-4) and motivates prayer on the model of the latter. Matthew returns here to the Q prayer topos with which 61. Interpreters such as Guelich, Allison, and Goulder therefore are right to intuit a relationship between 7.6 and 7.1-5. 62. Bornkamm’s analysis points this direction: ‘Dann aber kann τὸ ἅγιον im Zusammenhang der mt Bergpredigt nur ein zusammenfassender Ausdruck sein für alles, was in ihr und zumal im Vaterunser den Jüngern anvertraut worden ist’, and in this regard suggests a correlation to the fate of the salt that has lost its savor: καταπατεῖσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων (Mt. 5.13) (‘Aufbau’, p. 429). He does not follow this angle further, but it is notable that in both cases the definitive quality of an entity (Salt/the Holy/Pearls) is lost or corrupted through its inversion (becomes insipid/ cast before swine), resulting in negation (cast out and trampled by men/trampled underfoot, turn and tear you to pieces). Matthew 5.14-16 extends this pattern of symbolic inversion (light/under a bushel basket) and interprets the ‘salt’ and ‘light’ as the καλὰ ἔργα in the community of disciples.

214

Q in Matthew

he inaugurated this sequence of Sermon topoi and picks up its remaining elements in forward order. In other words, he is aware of the coherence of the Q prayer topos and uses it to frame and give coherence to his second course of topoi. With the same maneuver he stresses that the core of the renewed covenant relationship is trust in God actualized in prayer for subsistence needs, a relationship which on God’s side is manifested in unreserved giving, a word that with its cognates recurs six times in Mt. 7.7-11. In effect, and as Bornkamm intuited, Matthew has conceived the second topoi sequence (6.1–7.11) as an expansion of the Q 11.9-13 commentary on the Q 11.2-4 Prayer. He breaks open the Q Prayer topos, in the middle as it were, to frame sequences of material from Q 12, Q 11, Q 16, Q 6, and Mark 11, bringing each into connection with the Prayer.63 Moreover the ἐπιδώσει…ἐπιδώσει…δώσει and αἰτεῖτε…τοῖς αἰτοῦσιν αὐτόν of Mt. 7.7-11 are echoed in the ἀποδώσει occurrences and αἰτῆσαι occurrence in the M units on Almsgiving (6.1-4), Prayer (6.5-6), and Fasting (6.16-18).64 This concluding unit ties up the entire second sequence of Sermon topoi. q. Golden Rule (7.12) Matthew retrieves this reciprocity maxim from the Q Love Your Enemies topos (Q 6.27-36) – the remaining element of the Q sequence he utilized for the ultimate (5.43-48) and penultimate (5.38-42) Antitheses. It is well established that the saying as it stands in 7.12 sums up both the first and second topoi sequences. Matthew signals this by expanding the Rule, supplied with an anaphoric οὖν, with οὗτος γάρ ἐστιν ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται, a reiteration of μὴ νομίσητε ὅτι ἦλθον καταλῦσαι τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας· οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι ἀλλὰ πληρῶσαι, the first element of the Endurance of the Law topos (5.17-20) and similarly an M unit, that stands at the head of the Antitheses.65 The Rule in its various permutations was already viewed as a sapiential epitome of the Law. It was most frequently adduced as the norm for human relations, which is how it is used in Q 6.31. Matthew’s positioning of it after both topoi sequences, in inclusio with 5.17, reinforces his emphasis, grounded in the fourth petition of the Prayer, that the renewed relationship with God cannot be separated from renewed relationships with human beings.66 63. See also Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 141. 64. Bornkamm, ‘Aufbau’, p. 430. 65. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, pp. 174–7. 66. This is preferable to Robinson’s interpretation (‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 141) that Ask, Seek, Knock (7.7-11) summarizes the second sequence of topoi, the Golden Rule (7.12) the first.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

215

Before moving to the remaining parts of the Sermon on the Mount let us briefly review Matthew’s memory-grounded utilization of Q in his second topoi sequence, dominated by two sequential blocks of material from Q 11 and Q 12.67 The final two Antitheses (5.38-42; 5.43-48) bring Matthew forward to the absolute position in his source at Q 6.27-36. He then moves ahead to the Q Prayer topos (Q 11.2-4, 9-13), picking up its first element, the Prayer itself. He next moves forward to the Q topos – or perhaps better, double topoi – Do Not Be Anxious (Q 12.22-32) and Treasures in Heaven (Q 12.33-34), that together form the block of Q material 12.22-34, appropriating the second of these first.68 He then returns to two Q topoi he had visited earlier in the Sermon, retrieving Q 11.34-36 and Q 16.13. All three (Q 12.33-34; 11.34-36; 16.13) are placed in order to form an expanded Treasures topos. After picking up the remaining material in the Q 12 block, Do Not Be Anxious (12.22-32), Matthew returns to his absolute position in Q 6 for Judge Not (Q 6.37-38, 41-42) before closing the sequence by picking up the remaining elements of the Prayer topos (Q 11.9-13), with which he had initiated the topoi sequence. An economical circuit is thereby described that displays the marks of memory-grounded source-utilization. More precisely, Matthew navigates Q on the basis of its topoi, not its individual sayings. At a given topos location he enacts the speech itself, or a segment thereof, forward in sequence. Notably, his divergences from Q’s absolute order likewise occur at the level of topoi. The constituent sequences of the Q instructions themselves are produced in their Q order, as activated memory scripts – producing the ‘agreement in relative order’ phenomenon mapped by Taylor (and richly documented in the case studies of Chapter 2). That Matthew reproduces the Q sayings as integral cognitive units likewise corresponds their memory-based generation, and it also explains why in the few instances where cognate Markan and Q units appear in the same Matthean Sermon topos there is no micro-conflation. Finally, Matthew uses his own topoi scheme to access and arrange the Q materials, though to be sure, it is a scheme heavily influenced by the original Q topoi arrangement. Cycling materials from one topoi sequence into another is a well-attested practice in the transmission of ethical materials in the ancient world. Topoi schemas were memory schemas; they served as simple navigational aids that capitalized on the brain’s ordinary encoding and search protocols to locate and arrange materials. 67. In the Antitheses section, topoi defined by Matthew (Torah dicta) supply the cues for Q material. 68. CEQ has Treasures in Heaven first in order, which would make Matthew’s appropriative movements even simpler.

216

Q in Matthew

r. The Two Ways (7.13-14) The Two Ways sequence (and those that follow to the end of the Sermon) displays a high level of variation vis-à-vis its double tradition parallel. The parallels are undoubtedly variants of a base tradition: they share the programmatic admonition εἰσέλθατε/εἰσελθεῖν διὰ τῆς στενῆς πύλης/θύρας and the constitutive contrast of the πολλοί and the ὀλίγοι. On print culture assumptions it is of course difficult to conceive how such variation could arise in Matthew’s ‘copying’ or even ‘editing’ of his written source Q. A written source baseline, however, is indicated by the common order of heterogeneous, high-variation, yet unmistakably parallel units in Mt. 7.13-14, 22-23 and Lk. 13.23-24, 25-27, both sequences culminating in the pronouncement, ἀποχωρεῖτε/ἀπόστητε ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν/πάντες ἐργάται ἀδικίας (Mt. 7.23/Lk. 13.27). Matthew’s πλατεῖα in 7.13 suggests his awareness of ἐν ταῖς πλατείαις later in the Q topos (Lk. 13.26). If Luke preserves the sequence of a Q 13 topos, Matthew’s procedure of picking up its first segment (Q 13.23-24), integrating other Q materials (Q 6.43-45; Q 3.9/Mt. 7.16-20), returning to Q 13.25-27 in Mt. 7.21-23 (‘Lord, Lord’) and then again to the last unit Q 13.28-29 in the Capernaum Centurion (immediately following the Sermon), using up the sequence in successive forward appropriations, resembles the way he distributed the Q 11.2-4, 9-13 Prayer topos and again shows his working orientation to Q topoi. This last section of the SM (7.13-27) is protreptic – concerned to persuade people to enter upon the ethical path that has just been laid out. To this end Matthew adopts the conventional Two Ways protreptic schema, which therefore stands as the heading for the remaining elements of the Sermon. The Q 13 topos Strive to Enter is also protreptic, portraying a ‘narrow door’ that in the course of the sequence opens into a house where a banquet is about to begin. It is Matthew’s adaptation of Q 13.23-24 to the Two Ways schema – in other words, its adaptation to the macro redactional framework of the Sermon on the Mount – that produces the extensive variation between the Matthean and Lukan parallels. It accounts, moreover, for θύρα becoming πύλη and the heightened antithetical rendering of the unit itself. The ‘way that leads to life’ is Jesus’ ethical program just described. ‘The way that leads to destruction’ and those upon it are the subject of the next two topoi. s. Beware of False Prophets; By Their Fruit (7.15-20) This is a single deliberative sequence made up of three units in a now familiar pattern: an inaugural M unit, followed by two Q units (Q 6.4345; Q 3.9). The προσέχετε ἀπὸ τῶν ψευδοπροφητῶν corresponds to the

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

217

προσέχετε τὴν δικαιοσύνην ὑμῶν μὴ ποιεῖν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων of the M unit (6.1-4) that opens the ‘Cult Didache’. The parallel wording suggests that both sequences have the same group of people in view. Like the other M units in the Sermon, Mt. 7.15 steers the Q materials that follow in a particular paraenetic direction. Also like the other M units, it characterizes in sharp language the Matthean opponents and their practices. The antithetical contrast of outer appearance ἐν ἐνδύμασιν προβάτων with ἔσωθεν δέ εἰσιν λύκοι ἅρπαγες foreshadows καθαρίζετε τὸ ἔξωθεν τοῦ ποτηρίου...ἔσωθεν δὲ γέμουσιν ἐξ ἁρπαγῆς (Mt. 23.25), ἔξωθεν μὲν φαίνονται ὡραῖοι, ἔσωθεν δὲ γέμουσιν ὀστέων νεκρῶν (Mt. 23.27), as well as ἔξωθεν μὲν φαίνεσθε τοῖς ἀνθρώποις δίκαιοι, ἔσωθεν δέ ἐστε μεστοὶ ὑποκρίσεως καὶ ἀνομίας (Mt. 23.28), and thus identifies these ψευδοπροφηταί of Mt. 7.15 as the γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί of Matthew 23.69 Not only does this M unit adjust the Q units that immediately follow (Q 6.43-45) to the deliberative framework of the Sermon, it orients them to the cardinal points of Matthew’s gospel itself. This, we have seen, is the raison d’être of the Sermon M units. Naturally, having never seen the Gospel of Matthew, Luke does not have these units. Accordingly, the M unit (7.15) directs the sapiential τὸ δένδρον καρποὺς πονηροῦς ποιεῖ of Q 6.44 against this group, whose ‘bad fruit’ will be made clear when Matthew 23 castigates the practices of the scribes and Pharisees, though some of these have already been identified in the denunciations of the ὑποκριταί in the Cult Didache. This protreptic topos, therefore, sets the comprehensive moral program of the Sermon over against that of the Matthean opponents, who are signified in the ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Its first Q unit (Mt. 7.16/Q 6.43-45) marks Matthew’s return to his absolute forward position in Q 6. The Matthean and Lukan parallels vary significantly, in particular in Matthew’s ἐπιγνώσεσθε αὐτούς and the absence in Matthew of Q’s application of the sapiential analogy to speech as the criterion for gauging moral character. This is because in Matthew, Trees and Fruit tacks in the deliberative direction set by the opening M unit, which specifies that the ψευδοπροφηταί are identified by their deeds.70 That deeds are in view is clear from the anticipation of Matthew 23, the retrospective allusion to the ὑποκριταί of the other M units of the Sermon who ‘practice their righteousness before men, to be seen by them’, and by Matthew’s appending of Q 3.9 (Mt. 7.19). Καρπός in Q 3 signifies deeds ἄξιον τῆς μετανοίας (Q 3.8). Matthew specifies that John’s Q Sermon is an address to ‘the Pharisees 69. These can be identified as ‘false prophets’ because scribes likened their authori­tative Torah interpretation to prophetic inspiration. 70. The Q Judge Not (Q 6.37-42) has Torah elites in view, and its Trees and Fruit unit assesses them by their speech, so Matthew’s recontextualization is not radical.

218

Q in Matthew

and Sadducees’ (Mt. 3.7). His transposition of Q’s ἕκαστον γὰρ δένδρον ἐκ τοῦ ἰδίου καρποῦ γινώσκεται (syntactically revised to: ἀπὸ τῶν καρπῶν αὐτῶν ἐπιγνώσεσθε αὐτούς) and οὐ γὰρ ἐξ ἀκανθῶν συλλέγουσιν σῦκα οὐδε ἐκ βάτου σταφυλὴν τρυγῶσιν from their second position in Q (6.44) to the lead position in Mt. 7.16, thereby displacing δένδρον καλόν (Q 6.43) from its first position in the Q unit, aligns Q 6.43-44 with the focus of the programmatic M unit on the ψευδοπροφηταί and λύκοι ἅρπαγες. Variation in these double tradition parallels, in other words, is driven by Matthew’s reenactment of the Q tradition in the framework of the contemporary realities of the Matthean community, namely, its cultural and moral conflict with the heirs of the scribes and Pharisees. For the next element in this sequence (7.19) Matthew uses Q 3.9 a second time: the Matthean Jesus exactly echoes John’s denunciation of trees that do not bring forth good fruit. We need hardly think of Matthew scrolling from Q 6 back to Q 3 (or for that matter from Q 13 furiously back to Q 6 to Q 3 then back to Q 6). ‘Tree’, ‘bearing’, and ‘fruit’ in Q 6.43-44 cue the Q 3 John saying. The effect of repeating the Q 3 saying here is to have the Matthean topos (7.15-20) issue in a dramatic announcement of judgment that picks up and expands on the programmatic Two Ways motif: ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ ἀπάγουσα εἰς τὴν ἀπώλειαν (7.13). It also brings this Matthean topos, made up of Q 6 materials, into parallel with the Q 13 speech Matthew uses to frame this section of the Sermon, which similarly concludes with an announcement of judgment: ἀποχωρεῖτε ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν.71 Matthew’s προσέχετε ἀπὸ τῶν ψευδοπροφητῶν and κύριε κύριε sequences thus both will end in parallel announcements of judgment, which effectively identifies their subjects as those on ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ ἀπάγουσα εἰς τὴν ἀπώλειαν. Matthew draws upon Q 6.43-45 and Q 3.9, producing these as coherent, self-contained cognitive units not conflated with each other. In contrast to his utilization of the Q 13.23-24 and Q 6.43-45 material, Matthew brings Q 3.9 with exactitude. The effect is the curious alternation, in the compass of one sequence, of wide variation with close agreement, the pattern so typical of the Synoptic tradition. Here this is because the requisite adjustments to the Matthean paraenetic framework have already been carried out on the preceding Q 6 unit. It is a matter, accordingly, not of oral versus written sources, or of wooden versus rhetorical reproduction, but of memory-supported enactment of a community’s normative tradition by a scribal tradent, with differential variation and stability inhering in the cultivation of a living tradition in the framework of particular didactic and historical exigencies. 71. It also identifies John’s message with Jesus’ message (and vice versa), which, as we will see in the next chapter, is a Matthean redactional motif.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

219

t. ‘Lord, Lord’ (7.21-23) The next topos (7.21-23) is inaugurated by οὐ πᾶς λέγων μοι κύριε κύριε, εἰσελεύσεται εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. It likewise belongs in the Two Ways protreptic framework, identifying another group that is upon ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ ἀπάγουσα εἰς τὴν ἀπώλειαν. It corresponds to Q 6.46: τί δέ με καλεῖτε· κύριε κύριε, which occurs immediately after Trees and Fruit (Q 6.43-45); thus it marks a step in Matthew’s absolute forward progress through his source. Some of the variation in the Matthean parallel of the saying is due to the rendering of Q’s second-person question as a third-person indicative which identifies the salient characteristic of the type of person in view; this aligns it with the ψευδοπορφηταί saying (7.15) that initiates the preceding sequence. The final phrase, ὁ ποιῶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, echoes Matthean additions to the Lord’s Prayer. Incidentally, because the unit – as well as the next one (7.22-23) – clearly has a Q parallel as its reference point and yet is so Matthean, it indicates how Matthew could in other cases fully work up M materials out of base Q (and Markan) tradition. The Q ‘Lord, Lord’ saying shares with the ‘false prophets’ saying of Mt. 7.15 an outer–inner contrast: here profession of adherence to the κύριος without fulfilling ἃ λέγω, or as Matthew more ornately but synonymously puts it, τὸ θέλημα τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς: in other words, the covenant instruction of the Sermon. With this sequence, therefore, Matthew (like Q 6 itself) anticipates the δοῦλος/κύριος parables and the assizes of Matthew 24 and 25.72 For the next unit (7.22-23) of this κύριε κύριε speech Matthew returns to the Q 13 topos with which he began this protreptic section of the Sermon, picking up in forward sequence its next segment (Q 13.25-26), which similarly is marked by κύριε address. This is reminiscent of his use of two segments of the Q 11 Prayer topos to frame Q and M materials in the second sequence of Sermon topoi. The Matthean and Lukan parallels differ widely; Mt. 7.22-23 conceivably shades into an M unit worked up from the parallel Q tradition. The πλατεῖα of Mt. 7.13 (compare Q 13.26. ἐν ταῖς πλατειάις) is an indicator, albeit hardly amounting to proof, that Matthew is working from this Q 13 topos. At any rate, Matthew’s Two Ways protreptic framework makes it impossible simply to take over the οἰκοδεσπότης/ ἀποκλείσῃ τὴν θύραν/κρούειν τὴν θύραν/ἄνοιξον ἡμῖν constellation of motifs 72. According to Bornkamm, represented here are ‘als christlich Charismatiker auftretenden Verführer’ (‘Aufbau’, pp. 423–4). No specific competing Christian group need be in view, no polemic; rather, Mt. 7.21-23 coheres with Matthew’s broad point in the Sermon that righteousness, in accordance with Jesus’ fulfillment of the Law, is requisite for entering into the Kingdom of God. Charismatic endowments and great deeds do not suffice.

220

Q in Matthew

that control the Q parallel. In addition to the κύριε address and the climactic ‘Depart from me’ announcement of judgment, the moral identity of interlocutors in both parallels is the same: a professed proximity to Jesus that nevertheless stops short of following him. For Matthew this is failing to enter upon the path of moral transformation that is described in the Sermon and the mark of discipleship (see Mt. 4.5/Lk. 6.20: οἱ μαθηταῖ αὐτοῦ/εἰς τοῦς μαθητάς). The κύριε κύριε of Mt. 7.23 is itself the address of a putative disciple to the teacher.73 As indicated by their identical positioning in a sequence of otherwise heterogeneous materials and their culmination in the emphatic announcement of judgment, ‘Depart from me, you workers of iniquity’, these are not oral variants over against written redaction but oral-traditional enactment of the written tradition, though this does not rule out Matthew’s continuing a tradition of performance of this concatenation of units. u. The Two Builders (7.24-27) With this unit Matthew has finished working his way forward to the end of the Q Sermon (Q 6.47-49). The Two Builders is the original protreptic ending of the Q Sermon, the element of the latter’s infrastructure from which Matthew builds out the Two Ways protreptic framework of the final section of his Sermon. The CEQ judges the Matthean parallel to be the more primitive. The variation in the parallels can be put down to performative variations within distinct tradent communities. 4. Matthew’s Source Utilization in the Sermon a. Memory-Grounded Utilization Matthew’s utilization procedures in the Sermon point to memory-grounded competence in his source. As we also observed for the preceding parts of the Sermon, Matthew’s movements around Q in fashioning the protreptic conclusion to the Sermon – Q 13 to Q 6, Q 3, back to Q 13, back to Q 6 – are on the basis of Q topoi. The cycling of materials from the Q topoi sequence into the modified Matthean topoi sequence is a well-attested source-utilization practice in antiquity. For the most part Matthew alternates between Q 13 topoi and Q 6 topoi. Indeed, after rejoining Mark 1 with the Healing of the Leper (Mt. 7.28-29; 8.1-4) and then the absolute Q sequence with the Capernaum Centurion (Mt. 8.5-13; Q 7.1-10), in accord with his usual practice Matthew returns to and uses up the remaining element from the Q 13 topos (Mt. 8.11-12; Q 13.28-29). In other words, Matthew treats 73. Kloppenborg, Formation, p. 187.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

221

the Q topoi, configured in deliberative arguments, not as loosely aggregated sayings but as cognitive scripts. He consistently produces a topos or a desired segment thereof in sequence forward and not conflated with other materials. Matthew’s Q utilization conforms to the simple cognitive search algorithm described by Klahr and his colleagues: ‘A serial, self-terminating search is first performed at the top level in the hierarchy followed by a serial search at the subgroup level’.74 M, Mk, and Q units are collocated as discrete segments, as cognitive units, down to the individual saying. Quite a bit of the variation in these Q units is due to Matthew’s adjusting them to the paraenetic framework of the SM,75 the latter itself a response to the contemporary realities of the Matthean community. b. Memory and Scroll Artifact It would be wrong to conclude, however, that Matthew’s source utilization proceeds in a scroll-free zone, in a virtual memory space as it were, as if the scroll artifact, after serving to provision memory, was dispensed with. One must think rather of an operational fusion of memory and manuscript. This is why we have been careful to describe Matthew’s source utilization as ‘memory-based’ or ‘memory-grounded’. To be sure, the unformatted, undifferentiated scroll-based script bore only a weak representational relationship to the work. It was only in memory that Q’s organizing topoi were ‘visible’ and therefore navigable, with their constituent traditions co­nnected in clear deliberative lines; its actualization as a work was likewise grounded in memory. In short, Q’s utilization was operationalized in memory. This said, the relationship of memory and scroll artifact in Matthew’s Q-utilization is best seen as symbiotic and interactive, with memory the navigator and enactor in whatever level of manual and visual engagement Mathew might have with the source. c. The ‘M’ Materials Without exception the M materials in the SM have the special function of integrating the Q (and occasionally Markan) units into the macro-redactional framework of the Sermon. The M elements in Matthew 5–7 are the mortar that fixes the Q units into the structure of the Sermon. Conversely, it is the Q units that supply Matthew with his motifs and raw materials for working up M materials: Matthew composes from his normative tradition, from memoria. In the Sermon (and we can say this without circularity), 74. Klahr et al., ‘Alphabetic Retrieval’, p. 462 (see the full discussion in Chapter 3). 75. See Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 160.

222

Q in Matthew

‘M’ is not an adventitious category, an entailment of a source hypothesis, but a functionally distinguishable subset of materials.76 d. Matthew’s Reordering of Q Materials Matthew’s utilization of Q is grounded in memory-based competence in the source. The principle governing his appropriative movements within Q is not the individual saying but Q’s macro-sequence of topoi and the composite deliberative sequences that each enacts. Matthew cycles these materials into his own topoi schema, which is to say that the order in which he arranges his topoi regulates the order in which he uses Q. Matthew’s departures from Q’s order (put differently, his rearrangements of Q’s order) occur at the superordinate level of topoi, while the sequences of sayings themselves are consistently reproduced in their forward sequence. Where Matthew seems to be working at the level of individual Q sayings he turns out upon closer examination to be redistributing elements of a single Q topos among two or more of his own topoi. The case studies of Chapter 2 provided an excess of documentation for precisely these utilization patterns, which one sees repeatedly in florilegia tradition and in sourceconsolidation projects such as Apollonius Sophista’s Homer Lexicon. Memory-grounded source competence, combined with the nat­ uralness and economy of forward appropriation of content, accounts for Matthew’s departures from Q’s absolute order while reproducing the relative order of its constituent units. Taylor observed this pattern but could only conceive Matthew’s source-utilization along the lines of visual scanning and copying. Consequently, he turned simple memory-facilitated utilization actions into awkward and compositionally unintelligible scrolling operations impossible to correlate to Matthew’s actual topoi compositions. Taylor’s was a mechanical solution driven by the logic of his print assumptions. Luz for his part notices that a significant amount of Q is organized as ‘thematic blocks’, and that these often seem to be a factor in Matthew’s source utilization, but because of his sub-literary Q conception he does not recognize that this is actually Q’s pervasive topoi organization. This in turn leads him to attribute little literary coherence to sections of Q where Matthew is not taking over thematic blocks complete, to the point of labelling those materials oral tradition.77 76. This is not intended to be a comprehensive theory of the origins of the M materials; on the latter question see Paul Foster, ‘The M-Source: Its History and Demise in Biblical Scholarship’, in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg, and Verheyden, eds., New Studies, pp. 591–616, and especially his summary pp. 613–16. 77. Luz, ‘Looking at Q’, pp. 572–4.

5. Source-Utilization in the Sermon on the Mount

223

e. Matthew’s Source-Utilization Strategy Why are Matthew’s departures from Q’s order particularly concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount rather than more evenly distributed throughout the Matthean double tradition, and why has Matthew left the order of the Q Sermon itself largely intact? The paucity not only of Markan elements in the Sermon but of Markan parallels to its constituent units suggests the answer to these questions. Most of the Q 11, 12, 13, and 16 materials that Matthew pulls forward into the SM lack workable topical pegs in the Markan narrative, just as there is no Markan counterpart to the Q 6 Sermon itself.78 The Markan prayer saying (Mk 11.25) brought into the Matthean Prayer topos (Mt. 6.14) is taken from a sequence focused not on prayer but faith (Mk 11.20-25). Moreover, these Q materials are not thematically apt for incorporation into discourses of the sort that can be developed from such points of departure that Mark does provide: Mark’s Commissioning instruction (Mk 6.6-13), Beelzebul controversy (Mk 3.22-30), Parable discourse (Mk 4), Denunciation of the Scribes (Mk 12.37-40), and Apocalypse/Watchfulness sequences (Mk 13). These points of Mark–Q convergence give Matthew deliberative rubrics for bringing Q and occasionally other Markan materials into longer, multitopoi discourses in a manner that sustains overall forward movement through both sources.79 Matthew’s utilization actions in the Sermon are part of a comprehensive strategy for solving the technical problem of coherent coordination of his two sources, and more particularly, of his narrative source with his non-narrative source. Matthew manages this by aligning them topically where feasible and expanding the Sermon with Q materials for which there are no fitting points of attachment in Mark.80 It 78. Markan parallels exist for the Salt saying (Mt. 5.13/Q 14.34-35; Mk 9.49-50), the Lamp saying (Mt. 5.15/Q 11.33; Mk 4.21) and the Divorce saying (Mt. 5.31-32/ Q 16.18; Mk 10.3-4, 11-12). Measure for Measure (Mt. 7.2b; Mk 4.24) is already a core element of the Q Sermon (Q 6.38b). The Markan ‘If your eye offends you’ saying (Mk 9.43-48) is brought into the Adultery Antithesis (Mt. 5.72-30), but Matthew repeats it later (Mt. 18.6-9) in connection with the Q Scandals saying (Q 17.1). These cases show that Matthean topoi can attract Markan as well as Q materials. 79. A closely related reason, and quite intelligible on this source scenario, that the SM has a lot of material from elsewhere in Q is that most of Q at this point is unexploited. As Streeter put it, Matthew can expand the Q Sermon only by anticipating later materials (Four Gospels, p. xvii). 80. The compiler of the Corpus Parisinum proceeded in an identical manner: combining materials from his DIE (Democritus/Isocrates/Epictetus) source with his Stobaeus source where they topically overlapped; bringing DIE materials lacking topical pegs in the Stobaeus source separately; similarly Apollonius Sophista for Odyssey commentary materials lacking lexical pegs in the Iliad materials.

224

Q in Matthew

makes strategic sense that he gets those materials out of the way first. This is not the whole story of course. We have seen that Matthew’s own redactional concerns are a leading factor in his disposition of Q and Markan materials in the Sermon on the Mount. But in scribal culture, didactic and utilization activities are not distinguished, the transmission of the tradition from its cultivation.81 Matthew is a redactional opportunist, seizing on ways of combining his sources in ways that serve his theological and ethical program. His sources already lay down the normative groundwork for this program. In the Q Sermon Matthew finds the essential components of a sapiential epitome of the Law and covenant instruction. He builds out this structure along redactional lines that it already supports. This account of Matthew’s source-utilization strategy must now be tested against the other vexed problem of order for the 2DH, namely, the Markan transpositions in Matthew 4–12.

81. The impossibility of separating redaction criticism from source criticism is recognized and articulated by Syreeni (Making of the Sermon, pp. 5, 13, 41, 92–3, 159–65); to a lesser extent also by Bornkamm (‘Aufbau’, p. 431).

Chapter 6 Q a nd M at t h ew ’ s M a r k a n T r ansposi ti ons

Matthew’s reordering of double tradition finds its counterpart in his major transpositions within an extended segment of triple tradition, Mk 1.39–6.13, in a localized section of his gospel: Mt. 4.23–11.30. Synoptic scholarship has not seriously entertained the possibility that Matthew’s Markan transpositions are of a piece with his reordering of Q. This owes something to the ‘sub-literary Q’ conception: since Q is just a loose, morphing collection of sayings, an Überlieferungsschicht, how can it have been anything more than a subsidiary factor in Matthew’s utilization of the ‘literary’ Mark? Beginning with Mt. 4.23, one observes (Figure 6.1) the following Markan transpositions (indented/bold), represented here in their relationship to Q materials (italicized/shaded): Figure 6.1 Mt. 4.18-22 Mk 1.16-20 Call of Disciples Mk 1.39 Galilee Preaching Tour Mt. 4.23–5.21 [Mt. 5–7] [Sermon on Mount] Mt. 7.28-29 Mk 1.22 Ending of Sermon Mt. 8.1-4 Mk 1.40-45 Healing of Leper Mt. 8.5-13 Q 7.1-10 Healing of Centurion’s Servant Mt. 8.14-15 Mk 1.29-31 Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law Mt. 8.16-172 Mk 1.32-34 Healings in the Evening

1. Mt. 4.23–5.2 is analyzed separately below. 2. Since Matthew uses Mk 1.39 in Mt. 4.23, it is possible to view him after the Sermon continuing straight through to Mk 1.40-45, in which case Mk 1.29-34 would constitute the transposition. But since he returns first to Mk 1.22 for the conclusion to the Sermon, it is preferable to identify Mk 1.39, 40-45 as the transposed materials.

226

Q in Matthew

Mt. 8.18-223 Q 9.57-59 Following Jesus in Discipleship Mt. 8.23-27 Mk 4.35-41 Stilling of Storm Mt. 8.28-34 Mk 5.1-20 Gadarene Demoniac Mt. 9.1-8 Mk 2.1-12 Healing of Paralytic Mt. 9.9-13 Mk 2.13-17 Call of Matthew/Eating with Sinners Mt. 9.14-17 Mk 2.18-22 Controversy on Fasting Mt. 9.18-26 Mk 5.21-43 Jairus’ Daughter/Woman with Flow Mt. 9.27-31 (Mk 10.46-52/Mt. 20.29-34) Healing of Two Blind Men Mt. 9.32-34 (Mk 3.22/Mt. 12.22-24) Healing of Dumb Demoniac; Beelzebul Accusation Mt. 9.35-384 Q 10.2 Mk 6.6b/ Harvest Great/Laborers Few Mt. 10.1-4 Mk 3.13-19 Naming the Twelve Mt. 10.5-16 Q 10.3-16 Mk 6.7-13 Mission Instruction [Mt. 10.17-42]5 [Mk 13.9-13] [Persecutions Foretold] Mt. 11.1-19 Q 7.18-35; 16.16 John the Baptist Mt. 11.20-24 Q 10.12-15 Woes on Galilean Towns Mt. 11.25-27 Q 10.21-22 Thanksgiving for Revelation Mt. 11.28-30 Come Unto Me Mt. 12.1-8 Mk 2.23-28 Plucking Grain on the Sabbath Mt. 12.9-14 Mk 3.1-6 Withered Hand Healing Mt. 12.15-21 Mk 3.7-12 Multitudes Healed by the Sea Mt. 12.22-30 Mk 3.22-27/Q 11.14-23 Beelzubul Accusation Mt. 12.31-35 Mk 3.28-30/Q 12.10 Sin Against the Holy Spirit Mt. 12.36-37 Q 6.43-45 By Words Justified Mt. 12.38-42 Q 11.16, 29-32 Request for a Sign (Mk 8.11-12) Mt. 12.43-45 Q 11.24-26 Return of Evil Spirit Mt. 12.46-50 Mk 3.31-35 Jesus’ Family Mt. 13.1-9 Mk 4.1-9 Parable of the Sower Mt. 13.10-15 Mk 4.10-12 (25) Mysteries of the Kingdom Mt. 13.16-17 Q 10.23-24 Blessed the Eyes Mt. 13.18-23 Mk 4.13-20 Interpretation of the Sower Mt. 13.24-30 Parable of the Tares Mt. 13.31-32 Mk 4.30-32/Q 13.18-19 Parable of Mustard Seed Mt. 13.33 Q 13.20-21 Parable of Leaven Mt. 13.34-35 Mk 4.33-34 Jesus Speaks in Parables Mt. 13.36-52 Matthean Parables 3. With Matthew’s transposition of the Q Baptist material (Q 7.18-35/Mt. 11.1-19), Q 9.57-59 is next in sequence after the Capernaum Centurion (Q 7.1-10). 4. Q 10.2, and closely following, Q 10.13-16 remain in absolute (untransposed) Q sequence. 5. Like the Sermon on the Mount, the Commissioning is a distinct compositional enterprise; its transpositions of Mk 13 materials will be analyzed separately.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions Mt. 13.53-58 Mt. 14.1-2 Mt. 14.3-12

Mk 6.1-6a Mk 6.14-16 Mk 6.17-29

227

Preaching at Nazareth Herod’s Opinion Death of John the Baptist

After following Mark’s order as far as Mk 1.16-20/Mt. 4.18-22 (Call of Disciples), Matthew in 4.23 reaches ahead to Mk 1.39 (Galilean Tour) for an element of his preface (Mt. 4.23–5.2) to the Sermon on the Mount. This initiates a series of transpositions that alternate with returns to his absolute forward position in Mark 1–2, a pattern of utilization that ends abruptly after the Commissioning Instruction in Matthew 10. Some interpreters extend the section containing Markan transpositions to Mt. 13.58, since all the transposed materials are prior to Mk 6.14, the point Matthew reaches in 14.1.6 With the exception of a single saying (Mk 4.25 to Mt. 13.12), however, the return to consistent forward movement through Mark occurs at Mt. 12.1, with Mk 2.23-28 (Plucking Grain on the Sabbath). Matthew 11, dominated by the Q 7 Baptist sequence, has no Markan material at all. There are different ways to count the major transpositions of Markan and Q sequences in chs. 8–12. For example, is it Q 9.57–10.16 (Q Commissioning) that is transposed or Q 7.18-35 (John the Baptist)? For the present it suffices to identify, in addition to Mk 1.39 (Galilean Tour), the following as Markan transpositions: Mk 1.40-45 (Healing of Leper); Mk 4.35–5.20 (Stilling of Storm; Gadarene Demoniac); Mk 5.21-43 (Woman with Flow/Ruler’s Daughter); Mk 6.6b-13 (Commissioning); Mk 3.13-19 (Naming the Twelve), for a total of six, and seven if one counts Mk 13.9-13 (Persecutions Foretold) in the Matthew 10 Commissioning. For each, Matthew reaches forward from his absolute position in Mark. Most striking is Matthew’s reaching forward from Mark 2–3 for extensive sequences of material from Mark 4, 5, and 6. In Mt. 12.1 he returns to the thread of his absolute position in Mark (Mk 2.23-28, Plucking Grain on the Sabbath) and for the rest of the Gospel to strict adherence to Mark’s order. One also observes some transpositions of Q sequences, the most notable being the Baptist block (Q 7.18-35/Mt. 11.2-19) to a position after the Commissioning.

6. For example, Frans Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne et la structure du premier évangile’, in Evangelica : Gospel Studies – Etudes d’évangile. Collected Essays by Frans Neirynck (ed. F. van Segbroeck; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1982), pp. 3–33 (21).

228

Q in Matthew

1. The Problem of the Transpositions The problem is the anomalousness of Matthew’s utilization procedures with respect to Mark in this localized section of his gospel; more precisely, what seems to be Matthew’s sudden but temporary switch to different utilization practices vis-à-vis Mark. ‘[T]he main task’, Hawkins remarked, ‘is to discover the reasons which induced Matthew…here, and here only, to break up his Markan source, and to rearrange it among other materials’.7 Luz describes Matthew’s procedure as ‘untypische’, as an ‘aussergewöhnliche’ compositional freedom that ‘passt schlecht’ to Matthew’s use of Mark elsewhere8, Boring as ‘[t]he sudden shift from the creative restructuring of [Matthew’s] sources in 1.2–12.21 to unswervingly following Mark’s order…the dramatic shift in compositional technique’.9 Stanton says that ‘[i]f Matthew has used Mark, then he seems to have done so in two quite different ways in the two halves of his gospel’.10 Absent a plausible explanation, he continues, ‘Matthew’s dependence on Mark would seem to be called in question’. Some in fact claim that the transpositions undermine the argument from order for Markan priority, and that taken together with Matthew’s different ordering of the double tradition vis-à-vis Luke they should force consideration of different or more complicated documentary solutions to the Synoptic Problem.11 This skepticism is fed by the difficulty 2DH scholarship has had coming up with a satisfactory redaction-critical account of Matthew’s singular interventions in Mark in this section of 7. John C. Hawkins, ‘Three Limitations to Luke’s Use of St. Mark’s Gospel’, in Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. W. Sanday; Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 29–94 (30, emphasis added). See also Frans Neirynck, ‘Synoptic Problem’, in New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), pp. 587–95 (589). 8. Ulrich Luz, ‘Die Wundergeschichten von Mt 8–9’, in Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament (ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne with Otto Betz; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987), pp. 149–65 (149); also Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 125. 9. Eugene Boring, ‘The Convergence of Source Analysis, Social History, and Literary Structure in the Gospel of Matthew’, in SBL 1994 Seminar Papers (ed. E. H. Lovering; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), pp. 587–611 (601). 10. Stanton, Gospel for a New People, p. 31. 11. For example, Delbert Burkett, Rethinking Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 61–7; E. P. Sanders, ‘The Argument from Order and the Relationship between Matthew and Luke’, NTS 15 (1969), pp. 249–61 (253–4); David J. Neville, Mark’s Gospel – Prior or Posterior? A Reappraisal of the Phenomenon of Order (JSNTSup 222; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002), p. 267. Sanders misrepresents the argument from order as ‘the statement that both Matthew and Luke generally support Mark’s order’ (p. 253). More accurately, it is that Matthew and Luke do not agree in order against Mark.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

229

his gospel.12 As Linden Youngquist notes, redaction-critical accounts of the transpositions are often contradictory and of uneven plausibility.13 However insightful these accounts might be of the theological and ethical program driving Matthew’s redaction, they only sharpen painfully the most pressing anomaly: Why are Matthew’s extraordinary interventions into the narrative order of his Markan source, driven by whatever redactional interests, so localized to Matthew 8–11? Gundry’s (and Goulder’s) attribution to Matthew of ‘editorial fatigue…in the last half of his gospel’ simply shows the loss scholarship finds itself at in the face of this problem.14 Redaction criticism has cast much light on the fine-grained Christological and ethical program Matthew works out in these chapters. But it has failed to account for the singularity and scale of the transpositions. Redaction criticism tries to trace all Matthew’s operations upon his materials back to his theological and Christological interests. It specializes in analysis of small-scale editorial actions. Its practitioners sometimes think of it as superseding source criticism. Both source criticism and redaction criticism, moreover, operate blind to ancient media conditions and practices. The question is rarely asked how Matthew managed the transpositions, or if it is, the answers given betray faulty media understandings.15 Neville, for example, thinks of Matthew at 8.18-27 having to scroll ahead in both sources hunting visually for Q 9.57-59 and Mk 4.35-41.16 Memory, if it is even invoked, is assumed to be a weak cognitive faculty. Allen suggests that the severe abbreviation of Mk 5.20-43 in Mt. 5.21-42 is due to Matthew’s ‘summarizing’ it from memory rather than unrolling his scroll to the location, presumably to copy it accurately by sight.17 Neville ventures that Matthew separated Mk 5.21-43 from Mk 4.35–5.20 because, working ahead in Mk from memory, he failed to recollect that these were a unified sequence.18 Uncertainty over Q’s documentary status, or alternatively, the view that Q is a sub-literary collection of loosely cohering sayings, short-circuits attempts to explain Matthew’s utilization procedures in chs. 8–12. Gundry’s 12. See Stanton, A Gospel for a New People, p. 31; Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 267; and Burkett, Rethinking Gospel Sources, pp. 61–2. 13. Linden Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’ (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 2003), p. 107–8. 14.  Gundry, Matthew, p. 10; see Goulder, Midrash and Lection, p. 35. Goulder does attempt to work out a lectionary-order rationale for Matthew’s reordering of Mark (pp. 313–18). 15. Derrenbacker makes this point (Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 215). 16. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 239. 17. Allen, Commentary, p. 95. 18. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 254.

230

Q in Matthew

‘editorial fatigue’ explanation, for example, cannot be separated from his minimalist understanding of Q, namely, ‘other materials often shared with Luke’ that Matthew inserts while he ‘freely rearranged his Markan materials’.19 The practice is to regard Q as virtually sub-documentary, contrast it to Mark in this regard, and then discount Q’s literary Gestalt as a factor that Matthew must reckon with in the execution of his project.20 Q for Matthew is merely a handy, versatile resource for sayings to supplement Markan themes. Discounting the Q factor makes the transpositions at the outset solely a problem in Matthew’s use of Mark. This throws the burden of explanation wholly upon redaction-critical analysis of Matthew’s modifications to Mark. It is no wonder, therefore, that these have failed to account for the transpositions. To be sure, almost every redaction-critical account points to Matthew’s need to create narrative antecedents for the list of wonders in Q 7.22 (Mt. 11.5) as a factor, even the factor, in the transpositions. As will become clear, however, the miracle list in Q 7.22, itself located in Q material that Matthew transposes, cannot account comprehensively for Matthew’s utilization actions in chs. 8–12. Matthew 8–10 is replete with double tradition materials (Q 9.57-59; 10.2-16). This density continues into Matthew 11–12 (Q 7.18-35; 10.1215, 21-22; 11.14-32; 10.23-24) but then, curiously, ends shortly after Matthew resumes Mark’s order unbroken.21 Matthew’s interventions in Markan order begin at Mk 1.21-22, with the insertion of the Q Sermon. The sudden turbulence in Matthew’s use of Mark seems to correlate to an encounter with parallel Q material. Our analysis will show that the Markan transpositions are an element in Matthew’s solution to his most pressing technical problem, namely, the integration of Mark and Q in a manner that coherently reconciles their divergent order. In carrying out 19. Gundry, Matthew, p. 10. Also Hawkins: Matthew rearranges Mark among ‘other materials’ (‘Three Limitations’, p. 30), and Goulder: ‘In 1–12, he [Matthew] rearranges Mark freely, and adds large units of new material’ (Midrash and Lection, p. 35). 20. This view was widespread even before the Kleinliteratur Q of the form critics. Streeter claims that ‘[i]f Matthew could so completely disregard the order of Mark as he does in Matt 8–9, we may assume he would be still more indifferent to the original order of a document which was plainly only a loose collection of sayings’ (‘Original Order of Q’, p. 146). In Four Gospels he shifts his position somewhat and suggests that ‘Matthew’s rearrangement of Mark has been, at any rate partly, determined by the necessity of combining Mark with Q’ (Four Gospels, p. 274). He speculates that the position in Q sequence of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven has led Matthew ‘to postpone Mark’s collection of parables’. 21. Neirynck notes the strong presence of double tradition in this section (‘La redaction matthéenne’, p. 25).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

231

this solution, Matthew coordinates Mark and Q such that the Markan and Q configurations of the tradition continue to structure, in their combination, his new composition.22 Matthew is intent on building the essential structures and programmatic concerns of his primary sources right into his new gospel artifact. This points to the normativity of Mark and Q in the Matthean community. Matthew emerges as a skilled scribal tradent, the living embodiment of the normative traditions of his community, exercising a performative competence in his sources, able to give these definitive reenactment in the manuscript medium. 2. Matthew’s Utilization Actions and Ancient Media Conditions Does the pattern of Matthew’s use of Mark and Q reflect the constraints of ancient media? The first step is to map Matthew’s utilization movements accurately. An initial complication is identifying at what point in Mark Matthew has inserted the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5.2–7.27). The issue is vexed, since Mt. 4.23–5.2, the introduction to the Sermon, combines elements from Mk 1.21; 1.32-34; 1.39; 3.7-13; and 6.6. This has led to disagreement over whether Matthew inserts the Sermon at Mk 1.21 (Neirynck), Mk 1.39 (Huck), or Mk 3.13 (Aland). We follow Neirynck that Matthew inserts the Sermon at Mark’s first mention of Jesus’ teaching at Mk 1.21b, and immediately after the call of the first disciples (Mk 1.16-20/Mt. 4.18-22):23 Mk 1.21b: Mt. 5.2:

εἰσελθὼν εἰς τὴν συναγωγὴν ἐδίδασκεν καὶ ἀνοίξας τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ ἐδίδασκεν αὐτοὺς λέγων (also 4.23. διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς ἀυτῶν)

At the end of the Sermon Matthew picks up at Mk 1.22: Mk 1.22: Mt. 7.28:

καὶ ἐξεπλήσσοντο ἐπὶ τῇ διδαχῇ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐγένετο ὅτε ἐτέλεσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς τοὺς λόγους τούτους, ἐξεπλήσσοντο οἱ ὄχλοι ἐπὶ τῇ διδαχῇ αὐτοῦ

22. Syreeni: Matthew is ‘guided by his principal sources’ (Making of the Sermon, p. 95). 23. Franz Neirynck, ‘The Gospel of Matthew and Literary Criticism: A Critical Analysis of A. Gaboury’s Hypothesis’, in L’Évangile selon Matthieu: Rédaction et théologie (ed. M. Didier; BETL 29; Gembloux: Duculot, 1972), pp. 37–70 (60); idem, ‘La redaction matthéenne’, p. 66, n. 102; also C. M. Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order: Definition and Evaluation’, in Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (ed. C. M. Tuckett; JSNTSup 7; Sheffield: JSOT, 1984), pp. 197–219 (204–8); similarly in 1907, Allen, Commentary, p. xv.

232

Q in Matthew

On the basis of this positioning of the Sermon relative to Mark, above we identified the following sequences appearing out of absolute Markan order through to the end of the Matthew 10 Commissioning.  (1) Mk 1.39/Mt. 4.23 (2) Mk 1.40-45/Mt. 8.1-4 (3) Mk 4.35–5.20/Mt. 8.23-34 (4) Mk 5.21-43/Mt. 9.18-26 (5) Mk 6.6b, 7-13/Mt. 9.35; 10.1-16 (6) Mk 3.13-19/Mt. 10.2-4 (7) Mk 13.9-13/Mt. 10.17-25

Galilean Tour Healing of the Leper Stilling of Storm/Gadarene Demoniac Jairus’s Daughter/Woman with Flow Commissioning Instruction Naming the Twelve Persecutions Foretold

After ch. 11, comprising mostly Q 7 and Q 10 materials, Matthew returns to his absolute forward position in Mk 2.23-28 (Plucking Grain on the Sabbath) and proceeds forward through Mark in unbroken order. In addition there are three transpositions of single Markan sayings in Mt. 9–13.24 The Commissioning will receive its own analysis; accordingly Mk 13.9-13/Mt. 10.17-25 (Persecutions Foretold) can be bracketed. Hence the six transpositions.25 Following Huck in locating the Sermon after Mk 1.39 (Mt. 4.23 parallel to Mk 1.39) complicates the picture somewhat by having Matthew move from Mk 1.21 ahead to Mk 1.39 to fill out his introduction to the Sermon, back to Mk 1.22 for the conclusion (Mt. 7.28), and then forward again to Mk 1.40-45 (Mt. 8.1-4), but it does not materially change the pattern of large transpositions.26 Does the pattern of these transpositions tally with ancient media conditions? As Neirynck notes, the transpositions reproduce Mark in relative order. Below (Figure 6.2) is an arrow-enhanced and slightly expanded 24. Mk 6.34 (Sheep Without a Shepherd) is shifted to Mt. 9.36, hence to a position immediately after Matthew’s use of Mk 6.6b. Mk 9.41 (Cup of Water) is pulled forward into the Mission Discourse (Mt. 10.42). Later, Mk 4.25 (Whoever Has) becomes Mt. 13.12 in the Parable Discourse, so shifted to a position immediately following Matthew’s use of Mk 4.10-12 (Mysteries of the Kingdom). 25. Seven if one counts the separation of Mk 6.6b and Mk 6.7-13 as separate transpositions because of Matthew’s insertion of Mk 3.13-19 between them. But it is better to regard this as a transposition (Mk 3.13-19) within a transposition (Mk 6.6b-13). 26. See Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 222; Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 208. At most it becomes a matter of whether Matthew is reaching forward from Mk 1.22 for Mk 1.40-45 (Mt. 8.1-4, Neirynck) or reaching backward from Mk 1.45 for Mk 1.29-34 (Mt. 8.14-17, Huck). Aland’s placement of Mt. 5–7 at Mk 3.13 creates an awkward source-utilization scenario: virtually double the number of transpositions, which entail reaching back from Mk 3 six times and forward five times. See Neville, Mark’s Gospel, pp. 59–60.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

233

version of Neirynck’s columnar representation of Matthew’s appropriation of Markan material in this section.27 It shows that after transposing a Markan sequence (Mk B), Matthew consistently returns to his absolute position in Mark, and, accordingly, sustains his absolute forward progress through Mark (Mk A). Matthew’s progress through the transpositions is marked with solid arrows, and his absolute forward progress through Mark is marked with dashed arrows: Figure 6.2 Mt. Mk A Mk B 7.28 1.22 8.1-4 1.40-45 8.14-17 1.29-34 8.18, 23-34 4.35–5.20 9.1-17 2.1-22 9.18-26 5.21-43 9.35 6.6b 10.1-14 6.7-11 (10.2-4) (3.13-19) 12.1-16 2.23–3.12 12.24-32 3.22-30 12.46-50 3.31-35 13.1-35 4.1-3 13.53-58 6.1-6a

Matthew consistently reaches forward from his absolute position in Mk for his material (Neirynck: ‘an anticipating movement’).28 This is true also for Mk 3.13-19/Mt. 10.2-4 (Naming the Twelve), even though relative to the preceding transpositions it amounts to reaching back. After completing a transposition Matthew returns to and moves forward from his absolute position.29 This pattern is virtually identical to his utilization of Q in the Sermon on the Mount: consistent forward movement from his absolute position in 27. Franz Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.32–5.2 and the Matthean Composition of 4.23–11.1’, in The Interrelations of the Gospels (ed. David L. Dungan; BETL 95; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1990), pp. 23–46 (40–1). 28. Neirynck, ‘Synoptic Problem’, p. 588. 29. This clarifies that Mk 2.1-22/Mt. 9.1-17, sandwiched between Mk 4.35–5.20/ Mt. 8.18-34 on the one hand and Mk 5.21-43/Mt. 9.18-26 on the other, is not an interpolation within an interpolation (Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 111; Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 149). Rather, Matthew returns to his absolute position in Mark (2.1) after his transposition of Mk 4.35–5.20, and subsequently reaches forward again for Mk 5.21-43.

234

Q in Matthew

the source, from this moving fulcrum reaching forward in the source for additional materials, while maintaining the internal order of transposed sequences. As a concatenated group the Markan transpositions, with the exception of Mk 3.13-19, likewise fall into their forward Markan order. Thus one sees no sharp discontinuity in Matthew’s basic utilization pattern for Mark between these transposition-laden chapters and other parts of his Gospel, though to be sure, Matthew’s rationale for the transpositions is still obscure. Neville thinks the unwieldiness of scrolls would make it prohibitively difficult for Matthew to execute the transpositions. He imagines Matthew scrolling forward to Mk 4.35–5.20, then ‘backtracking’ to Mk 2.1-22, and then ‘bypass[ing] a large section…Mk 2.23–4.34’ to get to Mk 5.21: ‘In light of the first-century convention of using relatively simple compositional procedures’ Matthew’s procedure ‘was not “economical” ’.30 Similarly, because Matthew skips over the Q Baptist section (Q 7.18-35), ‘[he] had to search a long way forward for Mt. 8.19-22 (cf. Lk. 9.57-60)’.31 It is commendable that Neville weighs the media realities of source utilization, but he assumes that apart from an occasional resort to ‘reminiscence’, Matthew is dependent upon visual contact with his sources. But these utilization patterns attest to a memory-grounded competence in Mark, combined with parsimony of cognitive effort. In antiquity memory played an instrumental role in utilization of written works, making it possible to overcome the constraints of the scroll. A work’s existence in memory enabled not just sequential but roving access guided by the configuration of the work as a memory artifact. For Q this would be its sequence of moral topoi, for Mark its narrative sequence of episodes. Because the work was grounded in memory as coherent sequences, and because textual intelligibility unfolds in order, utilization would tend to be in sequence forward. Matthew’s utilization of Mark in Matthew 8–12 fits this media framework. It is not a matter of his making ‘scans’ or ‘passes’ through Mark 1–6. Rather, from the stable yet advancing point of his absolute position in Mark, he roves forward for the desired materials, producing them in their forward sequence, then returns to pick up the thread of his absolute progress through Mark. Particularly noteworthy is the economy of these maneuvers. The transpositions amount to a simple appropriative movement forward along a single axis: Mk 4.35–5.20 → Mk 5.21-43 → Mk 6.6b-13.32 This 30. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 251. 31. Ibid., p. 239. 32. Noted by Luz, Matthew 8–20, pp. 2–3; see also Linden Youngquist, ‘Matthew, Mark, and Q: A Literary Exploration’, in Mark and Matthew I (ed. E. M. Becker and A. Runesson; WUNT 271; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2011), pp. 233–61 (253–4).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

235

runs in tandem to the line of Matthew’s absolute progress through Mark: Mk 1.29-31 → Mk 2.1-22 → Mk 2.23 (to the end of the Gospel). With the exception of Mk 3.13-19 (Naming the Twelve) positioned between Mk 6.6b and 6.7-13, this double linear movement accounts for Matthew’s Markan utilization actions in this section. 3. Q Utilization Vector in Matthew 8–12 Q materials have a significant presence in this section of Matthew, all the more so if all of Matthew 8–12 is in view. Matthew’s arrangements of Q in this section relative to its Lukan order have not excited much comment. If raised at all the issue is usually subordinated to the problem of Matthew’s utilization of Mark. In Luz’s words, ‘Matthew has combined two Markan sections (1.40–2.22; 4.35–5.43) and has supplemented them with Q material’.33 But the Mark utilization vector and the Q utilization vector in this section are intelligible only if analyzed together. Matthew’s ordering of Q in this section can be represented as follows (Qa = Q Lk. order; Qb = Matthew’s changes to that order; jagged arrow = a retrieval action): Figure 6.3 Capernaum Centurion Kingdom Banquet Disciples Called Harvest Plentiful Commissioning John the Baptist Woes on Cities Thanksgiving Beelzebul Sin Against Spirit Trees, Fruit, the Heart Sign of Jonah Return of Evil Spirit Blessed the Eyes Mustard Seed Leaven

Mt. Qa (in Lk. order) Qb (Matthew reorders) 8.5-13 7.1-10 8.11-12 13.28-29 8.18-22 9.57-60 9.37-38 10.2 10.10-16, 40 10.3-12, 1634 11.2-19 7.18-35 11.20-24 10.13-15 11.25-27 10.21-22 12.22-30 11.14-15, 17-23 12.31-32 12.10 12.33-35 6.43-45 12.38-42 11.16, 29-32 12.43-45 11.24-26 13.16-17 10.23-24 13.31-32 13.18-19 13.33 13.21-22

33. Luz, Matthew 8–20, p. 2 (emphasis added). 34. The Commissioning (Mt. 10.17-42), which shifts around a few elements of Q 10.3-16 (including 10.13-15 above) and in addition incorporates Q 6.40; 12.2-9, 11-12; 12.51-53; 14.25-27, as we noted earlier, will be analyzed separately.

236

Q in Matthew

When he pulls Q 13.28-29 (Kingdom Banquet) forward into the Capernaum Centurion (Mt. 8.5-13), Matthew is going back to and finishing off the longer Q topos 13.23-29, the other elements of which he had just used in the protreptic ending to the Sermon on the Mount. This caps off a tidy Q-utilization pattern in which he alternates between his advancing absolute position in Q 6–7 and his appropriation of this Q 13 topos forward in a double sequence. Neirynck represents this as follows:35

Mt. 5–7 Q 6.20-49 Mt. 7.13-14, 22-23 Q 13.23-27 Mt. 8.5-10, 13 Q 7.1-10 Mt. 8.11-12 Q 13.28-29

Inclusive of Q 13.28-29 one observes a utilization pattern similar to that just observed for Mark: absolute forward progress through Q 7–13, broken by the transposition of Q 7.18-35; 10.13-15; 12.10; 11.24-26; and 10.23-24. Counting Q 6.43-45/Mt. 12.33-35 (Trees and Fruit), which also appears in its Q order at Mt. 7.16-19, five of Matthew’s six transpositions are retrievals of Q units passed over in his absolute forward progress through Q. Q 11.2426, however, is less a transposition than a simple inversion of order with Q 11.29-32. The most noteworthy of the transpositions is Q 7.18-35 (Baptist), moved by retrieval to a position after the Commissioning. Hence there are really two retrieval movements of interest: Q 7.18-35, and Q 10.23-24. It is certainly possible to construe Q 9.57-59; 10.2-16 as the major transposition – Matthew pulling this material forward – and consequently Matthew’s subsequent use of Q 7.18-35 as his return to his absolute position in Q, whence he then continues forward to Q 10.1315.36 Here and perhaps in a few other instances there may be reasonable differences of opinion on what constitutes Matthew’s progress in his absolute position in Q and what constitutes the transposition. In this case, Matthew’s movement ahead to Q 9 and Q 10 (the Q Commissioning) is sustained and carries forward ultimately to the Q 11 and Q 13 materials. Not much depends on the perspective one adopts, but it is better to identify the Baptist sequence (Q 7.18-35) as the transposed element, for reasons at this point unclear shifted to after the Commissioning. On either scenario Matthew’s utilization pattern is the same: forward progress through the source, punctuated by two or three transpositions. The internal order of the Q sequences is mostly kept intact (maintenance of relative order), and the constituent elements are appropriated as integral units. This pattern accords with memory-based source competence, attesting to 35. Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, p. 39. 36. Neirynck takes it thus (ibid., pp. 41–2).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

237

an established, intelligible order constitutive of Q that affects and indeed regulates Matthew’s enactment and utilization of it as a source. It is similar to the pattern of Matthew’s use of Mark in the same section. 4. Matthew 4.23–5.2: Galilean Teaching and Healing Tour But why does Matthew arrange his sources in the peculiar way that he does in this section? Before looking at redaction-critical solutions to this problem, the special case of Mt. 4.23–5.2 needs to be dealt with, using Neirynck’s analysis as the baseline.37 Matthew incorporates the Sermon on the Mount, dominated by Q material, into Mark’s narrative sequence at Mark’s first reference to Jesus teaching (Mk 1.21, εἰσελθὼν εἰς τὴν συναγωγὴν ἐδίδασκεν/Mt. 4.23, διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς). His extensive lead-in to the Sermon (4.23–5.2), however, is a mosaic of M-expanded phrases worked up out of Markan tradition in roughly the following order: Mk 1.21; 6.6b; 1.39, 28, 32-34; 3.7-13, capped off in Mt. 5.2 with a return to the ἐδίδασκεν of Mk 1.21: Figure 6.4 Mk 1.21: καὶ εἰσπορεύονται εἰς Καφαρναούμ· καὶ εὐθὺς τοῖς σάββασιν εἰσλθὼν εἰς τὴν συναγωγὴν ἐδίδασκεν.

Mt. 4.23: καὶ περιῆγεν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ Γαλιλαίᾳ διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν καὶ κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας καὶ θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν ἐν τῷ λαῷ.

Mk 6.6b: καὶ περιῆγεν τὰς κώμας κύκλῳ διδάσκων Mk 1.39: καὶ ἦλθεν κηρύσσων εἰς συναγωγὰς αὐτῶν εἰς ὅλον τὴν Γαλιλαίαν καὶ τὰ δαιμόνια ἐκβάλλων Mk 1.28: καὶ ἐξῆλθεν ἡ ἀκοὴ αὐτοῦ εὐθὺς πανταχοῦ εἰς ὅλην τὴν περίχωρον τῆς Γαλιλαίας Mk 1.32-34: Ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης, ὅτε ἔδυ ὁ ἥλιος, ἔφερον πρὸς αὐτὸν πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας καὶ τοὺς δαιμονιζομένους· καὶ ἦν ὅλη ἡ πόλις ἐπισυνηγμένη πρὸς τὴν θύραν. καὶ ἐθεράπευσεν πολλοῦς κακῶς ἔχοντας ποικίλαις νόσοις...

Mt. 4.24: καὶ ἀπῆλθεν ἡ ἀκοὴ αὐτοῦ εἰς ὅλην τὴν Συρίαν· καὶ προσήνεγκαν αὐτῷ πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας ποικίλαις νόσοις καὶ βασάνοις συνεχομένους δαιμονιζομένους καὶ σεληνιαζομένους καὶ παραλυτικούς, καὶ ἐθεράπευσεν αὐτούς.

37. Ibid., passim; idem, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, pp. 29–30.

238

Q in Matthew

Mk 3.7-13: καὶ ὁ Ἰησοῦς μετὰ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ ἀνεχώρησεν πρὸς τὴν θάλασσαν, καὶ πολὺ πλῆθος ἀπὸ τῆς Γαλιλαίας [ἠκολούθησεν], καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς Ἰουδαίας καὶ ἀπὸ Ἱεροσολύμων καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς Ἰδουμίας καὶ πέραν τοῦ Ἰορδάνου καὶ περὶ Τύρον καὶ Σιδῶνα πλῆθος πολὺ ἀκούοντες ὅσα ἐποίει ἤλθον πρὸς αὐτόν...πολλοὺς γὰρ ἐθεράπευσεν, ὥστε ἐπιπίπτειν αὐτῷ ἵνα αὐτοῦ ἅψωνται ὅσοι εἶχον μάστιγας. καὶ τὰ πνεύματα τὰ ἀκάθαρτα, ὅταν αὐτὸν ἐθεώρουν, προσέπιπτον αὐτῷ καὶ ἔκραζον λέγοντες ὅτι σὺ εἶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ. καὶ πολλὰ ἐπετίμα αὐτοῖς ἵνα μὴ αὐτὸν φανερὸν ποιὴσωσιν. Καὶ ἀναβαίνει εἰς τὸ ὄρος καὶ προσκαλεῖται οὓς ἤθελεν αὐτός, καὶ ἀπῆλθον πρὸς αὐτόν. καὶ ἐποίησεν δώδεκα...

Mt. 4.25: καὶ ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ ὄχλοι πολλοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς Γαλιλαίας καὶ Δεκαπόλεως καὶ Ἱεροσολύμων καὶ Ἰουδαίας καὶ πέραν τοῦ Ἰορδάνου.

Mt. 5.1-2: ἰδὼν δὲ τοὺς ὄχλους ἀνέβη εἰς τὸ ὄρος καὶ καθίσαντος αὐτοῦ προσῆλθαν αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ. καὶ ἀνοίξας τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ ἐδίδασκεν αὐτοὺς λέγων...

Mk 1.21: εἰσελθὼν εἰς τὴν συναγωγὴν ἐδίδασκεν.

At the conclusion of the Sermon (Mt. 7.28-29), Matthew picks up at Mk 1.22, in Mark the astonishment of the synagogue in Capernaum at Jesus’ teaching, to register the reaction of the crowds, come together from many places, to the Sermon on the Mount: Figure 6.5 Mk 1.22: καὶ ἐξεπλήσσοντο ἐπὶ τῇ διδαχῇ αὐτοῦ· ἦν γὰρ διδάσκων αὐτοὺς ὡς ἐξουσίαν ἔχων καὶ ουχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς.

Mt. 7.28-29: …ἐξεπλήσσοντο οἱ ὄχλοι ἐπὶ τῇ διδαχῇ αὐτοῦ· ἦν γὰρ διδάσκων αὐτοὺς ὡς ἐξουσίαν ἔχων καὶ οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς αὐτῶν.

Mark 1.21 and Mk 1.22, accordingly, frame the Sermon. Though διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς in Mt. 4.23 parallels εἰς τὴν συναγωγὴν ἐδίδασκεν of Mk 1.21, the Evangelist draws preponderantly from Mk 1.39, though with θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον he incorporates a motif of Mk 1.34 (ἐθεράπευσεν πολλοὺς…ποικίλαις νόσοις).38 Similarly, περιῆγεν...διδάσκων echoes Mk 6.6b (περιῆγεν τὰς κώμας κύκλῳ διδάσκων). This is more than Matthew just picking up an expression from his source (see περιάγετε in Mt. 23.15). 38. Neirynck interprets θεραπεύσεν πᾶσαν νόσον as Matthew’s substitute for the omitted synagogue exorcism (Mk 1.23-27) (‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, p. 30).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

239

Rather, as many commentators have observed, Mt. 4.23 and 9.35 (Mk 6.6b) form an inclusio enclosing the intervening material that portrays Jesus successively as Messiah of Word (chs. 5–7) and Messiah of Deed (Healings) (chs. 8–9). In short, in Mt. 4.23–5.2 Matthew composes on the basis of Markan phrases localized in Markan summaries to shape a distinctively Matthean prospectus on the next five chapters of the Gospel. In 4.24 Matthew tracks Mk 1.28, 32-34 closely, temporarily passing over Mk 1.29-31, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. By omitting ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης, ὅτε ἔδυ ὁ ἥλιος (Mk 1.32a) and καὶ ἦν ὅλη ἡ πόλις ἐπισυνηγμένη πρὸς τὴν θύραν (Mk 1.33), Matthew de-localizes the healings and crowd scene from Capernaum, thereby opening up a vastly widened, indeed, universal horizon for Jesus’ activities and teaching, a transformation of setting begun when he made Mk 1.39, with its reference to Jesus κηρύσσων εἰς τὰς συναγωγὰς αὐτῶν εἰς ὅλην τὴν Γαλιλαίαν, the definitive element of the inaugural Mt. 4.23, instead of the εἰσπορεύονται εἰς Καφαρναούμ of Mk 1.21. This also accounts for Matthew’s dexterous reach forward in Mt. 4.25; 5.1-2 to the geographical notices of Mk 3.7-13, where instead of just the local Capernaum crowd people converge upon Jesus from geographical areas all over Palestine and beyond.39 In Mk 3.13 Jesus ἀναβαίνει εἰς τὸ ὄρος preliminary to summoning the Twelve; Matthew in 5.1 takes over this phrase to pinpoint the location for the Sermon, with Jesus’ μαθηταί his most proximate audience (5.1-2; see Mk 3.7: μετὰ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ). When later Matthew’s absolute progress through Mark brings him to Mk 3.7-13 (Mt. 12.15-16), he passes over the elements he has used for 4.23–5.2. Matthew’s concern to establish a wide horizon and audience appropriate for Jesus’ programmatic teaching elegantly accounts for his choices, rearrangements, and modifications of Markan materials in this sequence. The question typically not asked by the redaction critics, however, is how he goes about pulling together and combining the Markan materials. Neirynck describes Matthew’s compositional moves as ‘anticipations’ and leaves it at that. For Neville the ‘cumbersome’ scroll medium calls in question the plausibility of this scenario for 4.23–5.2, in view of ‘the redactional acrobatics required to effect…the alleged conflation of materials from widely disparate sections of Mark’s Gospel’.40 He charges Neirynck’s 39. Matthew substitutes Syria for Tyre and Sidon, and the Decapolis for Idumea (Neirynck, ‘Gospel of Matthew’, p. 65). For Matthew’s invocation of crowds from the geographical areas of all Israel and the ‘whole area of [Gentile] Syria’ as his means of symbolically creating a universal audience for Jesus’ programmatic teaching, see Frankemölle, Kommentar I, pp. 202–4. 40. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 267.

240

Q in Matthew

‘anticipations’ explanation with being ‘convoluted’ and ‘anachronistic’, with special difficulty purportedly attaching to Matthew’s jump forward in 4.25 to the ‘far removed’ Mark 3.41 Neville has absorbed enough of ancient media realities to appreciate the difficulties of hunting around in a scroll in scriptio continua to locate dispersed fragments of text. But he has little conception of memory-based source competence; for him memory of a source is a random factor that occasionally works ‘subconsciously’ upon a redactor or copyist.42 Neville’s own Griesbachian scenario, however, has Mark at the Matthew 12/Mark 3/Luke 6 juncture reaching back to Mt. 4.25 for material. To try to escape the inconsistency Neville argues weakly that ‘reminiscence’ is a more plausible memory operation than ‘anticipations’. In other words, memory for Neville is short-term memory: it is easier for an Evangelist to remember material just read than to anticipate material not read so recently. Certain features of the Markan materials in 4.23–5.2 indicate that Matthew’s deep memory competence in his source in fact is a leading factor in its composition. After establishing the leading redactional motif – the wide scope of Jesus’ healings and proclamation – for 4.23–5.2 by drawing on Mk 1.39 (κηρύσσων εἰς τὰς συναγωγὰς αὐτῶν εἰς ὅλην τὴν Γαλιλαίαν) for elements of 4.23, hybridizing these with Mk 1.21 (διδάσκων), Matthew finds his way in order forward through Mk 1.28, 32, 34, 3.7-8, 13, then back to his absolute position in Mk 1.21-22. Of these, Mk 1.39 is accessed out of Markan sequence. Though involving much smaller sequences of text, this utilization procedure is identical to the pattern observed above for Matthew’s use of Mark and Q respectively in chs. 8–12 as well as for his use of Q in the Sermon on the Mount. It accords with a memory mastery of the source, as does the performative freedom, as opposed to microcopying, with which Matthew takes up these short Markan sequences. Notably, the Markan phrases taken up are quite formulaic, that is, made up of recurrent words and groups of words that are frequent in synoptic summaries. These include typical actions such as κηρύσσων, διδάσκων, θεραπεύων, ἐθεράπευσεν, ἔφερον πρὸς αὐτόν, ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ, formulaic noun structures such as τὸ εὐαγγέλλιον τῆς βασιλείας, ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς, and catch-all lists of afflictions and diseases: πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας ποικίλαις νόσοις, βασάνοις συνεχομένους, δαιμονιζομένους, σεληνιαζομένους, παραλυτικούς. The geographical notices likewise are generalized designations of the districts of Palestine and its bordering regions. Masterful deployment of a repertoire of stock words and phrases is a feature of 41. Ibid., pp. 201–2. 42. Ibid., p. 267.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

241

oral-traditional composition. Matthew 4.23–5.2 is a textbook case of the intersection of oral-traditional competence and manuscript competence. The foundational Markan tradition, engrained in Matthew’s memory, provides him with a lexical inventory to compose from. In the Sermon on the Mount Matthew was similarly observed composing M materials out of Q source traditions. One might even be inclined to put 4.23–5.2 down in its entirety to Matthew composing in oral-traditional manner from a repertoire of stock words and phrases drawn from, or attested in, the Markan summaries. But the traces of a Markan order in 4.23–5.2 makes it a case of oral utilization practices applied to a written source.43 Good analogies to Matthew’s procedure lie to hand. Jeffrey Tigay describes the tenth commandment of the Samaritan Torah, the command to build at Gerezim, as ‘a pastiche or mosaic’, consisting of ‘verses and partial verses from Deuteronomy 11 and 27’. ‘[T]his tendentious supplement’, he continues, ‘is composed in almost every detail…of elements already present in the Masoretic Torah’.44 Dwight Swanson shows how the scribe(s) of the Temple Scroll wove lexical threads together from different textual locations to create a new textual unity. 11QT 59.5b-7a, for example – ‘And in the land of their enemies they will groan and cry out because of a heavy yoke and they will call and I will not hear, and they will cry out and I will not answer them’ – is a weave of lexical elements from Lam. 1.11, Exod. 2.23, Jer. 11.1, Zech. 7.13, and Mic. 3.4.45 In the Temple Scroll, Swanson summarizes, ‘[w]e are…presented with an example of the consummate skill of the ancient scribes in drawing from their deep and intimate knowledge of the scriptures to weave together the various strands of each topic in a new unity which both respects the tradition drawn on and draws out new interpretations of it’.46 This is equally apt as a description of Mt. 4.23–5.2.

43. Neirynck observes that Mt. 4.23–5.2 constitutes ‘une vraie synthèse, bien caractéristique du premier évangile, qui révèle une très grande familiarisation avec l’évangile de Mc et un style personnel dans son utilization’ (‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 30). 44. Jeffrey H. Tigay, ‘Conflation as a Redactional Technique’, in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 53–96 (81). 45. Dwight D. Swanson, The Temple Scroll and the Bible: The Methodology of the 11QT (STDJ 14; Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 153–4. 46. Ibid., p. 15. See also Edward L. Greenstein, ‘Misquotation of Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume (ed. Barry Walfish; Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), pp. 71–83 (76).

242

Q in Matthew

5. Explanations of the Markan Transpositions We return now to the problem of the Markan transpositions in Matthew 8–11. What explanations of the transpositions have been offered, and how successful are they? a. ‘Collection of Miracles’ Because critics in their marginalization of Q attend only to the Markan transpositions, they typically limit their analysis to Matthew 8–9. It is widely recognized that the effect of the transpositions has been to create a density of healing stories in these two chapters: Healing of the Leper (Mt. 8.1-4/Mk 1.40-45); Healing of Centurion’s Son (Mt. 8.5-13/Q 7.1-10); Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law (Mt. 8.14-15/Mk 1.29-31); Healings in the Evening (Mt. 8.16-17/Mk 1.32-34); Healing of Gadarene Demoniacs (Mt. 8.28-34/Mk 5.1-20); Healing of the Paralytic (Mt. 9.1-8/Mk 2.1-12); Healing of Woman with Flow/Ruler’s Daughter (Mt. 9.18-26/Mk 5.2143); Healing of Blind Men (Mt. 9.27-31/Mk 10.46-52); Healing of Mute Demoniac (Mt. 9.32-34/Mk 3.22). These amount to a significant proportion of all the miracles recounted in the Gospel. Many have therefore concluded that Matthew has compiled materials from Mark 1–5 in order to create an impressive collection, a ‘cycle’, of miracle stories.47 Why has Matthew done so? Counting the Storm at Sea among the wonders, Hawkins noted in Horae Synopticae that mnemonic ‘numerical arrangements’ are common in the rabbinic literature, and that Pirke Aboth 5–8 might therefore cast light on Matthew’s collection of miracles: ‘Ten miracles were wrought for our fathers in Egypt, and ten by the sea… Ten miracles were wrought in the sanctuary.’48 The collection of healings establishes that Jesus is Messiah of Deed (chs. 8–9) as well as Messiah of Word (chs. 5–7), and Matthew signals this by the inclusio formed by Mt. 4.23-25 and Mt. 9.35.49 In this vein Kümmel adds that Matthew collects healing episodes to illustrate the θεραπέυων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν ἐν 47. Christoph Burger, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus 8 und 9’, ZTK 70 (1973), pp. 272–87 (277). Neville (Mark’s Gospel, p. 203) traces the ‘healing cycle’ explana­tion of the transpositions as far back as Heinrich Julius Holtzmann’s Die Synoptiker (Freiburg: Mohr-Siebeck, 1889). 48. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, pp. 165–7. R. Schnackenburg (Matthäus­ evangelium 1,1–16,20 [NEB; Würzburg: Echter, 1985], pp. 7–8) and Grundmann (Evangelium, p. 246) also advance this interpretation. 49. Beare, Gospel, pp. 14–18; Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Matthew (trans. David E. Green; Atlanta: John Knox, 1975), p. 69; Wiefel, Evangelium, pp. 157–8, and numerous others.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

243

τῷ λαῷ of Mt. 4.23c and also to prepare for the Mission Instruction in Matthew 10.50 Numerous commentators make the point that in addition, Matthew pulls together narrative antecedents to the list of healings in Jesus’ response to John in Q 7.22 (Mt. 11.5): τυφλοὶ ἀναβλέπουσιν, χωλοὶ περιπατοῦσιν, λεπροὶ καθαρίζονται καὶ κωφοὶ ἀκούουσιν, νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται.51 Indeed, Matthew strengthens the correspondence between νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται of Mt. 11.5/Q 7.22 and the Raising of the Ruler’s Daughter (Mt. 9.18-26/ Mk 5.21-43) by modifying Jairus’s τὸ θυγάτριόν μου ἐσχάτως ἔχει (Mk 5.23) to ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν (Mt. 9.18), and he adds the Healing of the Two Blind Men and the Healing of the Deaf Mute (Mt. 9.27-34) to give narrative antecedents to those items on the list. Nevertheless there are difficulties with the ‘healing collection’ explanation of Matthew’s transpositions, at least as their comprehensive rationale. The most debilitating is that a number of transposed episodes in Matthew 8–9 do not feature miracles: Call of Disciples (8.18-22); Call of Matthew; Eating With Sinners (9.9-13); Fasting/Wineskins Controversy (9.14-17).52 Kümmel’s explanation – Matthew takes these materials into his cycle of miracle stories on the grounds that ‘this is where they occur in Mark’ – is strained.53 Matthew is quite prepared elsewhere if need be to pass over or defer materials. Furthermore, he pulls the Q call stories (Q 9.57-59), which lack any miraculous elements, from their position as frontispiece to the Q Mission right into the heart of the transposed Markan materials (Mt. 8.18-22), indeed, putting them at the head of the first major Markan 50. Werner Georg Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament (trans. Howard Clark Kee; Nashville: Abingdon, rev. ed., 1975), pp. 59–60. 51. Streeter, Four Gospels, p. 273; Schweizer, Good News According to Matthew, p. 69; Schnackenburg, Matthäusevanglium, p. 78, Wiefel, Evangelium, p. 157 n. 1, are representative of the many commentators who mention this. 52. Burger, ‘Jesu Taten’, p. 276; also Luz, ‘Die Wundergeschichten’, p. 151; Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 110. 53. Kümmel, Introduction, p. 60. Allen also fell back on this explanation (Commentary, p. 86); also Hawkins (‘The Arrangement of Materials in St. Matthew viii.–ix’, ExpTim 12 [1900–1901], pp. 471–4 [472]). J. C. Fenton tries to get around the problem of the non-miraculous materials by arguing that ‘[t]he acts of power give the character to the section’ (The Gospel of Matthew [PNTC; Middlesex: Penguin, 1963], pp. 119–20). Beare’s calling them ‘interludes’ begs the question (Gospel, p. 201). Carl R. Holladay suggests that Matthew included the non-miraculous materials in order to create alternating sets of miracles, ‘thereby making them more memorable’ (‘Jesus’ Ministry in Galilee in Matthew 8–10’, in Gospel Images of Jesus in Church Tradition and in Biblical Scholarship [ed. Christos Krakolis, Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, and Sviatoslav Rogalsky; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012], pp. 337–48 [341]).

244

Q in Matthew

transposition.54 Oddly on the ‘cycle of healings’ theory, Matthew’s redaction of the Healing of the Paralytic downplays the miraculous elements and sharpens its controversy elements.55 Likewise, it is anomalous that Matthew should include two controversies without miracles (Eating with Sinners; Fasting) while postponing to ch. 12 the Plucking Grain on the Sabbath and the Healing of the Withered Hand controversies (Mk 2.23–3.6/Mt. 12.1-14), especially when the latter features a miracle. Burkett comments: ‘Matthew does just the opposite of what the theory requires of him: he postpones a controversy story that relates a miracle, but keeps two controversy stories with no miracle’.56 Similarly, though Mk 4.35–5.43 conveniently offers Matthew a connected sequence of miracle stories, he oddly breaks it in two by his insertion of Mk 2.1-22 (Mt. 9.1-17), which not only contains the Healing of the Paralytic but also the aforementioned Call of Levi and the Eating with Sinners/Fasting controversies.57 The citation of the Isaiah 53 Testimonium at Mt. 8.17 after a sequence of just three healings (Mt. 8.1-16) marks a caesura. Matthew 8.16 (πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας ἐθεράπευσεν) forms an inclusio with Mt. 4.24 (πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας…ἐθεράπευσεν αὐτούς), and the Q call story that immediately follows in combination with Jesus’ instruction to cross to the other side of the lake initiates a new section.58 In short, while there can be little doubt that Matthew intends to concentrate healings in this section, this is not a sufficient account of his utilization actions. It fails render the pattern of his transpositions intelligible; it does not explain ‘weshalb er eine weithin neue Anordnung der Geschehnisse schafft’.59 54. B. W. Bacon commented on this anomaly (‘Editorial Arrangement in Matthew VIII–IX’, Exp 8 [1920], pp. 200–213 [210]). 55. Jack Dean Kingsbury, ‘Observations on the “Miracle Chapters” of Matthew 8–9’, CBQ 40 (1978), pp. 559–73 (561). 56. Burkett, Rethinking Gospel Sources, p. 63; also Burger, ‘Jesu Taten’, pp. 276–7. 57. Burger, ‘Jesu Taten’, p. 278; Burkett, Rethinking Gospel Sources, p. 63. For Neville this is evidence that Matthew may not be ‘primarily dependent on Mk’ as the source for the miracles in this section (Mark’s Gospel, p. 203). Schweizer proposes that the arrangement of double and triple tradition in this extended section of Matthew might point to the use of a distinct source (Good News, pp. 71–2). 58. Burger, ‘Jesu Taten’, pp. 278–9. 59. Ibid., p. 277; also Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 208. Neirynck suggests that the Q sequence, Healing of the Centurion’s Son (7.1-10) → List of Healings (7.22), ‘peut avoir suggéré [to Matthew] l’idée d’une série de miracles de Jesus’ (‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 30). But Mk 1.23–2.12 already offers a sequence of at least five miracles. Moreover, it is odd that Matthew would take the Q 7.1-10 → 7.18-35 sequence as his cue for organizing his Gospel in this section but then completely reverse the order of Q 7.18-35 and Q 9.58–10.16.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

245

b. Redaction-Critical Explanations In its widest sense redaction-critical analysis would include the ‘miracle collection’ theory. But redaction criticism as a methodology traces Matthew’s editorial operations upon his sources back to his Christological and ethical interests. (1) Held. Held pioneered the redaction-critical approach to Matthew 8–9. His work shows the explanatory power but also the limitations of redaction criticism when confronted by these chapters. Matthew’s intention, Held argues, is indeed to collect a number of Jesus’ miracles into this section. This is clear from the emphasis upon Jesus’ healing activities in the summaries in Mt. 4.23; 9.35; and 10.1. The repetition in the summaries of the Matthean θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν connects all of Matthew 5–10 together, while Matthew’s idiosyncratic rendering of Isa. 53.4, καὶ τὰς νόσους ἐβάστασεν (Mt. 8.17), brings all Jesus’ wonderworking activities in these chapters under the rubric of the Servant Testimonium. Matthew’s program is Christological: to depict Jesus as Messiah of Word (chs. 5–7) and Deed (chs. 8–9), but also, in view of his insertion of θεραπεύειν πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν (Mt. 10.1b) into the Markan opening of the Mission Instruction (Mk 6.7), to depict the transfer of Jesus’ healing authority to his disciples.60 Held’s analysis of the ‘miracle cycle’ of Matthew 8–9 in the Christological framework of Mt. 4.23–10.1 is illuminating, but it does not explain the transpositions. Held recognizes that the controversies in Mt. 8.18–9.17 are ‘quite remarkable…in a cycle of miracles’, but he falls back on Kümmel’s weak explanation that Matthew took the controversies over because they were so solidly embedded in the sequence.61 His own analysis shows that Matthew’s redaction of the Healing of the Paralytic heightens the controversy elements while downplaying, even eliminating, the miracle story elements, turning it more unequivocally into a controversy over Jesus’ authority to forgive sins.62 Held’s ad hoc equivocations to salvage the miracle cycle explanation show the complications Matthew’s sudden return to Mk 2.1-22 from Mk 4.35–5.20 throws up

60. Joachim Heinz Held, ‘Matthew as Interpreter of the Miracle Stories’, in Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew (ed. Günther Bornkamm, Gerhard Barth, and Heinz Joachim Held; trans. Percy Scott; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), pp. 165–299 (246–50, 259–60, 270–1). 61. Ibid., pp. 248–9. 62. Ibid., pp. 176–7.

246

Q in Matthew

for this neat solution.63 Moreover (and as Held notes), movement from (a) a cycle of healings that establish Jesus’ authority to (b) the transfer of that authority to disciples in a Commissioning is already a feature of Matthew’s source (Mk 4.35–6.13).64 It is difficult, therefore, for a stand-alone redaction-critical analysis to bear all the weight of Matthew’s transpositions. Held is typical of redaction critics in leaving Q wholly out of consideration when trying to recover the rationale for Matthew’s editorial actions. In this regard it is noteworthy that the didache plus healings sequence constitutive of Matthew’s Messiah of Word and Deed Christological narrative depends upon his incorporation of the Q 6 Sermon in the order of its occurrence in Q. Naturally we will have more to say about this in due course. Similar difficulties arise for Held’s subdivision of Mt. 8.18–9.17 under the redactional rubrics of Christology (8.1-17), discipleship (8.18–9.17), and faith (9.18-34). Held acknowledges that these motifs surface not only throughout the entire section but also in other Matthean miracle stories. Nevertheless he argues that they serve Matthew as his redactional scalpels in his abbreviation of these Markan episodes. Servant Christology is the definitive redactional factor in 8.1-17.65 That faith is the redactional factor in Mt 9.18-34 (Mk 5.21-43) is evident, Held argues, in κατὰ τὴν πίστιν ὑμῶν γενηθήτω ὑμῖν (9.29b), the ‘catchword bridge’ πιστεύτε/πίστιν (9.28-29), and ἡ πίστις σου σέσωκέν σε (9.22).66 In view of (a) the Call of Disciples (8.18-22), (b) the redaction of the Storm at Sea (8.23-27) into a parable of discipleship, and (c) the Call of Levi and the Feasting/Fasting Controversies (9.9-17), Held identifies ‘discipleship’ as the redactional factor in 8.18–9.17.67 This middle section, however, resists this neat thematic classification. The discipleship motif becomes more difficult to trace in the Healing of the Paralytic and Gadarene Demoniacs, and the latter episode, Held points out, ‘is placed completely in the service of the Christological statement (Matt. 8.29)’.68 The thematic complexity of this section, the uneven thematic coherence of materials comprised by the other 63. ‘But all the more would the evangelist have attached importance to a miracle narrative the meaning of which lay not in the miraculous deed itself but in the evidence furnished by it that Jesus and his congregation have authority on earth to forgive sins (ibid., p. 249). 64. Ibid., pp. 270–1. 65. Ibid., pp. 169–74, 245, 254, 268. 66. Ibid., pp. 179, 193, 224–5. 67. Ibid., pp. 200–204. 68. Ibid., p. 245. Matthew has eliminated the discipleship element from the Markan version of the Gadarene exorcism, though the reason might be Jesus’ refusal of the man’s request ‘that he might be with him’ (Mk 5.18).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

247

two sections, and the pervasiveness of the three motifs in Matthew 8–9 and elsewhere – something Held himself points out – raise doubts about the demarcating function he assigns to them.69 Luz’s description of these themes as forming a theological tapestry in chs. 8–9 is more apt.70 To this one can add that the existence of a section break between Mt. 9.14-17 (Fasting) and Mt. 9.14-26 (Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with Hemorrhage) is dubious. The latter episode, though it marks Matthew’s return to Mark 5 from Mark 2, is bound through ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς (Mt. 9.18) directly to the Wineskins sayings. Indicators of a Matthean section break (compare the inclusio and Testimonium in 8.16-17) are absent. (2) Tuckett. Held does not explicitly tie these theological factors to the transpositions, but subsequent interpreters, such as Thompson and Tuckett, have done so.71 For Thompson these themes provided ‘the viewpoint which guided Matthew as he rearranged and combined traditional material to create a new composition’.72 Tuckett, though broadly following Held’s line, addresses the source-critical problem of order. His goal is limited: to demonstrate that on the 2DH the phenomenon of order in Matthew 8–9 is theologically more intelligible than on other source theories. Nevertheless this shades into a claim, latent in redaction criticism, that accounting for the theological intelligibility of an arrangement accounts for the arrangement itself.73 After describing how Matthew’s transposition of Mk 1.40-45, with its redactionally highlighted command for the leper to fulfill the requirements of the Law, to immediately after the Sermon (Mt. 8.1-4), supports the Sermon’s portrayal of Jesus as the fulfiller of the Law, Tuckett remarks that this is ‘a relatively simple explanation of the change in order’.74 It is also the case, however, that in the course of integrating the Q Sermon Matthew 69. K. Gatzweiler shows that Matthew ‘habituellement’ redacts miracle stories to highlight faith (‘Les récits de miracles dans l’Évangile selon Matthieu’, in Didier, ed., L’Évangile selon Matthieu, pp. 209–20 [215]). 70. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 151; similarly W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Vol. 2, Commentary on Matthew VIII–XVIII (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 3; Donald Senior, Matthew (ANTC; Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 95; Joachim Gnilka, Das Matthäusevangelium, Teil I. Kommentar zu Kap. 1,1–13,58 (Freiburg: Herder, 1986), p. 351; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, pp. 195–6. 71. William G. Thompson, ‘Reflections on the Composition of Mt 8.1–9.34’, CBQ 33 (1971), pp. 365–88; Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, pp. 206–11. 72. Thompson, ‘Reflections’, p. 372. 73. Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, pp. 206–8; similarly Kingsbury, ‘Observa­ tions’, p. 572. 74. Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 209.

248

Q in Matthew

has directed Jesus’ itinerary out of Capernaum (Mk 1.39). By repositioning Mk 1.40-45, Matthew avoids awkwardly picking up the thread with the Capernaum miracles in Mk 1.29-34 (Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law; Healings in the Evening).75 The point is not to deny that Christological motives are at work in Matthew’s transposition of Mk 1.40-45 but to analyze both the transposition and the Christology against the wider horizon of Matthew’s solutions to his source-utilization challenges. The sheer scale of the transpositions in Matthew 8 and 9 simply overwhelm redaction-critical attempts to explain them as the effects of Matthew’s theological and Christological program. Tuckett follows Held in organizing these materials under Servant Christology (8.1-17), discipleship (8.18–9.17), and faith (9.18-34), all but explicitly identifying these rubrics as accounting for Matthew’s reorganization of Mark. ‘If then’, he writes, ‘9.18-34 is intended to illustrate the proper response to Jesus as being one of faith, there is little difficulty in seeing Matthew’s redaction of, and transposition of, Mk 5.21-43 in Matt. 9.18-26 as perfectly consistent with this’.76 Tuckett successfully aligns redactional features of 8.18–9.17 and 9.18-34 with discipleship and faith respectively, aided, however, by the generous accommodative capacity of these themes. Thus on the one hand he sees in Matthew’s doublet of the Beelzebul Accusation (Mt. 9.32-34) an antitype to faith and on the other interprets both the rejection of Jesus by the Gadarenes (Mt. 8.34) and the grant of authority to men in the Healing of the Paralytic (Mt. 9.8) as pertaining to the vocation of discipleship.77 It also seems that if Matthew desired to highlight a point so commonplace as ‘the proper response to Jesus…being one of faith’, he could have done so without so much source reshuffling, especially given his skill at localized redaction.78 As Burkett points out, redaction to the theme ‘faith’ cannot explain why Matthew places a doublet of the Beelzebul Accusation (Mt. 9.32-34) in the Mt. 9.18-34 sequence when Mark conveniently offers one to hand (Mk 3.22).79 The redactional activities that Tuckett identifies point instead to something of greater import going on in these chapters. The differential concentration of motifs such as faith and discipleship in 75. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 72. 76. Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 210. 77. Ibid., 210–11; see also Burger, ‘Jesu Taten’, p. 287. Tuckett acknowledges that it is difficult to bring the controversies under these rubrics. 78. To turn the point around, if the commonplaces ‘faith’ and ‘discipleship’ brought about such extensive reshuffling of Markan materials, it is curious that we do not find Matthew more consistently proceeding in this way in his use of Mark. 79. Delbert Burkett, Rethinking Gospel Sources: The Unity and Plurality of Q (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), p. 64.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

249

Matthew 8–9 is indisputable. Nevertheless they scarcely serve as adequate principles of theological coherence for the putative sub-sections, let alone account for the scale and singularity of the transpositions. Numerous other theologically grounded rationales for the transpositions have been proposed. Grundmann, for example, argues that Matthew inserts Mk 2.1-22 into the middle of the Mk 4.35–5.43 transposition in order with special emphasis ‘den Heiler der Gebrechen, den Herrn über Sturm und Meer, den Überwinder der Dämonen als den Heiland der Sünder zu enthüllen’, while taking issue with Gaechter who differently locates the high point of chs. 8–9 in the acclamation of Jesus as God’s Son in Mt. 8.29/Mk 5.7.80 We see that the problem of the transpositions is insoluble by redaction-critical methods that invoke Matthew’s theological creativity without reference to his source-utilization issues.81 (3) Davies and Allison. Davies and Allison argue that Matthew’s reordering of Mark is ‘dictated’ more by formal than by theological considerations, namely, his penchant to arrange his materials in triads. They argue that in chs. 8–9 Matthew arranges nine miracles in three groups.82 Each of the three groups (8.1-22; 8.23–9.17; 9.18-34) comprises a sequence of three miracles rounded off with words of Jesus. This accounts for the transpositions, a case in point being Mk 4.35–5.20, ‘brought forward so that Matthew can maintain his thrice repeated pattern, three miracle stories + words of Jesus’.83 Problems in this account immediately spring to view. As Youngquist notes, the third group (9.18-34) features four miracles, a difficulty Davies and Allison get around (perhaps unobjectionably) by counting the Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with the Hemorrhage as a single episode.84 Matthew prefaces the Q call story (Mt. 8.18-22/Q 9.57-60) with introductory elements of the Markan Stilling of the Storm (ἐκέλευσεν ἀπελθεῖν εἰς τὸ πέραν, Mt. 8.18b; see Mk 4.35b: διέλθωμεν εἰς τὸ πέραν); 80. Grundmann, Evangelium, p. 265, citing P. Gaechter, Die literarische Kunst im Matthäus-Evangelium (Stuttgart: KBW, 1965), p. 20. 81. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 13. Wrege goes so far as to have his redaction-critical judgments trump source-critical judgments (Überlieferungsgeschichte, p. 3). 82. Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, pp. 3–4. 83. Ibid., pp. 101–2. The transposition, in other words, creates the sequence (1) Stilling of the Storm (Mk 4.35-41/Mt. 8.23-27); (2) Gadarene Demoniacs (Mk 5.1-20/Mt. 8.28-34); (3) Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1-12/Mt. 9.1-8); (4) Call of Levi (Mk 2.13-17/Mt. 9.9-13). 84. Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 108. This difficulty for triad theories (which have a respectable history) was noted as early as Hawkins, ‘Arrangement’, p. 473.

250

Q in Matthew

by this means he integrates the former into the latter and hence into the subsequent sequence. Therefore the call story cannot be taken as the final element of the first triad of miracles. For the transposition of Mk 5.21-43 and the corresponding deferral of Mk 2.28–3.6 to Matthew 12, Davies and Allison appeal not to triads but to Matthew’s desire to feature miracles in Matthew 8 and 9 and to defer controversies to Matthew 12.85 Their explanation of the transpositions, in other words, becomes ad hoc, and at any rate controversy elements appear prominently in Mt. 9.1-17 (Healing of Paralytic; Feasting/Fasting). The effect of their triad hypothesis, moreover, is to obscure how closely Matthew actually adheres to Markan order in chs. 8–9. These criticisms aside, one of the reasons Davies and Allison give for Matthew’s abandoning triadic composition in Mt. 14.1 to follow Mark scrupulously gets close to the truth of the matter: he had used all his Q material except what he planned to use in the ch. 18 and chs. 24–25 discourses.86 (4) Luz. Luz is wary of localized redaction-critical explanations of the transpositions. Though positing four subdivisions for chs. 8–9 (8.1-17; 8.18–9.1; 9.2-17; 9.18-35), he does not correlate these to distinctive redactional motifs.87 Taking his cue from narrative theory, he connects the disposition of the Markan materials in Matthew 8–9 into the larger narrative and theological design of the Gospel.88 Nevertheless, his appeal to Matthew’s theological and narrative concerns amounts to a continuation of the redaction-critical approach. Matthew’s objective in boldly reorganizing the Markan materials, Luz argues, is to impress his theological distinctives upon the Markan tradition, to ‘communicate to the reader the most important points of view from which [he] might have read the Gospel of Mark’.89 Matthew accomplishes his theological recasting in chs. 1–11; this rather than editorial fatigue explains his return to Markan order in ch. 12.90 To achieve his end Matthew develops a distinctive narrative line. Exploiting the symbolic potential of the tradition, Matthew mobilizes his Markan materials for a narrative history of the Matthean community. Out of Jesus’ mighty acts (chs. 8–9) emerges the Jüngergemeinde, symbolic of the Matthean community itself and its historical experience.

85. Davies and Allison, Matthew I–VII, p. 102. 86. Ibid., pp. 70–1. 87. Luz, Matthew 8–20, p. 1. 88. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 150. 89. Luz, Matthew 1–7, p. 43. 90. Ibid.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

251

Its eschatological witness in Israel issues in schism (ch. 11) and a pattern of Jesus and the community’s withdrawals from Israel (Mt. 12.1–16.12), followed in turn by a focus on the organization and life of ‘der aus Israel heraus entstandenen Gemeinde’ (Mt. 16.13–20.34). In the wake of Israel’s final repudiation of Jesus in the Passion Narrative, the risen Christ sends his community out into the Gentile world (Mt. 28.16-20).91 This masterful account of Matthew’s project shows the symbolic capacity of normative traditions to signify the contemporary realities of a tradent community. It is hard to improve upon Luz’s characterization of this property of tradition as ‘Transparenz für die Gegenwart’.92 This is true even if Luz’s attempts to resolve Matthew’s materials into a clean, connected narrative line are sometimes strained, a problem maybe due to his squeezing the Gospel too much into the mold of contemporary narrative theory. The tradition sequences given to Matthew by his sources are perhaps not so malleable to narrative realignment. In accord with the way in which tradition is actually cultivated, Matthean community motifs are more pervasively distributed (synchronously present) than linearly invoked in the Gospel, as indeed Luz’s analysis shows. More pertinently, however, it is questionable that Matthew’s narrative interests explain the Markan transpositions, even while they make numerous features of chs. 8–9 intelligible. The concentration of miracle stories into this block, Luz observes, effectively makes the point that the community’s origins lie in the mighty acts of God through the Messiah.93 Nevertheless, Mk 1.23–3.6 and Q 7.1-10 already offer Matthew six miracles, more if one counts Healings in the Evening (Mk 1.32-34), and the old problem of the non-miraculous materials in Mk 2.1-22, the controversies in particular, rears up again. Luz’s assertion that chs. 8–9 depict the emergence of the community from the Messiah’s mighty acts to some extent rationalizes the call stories (Mt. 8.18-22/Q 9.57-59; Mt. 9.9-13/Mk 2.13-17), though a case could be made that Matthew follows Mark in using the Eucharistic Feeding stories to symbolize the community coalescing out of the apostolic Mission (Mk 6.32-34/Mt. 14.13-21). For Luz the controversies (Mt. 9.9-17), and especially the culminating healing and exorcism episodes (Mt. 9.27-34), which elicit marveling from the crowds but rejection from the leaders, show the mighty works of the Messiah bringing about not only the ‘Entstehung der Jüngergemeinde aus Israel’, but also a ‘Spaltung in Israel’.94 He puts the weight of this posited 91. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, pp. 155–6. 92. Ibid., p. 158. 93. Ibid., p. 157. 94. Ibid., p. 155.

252

Q in Matthew

narrative development, however, not on the transposed Mk 5.21-43 (Mt. 9.18-26), but as noted on the concluding M doublets (Mt. 9.27-34), which draw upon Mk 10.46-52 and Mk 3.22 respectively. Luz acknowledges that the schism actually occurs (‘zuspitzt’) in ch. 11, that is, after the Mission, and it is even better to say in ch. 12, where Matthew returns to pick up the Mark 2–3 controversies that escalate into the Beelzebul Accusation. Perhaps sensing the problem, Luz qualifies the mini-Beelzebul accusation as a sort of prospectus of the ‘später ausbrechenden Konflikts’; likewise, the controversies in Mt. 9.1-17 (Mk 2.1-22) ‘bereiten die Spaltung in Israel vor’.95 Our point is that Matthew conceivably could have achieved these theological and narrative ends by sticking with the existing Markan order, which supplies a number of miracles, a call story, and controversies escalating to open breach, while enhancing these, as he does, with Q 7.1-10; 9.57-60. One senses, therefore, the presence of other factors affecting his rearrangements of Markan order.96 It is possible that another element of Matthew’s theological narrative accounts for his transposition, though Luz himself stops short of making the connection explicitly. The Matthean nativity story, Luz points out, is a ‘Vor-Erzählung’, a narrative in miniature that is proleptic of the great ‘Grundgeschichte des Evangeliums’: at birth the Messiah comes into conflict with the King of Israel, travels into a Gentile land and then in turn into Galilee (2.19-23), specified as ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (4.1217), to which the adult Jesus again withdraws after the arrest of John the Baptist and where he calls his community (4.18-22).97 The transposition of the Markan episode of the journey to the land of the Gadarenes (Mk 4.35–5.20/Mt. 8.18-24) might reflect Matthew’s concern for a timely reenactment of this Leitmotif – the Messiah and his community’s separation 95. Ibid., p. 156. 96. Other redactional features in Mt. 8–9 seem anomalous on Luz’s ‘Entstehung der Gemeinde’ and ‘Spaltung’ account. Matthew eliminates the discipleship element from the ending of the Gadarene Demoniac. Held comments. ‘The report in Matthew…reads (8.34): καὶ ἰδοὺ πᾶσα ἡ πόλις ἐξῆλθεν εἰς ὑπάντησιν τῷ Ἰησοῦ καὶ ἰδόντες αὐτόν…, namely Jesus. This can only mean: no interest is attached to the person healed nor to his wish to follow Jesus’ (‘Matthew as Interpreter’, p. 172). Matthew sharpens the rejection element of the story, but since Gentiles are involved it is not specifically anticipation of the Spaltung with Israel. The grant of authority ‘to men’ at the end of the Healing of the Paralytic (9.8) likewise does not fit easily into Luz’s two-fold scheme. Luz also notes, however, that ‘die Wundergeschichten von Kap. 8–9 [sind] unabdingbare Voraussetzung von Kap. 10, wo Jesus den Jüngern die Vollmacht, Wunder zu tun, überträgt (10,1)’ (‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 150). He also agrees that they prepare for Jesus’ response to John in 11.5. 97. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 158.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

253

from Israel and movement into the Gentile territory – proleptically enacted in the birth story, and like the latter signifying the historical experience of the Matthean community. The difficulty is that Matthew’s redaction of the Gaderene episode does not evince interest in the Gentile theme; instead it highlights rejection. Luz’s construal also depends upon a forced reading of the narrative motif, ‘Trennung von Israel’, into Mt. 8.18: ἰδὼν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὄχλον περὶ αὐτὸν ἐκέλευσεν ἀπελθεῖν εἰς τὸ πέραν. The ‘crowd’ in question is supplicant, seeking (Mt. 8.16-17), and later it will give the climactic acclamation of Jesus (9.33). Furthermore, Luz’s reading of 8.18-22 stands in tension with his interpretation of 9.27-34: does the ‘Spaltung’, or ‘Trennung’, separate the ‘Volk’ from Jesus and disciples (8.18-22), or the ‘Volk’ from the Pharisees (9.33-34), rendering them ‘sheep without a shepherd’ (9.36)?98 But even were Luz’s interpretation of Mt. 8.18-34 granted, it still does not account satisfactorily for the pattern of Matthew’s source utilization, for it is not clear why after getting Jesus to Gentile territory and back, both to Galilee and to Mk 2.1, Matthew would subsequently return to pick up Mk 5.21-43 (Mt. 9.18-26). Or viewed from the converse angle, it does not explain why Matthew takes Jesus across the lake from Mk 5.20 back to Mk 2.1-22 (Healing of the Paralytic, etc.) rather than simply continuing with Mk 5.21-43, given that the latter also returns Jesus across the lake and to a healing story (Ruler’s Daughter). Like most critics, Luz frames the transpositions as a problem in Matthew’s use of Mark and leaves Q completely out of the picture. The engrossing phenomenon is Mark’s order and Matthew’s departures from it. Mark’s order with its topical pegs is the principal factor in Matthew’s use of Q. Q serves Matthew as a source for expansions of Mark: ‘[A]us­nahmsweise’ is Matthew’s placement of the Demand for a Sign (Mt. 12.38-42/Q 11.16, 29-32) after the Beelzebul episode (Mt. 12.22-30/ Mk 3.22-20/Q 11.14-23) ‘nicht von Markus veranlaßt’.99 Matthew is a ‘Neuausgabe’ of the Gospel of Mark; ‘die Logienquelle dagegen hat Matthäus “ausgeschlachtet” und dabei ihren Aufbau zerstört’.100 In contrast to his fragmenting use of Q, Luz says, ‘Matthew adopts virtually integrally the complete narrative line of Mark’s Gospel… Only in Mt 8 and 9 did Matthew rework the controversy-dialogue and the 98. Ibid., pp. 153–5. 99. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p, 210. Similarly Burger: the placement of Mt. 8.18-22/Q 9.57-60 (discipleship sayings) and Mt. 8.5-13/Q7.1-10 (Healing of Centurion’s Servant) ‘ist durch keine Vorlage veranlaßt und kann nur der freien Entscheidung des Evangelisten zugeschrieben werden’ (‘Jesu Taten’, p. 277). 100. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 207.

254

Q in Matthew

miracle-stories of Mk 1,20ff. and 5,35 ff. Yet even here he follows to a large extent the internal order of the Markan sequences 1,20–2,8 (= sequence A) and 4,35–5,43 (= sequence B).’101 But why does Matthew interrupt Mark’s narrative line and rearrange it? The problem cannot be waved away simply by noting that Matthew takes the transpositions in sequence. (5) Watson. This however is the tack that Francis Watson takes. Watson’s analysis is a rare FGH-based discussion of the Markan transpositions, conceived as an attack on the 2DH claim that the Matthew’s ‘free handling’ of the Markan narrative sequence in chs. 8–9 makes it more likely that Luke also better preserves the sequence of Q.102 Watson’s angle is to define the problem of the transpositions as being ‘[t]he apparent disorder in Matthew’s editing of Mark’ in Matthew 8–9.103 Having set up this straw man (no one claims that the issue is Matthew’s ‘disordered’ editing), Watson knocks it down: the transposed Mark 4–5 materials appear in Matthew 8–9 in intact Markan sequences; accordingly, ‘the appearance of disorder in the editing of Mark…is illusory’.104 Watson therefore simply dodges the problem posed the transpositions: Why does Matthew rearrange these Markan sequences? (6) Häfner. Häfner’s insightful redaction-critical account of the transpo­si­ tions incorporates the ‘miracle collection’ rationale but works at overcoming some of its inadequacies. Matthew’s activist redaction in chs. 1–11 is driven by his Christological program, which issues in ‘eine christologische Zwischenbilanz in Kapitel 11’.105 Matthew returns to Markan order in ch. 12 because he has adequately established his Christological perspective.106 The transpositions serve Matthean Christological interests, and corresponding to this, provide narrative backfill for Mt. 11.2-6 (Q 7.18-23) in particular. Matthew’s positioning of the Baptist materials connects the ἔργα τοῦ Χριστοῦ (Mt. 11.2) retrospectively to all the materials between Mt. 4.23 101. Luz, ‘Looking at Q’, p. 583. 102. Watson, ‘Q as Hypothesis’, p. 409. Mark Goodacre mentions but does not offer an account of Matthew’s ‘radically restructured Mark’ in Mt. 3–11 (Case Against Q, pp. 180–1). 103. Watson, Gospel Writing, p. 150, emphasis added. 104. Ibid. 105. Gerd Häfner, ‘Das Matthäusevangelium und seine Quellen’, in The Gospel of Matthew at the Crossroads of Early Christianity (ed. Donald Senior; BETL 243; Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 25–71 (66, original emphasis). 106. Ibid., pp. 67–8.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

255

and Mt. 10.42. The ‘preaching to the poor’ refers back to the Sermon on the Mount, and the Mt. 11.5 list of healings is filled out narratively, with the help of the Markan transpositions, in chs. 8–9. To accommodate the Mt. 9.9-17 controversies in this ‘miracle cycle’ without falling back on Kümmel’s weak expedient, Häfner construes Mt. 11.6, μακάριός ἐστιν ὃς ἐὰν μὴ σκαδαλισθῇ ἐν ἐμοί, as a ‘Warnung vor dem Widerspruch gegen Jesus’,107 that is, as making retrospective reference to the offense taken at Jesus’ interaction with sinners and his eating practices in Mt. 9.1-17. The narrative connection brought into being by this redactional arrangement works well, notwithstanding that 11.6 already has a local narrative connection to John’s question, and strictly speaking the Mk 2.1-22/Mt. 9.1-17 segment is not transposed. Häfner explains one of the major transpositions – the deferral of the Q 7.18-35 Baptist sequence to after the Q 10/Mark 6 Commissioning – as Matthew’s widening the mission so as to account for how John in prison hears of the ‘deeds of Christ’.108 There is nothing incoherent about the resulting narrative progression, but the mission of the disciples is hardly required to explain how word of the Christ’s deeds reaches John (crowds from all over Palestine and Syria hear of Jesus in Mt. 4.23–5.2). Since there is no real narrative exigency, it is difficult to see it as triggering this major reversal in order, and in fact Häfner acknowledges that the narrative effect of the insertion of the Commissioning is equivocal.109 Without taking anything away from Häfner’s redaction-critical insights, there must be additional factors in the rearrangements of Mark in Matthew 8–9 and the Q 7/Q 10 reversal. (7) Kloppenborg. On the occasions Kloppenborg touches on the problem, he refers the transpositions to Matthew’s collection of healing narratives to anticipate the list in Mt. 11.5 (Q 7.22).110 Notable, however, is his correlation of the last item in Mt. 11.5, πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται, not just to the πτωχοί of the Sermon (Mt. 5.2-11/Q 6.20), but to the harassed, shepherdless crowds of Mt. 9.36 (Mk 6.34).111 In other words, he sees the 11.5 list as a factor 107. Ibid., p. 66. 108. Ibid. 109. ‘Zwar scheint die Aussendungsrede diesen Zusammenhang [between Wunderzyklus and Täuferanfrage] wieder etwas zu unterbrechen, sie zerstört ihm aber nicht’ (Häfner, ‘Matthäusevangelium’, p. 66 n. 138). 110. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 72 n. 22; idem, ‘On Dispensing with Q? Goodacre on the Relation of Luke to Matthew’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 210–36 (235). 111. In Excavating Q, Kloppenborg correlates πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται with the Mission Instruction (‘9.35–10.42 [Q + Mk 6.34]’), and in ‘On Dispensing with Q’ to the Sermon as well (‘5.3-12; 9.35–10.42 [Q + Mk 6.34]’).

256

Q in Matthew

in Matthew’s pulling forward of Mk 6.6-12 and thus also for the transposition of Mk 6.34 to a position before Mk 6.7 (Mt. 9.36) and Mk 3.13-19 (Call of Apostles) to a position after Mk 6.7 (Mt. 10.2-4).112 This is a lot of weight to place on πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται, and perhaps Kloppenborg’s point is that simply by virtue of this sequencing, πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται will have Mt. 9.36/Mk 6.34 in its purview. At any rate, the 11.5 list of wonders cannot account adequately even for the transpositions in chs. 8–9, though Kloppenborg is right to connect chs. 10–11 to the source-utilization issues usually studied in narrow reference to chs. 8–9. Kloppenborg also breaks from the preoccupation of commentators with Mark’s order and follows Neirynck in invoking Q to account for Matthew’s transposition of Mk 1.40-45 (Healing of the Leper) to the position immediately after the Sermon (Mt. 8.1-4) and prior to Mk 1.29-34/Mt. 8.14-16 (Simon’s Mother-in-Law; Healings in the Evening), with Q 7.1-10/Mt. 8.5-13 (Centurion’s Servant) intervening. Without denying theological motives in the transposition (Jesus’ faithfulness to the Law), Kloppenborg observes that Matthew’s transposition of Mk 1.40-45 follows from his incorporating the Q 6 Sermon at Mk 1.21-22. For the Sermon Matthew moves Jesus’ itinerary out of Capernaum (Mk 1.39). The Healing of the Leper outside of town necessarily follows. The Q healing story then brings Jesus back into Capernaum (Q 7.1) and to Mark’s remaining Capernaum healings (Mk 1.29-34).113 Kloppenborg recognizes, in other words, that the Q sequence 6.20b-49; 7.1-10 is a factor in Matthew’s re-sequencing of Markan materials, one that adroitly coordinates Q and Markan order. (8) Robinson. Robinson inverts the paradigm for the Markan transpositions by proposing that Matthew expands Q by means of Mark. Not Mark but Q sets the agenda in Matthew 3–11. Robinson resolves the putative differences between chs. 3–11 and chs. 12–28 – the latter’s suddenly ‘slavish’ adherence to Markan order – into a Christian origins metadrama, a Matthean ‘trajectory’, featuring pristine Q Christianity’s heroic but futile resistance to the emergent, hegemonic orthodoxy represented by Mark, a struggle issuing in canonical Matthew. Robinson places the ‘redactional energy’ and density of Q materials in chs. 3–11 in ideological antithesis to Matthew’s close tracking of Mark in chs. 12–28, which he characterizes tendentiously as Matthew’s ‘pedantic following of Mark’s order’, as a shift ‘from [Matthew’s] loyalty to Q…to 112. Luz’s account is more economical: in 9.34 the Pharisees forfeit their claims to be Israel’s shepherds, and by pulling forward Mk 6.34 from its position before the Markan feeding story, Mt. 9.36 assigns that position to Jesus and the apostles. 113. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 72 n. 22.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

257

subservience to Mark’.114 The early Matthean community was grounded in the ‘(pre-)christological’ faith and lifestyle of Q that it cultivated in a QMt. expansion. Markan materials in Matthew 3–11 are redactionally embedded in – for Robinson this means ideologically subordinated to – a framework supplied by QMt. 3–7. Chapters 3–11, Robinson infers, archive and memorialize the early stages of the Matthean community. On the other hand the ‘intrusion’ of Markan materials makes chs. 3–11 ‘a first installment of Matthew’.115 The chs. 8–9 miracle collection, though largely made up of Markan sequences, is in service to Q’s list of wonders (Mt. 11.5).116 Matthew’s curious reversal in the order of the Q 10 Commissioning and the Q 7 Baptist sequence is a relic of the next stage of the community’s trajectory: the failure of its mission to Israel, recorded in Matthew 10. For following this debacle the community, still oriented to Jews and still holding out against the encroaching Hellenistic Christianity of Mark, turned with urgency to the Baptist’s followers for converts (Mt. 11).117 The effort came to nothing, and the community finally succumbed to the hegemony of emergent orthodoxy, a defeat registered in Matthew’s ‘rather rote copying out of Mark’ in chs. 12–28.118 Nevertheless, in chs. 3–11 the evangelist has succeeded in embedding in the canonical Gospel a monument to the primitive Matthean community’s faithfulness to Q Christianity, hence to the authentic way of Jesus.119 There are reasons to be skeptical about Robinson’s plotting of Matthean utilization patterns onto this Christian origins narrative. It is falsified by Daniel Smith’s demonstration that Q continues to be a structuring factor in sections of the second half of the Gospel, particularly in the apocalyptic 114. Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, pp. 124–5, 129, 132, 145. 115. Ibid., p. 123; see pp. 123–30. Robinson suggested in 1971 (1964 in German) that Mt. 3–11 might better be understood as controlled by the order of Q (‘ “LOGOI SOPHON”: On the Gattung of Q’, in James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity [Philadelphia. Fortress Press, 1971], pp. 71– 113 [94 n. 47]): ‘Of course one could argue that Matt. 3–12 tends to follow the original (Lucan) order of Q (see esp. Matt. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12)’. 116. Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 132. 117. Ibid., p. 150. Come Unto Me (Mt. 11.28-30) is an ‘altar call’ to the Baptist’s followers (p. 153). 118. Ibid., p. 132. 119. Ibid., pp. 128, 130. One hears echoes of Bultmann: ‘It seems to me that the sayings source (Spruchquelle)…is the nearest to the primitive community’ (‘What the Sayings Source Reveals about the Early Church’, in The Shape of Q: Signal Essays on the Sayings Gospel [ed. John S. Kloppenborg; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994], pp. 23–34 [23], first published as ‘Was lässt die Spruchquelle über die Urgemeinde erkennen’, Oldenburgische Kirchenblatt 19 [1913], pp. 35–7, 41–4).

258

Q in Matthew

discourse (chs. 24–25).120 But it is questionable taken on its own terms. Robinson decomposes the Gospel of Matthew into tradition-histories of the kind made familiar by form criticism. The Matthean community’s shifting historical Sitze im Leben register as compositional developments in the Gospel. The vertical stratification form criticism claimed to recover in the history of Synoptic tradition is turned on its side to become a horizontal historical ‘trajectory’ across the Gospel, one that tracks the community’s inexorable movement from the Jewish to the Hellenistic sphere. The earliest layer (chs. 3–11) gets back close to the authentic Jesus, while the latest (chs. 12–28) marks the terminal point in the Gospel of Mark and its κύριος cult myth.121 Robinson grafts this trajectory onto the narrative trope, popular in contemporary Christian origins scholarship, of the crushing of earlier, more authentic varieties of Christianity by hegemonic orthodoxy.122 This forces Robinson to exaggerate the differences in utilization patterns between chs. 3–11 and chs. 12–28 to the point of caricature (‘slavish adherence’ to Mark’s order) and to downplay the significance of the extensive presence of Markan materials in chs. 3–11, especially in chs. 8–9. Robinson can only conceive of Matthew’s source-utilization agonistically: either Q or Mark must at any one time be dominant, the other subordinate.123 On this reckoning the Gospel gives expression simultaneously to two inimical visions of Christian faith, but since for Robinson the Gospel primarily registers a tradition history, the problem of its coherence as a work does not arise. In a trend that goes back to Harnack, Q is often romanticized as representing a more original, radical, and liberating Christianity inimical to 120. Daniel A. Smith, ‘Matthew and Q: The Matthean Deployment of Q and Mark in the Apocalyptic Discourse’, ETL 85 (2009), pp. 99–116 (105–6). 121. Robinson is not clear whether the Gospel originated in stages (chs. 3–11 is an ‘installment’) or whether the Evangelist arranged the composition to correspond to this trajectory (the Evangelist deliberately ‘archaizing’) (‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 129). 122. There are parallels here to Robinson’s equally dramatic story of the hiding of the Nag Hammadi codices in response to the advancing hegemony of orthodox Alexandrian Christianity in the fourth century and their rediscovery by modern scholars (James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 3rd ed., 1990], pp. 19–21). On the problems with Robinson’s narrative of the secreting of the Nag Hammadi codices see Nicole Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, ‘Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices’, JBL 133 (2014), pp. 399–419. Boring also argues that ‘Q forms the central focus and organizing principle’ of Mt. 3–12, and he works up a narrative that tells of the Q community’s later convergence with a Mark-bearing group (‘Convergence’, p. 588). 123. Robinson, ‘Matthean Trajectory’, p. 126.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

259

emergent hegemonic orthodoxy and silenced or domesticated through its incorporation into the kerygmatic Markan narrative.124 In Koester’s words, Q represents ‘the most original gattung of the Jesus tradition – the logoi sophon – which, in the canonical gospels, became acceptable to the orthodox church only by radical critical alteration, not only of the form, but also of the theological intention of this primitive gattung. Such critical evaluation of the gattung, logoi, was achieved by Matthew and Luke through imposing the Marcan narrative-kerygma frame upon the sayings tradition represented by Q.’125 Taking their cue from Bauer’s reconstruction of second- to fourth-century Christianity as the story of orthodoxy’s gradual suppression of earlier forms of diverse Christianity, Robinson and Koester attempt to find in Q a foothold in the first century for Bauer’s paradigm, to make Q the Archimedean point from which to upend the whole contrived Luke–Acts, Markan, kerygmatic edifice. This is complicated, to say the least, by the major role Matthew gives to Q (as Robinson recognizes) in chs. 3–11. Robinson therefore has little choice but to depict Matthew’s source-utilization as a playing-out of the imagined struggle with orthodoxy.126 (9) Youngquist. Skepticism about Robinson’s ‘Matthean trajectory’ takes nothing away from his basic observation: Q order is a major factor in Matthew 3–12. Indeed, back in 1967 Neirynck observed that the arrangement of materials between Matthew 4 and Matthew 12 occurs ‘tant d’après l’ordre de Q qu’ d’après celui de Mc’.127 Linden Youngquist, in his Claremont dissertation, pursues this line of analysis free of the more imaginative aspects of Robinson’s account, though he persists in placing Q and Mark in ideological opposition. Hence he subordinates Mark to Q in Matthew 3–11, compositionally and theologically, claiming that chs. 3–11 are ‘an adaptation of the opening sections of Q, with Markan and other Q material interpolated into Q’s outline’.128 He must strain, however, to maintain this position. He claims, for example, that in chs. 3–4 Matthew 124. On this point see Simon Joseph, Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (WUNT 2/333; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2012), p. 40, and Watson, Gospel Writing, p. 117. 125. Helmut Koester, ‘GNOMAI DIAPHOROI: The Origin and Nature of Diversi­ fication in the History of Early Christianity’, in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories, pp. 114–57 (135). 126. In 1971 Robinson made the less nuanced claim that Q was made acceptable to the ‘orthodox’ by being ‘imbedded in the Marcan outline by Matthew and Luke’ (‘ “LOGOI SOPHON” ’, p. 113). 127. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 34. 128. Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 8.

260

Q in Matthew

is ‘following Q’s storyline’, whereas seen more neutrally he is simply tracking Mark and Q’s common order of episodes.129 Lundquist’s rationale acknowledges this indirectly: ‘[I]t is as fair to say Mark was used to supplement Q as to say that Q was used to supplement Mark’. But since Q is predominantly sayings and Mark predominantly narrative, by definition they supplement each other. To say that Matthew has ‘interpolated [Markan materials] into Q’s outline’ or ‘occasionally rearranged [Mark] to support or enhance Q’s presentation’, scarcely does justice to redactional attention and space allotted to Markan materials in chs. 8–9.130 In the final analysis both Robinson and Youngquist trace Matthew’s utilization patterns back to theological and ideological factors; they do not get beyond the redactioncritical approaches to the problem.131 Nonetheless, they grasp that Q order is a major factor in Matthew 3–12.132 Youngquist’s analysis of chs. 8–11 in fact amounts to something of a breakthrough in the study of the transpositions. 6. Matthew’s Utilization Strategy: Q and Mark in Matthew 3–12 It is not difficult to see why Robinson and Youngquist regard Q as the leading factor in Matthew 3–11. The expanded Q Sermon (Mt. 5–7) occupies a commanding position in this section of the Gospel – like the Mount itself its major topographical feature. As it does in Q it holds a programmatic inaugural position, and its internal expansion follows lines surveyed out from the ethical and theological markers of the Q Sermon. Matthew 3–11 follows the sequence Q 3/Matthew 3 (Baptist’s Preaching; [Baptism]) → Q 4/Matthew 4 (Temptation) → Q 6/Matthew 5–7 (Sermon) → Q 7 (7.1-10)/Matthew 8 (Centurion’s Servant) → Q 9/ Matthew 8 (Call to Discipleship) → Q 10/Matthew 10 (Commissioning) → Q 11/Matthew 12 (Beelzebul Accusation/Demand for a Sign). After 129. Ibid., p. 98. 130. Ibid., pp. 8, 73. 131. In his recent essay Youngquist is more uncomfortable with the notion of an ideologically binary Gospel of Matthew; nevertheless he continues to place Mark and Q in ideological tension. To square this he ventures that Q might be ideologically dominant in Mt. 12–28 also: Markan narratives illustrating Q (‘Matthew, Mark, and Q’, pp. 260–1). 132. This has a forerunner in K. Lachmann, ‘De ordine narrationum’ (Palmer, ‘Lachmann’s Argument’, pp. 368–78). Lachmann suggested two phases in the history of the Gospel of Matthew. The first was a logia source composed by the apostle Matthew (Schleiermacher’s reading of Papias) into which, subsequently, Markan materials were integrated. Out of respect for the apostolic authorship of the logia source, the Markan materials were rearranged to accommodate its order.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

261

this the Q line becomes less distinct, but one can still see the traces of a progression through Q 12/Matthew 12 (Blasphemy Against Holy Spirit) and Q 13/Matthew 13 (Parables of Mustard Seed and Leaven). In positioning the Commissioning (Mt. 10/Q 10/Mk 6) before the Beelzebul Accusation (Mt. 12/Q 11/Mk 3), Matthew follows Q instead of Mark in this major divergence in the order of their common episodes. Nevertheless one can hold that Matthew is singularly deferential to Q only by ignoring his displacement of Q 7.18-35 (John the Baptist), in scale equal to any of the Markan transpositions, to Matthew 11, hence to a position after Q 10. This is an accommodation to the Markan narrative, which prefaces the Commissioning with a series of miracles, rather than to Q, which places its Commissioning after the John the Baptist units. Furthermore, Matthew pulls Mk 13.9-13 (Persecutions) into the Commissioning while shifting Q 10.12-15 (Woes on Cities) and Q 10.21-22 (Thanksgiving) out of the Q Commissioning altogether to positions after the transposed Q 7 Baptist materials in Matthew 11. He moves Q 10.23-24 (Blessed the Eyes) even further ahead to the ch. 13 Parables section, after he has long been following Markan order scrupulously. Likewise, he pulls Q 12.10 (Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit) forward into the Beelzebul Accusation to line it up with its Mark 3 ‘peg’ in Markan narrative order. How do we account for this pattern of utilization? Matthew confronts a daunting technical problem, namely, how to combine two overlapping but independently ordered sources coherently while harnessing their authority for his own reenactment of the tradition. This problem becomes particularly acute where the two sources fall together in their materials. It is scarcely a coincidence that between Mt. 8.1 and Mt. 12.50 there is a concentration of materials from Q 7–11 that fall roughly together with materials in Mark 2–6 but are differently ordered. Besides the Commissioning and the Beelzebul Accusation these include healings, discipleship vocations, references to Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, and John the Baptist materials. From the vista reached at the end of ch. 7 in his forward use of both sources (end of Mk 1 and Q 6) Matthew surveys this suddenly complicated utilization terrain and considers how to navigate it in a manner charted by both sources. Beyond this, where the double tradition thins or even peters out (not least because he has prudently pulled a lot of it forward into chs. 5–7), he will be able to return to Markan order and follow it to the end of his Gospel.133 133. Youngquist acknowledges this obliquely: ‘Where there is less Q material… Matthew uses more of Mark, and then almost always in Mark’s sequence’ (‘Matthew and Q’, p. 74).

262

Q in Matthew

a. Didactic and Technical Vectors in Matthew’s Utilization Strategy Source-utilization accounts are not in competition with redaction-critical accounts. In fact, as Stanton says, ‘the results of redaction criticism are more compelling when they are complemented by other methods’.134 Technical competence and didactic competence, the transmission of the tradition and its cultivation, converge in the scribal tradent. Consolidating two works formative of the moral and cultural identity of the tradent community entails that Matthew build the Q and Markan configurations of the tradition structurally right into his new gospel. Matthew must ground the authority of his gospel in the established authority of its principal sources. But their combination opens up scope for redactional maneuvering through which Matthew engages the tradition directly with the Matthean community’s present predicaments. In fact Matthew’s comprehensive mobilization of the tradition is evidence of a community that is going through momentous historical and cultural change. Both the technical and didactic vectors are evident, for example, in Matthew’s pulling forward the Healing of the Leper (Mk 1.40-45/Mt. 8.1-4) to a position directly after the Sermon on the Mount and prior to the Q’s Healing of the Centurion’s Servant (Q 7.1-10). In this position Jesus’ redactionally highlighted command to ὕπαγε σεαυτὸν δεῖξον τῷ ἱερεῖ καὶ προσένεγκον τὸ δῶρον ὃ προσέταξεν Μωϋσῆς (Mt. 8.4) reinforces the Torah-fulfillment motif of the Sermon at the same time as it resolves Mark’s and Q’s Capernaum exits and entrances into a neat narrative line.135 It is essential to observe this interplay of Matthew’s didactic interests with his technical virtuosity in source-utilization. For clarity, however, we will treat them separately: first, as economically as possible, the didactic program Matthew works out between ch. 4 and ch. 12 by means of his combination of his source materials – in particular his transpositions – and second, analysis of these arrangements as a skillfully enacted sourceutilization strategy. b. Matthew’s Didactic Program in Chapters 4–12 Source-critical analysis is a matter of closely attending to detail. Chapters 4–12 make up a considerable section of the Gospel. To ensure economy and to avoid getting lost in the trees, we will focus on didactic motives in these chapters strictly as these bear upon Matthew’s source-utilization strategy. 134. Stanton, Gospel for a New People, p. 23. 135. Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 208; Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, p. 39; Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 72.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

263

(1) Jesus’ Messianic Mission Passed to the Disciples (Chapters 4–12). Interpreters recognize that Matthew arranges this section of the Gospel to depict Jesus as Messiah of Word in the Sermon (Mt. 4.23–7.29) and then in the healing stories as Messiah of Deed (Mt. 8.1–9.34). In the Commissioning (Mt. 9.35–11.1) Jesus then transfers his authority in word and deed to his apostles, commissioned ‘to do and speak as he himself has acted and spoken’.136 That Matthew intends this elaboration across the span of chs. 4–10 is indicated by the ὁ δεχόμενος ὑμᾶς ἐμὲ δέχεται shaliah formula of the Commissioning (Mt. 10.40). His interpolation of Q 6.40 into the Commissioning from its probably original location in the Q Sermon, οὐκ ἔστιν μαθητὴς ὑπὲρ τὸν διδάσκαλον…ἀρκετὸν τῷ μαθητῇ ἵνα γένηται ὡς ὁ διδάσκαλος αὐτοῦ (Mt. 10.24-25), makes the point even more explicit.137 Conversely, τὰ ἔργα τοῦ Χριστοῦ John the Baptist hears of in prison (11.2) refer retrospectively to the proclamation and wonders of Jesus and his disciples.138 This double elaboration is mapped out by the conjoined Markan pericopes in Matthew 4: Mk 1.14-15/Mt. 4.12-17, ‘le début de la prédication de Jésus’; Mk 1.16-20/Mt. 4.18-22, ‘la vocation des disciples’.139 Held points out that the double motifs of (1) Jesus’ authority manifest in his deeds, and (2) his sending of the disciples with his authority are found in both Matthew’s Mark and Q tradition; moreover, that in Mark ‘the sending forth is preceded by a cycle of miracle stories the meaning of which is to show the authority of Jesus through his miraculous deeds’.140 In Mark, however, the Beelzebul Accusation occurs in the miracle section and prior to the Commissioning. Matthew follows Q in placing the Beelzubul Accusation after the Commissioning. The reasons for this will become clear below. Matthew reinforces this elaboration by setting up redactional correspondences between Jesus’ didache and deeds (4.14–9.34) and the Commissioning (9.35–10.42). The most eye-catching of these is the framework Matthew creates around the ‘Messiah of Word’ and ‘Messiah of Deed’ section by repeating 4.23, the précis of Jesus’ teaching and healing activities that foreshadows the Sermon and the mighty deeds to 136. Richard A. Edwards, ‘Matthew’s Use of Q in Chapter Eleven’, in Logia: Les Paroles de Jésus – the Sayings of Jesus (ed. Joël Delobel; BETL 59; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1982), pp. 258–75 (273); also Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, pp. 33–4; Held, ‘Matthew as Interpreter’, p. 270. 137. Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, p. 197. 138. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 34; Häfner, ‘Matthäusevangelium’, p. 66. 139. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, pp. 33–4. 140. Held, ‘Matthew as Interpreter’, p. 270.

264

Q in Matthew

follow, almost verbatim in 9.35, which while closing out this large section also opens upon the Commissioning: 4.23: καὶ περιῆγεν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ Γαλιλαίᾳ διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν καὶ κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας καὶ θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν ἐν τῷ λαῷ. 9.35: καὶ περιῆγεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὰς πόλεις πάσας καὶ τὰς κώμας διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν καὶ κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας καὶ θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν.

Notices of the disciples are to be found in the ambit of both these framework units. Jesus calls disciples in 4.18-22, and when he takes his seat upon the mountain to teach, προσῆλθαν αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ (Mt. 5.1b). In 9.37 Jesus speaks to his disciples about the harvest, in 10.1 he calls his disciples, ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς ἐξουσίαν, and in 10.5 begins his charge to them. The inaugural summary of Jesus’ preaching in 4.17 (ἤρξατο ὁ Ἰησοῦς κηρύσσειν καὶ λέγειν· μετανοεῖτε· ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν) recurs in 10.7 as the substance of the disciples’ preaching (κηρύσσετε λέγοντες ὅτι ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν).141 (2) Alignment of Markan Transpositions to the Matthew 10 Commissioning. Matthew’s expansion in 10.1 and 10.8 of the Mk 6.7 grant of power over unclean spirits to include καὶ θεραπεύειν πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν (Mt 10.1) and ἀσθενοῦντας θεραπεύτε, νεκροὺς ἐγείρετε, λεπροὺς καθαρίζετε (Mt 10.8) encompasses most of the healings Jesus carries out in 8.1 to 9.34. ‘From this it already follows’, Held says, ‘that the mission chapter of Matthew 10 should be closely linked with those that have preceded it… It is quite obviously Matthew’s opinion that the disciples should do the work of Jesus.’142 The discipleship note sounded in the framework units (Mt. 4.23/9.35) is sustained across chs. 8–9. After wrapping up the healing stories from Mk 1 with a Servant Testimonium (Mt. 8.14-17/Mk 1.29-34), Matthew bypasses the Q Baptist block (Q 7.18-35), conspicuously thin in both healing and discipleship elements, to get on to the next Q unit, the disciple vocation chreias (Q 9.57-60/Mt. 9.19-22). In Q the call stories directly preface the Commissioning, but Matthew situates them at the beginning of Stilling of the Storm, which he has pulled forward from 141. Luz, Matthew 8–20, p. 59. 142. Ibid., pp. 249–50. See also Thompson, ‘Reflections’, pp. 366–8; Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, pp. 143–6; Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, p. 26; idem, ‘Synoptic Problem’, p. 589; Burger, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus’, p. 273; Edwards, ‘Matthew’s Use of Q’, p. 273.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

265

Mark 4 (Mt. 8.18-22/Mk 4.35-41). Here they retain the prominent frontispiece position they had in Q, but now at the beginning of an extended Markan sequence that in Mark also stands in some proximity, though less materially and conceptually, to the Mark 6 Commissioning. As Bornkamm has pointed out, Matthew thereby makes the Stilling of the Storm (Mt. 8.18, 23-27) a symbol of the community in its journey of discipleship, a going with Jesus into great and even terrifying perils, in the midst of which it is called to trust in Jesus.143 But it is important to recognize that he thereby more unequivocally orients the intervening Markan sequences to the Commissioning and the themes to be developed there. In effect, the community of disciples entering the boat with Jesus enters with him into his mission. Matthew’s redaction of the Gadarene Demoniac, next in the transposed Markan sequence (Mt. 8.28-34/Mk 5.1-20), makes the Gadarenes’ request that Jesus depart from their region the climax of the exorcism. Burger argues that this makes the story an illustration of the Q discipleship saying that now opens this section: αἱ ἀλώπεκες φωλεοὺς ἔχουσιν καὶ τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατασκηνώσεις, ὁ δὲ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου οὐ ἔχει ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ (Mt. 8.20/Q 9.58).144 Both anticipate elements of the Matthew 10 Commissioning. The desperate perils of the journey across the lake signify and foreshadow the vulnerability and absolute dependency of the messengers described in the Commissioning (Mt. 10.9-10, 16/Mk 6.8-10/Q 10.3-6) as well as the deadly resistance Jesus prepares the community to encounter in its mission through the Mark 13 materials Matthew pulls forward into the Commissioning (Mt. 10.16, 17-25/Q 10.3/Mk 13.9-13). The lake crossing also anticipates Jesus’ exhortation in the Commissioning, brought forward from Q 12, to trust in these dire situations (Mt. 10.19-20, 26-33/Q 12.2-9).145 Jesus’ call to a prospective disciple to abandon his family obligations to follow him (Mt. 8.21-22/Q 9.59-60) finds its counterpart in the eschatological family divisions Jesus foretells (Mt. 10.21-22/Mk 13.12; Mt. 10.34-36/Q 12.51-53) and in the discipleship sayings Matthew pulls forward into the Commissioning from Q 14 and Q 17: ὁ φιλῶν πατέρα ἢ μητέρα ὑπὲρ ἐμὲ οὐκ ἔστιν μου ἄξιος (Mt. 10.37-39/Q 14.25-27; 17.33). Youngquist argues that the Gadarenes’ turning away of Jesus despite the deed he performs 143. Günther Bornkamm, ‘The Stilling of the Storm in Matthew’, in Bornkamm, Barth, and Held, eds., Tradition and Interpretation, pp. 52–7; see also Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, p. 39; Burger, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus’, p. 285; Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 210. 144. Burger, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus’, p. 285; similarly Tuckett, ‘Arguments from Order’, p. 210. 145. Youngquist, ‘Matthew, Mk, and Q’, pp. 257–8.

266

Q in Matthew

foreshadows the rejection of the messengers by the cities and towns (Mt. 10.14-15, 22-24/Mk 6.11/Q 10.10-12). When rejected, ‘Jesus simply moves on’, as he will instruct the disciples (Mt. 10.23).146 Matthew eliminates Jesus’ refusal of the healed man’s request to follow him because it fits poorly with his alignment of Mk 4.35–5.20 to the Q discipleship chreias. With the sequence: Call of Disciples (Mt. 8.18-22/Q 9.57-60) → Journey (Mt. 8.23-27/Mk 4.35-41) → Gadarene Healing/Exorcism → Rejection (Mt. 8.28-34/Mk 5.1-20), Matthew replicates the order of the Q Commissioning: Call of Disciples (Q 9.57-62) → Commissioning to Heal and Exorcise (Q 10.2-12) → Rejection (Q 10.13-15). Conversely, he will redact the Q Commissioning to heighten its correspondences with the large block of material he has brought together in Mt. 8.18–9.26. Matthew combines a closing element of Gadarene exorcism episode (Mk 5.18, καὶ ἐμβαίνοντος αὐτοῦ εἰς τὸ πλοῖον) and an opening element of the Healing of the Ruler’s Daughter (Mk 5.21, καὶ διαπεράσαντος τοῦ Ἰησοῦ πάλιν εἰς τὸ πέραν) with the opening of the Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1, καὶ εἰσελθὼν πάλιν εἰς Καφαρναούμ) to shift Jesus back to Capernaum (and himself back to his absolute position in his source) to pick up Mk 2.1-22 (Mt. 9.1-17): καὶ ἐμβὰς εἰς πλοῖον διεπέρασεν καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς τὴν ἰδίαν πόλιν (Mt. 9.1). By means of ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς, Matthew attaches Mk 5.21-43 (Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with the Flow) directly to this sequence (Mt. 9.18-26). The Call of Matthew/Levi (Mt. 9.9/Mk 2.14) sustains the discipleship theme, but Matthew’s redaction of this now unified sequence of Mark 2 and Mark 5 materials serves to align it more directly to the Matthew 10 Commissioning.147 Matthew plays up the conflict elements of the Healing of the Paralytic and plays down its healing elements. Burger comments that this ‘erlaubt es, von einer Folge von drei Streitgesprächen zu sprechen’.148 Most notably, Matthew modifies Mark’s climactic crowd acclamation by integrating καὶ ἐδόξασαν τὸν θεὸν τὸν δόντα ἐξουσία τοιαύτην τοῖς ἀνθρώποις (Mt. 9.8b). This is an important clue to understanding the pattern of Matthew’s arrangements in this larger section, for it makes reference to Jesus’ ἐξουσίαν in healing and remitting sins (Mt. 9.6/Mk 2.10) and thus anticipates Jesus’ programmatic transfer of his ἐξουσία to the apostles in Mt. 10.1: ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς ἐξουσίαν (see Mk 6.7b). Jesus’ reclining at table in Matthew’s house (Mt. 9.10) models the messengers’ dependence upon hospitality (Mt. 10.9-13). 146. Ibid., p. 122. 147. Hence Youngquist’s claim that Matthew ‘scanned’ through Mk 2.1-22; 5.21-43 in order to assemble materials to illustrate Q 7.18-35 (‘Matthew, Mk, and Q’, p. 256) needs qualification. 148. Burger, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus’, p. 285.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

267

Though not overtly redactional, this correspondence is the effect of Matthew’s moving Mk 2.1-22 into proximity to the Commissioning. Luz points out, in addition, correspondences between the Sermon on the Mount and the Commissioning: The disciples’ behavior and fate correspond to the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. The disciples are defenseless (10.10, 16, cfr. 5.38-42), poor (10.9-14, cf. 6.19-34), and persecuted (10.16-23, 38-39, cf. 5.10-12). They are under God’s care (10.28-31, cf. 6.25, 31) and do not need to worry (10.19, cf. 6.25-34). Thus Matthew makes clear that the mission given to the disciples is no different from Jesus’ own mission, just as their authority and their fate are no different from those of Jesus.149

The transpositions of Markan and Q materials serve Matthew’s working out of this didactic theme. (3) Alignment of Matthew 9.1-17/Mark 2.1-22 (Paralytic/Feasting Controversies) with Matthew 11.2-19/Q 7.18-35 (Baptist). Youngquist points out the thick motif correspondences of Mt. 9.1-17 (Mk 2.1-22) to the Q Baptist section (Q 7.18-35). Matthew has pushed the latter out of Q order, to a position immediately after the Commissioning (Mt. 11.2-19) rather than immediately before, as it is in Q. The correspondences – Jesus’ conviviality with τελῶναι καὶ ἁμαρτωλοί (Mt. 9.9-10/11.19); criticism of Jesus’ feasting practices, and the contrast of his convivial lifestyle to John’s asceticism (Mt. 9.11-14/11.19) – are mostly to the third section of the tripartite Q Baptist sequence (Mt. 11.16-19/Q 7.31-35), the Children in the Marketplace. But the comparison of John and Jesus that surfaces in the feasting/fasting controversy (Mt. 9.14-17/Mk 2.18-22) is a motif that runs through the entire Q block (Q 7.18-35). A reference to the οἰ μαθηταὶ Ἰωάννου (Mt. 9.14/Mk 2.18) also occurs at the beginning of the first Q unit: πέμψας διὰ τῶν μαθητῶν (Mt. 11.2/Q 7.18). The dispute over Jesus’ forgiveness of ἁμαρτίαι arises in the Healing of the Paralytic (Mt. 9.2-5/Mk 2.3-9), and is carried over into Jesus’ feasting with ἁμαρτωλοί at Matthew’s house (Mt. 9.10-11/Mk 2.15-16). In the Children in the Marketplace segment of the Q Baptist sequence, Jesus is described pejoratively as τελωνῶν φίλος καὶ ἁμαρτωλῶν (Mt. 11.19/Q 7.34). These correspondences to the Matthew 11 Baptist materials (Q 7.1835), and more precisely, to the Children in the Marketplace (Q 7.31-35), distinguishes Mt. 9.1-17 (Mk 2.1-22) from the transposed Mark 4–5 materials on either side of it (Mt. 8.18-34/Mk 4.35–5.20 on the one side, 149. Luz, Matthew 8–20, p. 59.

268

Q in Matthew

Mt. 9.18-26/Mk 5.21-43 on the other), though to be sure, the immediately following Mk 5.21-43 segment of the transposition contributes to filling out the Q 7.22/Mt. 11.5 list of wonders. We just saw that Matthew’s redaction of Mk 4.35–5.1-20 has aligned it more tightly to the Matthew 10 Commissioning. Matthew’s return to and insertion of Mk 2.1-22 right into the middle of the Mk 4.35–5.43 transposition gives it the function of anticipating important elements of the Q Baptist materials in Matthew 11. In other words, Matthew’s arrangement of these Markan materials serves to create coherence across this large section of the Gospel, made up of Markan and Q source materials, that runs from ch. 8 to ch. 11. The Mt. 9.1-17/Mk 2.1-22 controversies supply narrative antecedents for Mt. 11.2-19/Q 7.18-35, and more precisely, for Jesus’ climactic Children in the Marketplace denunciation. As Youngquist points out, this goes a long way toward resolving the old conundrum of why these Markan controversies are found in the so-called Miracle Collection of Matthew 8–9.150 It also accounts for Matthew’s playing down the healing elements of the Paralytic episode and playing up its controversy elements. Nevertheless, the diverging lines of reference of the Mark 2 and the Mark 4–5 materials in Matthew 8–9 (to Mt. 11.2-19/Q 7.18-35 and Matthew 10/Q 10 respectively) should not be overly schematized.151 The Matthew 8–9 healings brought together from Mk 1.40-45, Q 7.1-10, and Mk 5.21-43 provide the narrative antecedents for the wonders that Jesus recites to John’s messengers in Mt. 11.5. The most striking feature of Matthew’s redaction of the Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1-12), ἐδόξασαν τὸν θεὸν τὸν δόντα ἐξουσίαν τοιαύτην τοῖς ἀνθρώποις (Mt. 9.8b), anticipates the grant of authority in Mt. 10.1. Matthew’s doubling back to Mk 2.1-22 is calculated: he is coordinating his Mark and Q materials in a way that reconstitutes them at a new level of coherence. In Mt. 9.18-26 Matthew returns to Mark 5 to pick up the double healing story, the Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with the Flow (Mk 5.21-43). This also brings him almost up to the Mark 6 Commissioning (Mk 6.6b-13). Matthew’s redaction of these healings continues his program of anticipatory alignment to Mt. 10.1-42 (Commissioning) and Mt. 11.2-19 (Baptist) and of narrowing the focus to the disciples as the ones who will receive 150. Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 120. 151. Youngquist’s assignment of ‘Sequence A’ (Mk 1.40-45; 2.1-22; 5.21-43) to a scan to collect materials to anticipate Q 7.18-35/Mt. 11.2-19, and ‘Sequence B’ (Mk 1.29-34; 4.35–5.20), to a scan to collect materials anticipating the Commissioning (‘Matthew, Mk, and Q’, pp. 255–9) overly differentiates the referentiality of these sequences. Though Youngquist’s Sequence A has marked affinities to Q 7, and Sequence B to the Commissioning, Matthew is careful to tie both to the Commissioning.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

269

authority to exercise Jesus’ ministry. The compression of the Markan episode to change the girl’s condition from ἐσχάτως ἔχει (Mk 5.23b) to ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν (Mt. 9.18b) grounds Jesus’ charge to his disciples, νεκροὺς ἐγείρετε (Mt. 10.8a), and gives the narrative antecedent for the retrospective reference to νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται in Jesus’ citation of wonders to John’s messengers (Mt. 11.5). Matthew brings the disciples into sharper focus by altering καὶ ἠκολούθει αυτῷ ὄχλος πολύς (Mk 5.24) to ἠκολούθησεν αὐτῷ καὶ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ (Mt. 9.19). He wraps up his account of the raising of the ruler’s daughter – and the extended sequence transposed in two sections from Mk 4.35–5.43 – with the phrase: καὶ ἐξῆλθεν ἡ φήμη αὕτη εἰς ὅλην τὴν γῆν ἐκείνην (Mt. 9.26). This phrase is reminiscent of the conclusion of the Markan Healing of the Leper (Mk 1.40-45), an element Matthew omitted when he took the story over to inaugurate this section of the gospel: ὁ δὲ ἐξελθὼν ἤρξατο κηρύσσειν πολλὰ καὶ διαφημίζειν τὸν λόγον (Mk 1.45; see Mt. 8.1-4). The phrase is repeated more exactly as the climax of the next pericope, the Healing of the Two Blind Men (Mt. 9.27-31): οἱ δὲ ἐξελθόντες διεφήμισαν αὐτὸν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ γῇ ἐκείνῃ (9.31). This creates an inclusio that demarcates the ‘Wunderzyklus’ of chs. 8–9, and it neatly incorporates the Mk 4.35–5.43 transpositions into this more encompassing Matthean section.152 (4) Two Blind Men (Matthew 9.27-31) and First Beelzebul Accusation (Matthew 9.32-34). The Healing of the Two Blind Men (Mt. 9.27-31) and the Exorcism and mini Beelzebul Accusation (Mt. 9.32-34) form a pair. These pericopes stand out as curiosities. They are much reduced and extensively recomposed M doublets of Mk 10.46-52 (Mt. 20.29-34) and Q 11.14-15 (Mt. 12.22-24). In other words, they have been worked up by Matthew from the raw materials of his sources, a practice already attested in the M materials of the Sermon.153 The M units in the Sermon served, we saw, to connect Q and Mark source materials into the macroframework of the Sermon and in some cases of the Gospel of Matthew 152. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 153. 153. See E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies: ‘For his two new miracles Matthew simply raided others. He seems to have had a small stock of traditional healing stories, and when he needed new ones he drew on it, rather than coming up with entirely new accounts’ (Studying the Synoptic Gospels [London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989], p. 173). Sanders and Davies characterize this as the ‘limited creativity of most early Christians’, but it would be better to describe it as a skilled tradent grounding the new purposes to which the tradition is put in the tradition itself. Goulder points to the influence of Mk 8.22-26 in ἥψατο (Mt. 9.29) and εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν (Mt. 9.28), as well as in the private character of the healing (Midrash and Lection, p. 45).

270

Q in Matthew

itself. The M healings in Mt. 9.27-34 fulfill this same function. Taken together they form a crucial redactional hinge, executing the transition from the miracle section (chs. 8–9) to Matthew’s next large block of material in chs. 10–12 that begins with the Commissioning and ends with the Beelzebul Accusation. Matthew uses concluding elements of the Healing of the Leper: ἐμβριμησάμενος αὐτῷ/…ἐξελθὼν ἤρξατο… διαφημίζειν (Mk 1.43, 45), passed over when he initiated his miracle cycle with this episode (Mt. 8.1-4), to build the conclusion to the Healing of the Two Blind Men: ἐνεβριμήθη αὐτοῖς…ἐξελθόντες διεφήμισαν (Mt. 9.31). In effect he parses out elements of Mk 1.43-45 to demarcate the boundaries of the Messiah of Deed section (Mt. 8–9).154 But the M unit Mt. 9.27-31 is at the same time forward-oriented. It gives the narrative footing for τυφλοὶ ἀναβλέπουσιν in the list of miracles in Mt. 11.5, and οἱ δὲ ἐξελθόντες διεφήμισαν αὐτὸν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ γῇ ἐκείνῃ anticipates in nuce the mission of the disciples itself, especially since the pericope introduces οἱ ἐξελθοντες as παράγοντι ἐκεῖθεν τῷ Ἰησοῦ ἠκολούθησαν (9.27) and profiles their πίστις. The other M unit (9.32-34) shares this bidirectional orientation, supplying the narrative reference for the κωφοὶ ἀκούουσιν of 11.5 but also, with the crowd’s declaration, οὐδέποτε ἐφάνη οὕτως ἐν τῷ Ἰσραήλ (9.33b), ‘appropriately bring[ing] chapters 8–9 to a climax’.155 As Luz observes, the unit ‘lässt zwei Hauptpersonengruppen der vorangehenden Geschichten in ihrer charakteristischen Reaktion gegenüber Jesus nochmals zu Worte kommen’.156 In contrast to the crowd’s acclamation, the Pharisees’ imputation of alliance with Beelzebul (9.34) not only sums up but ramps up the opposition to Jesus that emerged in chs. 8–9 (scribes’ blasphemy accusation in 9.3; Pharisees’ criticism of Jesus’ consorting with sinners in 9.11). Hence it too looks ahead, not just to the conflicts that will be foretold in the Commissioning, but also to the full-throated Beelzebul Accusation in ch. 12. Just as he used elements of the Markan Healing of the Leper to frame the miracle sequences (chs. 8–9), Matthew here frames the next long section (chs. 10–12), ridden with conflict motifs, with Beelzubul Accusation materials. Last but not least, with 9.32-34 Matthew also manages a nod to Mark’s order, more precisely, to Mark’s pre-Commissioning placement of the Beelzebul Accusation. By the same token, he echoes the Mark 1–3 sequence that, beginning with Jesus’ proclamation, passes through healings into conflicts that climax in the Beelzebul episode. But more than just acknowledgment of a familiarized order, this recapitulation of Mark 154. Luz, ‘Die Wundergeschichten’, pp. 152–3. 155. Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, p. 138. 156. Luz, ‘Die Wundergeschichten’, p. 152.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

271

evinces Matthew’s tradent concern to take up the narrative and instructional configurations of his community’s foundational traditions right into the very substance and design of the new gospel, thereby grounding the latter in the authority of former. In this shadow recapitulation of Markan order Matthew can be seen consolidating his sources such that each receives its due. Viewed from another angle, Matthew is making the exigent realities of the community, in response to which his gospel is written, recognizable to the community in the symbolic world of its normative tradition. Luz aptly calls the double pericope Mt. 9.27-34 a ‘Schlüsselstelle’.157 As noted, this M double pericope serves the same end as the M materials in the Sermon – as mortar binding the source materials into the macro redactional framework of the Sermon and of the Gospel itself. It is the redactional knot that ties the miracle chs. 8–9 together with chs. 10–12, each a considered arrangement of Mark and Q sequences, to form an extended Matthean elaboration. It appears prominently in the middle of this long section of the Gospel where Mark and Q converge, and thus where Matthew has his work cut out for him to combine his two sources coherently. (5) Matthew 10 Commissioning . This heightened level of redactional activity continues into the next few verses (Mt. 9.35-38), which lead into the Commissioning. At 9.35 Matthew moves forward from Mk 5.43 past Mk 6.1-6a (Rejection at Nazareth) to Mk 6.6b, the entrée to Mark’s Commissioning. That Mk 6.1-6a is left aside here (picked up in ch. 13) to move direct to the Commissioning confirms that Matthew is prioritizing the Q sequence in this section. As he does with the Q 6 Sermon in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew uses the Q Commissioning to frame his Commissioning. He expands the frame with Mark 6 Commissioning materials as well as with materials pulled forward from Q 12, Q 14, Mark 13, and retrieved from Mark 3.158 Also incorporated is a saying left over from the Q Sermon (Q 6.40/Mt. 10.24: Disciple and Master), and a Mark saying (Mk 9.41/Mt. 10.42: Cup of Cold Water).159 For the latter Matthew 157. Ibid. 158. Viewed from his absolute position at Mk 2.22, Matthew is pulling Mk 3.3-19 forward. 159. This confirms that Luke’s location of Q 6.39-40/Mt. 10.24 is Q’s. In contrast to its Q position in a sequence on moral education (Q 6.37-42), its connection into the Commissioning is redactional. It owes its position in the Commissioning to Matthew’s strengthening of the discipleship threads tying the Messiah of Word and Deed chapters (Mt. 4–9) together with the Commissioning and Conflict chapters (Mt. 10–12). Along with Q 14.25-27; 17.33/Mt. 10.37-39, it increases the disciple-instructional quotient in the Commissioning. Its intelligibility in the Commissioning

272

Q in Matthew

returns to a Markan sayings cluster (Mk 9.38-50) that he had earlier visited for materials for the Sermon on the Mount (Mk 6.43-48/Mt. 5.29-30: Offending Eye/Hand). Matthew’s use of καὶ περιῆγεν τὰς κώμας κύκλῳ διδάσκων (Mk 6.6b) in both Mt. 9.35 and Mt. 4.23 signals that chs. 4–9 and 10–11 constitute, as noted, a single elaboration in which the messianic authority and mission of Jesus is transferred to his disciples, now named as apostles (Mt. 10.2-4/Mk 3.13-19), and hence to the church.160 But immediately following (9.36) Matthew pulls forward ἰδὼν δὲ τοὺς ὄχλους ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν, ὅτι ἦσαν ἐσκυλμένοι καὶ ἐρριμμένοι ὡσεὶ πρόβατα μὴ ἔχοντα ποιμένα from Mk 6.34. This turns the latter into a prominent element in the framing of the Commissioning.161 Its meaning now comes from this new context. Luz points out that the Pharisees, by attributing Jesus’ authority to Beelzebul (Mt. 9.34), are unmasked as false shepherds, leaving the people bereft, ὡσεὶ πρόβατα μὴ ἔχοντα ποιμένα (Mt. 9.36). ‘In dieser Situation bekommen die Jünger den Auftrag, Arbeiter in der Ernte an dem hirtenlosen Volk zu sein.’162 Jesus is the Shepherd of Israel, and his disciples, named as apostles (Mt. 10.2-4) and sent to τὰ πρόβατα τὰ ἀπολωλότα οἴκου Ἰσραήλ (Mt. 10.5-6), are the shepherds of the new community. As noted, Matthew expands the Q Commissioning (Q 10.2-16) by conflating the Q 10 and Mark 6 instructions and pulling paraenetic materials forward from Mark 13, Q 12, Q 14, and Mark 9, and reaching back for Mk 3.13-19 and Q 6.40.163 The effect is to transform the Commissioning into a discipleship paraenesis on persecution and martyrdom,164 on bearing witness depends upon Mt. 10.25, which connects it to the Mt. 9.34 redactional M unit: the mini-Beelzebul Accusation. 160. The agreement of elements of Mt. 9.35 (τὰς πόλεις πάσας καὶ τὰς κώμας... κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλλιον τῆς βασιλείας) with elements of Lk. 8.1b (κατὰ πόλιν και κώμην κηρύσσων καὶ εὐαγγελιζόμενος τὴν βασιλείαν) is adventitious. The wording of Mt. 9.35 in addition to Mk 6.6b is drawn from Mt. 4.23. The agreements with Lk. 8.1 are formulaic terms and phrases of the sort frequent in summaries of Jesus’ activities. 161. In Mark it prefaces the Feeding of the 5000, where it unmasks Herod Antipas, murderer of the Baptist, as the false shepherd of Israel (Mk 6.14-29), and where it is connected to the return of the disciples from their Markan mission (Mk 6.30). That Matthew directs ‘sheep without a shepherd’ against the Pharisees instead of against the royal claims of Antipas (Mk) owes something to the changed historical frameworks of the Matthean community. 162. Luz, ‘Wundergeschichten’, p. 153. 163. Matthew follows Q 10, with some transpositions, working in small blocks of Markan material (Neirynck, ‘La redaction matthéenne’, pp. 32–3). 164. F. W. Beare, ‘The Mission of the Disciples and the Mission Charge: Matthew 10 and Parallels’, JBL 89 (1970), pp. 1–13 (3–5).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

273

in the fullest sense, experiences Matthew has prefigured in the narrative of Jesus’ calling disciples to accompany him on his perilous mission journey across the sea (Mt. 8.18-27). This is the reason for Matthew’s deferral of Q 10.3 (Lambs Among Wolves) to Mt. 10.16, where it leads directly into the persecution and martyr paraenesis from Mark 13 and Q 12. Matthew’s reorientation of the Commissioning from a messenger, provisioning, and hospitality instruction to an exhortation on persecution and the costs of discipleship, summed up as ὁ Ἰησοῦς διατάσσων τοῖς δώδεκα μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ (Mt. 11.1), also explains his deferral of the Woes against the Galilean Cities (Q 10.13-15) to the next block of material (Mt. 11.20-24). The Shaliah saying that forms the outer framework unit of the Q Commissioning (Q 10.16) serves the same purpose in Matthew’s Commissioning (Mt. 10.40). The assurances of Mt. 10.40-42 (M + Mk 9.41) of the μισθός for ὁ δεχόμενος the envoys, identified by the terms προφήτης, δίκαιος, and μαθητής, connect the Commissioning forward to the next block of material. (6) Matthew 11 and the Transposition of Q 7.18-35 (John the Baptist). The προφήτης designation of the envoys in Mt. 10.41 (hardly coincidentally an M unit) serves as a catchword to link the Commissioning to the Mt. 11.2-19 Baptist sequence transposed from Q 7. More than just a bare connective, it reinforces that John, Jesus, and the envoys constitute a unitary community of revelation and mission. Matthew has already signaled this by placing Jesus’ programmatic utterance, μετανοεῖτε· ἤγικκεν γὰρ ἠ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν (Mt. 4.17), in the mouth of John the Baptist (Mt. 3.2) and later in the mouths of the envoys at the beginning of the Commissioning (Mt. 10.8). Conversely, Matthew’s Jesus utters an element of John’s preaching, πᾶν οὖν δένδρον μὴ ποιοῦν καρπὸν καλὸν ἐκκόπτεται καὶ εἰς πῦρ βάλλεται (Mt. 3.10b//Q 3.9b), in the Sermon (Mt. 7.19). The reference to the ἔργα τοῦ Χριστοῦ (Mt. 11.2) looks back at the healing stories in chs. 8–9. But by virtue of Matthew’s shifting of the Q 7 Baptist sequence to after the Commissioning, the ἔργα also encompass the apostolic mission. In its Matthew 11 position, therefore, the Q Baptist sequence looks back upon all of Matthew 3–10. It pronounces retrospective judgment upon the rejection of the prophetic, but more than that, messianic revelation announced in word and deed by John, Jesus, and the apostolic envoys, a judgment that comes to the fore in the climactic Children in the Marketplace (Mt. 11.7-19/Q 7.31-35).165 Matthew simply extends the role Q 7.18-35 plays in Q: to align and reflect retrospectively on the preaching of John (Q 3) and Jesus (Q 6). But his shifting of it to a position after 165. Held, ‘Matthew as Interpreter’, p. 251; Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII– XVIII, p. 294.

274

Q in Matthew

chs. 3–10, compelled by the necessity of combining Q with Mark (among other things of supplying narrative antecedents for Q 7.22), widens and gives narrative depth to its retrospective view. In bringing Q 16.16 forward to ch. 11 – ‘From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and violent men seize it’ (11.12) – Matthew is not just aggregating John-themed Q material or gesturing at Mark’s placement of John’s execution after the Commissioning (Mk 6.14-29), though doubtless he is doing both. With Q 16.16 he strengthens the connection between the Baptist sequence and the Commissioning that he has recast as paraenesis preparing the envoys for persecution and martyrdom ἐπὶ ἡγεμόνας καὶ βασιλεῖς (Mt. 10.18). It extends the prophetic solidarity of John, Jesus, and the apostolic community in this respect also. Furthermore, bringing ὁ νόμος ἕως Ἰωάννου ἐπροφήτευσαν into ch. 11 draws the circle of the witness to include the Law and the Prophets. This interprets the mission of John, Jesus, and the envoys, as well as their rejection, as the culmination of the whole history of divine revelation that began with the Law. (7) Q 10 Commissioning Materials in Matthew 11 (Q 10.12-15; 10.21-22; 10.16). The transposition of Woes Against the Galilean Cities (Mt. 11.20-24/ Q10.12-15) is, more accurately, a simple reversal of order with Q 10.16. By virtue of its position right after the Children in the Marketplace, the Woes turn the Baptist sequence into a formal announcement of judg­ment.166 The δυνάμεις αἱ γενόμεναι ἐν ὑμῖν (Mt. 11.21b/Q 10.13b) point back to the healings in Mt. 11.5 and to their narrative antecedents in chs. 8–10. Matthew’s recasting of the Commissioning as a discipleship paraenesis on persecution and martyrdom meant that the Woes had to be relocated from their original position within the Q Commissioning. He deferred the Q 7 Baptist sequence because of the need to incorporate Markan narrative antecedents to Q 7.22 and the ‘friend of tax collectors and sinners’ charge of Q 7.19. Together these deferred sequences, taken up in Matthew 11, register the reaction to the rejection of the revelation of the Kingdom of God and its envoys. The conjoined Q units, Thanksgiving/Blessed the Eyes (Mt. 11.2527/Q 10.21-22), stand in their Q order the Matthew 11 block. As they do in Q where they likewise follow close upon the Commissioning, they continue to take stock of the reception of the revelation. Their contribution is to distinguish those who reject it (ironically, the σοφοί καὶ συνετοί) sharply from those who receive it (νήπιοι). Also as in Q, they elaborate on the Shaliah’s (Mt. 10.40/Q 10.16) anticipation of some fruitful response to 166. Häfner, ‘Matthäusevangelium’, p. 67.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

275

the proclamation (ὁ δεχόμενος ὑμᾶς ἐμὲ δέχεται), trace the envoys’ messianic revelation and commission up the commissioning chain from Jesus to God, and mark the outer boundary of the Commissioning. Their Q reflections upon the starkly different receptions are expanded and elaborated by Matthew’s intercalation of the Baptist sequence (Mt. 11.2-19/Q 7.18-35) and the Woes (Mt. 11.20-24/Q 10.13-15). The concluding M sayings, δεῦτε πρός με πάντες οἱ κοπιῶντες καὶ πεφορτισμένοι, κἀγὼ ἀναπαύσω ὑμᾶς κτλ. (Mt. 11.28-30), create a correspondence to the opening of the Commissioning, ἰδὼν δὲ τοὺς ὄχλους ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν, ὅτι ἦσαν ἐσκυλμένοι καὶ ἐριμμένοι ὡσεὶ πρόβατα μὴ ἔχοντα ποιμένα (Mt. 9.36), that Matthew contrived by pulling Mk 6.34 forward (Mt. 9.37/Q 10.2). Together Mt. 9.36 and Mt. 11.28-30 form a framework around the chs. 10–11 block of material. The Mt. 11.28-30 sayings have many Wisdom motifs, but κἀγὼ ἀναπαύσω ὑμᾶς also evokes shepherd themes: ἐπὶ ὕδατος ἀναπαύσεως ἐξέθρεψεν με (Ps. 22.2 LXX), ἐκεῖ ἀναπαύσονται [τὰ πρόβατα] ἐν τρυφῇ ἀγαθῇ (Ezek. 34.14 LXX), and ἐγὼ βοσκήσω τὰ πρόβατά μου καὶ ἐγὼ ἀναπαύσω αὐτά (Ezek. 34.15 LXX). Out of the mission of Jesus and the envoys emerges a flock, a leading ecclesial image in the chapters that follow, where after the Beelzebul Accusation this new community comes into view. The first Markan feeding story (Mk 6.34-44), full of shepherd and flock motifs, follows direct on the Markan mission. Matthew therefore is bringing aspects of the Markan narrative line into his arrangement here of Q and Markan Commissioning material. Matthew 11 is a hinge block of material, essential to the coherence of the entire the Gospel; hence Matthew’s heavy investment in putting it together. On the one hand it takes stock of the negative reception of the messianic proclamation to Israel in chs. 3–10. On the other it initiates the shift to the new community brought into existence by the messianic revelation and the apostolic mission.167 Chapter 11 is the fulcrum upon which the principal redactional development of the Gospel turns: ἀρθήσεται ἀφ’ ὑμῶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ δοθήσεται ἔθνει ποιοῦντι τοὺς καρποὺς αὐτῆς 167. The transitional character of Mt. 11 is pointed out by Luz, Matthew 1–7, 42; idem, Matthew 8–20, p. 129; Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, p. 294; Held, ‘Matthew as Interpreter’, p. 251; Häfner, ‘Matthäusevangelium’, pp. 66–8. The continuation of controversy materials into Mt. 12 is owing to Matthew’s sourceu­tilization realities: after the Commissioning he returns to his absolute position in his source with the Mk 2–3 controversies. This permits him to accommodate the Beelzebul Accusation in its forward Q order, i.e. after the Commissioning. But in a masterful reconciliation of the order of the two sources, it is integrated into the Markan narrative line through the coordination with Mk 2–3 (see below).

276

Q in Matthew

(Mt. 21.43). Rejection and judgment reach their climax in Matthew 12, in the sequence initiated by Beelzebul Accusation (Mt. 12.22-24/Mk 3.22/Q 11.14-15). Warnings of judgment are directed against those who ‘blaspheme the Holy Spirit’, who attribute the messianic revelation to demonic inspiration or demand its authentication in a sensational sign. The house is in danger of being reoccupied by unclean spirits seven-fold, the last state becoming worse than the first. On the other hand, a community nucleates around Jesus which Jesus identifies as a new family, as ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί μου (Mt. 12.49). This new community moves to the fore in the subsequent chapters. In Matthew 13 the privileged community of revelation identified in Mt. 11.25-27 (Q 10.21-22) is addressed again in the same terms: ὑμῖν δέδοται γνῶναι τὰ μυστήρια τῆς βασιλείας τῶν οὐρανῶν (Mt. 13.11/Mk 4.10) and distinguished from those who βλέποντες οὐ βλέπουσιν καὶ ἀκούοντες οὐκ ἀκούουσιν (Mt. 13.13/Mk 4.12), referring back to the Messiah of Deed (βλέποντες οὐ βλέπουσιν) and Word (ἀκούοντες οὐκ ἀκούουσιν) in Matthew 4–9.168 It is now clear that the βλέποντες…ἀκούοντες thematic of Mk 4.12 is the reason Matthew waits to adjoin Q 10.23-24 (μακάριοι οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ ὅτι βλέπουσιν καὶ τὰ ὦτα ὑμῶν ὅτι ἀκοόυσιν κτλ.) to the Markan narrative here. c. Taking Stock of the Transpositions Matthew is finished with his major Markan transpositions. In 12.1 he can be found back at his absolute forward position in Mark 2, picking up with the Plucking Grain on the Sabbath controversy (Mk 2.23-28) and from there working forward in order through the Mark 2, 3, 4, and 6 material left behind by the transpositions. The Beelzebul Accusation in Mk 3.22-27 marks the next convergence with parallel Q material (Q 11.14-23). Because of the transpositions, and Matthew’s pulling the Our Father (Q 11.2-4, 9-13) forward to the Sermon, the Mark Beelzebul Accusation now falls together neatly with its Q counterpart, which in Q follows close upon the Commissioning. When he has finished with the Mark and Q Beelzebul Accusations, including the Q Request for a Sign (Q 11.16, 29-32/Mt. 12.38-42) and the Return of the Unclean Spirit (Q 11.24-26/Mt. 12.43-45), Matthew has succeeded in using up much of the Q material through Q 12. This includes the Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit (Q 12.10), which Matthew brings forward to attach to the Mk 3.28-29 doublet. He can proceed in order with Mark 4 to incorporate the Q 13.18-21 Mustard Seed and Leaven into his parable discourse (Mt. 13.31-33). From now on Matthew is simply able to attach remaining 168. Matthew’s shifting of βλέπωσιν and ἀκούσωσιν (Mk 4.12) into indicative voice makes them retrospective and expressive of a present reality.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

277

Q material to Markan topical ‘pegs’, which become starting points for building discourses. This accounts for his shifting the Q Woes (Q 11.3952) and the Q Servant instructions (Q 12.39-46) to ch. 23 and ch. 24 respectively. Not by happenstance most of the remaining double tradition between Q 12 and Q 19 is material for which topical pegs in the rest of the Markan narrative are readily available.169 Owing to his calculated forward use of Q materials in the Sermon on the Mount and the Commissioning, Matthew will not encounter additional double tradition until Q 17.1-2; 15.4-5; 17.3-6, which along with Mark and M materials he will use to build the ch. 18 discourse. d. The Technical Vector: Matthew’s Source-Utilization Strategy in Chapters 4–12 The redactional and didactic art on display between Matthew 4 and 13 does not by a long shot suffice to account for Matthew’s Markan transpositions. As is evident in the rest of the Gospel, Matthew could have achieved solely didactic objectives more simply. His transpositions only become fully intelligible when understood as a solution to the technical problem posed by consolidating two foundational sources, each with its distinct literary Gestalt, each with its own disposition of parallel materials. To recapitulate: when Matthew reaches the end of Mark and Q’s common order for John’s Preaching (and possibly the Temptation), he is faced with formidable source-reconciliation problems. In Q he stands at the verge of the Q Sermon (Q 6.21-49), for which Mark offers nothing remotely comparable. The Mark Beelzebul Accusation (Mk 3.22-30) and the Q Beelzebul Accusation (Q 11.14-23) are wildly non-aligned: Mark’s occurs well before – and with little contextual connection to – the Markan Commissioning (Mk 6.6b-13); Q’s occurs soon after the Q Commissioning (Q 10.2-16). Between the Q 6 Sermon and the Q 10 Commissioning there lies a lengthy block of material on John the Baptist (Q 7.18-35) with no parallel in Mark relative to where it is located in Q. In addition to these blocks of parallel Markan and Q material, one finds here and there, both in proximity to them and in the rest of Q, a number of sayings without obvious topical pegs in the Markan narrative. Matthew’s utilization actions in chs. 4–13, in particular his transpositions in chs. 8–12, address these daunting problems of order and coherence. Their effect is to resolve the order of his sources in a coherent line while simultaneously building Mark’s and Q’s normative configurations of the tradition right into the structure of his new artifact. 169. E.g. Q 12.39-46 attached to Mk 13.35-37/Mt. 24.43-51; Q 12.53-56 attached to Mk 8.11-13/Mt. 16.2-4.

278

Q in Matthew

(1) Matthew’s Strategy Summarized. Matthew inserts the Q 6 Sermon at Mk 1.21, at Mark’s first mention that Jesus ἐδίδασκεν. Most of the Q materials he pulls forward into the Sermon on the Mount lack obvious attachment points to other parts of the Markan narrative. Pulling them into the Sermon is not only an economical but also prudent strategy for coordinating his sources. It clears out of the way a significant amount of Q material that lacks evident Markan parallels. This reduces and vastly simplifies remaining coordination and reconciling tasks. This early incorporation of a large block of Q material has far-reaching and certainly intentional effects on the character of the Gospel, but only those who fail to see the utilization exigency it addresses could see here an ideological preference for Q over Mark. The unaligned Mark 3 and Q 11 Beelzebul Accusations present Matthew with his biggest coordination difficulty. By pulling Mk 4.35-41; 5.1-43 forward after Mk 1.34, and by deferring the Q 7.18-35 Baptist materials, Matthew succeeds in bringing the Mark 6 and Q 10 Commissionings neatly into alignment. When he then resumes his absolute position at Mk 2.23 and continues forward through Mark 3, the Mark 3 and Q 11 Beelzebul Accusations automatically line up. Like Q 7.18-35, Mk 4.35– 5.43 constitutes a single block of material, separated though by Matthew’s insertion of Mk 2.1-22 (Mt. 9.1-17) between Mk 5.20 and 5.21. This is not a transposition but a return to his absolute forward position in his source at Mk 2.1. In short, Matthew executes this dual alignment of order by means of just one major transposition in each of his sources. Its effect is that Matthew follows the Q order Commissioning → Beelzebul Accusation rather than the Mark order Beelzebul Accusation → Commissioning. Further analysis will show that this is for compelling pragmatic reasons, that Matthew has no ideological agenda other than a determination to harness the authority of both of his sources. But to continue with Matthew’s source-utilization strategy. After incorporating the Q 7.18-35 Baptist and some Q 10 units in ch. 11, in ch. 12 he returns to Mk 2.23, his absolute forward position in Mark and picks up the remaining Mark 2, 3, 4, and 6 materials in forward order. Though it is only at Mt. 14.1 that he overtakes the point in Mark (Mk 6.14-16) where all his Markan transpositions lie behind him, Matthew effectively resumes Markan order at 12.1 with Mk 2.23-28 (Plucking Grain on the Sabbath).170 When he has reached the end of the ch. 13 Parable Discourse, Matthew has succeeded in utilizing almost all the Q materials forward 170. This is not always clearly registered. For example, Neirynck: ‘Il est en effet frappant de constater qu’ à partir de Mt. XIV,1, l’ordre de Marc est fidèlement suivi’ (‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 59), but Luz more accurately: ‘Das Markusevangelium

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

279

to Q 11, more precisely, to Q 11.29-35 (Request for a Sign; Lamp on a Lampstand), as well as large blocks of material from Q 12, 13, 14, and 16. This amounts to the bulk of the source. As noted, it can hardly be by chance that the still unused Q materials lend themselves topically to Markan attachment points, either to single Markan pericopes or pegs for the building out of discourses, in the unfolding Markan narrative.171 By far the most are gathered into the remaining Matthean discourses, each of which commences with Markan pericopes in the Markan narrative order. The sequence Q 17.1-2, 15.4-5;172 17.3-4 (Mt. 18.6-7, 12-15, 21-22) is an element of the Mt. 18.1-35 Community discourse, with its attachment point at Mk 9.33-37/Mt. 18.1-5 (Dispute About Greatness) and Mk 9.42-50/Mt. 18.6 (Scandals). The Q Woes Against the Pharisees/Announcement of Judgment (Q 11.39-51; 13.34-35) are taken up in Matthew’s discourse against the Pharisees (Mt. 23.1-39), which starts with Mark’s denunciation of the scribes (Mk 12.37b-40; Mt. 23.1-2, 6-7). The Q Apocalypse (Q 17.21-37) is taken up into the Matthew 24 Apocalyptic Discourse, cued in Markan order from Mark 13. Matthew incorporates Faithful and Unfaithful Servants (Q 12.39-46) at Mt. 24.4351. Mark 13.35 (Mt. 24.42) is the attachment point, its order reversed with Mk 13.33-34 (Mt. 25.14), which Matthew uses to lead into the Parable of the Entrusted Money (Q 19.12-26/Mt. 25.15-29). Matthew places the Parable of the Great Banquet (Q 14.16-23/Mt. 22.1-14) after the Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk 12.1-12/Mt. 21.33-46). Both feature the themes of commissioned servants, rejection, and displacement.173 Five individual sayings (two of dubious Q provenance) are all the double tradition materials that are to be found elsewhere between Matthew 14 and 25. These are attached to Markan pericopes to which they have obvious topical affinities.174 hat er von 2,23 = Mt. 12,1 an sozusagen ohne Änderungen seiner Reihenfolge übernommen’ (‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 207). 171. ‘Les omissions de péricopes y sont rares…et en dehors des discours de Mt. XVIII, XXIII, XXIV–XXV, le récit de Marc n’y est pas interrompu par des texts de la double tradition. Si l’on constate l’une ou l’autre transposition, elle se place à l’intérieur d’une péricope (ou unité littéraire)’ (Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 59). 172. I follow the judgment of the CEQ that the Matthean position of Q 15.4-5 (Lost Sheep) preserves its Q location (if indeed it is in Q). 173. Matthew assimilates the Q Banquet parable to motifs of the Wicked Tenants, for example, plural servants; abuse of servants. 174. Faith as a Mustard Seed (Q 17.6/Mt. 17.20) appears in the Healing of the Epileptic Boy (Mk 9.14-29), where πιστεύειν is a leading motif; Twelve Thrones

280

Q in Matthew

Thus after Mt. 12.1 the Markan order reasserts itself, not because Matthew is experiencing editorial fatigue, or because the community after heroic struggle to remain faithful to Jesus’ authentic teaching has succumbed to hegemonic kerygmatic proto-orthodoxy, but because Matthew can now easily accommodate the remaining Q materials to Markan topics that occur along the rest of the Markan narrative line. That Matthew’s rearrangements of Q and Markan materials in chs. 4–12 are elements of just such a source-utilization strategy must be confirmed, however, by a second, more finely grained analysis, one that looks closely at each of the major and minor transpositions in the controverted section of Matthew’s Gospel. This analysis will show the fascinating ways that Matthew’s redactional and source-utilization strategies react upon each other. (2) Q Sermon, the Centurion’s Child, and the Inversion of Mark 1.40-45 and 1.29-34. Neirynck remarks that the reversal in order of Mk 1.29-34/ Mt. 8.14-17 (Healings at Capernaum) and Mk 1.40-45/Mt. 8.1-4 (Healing of Leper) is intelligible in light of Matthew’s positioning of the Q sequence 6.20b-49 (Sermon) and 7.1-10 (Healing of Centurion’s Child) relative to the Markan narrative Jesus’ Day in Capernaum. Matthew’s inversion of Mk 1.29-34 and Mk 1.40-45 pivots upon the Q 7.1/Mt. 8.5 reference to Jesus entering Capernaum. Matthew’s positioning of the Healing of Centurion’s Child relative to the inverted passages gives Jesus’ Q 7.1 Capernaum entrance a function analogous to both of Mark’s first two references to Jesus entering Capernaum. Mark’s first reference is Mk 1.21, which is followed by the Mk 1.29-34 healings (see Mt. 8.14-17). Mark’s second reference is Mk 2.1, which is preceded by the Healing of the Leper in Mk 1.40-45 (see Mt. 8.1-4) and followed by the Healing of the Paralytic in Mk 2.1-12 (Mt. 9.1-7).175 Matthew’s positioning of Q 7.1/ Mt. 8.5 is an essential element of his construction of a coherent narrative line that resolves the Q sequence, Sermon → Healing of the Centurion’s Child, with this stretch of the Markan narrative (see Figure 6.6 below). (Q 22.28-30/Mt. 19.28) in the Rewards of Discipleship (Mk 10.23-31); and Blind Guides (Q 6.39/Mt. 15.14) in the Purity Controversy (Mk 7.1-23). Exalted Will Be Humbled (Q 14.11/Mt. 23.12) is incorporated with M material into the Woes Discourse. The Matthean version of Signs of the Times (Lk. 12.54-55/Mt. 16.2-3) is text-critically tenuous. At any rate, it is aptly attached to the Markan Request for a Sign (Mk 8.11-13). Last Shall Be First, at the end of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Mt. 20.1-16), may not be a Q saying (see Lk. 13.30) but a case of Matthew making a second use of the Mk 10.31 (Mt. 19.30) parallel. 175. Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, pp. 38–9.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

281

This consists in the transposition of Mk 1.40-45 (Healing of the Leper) to the position immediately after the Matthew 5–7 Sermon (Mt. 8.1-4) and prior to Mk 1.29-34/Mt. 8.14-16 (Healing of Simon’s Mother-in-Law; Healings in the Evening), with the Q block 7.1-10/Mt. 8.5-13 intervening. This is the consequence of Matthew’s incorporation of the Q 6 Sermon at Mk 1.21, the first reference in Mark to Jesus’ didache. For the Sermon Matthew moves Jesus’ itinerary out of Capernaum by anticipating Mk 1.39 (Mt. 4.23), since Q 7.1 places the Sermon outside of Capernaum. Matthew then moves directly forward in Q to the Centurion healing story to bring Jesus back into Capernaum (Q 7.1-10/Mt. 8.5-13) and to Mark’s remaining Capernaum healings (Mk 1.29-34/Mt. 8.14-17). Narrative logic dictates that the Healing of the Leper (Mk 1.40-45/Mt. 8.1-4), occurring outside of town, precede Jesus’ re-entry into Capernaum.176 Why might Matthew not just have proceeded through the Q Healing straight into the Markan Capernaum Healings and picked up Mk 1.40-45 in order? This would meet the narrative requirement that the leper healing occur outside town. It is possible to take the view that Matthew, having anticipated Mk 1.39 in Mt. 4.23–5.2, after the Sermon simply continues forward through Mk 1.40-45, then afterwards goes back to pick up Mk 1.29-34. This explanation, however, is too mechanical: it does not give the didactic element of the scribal ethos its due. Doubtless one must reckon with Matthew’s wanting to place Jesus’ stipulation that the leper conform to Mosaic law in contiguity to the Sermon. But it is noteworthy that in transposing Mk 1.40-45 prior to the Q 7.1 Capernaum entrance, Matthew conserves the essentials of the Markan narrative line. For after the Healing of the Leper (Mk 1.40-45), Mark likewise has Jesus entering Capernaum for a healing: the Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1-12). Matthew’s acknowledgment of the Markan sequence, and his displacement of the Markan healing, in his παραλυτικός description of the centurion’s child (Mt. 8.6) corroborates that this is indeed a motive in his transposing Mk 1.40-45. As Neirynck points out, moreover, by transposing Mk 1.29-34 and its concluding ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης to Mt. 8.14-16, Matthew takes over Mark’s ‘Day in Capernaum’ narrative structure as his framework for this section (of course no longer occurring wholly in Capernaum), which by means of the Mt. 4.24/Mt. 8.16 inclusio is widened to accommodate the Q Sermon, Q Healing, and the transposed Healing of the Leper.177 Placing 176. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 72 n. 22. 177. Neirynck, ‘Mt. 4.23–5.2’, p. 38; idem, ‘Gospel of Matthew’, pp. 63–5. Mt. 4.24: προσήνεγκαν αὐτῷ πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας…δαιμονιζομένους…καὶ ἐθεράπευσεν αὐτούς; Mt. 8.16: προσήνεγκαν αὐτῷ δαιμονιζομένος πολλούς…πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας ἐθεράπευσεν.

282

Q in Matthew

the Healing of the Leper after the evening healings in Capernaum would destroy this narrative framework. Matthew’s incorporation of the εἰσελθόντος δὲ εἰς Καφαρναούμ of Q 7.1 triggers a whole set of Matthean modifications to the Markan notices of Jesus’ Capernaum arrivals and departures that correlate, moreover, to his major Markan transpositions: Figure 6.6 (Markan/Q Capernaum Entrances/Exits 1,2,3,4,5,Q, Capernaum episodes shaded) Mk Matthew 1 1.14-15 Preaches in Galilee 4.13 Residence in Capernaum 1.16-20 First Disciples 4.17 Preaches in Galilee 1.21 Enters Capernaum1 4.18-22 First Disciples 1.29-31 Simon’s Mother-in-Law 24.23 Departs Capernaum 1.32-34 Healings in Evening QMatt 5–7 Sermon on Mount 1.35-39 Departs Capernaum2 8.1-4 Leper Q 1.40-45 Leper QMatt 8.5-13 Enters Capernaum, Centurion’s παραλυτικός Child 2.1-12 Enters Capernaum3, Paralytic 8.14-15 Simon’s Mother-in-Law 2.13-22 Call of Levi, Controversies 8.16-17 Healings in Evening 4 2.23-28 Plucking Grain 8.18-34 Departs, Storm, Gadarene Demoniac 3,5 3.1-6 Withered Hand 9.1-8 Enters Capernaum, Paralytic 3.7-12 Healings 9.9-17 Call of Levi; Controversies 3.13-19 Naming of Twelve 9.18-26 Ruler’s Daughter/Woman With Flow 3.20-21 Jesus’ Relatives 3.22-27 Beelzebul Accusation 3.28-30 Sin Against Holy Spirit 3.31-35 Jesus’ Family 4.1-34 Parable Discourse 4.35-5.20 Departs4, Storm, Gadarene Demoniac 5.21a Returns5 5.21b-43 Jairus’ Daughter/Woman With Flow

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

283

Jesus’ first Markan entrance into Capernaum, after calling disciples (Mk 1.18-20), occurs at Mk 1.21 (καὶ εἰσπορεύονται εἰς Καφαρναούμ). After preaching and healing, at Mk 1.39 he departs. Matthew places Jesus’ first εἰς Καφαρναούμ at Mt. 4.13 (κατῴκησεν εἰς Καφαρναοὺμ τὴν παραθαλασσίαν), just before Jesus calls the first disciples (Mt. 4.18-22); unlike Mark he brings Jesus into Capernaum as soon as he comes into Galilee. This notice has only an oblique connection to Mk 1.21: Matthew gives more a general notice of Jesus’ residence and base of Galilean ministry rather than, like Mark, an episodic notice that Jesus and his disciples ‘entered Capernaum’.178 This does not alter that Mt. 4.13 plays a role in relation to Matthew’s other uses of Mark’s Capernaum references, for Matthew then uses Mk 1.39 to bring Jesus out of Capernaum for the Sermon. We have just discussed Mt. 4.23 and 8.5, and Matthew’s bringing Mark’s Capernaum healings (Mk 1.29-34/Mt. 8.14-17) under Jesus’ second entrance into Capernaum. Having used Mk 1.39 in Mt. 4.23, and having another Capernaum entry in Mk 2.1, Matthew manages Jesus’ exit from Capernaum by reaching down to Jesus’ departure across the sea at Mk 4.35, which is also the first of Matthew’s two long Markan transpositions (Mk 4.35–5.20/Mt. 8.18-34). Mark 1.32-34 (Healings in the Evening) and Mk 4.35 are already linked by ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης (Mk 1.32)/ὀψίας γενομένης (Mk 4.35). Matthew now has a healing (Gadarene Demoniacs) intervening between these two Capernaum visits, filling the place in Mark occupied by the Healing of the Leper. Matthew then connects the Mk 5.21 notice of Jesus’ return from across the sea (καὶ διαπεράσαντος τοῦ Ἰησοῦ πάλιν εἰς τὸ πέραν) to the Mk 2.1 notice of Jesus’ entry into the city (καὶ εἰσελθὼν πάλιν εἰς Καφαρναούμ) to establish Jesus’ third Matthean entrance (Mark’s second) into Capernaum: καὶ ἐμβὰς εἰς πλοῖον διεπέρασεν καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς τὴν ἰδίαν πόλιν (Mt. 9.1) and to return to the Mk 2.1-22 sequence of materials.179 To this he appends Mk 5.21-43 with the simple expedient ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς (Mt. 9.18). 178. It is unclear whether in 4.13 Matthew substitutes a distinct Matthean tradition, inclusive of the Light in Galilee Testimonium (Mt. 4.14-16), or simply reverses the Markan order of episodes (Call of Disciples/Entrance into Capernaum). Likely the latter, given their proximity. Matthew’s κατῴκησεν makes Jesus more unequivocally a resident of Capernaum; thereby it enhances the force of the Light in Galilee Testimonium. It follows that Matthew would bring Jesus’ subsequent ministry, beginning with the Proclamation of the Kingdom (Mt. 4.17/Mk 1.14-15) and the Call of the Disciples (Mt. 4.18-20/Mk 1.16-20), under the rubric of the Testimonium. Here one sees the blend of redactional and source-utilization factors in Matthew’s actions. 179. This rationale for the move ahead to Mk 4.35–5.20, followed by the return to Mk 2.1-22, is noted by Youngquist: ‘[T]he stories suggest that Jesus entered Capernaum twice (Q 7.1-10; Mk 2.1-12), and left it once, to a journey across the lake

284

Q in Matthew

Analysis of Matthew’s distribution of the Markan Capernaum entrance/ exit notices shows that they occur at the joints of the transpositions. Although Matthew incorporates the Q 7.1/Mt. 8.5 notice, his total of arrivals and departures remains five. This is because Mt. 9.1 combines the Mk 5.21a departure (from the other shore of the Sea of Galilee) with the Mk 2.1 arrival (3,5). The effect is to bring his Q and Markan notices of Jesus’ arrivals and departures – and the major Markan transpositions – into a coherent narrative line. Notably, these modifications are triggered by Matthew’s incorporation of the Q sequence Sermon → Healing of the Centurion. In other words, the adjustments of Mark’s order are evidence of accommodation of another source with its own sequence.180 Mark and Q run parallel in their initial sequences: John’s Preaching and the Temptation (and possibly the Baptism). It can scarcely be coincidence that Matthew’s first adjustments to Mark’s order appear at the first divergence in his sources. Matthew’s utilization challenge is to reconcile a source that early on presents a large block of programmatic teaching material (Q 6.20b-49) followed immediately by an entrance into Capernaum and a healing (Q 7.1-10), with another source whose next segment has Capernaum entrances and healings but no teaching materials. An economical solution is to aggregate the teaching materials and the healings separately, bring Jesus outside Capernaum for (Mk 4.35-41). A reasonable arrangement, with the least amount of rearranging Mark, would be to place the sequence of Markan material that has Jesus ministering in the town, and then leaving it [Mk 1.29-34; 4.34–5.20] between the two stories of Jesus entering the town [i.e. between Mk 1.40-45/Q 7.1-10 and Mk 2.1-22]’ (‘Matthew, Mark, and Q’, p. 259). There must be reasons, though, why Matthew then goes back to Mk 5.21-43 (Youngquist argues Matthew needs to fill out the narrative antecedents to Q 7.22), so more is going on in Matthew’s move to the Mk 4–5 material than reconciliation of Capernaum entrance notices. Moreover, Matthew conceivably could have just elided the Mk 2.1 notice of Jesus’ entry into the city (he does something similar at Mk 5.21a), and reversed the order of Mk 1.32-34 and Mk 2.1-12, though bringing the Mk 2.1-22 materials into the ‘Day at Capernaum’ framework might have brought complications of its own. Allen suggests that by deferring Mk 2.1-22 rather than just proceeding forward to it from Mk 1.34, Matthew maintains Mark’s assignment of the Paralytic Healing to a different Capernaum visit (Commentary, pp. 80–1). These alleged scruples though did not stop Matthew from putting Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with Flow together with the Healing of the Paralytic in the same visit to Capernaum. 180. Matthew’s omission of Mk 1.35-38 (Jesus Prays in a Solitary Place) is further attestation of this. Matthew has brought Jesus back into Capernaum by means of the Q 7 Healing after taking him out by reaching ahead to Mk 1.39 for the Reisetätigkeit lead-in to the Q 6 Sermon. It is hard to see where in this adjusted sequence Mk 1.35-38 would fit.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

285

the Sermon (by pulling Mk 1.39 forward), and then back into Capernaum (Q 7.1) for the Q healing and Mark’s Capernaum healings, having him heal the leper en route (Mk 1.40-45/Mt. 8.1-4). In pulling Mk 1.39 forward to Mt. 4.23, Matthew sticks to the Q setting for the Sermon, which Q 7.1 defines as occurring outside Capernaum. In placing the healing stories after the block of teaching, he retains the Q order, though of course in Mark also Jesus’ healings (Mk 1.23-34) follow upon his teaching in the synagogue (Mk 1.21). On the other hand, Matthew gives Mark its due by framing the whole of Mt. 4.24–8.16 as an expanded Day (and making the Centurion’s child παραλυτικός). In other words, adjustments Matthew makes here to Mark’s narrative order are a strategic response to the problem forced upon him of early integration of a massive block of teaching material in a source with its own sequential coherence. In the end he manages to reconcile both the Markan and the Q lines. That Matthew has redactional motives in presenting Jesus’ Messianic didache (chs. 5–7) and his Messianic healings (chs. 8–9) separately goes without saying. The point is that at the same time he resolves a pressing source-utilization problem. On any utilization hypothesis one can always tell a story about Matthean redactional interests that account for such and such an arrangement of triple and double tradition materials, in this case in Mt. 4.13–8.17. Perhaps Matthew ‘wanted’ to expand Mark’s Day at Capernaum by pulling into the Day some teaching traditions and the Healing of the Leper, and that the incorporation of the latter pushed the Sermon out of town. As with all such stories, this has a certain consistency within its own terms of reference. But it fails to explain why, for example, Matthew would go to pains to incorporate the Healing of the Leper but defer the Healing of the Paralytic. In other words, it cannot establish correlations to the larger pattern of transpositions other than by spinning out a lengthening series of ad hoc rationales. (3) Q 7.18-35: John the Baptist. The transposition of the Baptist block (Q 7.18-35) is on the scale of any of the Markan transpositions. Neirynck suggests that its transposition might be attributable to its topical incompatibility with the double Markan pericope that Matthew, taking over the role it plays in Mark, positions as frontispiece to Mt. 4.23–9.35: (1) ‘le début de la prédication de Jésus’ (Mk 1.14-15/Mt. 4.13-17) and (2) ‘la vocation des disciples’ (Mk 1.16-20/Mt. 4.18-22).181 There is much to be said for this; the principal factor, however, is Matthew’s need to integrate his instructional source into the Markan framework without creating narrative anomalies. Accordingly, it is not without reason that Q 7.22 is so frequently invoked to account for Matthew’s Markan transpositions. Not only the Q 7.22 list 181. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, pp. 33–4.

286

Q in Matthew

of healings (plus πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται – hence ἃ εἴδετε καὶ ἠκούσατε), but also the references in Q 7.31-35 to Jesus’ controversial eating practices and the hostile reception of his preaching need narrative antecedents. In addition, narrative logic requires that once Q 7.18-35 is transposed after the Commissioning it displaces Mk 6.14-29, the Execution of John, from its Markan position right after the Commissioning. Nevertheless, as established earlier the Q 7.22 list of healings cannot account comprehensively for the Matthew 8–9 transpositions. Moreover, in the transposed materials only νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται (Mk 5.21-43: Ruler’s Daughter) corresponds directly to an item on the Q 7.22 list, and that by dint of Matthew’s redaction of the episode. Matthew 5.3-11, the Beatitudes, provides the antecedent for πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται. Were the concern solely narrative logic, Q 7.18-35 could be placed anywhere after Mk 4.35–5.21 and prior to Mk 6.14-29. The need for controversy episodes as narrative backfill for Q 7.31-35 (Children in the Marketplace) goes a long way toward explaining Matthew’s retrieval of Mk 2.1-22 in the middle of the Mk 4.35–5.43 transposition, bisecting the latter, but there is no correlation in this odd utilization pattern to the tripartite structure of Q 7.18-35. Clearly Matthew has the Commissioning in his view here as much as Q 7.22 and 7.18-35, for returning to Mk 5.21-43 after retrieving Mk 2.1-22 brings him almost up to the Mark 6 Commissioning, just as his deferral of Q 7.18-35 brings him right to the Q Commissioning. Whatever the narrative ripple effects might be of the deferral of Q 7.18-35, they do not explain why Matthew reverses its position vis-àvis the Commissioning, though the narrative line that emerges with the reversal is certainly coherent. Doubtless Matthew’s redactional interests and narrative acumen should receive their due here. But only when seen as a response to a pressing source-utilization problem do Matthew’s actions become fully intelligible: the transposition of Q 7.18-35 is indispensable to Matthew’s reconciliation of the order of the Mark 6 and Q 10 Commissionings, and the Mark 3 and Q 11 Beelzebul Accusations. (4) Transposition of Mark 4.35–5.20; 5.21-43. Matthew transposes Mk 4.35–5.43 because he follows Q and places the Commissioning prior to the Beelzebul Accusation. On the other hand, key aspects of the Markan narrative sequence recommend this to him as the obvious course. Matthew’s move forward to Mk 4.35–5.43 after finishing up with Mark 1 will bring him almost to the Mk 6.6b-13 Commissioning (separated by Mk 6.1-6a). He will redact the Mark 4–5 materials to tighten their alignment to the Commissioning. On the other hand, his progress through Q has brought him to the end of Q 7.1-10 (Mt. 8.5-13) where Q 7.18-35 separates him from the Q Commissioning. He defers this sequence, which

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

287

needs its narrative antecedents, and moves directly forward to incorporate Q 9.57-60, the discipleship chreias that serve as prologue to the Q Commissioning, at Mt. 8.18-21.182 In so doing he takes over the close connection Q makes between discipleship and mission, for he makes the chreias the opening elements of the Storm at Sea, which is redacted to emphasize discipleship and foreshadow the mission of the apostolic community described in Matthew 10.183 Moreover, Matthew uses the Q discipleship chreias (Q 9.57-60) and the Q Commissioning instructions (Q 10) to frame the materials from Mk 4.35–5.43 and Mk 2.1-22.184 Assisted by redaction, the effect is to put a heavy accent on the discipleship and mission motifs in these Mark 2 and Mark 4–5 materials. In short, Matthew incorporates Mk 4.35–5.43 and Mk 2.1-22 into the Q schema: the Q 9.57-60 → 10.2-16 Commissioning sequence and its deliberative vector from discipleship to mission. This helps clarify why Matthew reaches forward to Mk 4.35–5.20 at this point: it is here that he finds a departure and a journey leading to a mission.185 In important respects Q order and Q deliberative logic control Matthew’s use of Mark between Mt. 8.18 and 9.35. Q 9.57-60 sets the redactional tone for Matthew’s transposition of Mk 4.35–5.43: the call to discipleship in its rigors, dangers, and vocation towards mission. But before jumping to conclusions about Matthew ‘subordinating’ Mark to Q, it is important to recognize that the basic Matthew 4–10 narrative line – Jesus’ mission that issues in the disciples’ mission – comes from Mark. This begins with Jesus’ call of disciples upon his first public proclamation in Galilee (Mt. 4.18-22/Mk 1.16-20); they accompany him on a conflict-laden healing and teaching mission that issues in their own commissioning. Q does not sound this note until 9.57-60. Q’s first section (Q 3, 4, 6, 7) compares and reconciles John’s and Jesus’ proclamations.186 As Neirynck observed, one reason Matthew defers the Q Baptist sequence 182. Neville’s reservation is therefore hard to understand: ‘If current opinion that the order of Q is most faithfully reflected in Luke’s Gospel is correct, Matthew had to search a long way forward for Mt. 8.19-22 (cf. Lk. 9.57-60)’ (Mark’s Gospel, p. 239). 183. Luke uses the chreias to inaugurate the Travel Narrative. Like Matthew he makes the journey of discipleship into mission a journey toward suffering and martyrdom – an identical theme realized narratively in remarkably different ways. 184. Similarly in the Sermon on the Mount Matthew uses the Our Father (Q 11.2-4) and its conjoined Q Prayer instruction (Q 11.11-13) to frame transposed materials that he incorporates into the Sermon. 185. See Thompson, ‘Reflections’, p. 375. 186. Nevertheless the first section of Q, which showcases Jesus’ programmatic teaching, has a protreptic character, i.e., intended to recruit (as well as form) disciples. Thus it is not by chance that it depicts potential disciples approaching Jesus

288

Q in Matthew

is because it lines up poorly with the Markan narrative orientation to discipleship and mission in Matthew 4–10. Youngquist’s point that Matthew’s transposition of Q 7.18-35 ‘was not suggested by Mark’ is correct, but with the proviso that it was caused by the need to coordinate Q with the Markan narrative line.187 Conversely, it is the affinity of Q 9.57-60 to this Markan narrative line that enables Matthew to go forward at Mt. 8.18 to these discipleship stories. But this cannot simply be a matter of Matthew bringing ‘loose’ Q materials into apt locations along the Markan narrative thread: such scarcely explains why he pulls forward the entire Q Commissioning complex, along with Mk 4.35–5.43 and Mk 6.6b-13, while deferring the long blocks Mk 2.23–3.35 and Mk 4.1-34. What makes these latter moves even more perplexing is that through chs. 4–10 he sticks with the Markan narrative arc that moves from discipleship to mission. The Q sequence is the determinative factor, or more accurately, Matthew’s adjustment of the Markan to the Q sequence and vice versa. Mark 4.35–5.43, with Mk 2.1-22 intercalated, helps fill in the narrative background to Q 7.18-35 (and these Markan materials in effect substitute for the original position of the latter after Q 7.1-10). Naturally, therefore, this Markan material consists mostly of mission, healing, and discipleship pericopes. These motifs cohere with the Markan narrative arc Matthew has been following from the outset. But their transposition concentrates them into Matthew 8–9. This strengthens the rationale for, indeed, pretty much determines, that Matthew continue along that narrative line direct to the Commissioning, especially since with Mt. 8.18-22 (Q 9.57-60) Matthew has already entered upon the Q Commissioning complex. This entails further deferring the Q Baptist block. The Q 7.22 list evokes the entire sphere of Jesus’ activities. Matthew’s supplying it with Markan narrative antecedents perforce pulls in the wide sweep of Jesus’ ministry as recounted in the Markan narrative, where Jesus’ mission flows indistinguishably into the mission of the disciples. The consequence of the Mark 4–5 transpositions is to bring Matthew almost up to the Mark 6 Commissioning. This lines up the Markan sequence with the Q sequence, and not just by happy chance. The transposed Mark 4–5 materials, abetted by Matthew’s redaction, foreshadow the themes of Commissioning as much as they do the Baptist sequence. In other words, Matthew makes the Mark 4–5 transpositions in view of pulling the Mark Commissioning forward to line it up with the Q Commissioning. In short, the Mk 4.34–5.43 and Q 7.18-35 transpositions resolve the utilization immediately after. The invitation to discipleship is sounded in the Q Sermon itself, in the discipleship saying in 6.40. 187. Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 159.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

289

problem raised by the conflict between the Mark sequence (Beelzebul → Commissioning) and the Q sequence (Baptist → Commissioning → Beelzebul). Matthew’s solution neither advantages or disadvantages one source over against the other. His adverting to the Q sequence for the Commissioning is balanced, in fact influenced, by his adherence to essential markers of the Markan narrative vector that runs through proclamation, discipleship, healings, and conflict to mission. If its splicing with the Q sequence has altered the grand Markan narrative that runs through to Mark 6 by the corresponding deferral of its large middle sections (Mk 2.23–4.34), the coherence of Q’s first section is broken up by the deferral of its crowning reconciliation of John’s and Jesus’ preaching (Q 7.18-35) to a position after the Commissioning. But Matthew has not only successfully consolidated his sources. At the same time he has given new voice to the respective Q and Markan actualizations of the tradition, as these are refracted through the Mark and Q sequences. Mark’s narrative line remains definitive. The retrospective horizon of the Q Baptist sequence is not lost but widened to incorporate the preaching of Jesus and that of his disciples. Not only the distinct sequences but also the distinct emphases of Matthew’s sources are consolidated. (5) Mark 2.1-22. Healing/Forgiving Sins Controversy; Call of Levi; Feasting Controversies. Matthew’s seemingly odd disposition of Mk 2.1-22 is intelligible as an element of his larger pattern of transpositions, hence of his reconciliation of his two sources. The conundrum has been that Matthew inserts Mk 2.1-22 (Mt. 9.1-17) into the middle of the transposed Mk 4.34–5.43 (Mt. 8.18-34; 9.18-26), sundering this long Markan sequence by this sudden and brief return to Markan order. Conversely, he wrenches Mk 2.1-22 out of a coherent Markan sequence that extends through the Sabbath controversies to Mk 3.6. Moreover, Mk 2.1–3.6 inaugurates the controversies that climax in the Beelzebul Accusation in Mk 3.22-27. ‘[C]’est l’insertion de Mc II, 1-22 que fait difficulté’, comments Neirynck, ‘sa séparation de Mc II, 23–III,6 et sa place ici à l’intérieur de Mc IV, 35–II, 43’.188 Redaction criticism clarifies Matthew’s theological use of Mk 2.1-22, but it accounts for his doubling back to it just so little as it accounts satisfactorily for the transpositions themselves. Neville goes so far as to claim that the problem calls the viability of the 2DH itself into question.189 Youngquist has shown how the sequence Mk 4.34–5.20; 2.1-22; 5.21-43 anticipates the Commissioning (Mt. 9.35–10.42) and the Baptist discourse (Mt. 188. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 32 n. 11. 189. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 250.

290

Q in Matthew

11.2-19); moreover Matthew’s insertion of Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1-12/Mt. 9.1-8) right after the Gadarene Demoniacs (Mk 5.1-20/Mt. 8.28-34) depicts Jesus departing from one city that does not receive him and traveling to another city, foreshadowing Jesus’ instructions to the apostles on this point (Mt. 10.14, 23). Nevertheless, adverting to Mk 2.1-22 is not necessary to achieve this effect, for Mk 5.21-43 already has Jesus traveling back from the city of the Gerasenes to healings (Ruler’s Daughter/Woman with the Flow) on the west shore of the lake. Likewise, Mk 2.1-12 can supply the narrative antecedent to the χωλοὶ περιπατοῦσιν (Mt. 11.5) from its original position. Above we saw that Matthew’s move ahead to Mk 4.35–5.20 and then return to Mk 2.1 are key to his coordination of the Q and Markan notices of Jesus’ entrances and exits from Capernaum, following upon his incorporation of Q 6.20b-49; 7.1-10. But why when after going through Mk 2.1-22 does he suddenly return to Mk 5.21, where he left off, and go forward to 5.43? That he continues to seek narrative antecedents for Q 7.22, as Youngquist suggests, is doubtless a factor, but it can hardly be the principal one.190 Of the two healings in Mk 5.21-43 only the Ruler’s Daughter corresponds to the Q 7.22 list (νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται). Matthew easily works up his own M units out of Markan tradition (Mt. 9.27-31: Healing of Blind Men; Mt. 9.32-34: Healing of Deaf Mute) to supply two others. Moreover, on this count it is not clear why he has not just continued forward through the Mark 2–3 materials. If he incorporates a mini-Beelzebul Accusation in Mt. 9.32-34, why should he defer the controversies in Mark 2–3 and the Beelzebul episode at Mk 3.22-27? One must reckon, therefore, with his scribal exigency of reconciling Q’s and Mark’s very different positioning of their respective Commissioning and Beelzebul Accusation. As with his transposition of Q 7.18-35 and Mk 4.35–5.43, the deferral and then retrieval of Mk 2.1-22 is consistent with Matthew’s push past Q 7.18-35 and into the Q Commissioning with Q 9.57-60 (Mt. 8.18-22). It would be incongruous to follow the two Q ἀκολουθήσω σοι/ἀκολούθει μοι chreias with a healing story (Mk 2.1-12) in blind adherence to Markan order, and Matthew fittingly embeds them in the departure, journey, and mission narrative of the Markan Storm at Sea and Healing of the Gerasene Demoniac (Mk 4.35–5.20). But Matthew’s push to the Q and Mark Commissionings also rules out that he append Mk 2.1-22 to the Healing of the Ruler’s Daughter (Mk 5.21-43) at the end of the long Markan transposition. This would pull him from the verge of the Mark 6 Commissioning back to Mark 2, scarcely conducive to economy of source-utilization. By the same token, interposing blasphemy and feasting 190. Youngquist, ‘Matthew, Mk, and Q’, pp. 253–9.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

291

controversies, not to mention the Wineskins sayings, immediately before the commissioning of the disciples to heal and preach is out of the question, for such would interrupt the narrative vector abruptly and anomalously right at this critical transition. Inserting Mk 2.1-22 at the joint between Mk 5.20 and 5.21 is therefore the only practical course open to Matthew. The effect is to graft Mk 2.1-22 – somewhat forcibly pulled out of a Markan elaboration consisting of healing, blasphemy, feasting, and Sabbath controversies extending to Mk 3.6, to which the Wineskins sayings provided the interpretative key, and which escalates into the Markan Beelzebul Accusation and Jesus’ counter-accusation of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit – into the preCommissioning narrative. In short, Matthew’s deferral and insertion of Mk 2.1-22 is a necessary element of his adjustments of Mark and Q order to each other. Indeed, the deferral and subsequent intercalation of Mk 2.1-22 into the long Mark 4–5 transposition is key to clarifying what Matthew is up to in this section of his Gospel. To state the point differently: this major perturbation in Mark’s order is not fully intelligible unless one posits the effects of the sequence of the second source. Objections that this combination of transposition and intercalation is complicated and too difficult rest upon false media understandings.191 They conceive Matthew scrolling forward and backward for obscure reasons between Mark 2 and Mark 4–5 trying to pick out blocks of text. As soon as one grasps Matthew’s memory-based scribal competence in his sources it becomes clear that these maneuvers are economical and easy to execute. From his forward position at the end of Mark 1 Matthew can move forward and take Mk 4.35–5.20 in sequence. His return to Mk 2.1-22 simply registers a return to his absolute position in his source. He then goes back to his position in Mk 5.21 and advances up close to – separated by a pericope – the Mark 6 Commissioning, which lines it up with his position in the sequence of his second source. e. Q 11.14-32/Matthew 12.22-45/Mark 3.20-30: Beelzebul Accusation After working through the Commissioning and then the Baptist sequence, Matthew in his forward position in both Mark and Q stands at the threshold of their respective Beelzebul Accusations.192 In other words, the Mark and Q Beelzebul Accusations now fall neatly into alignment. In Mark this is simply a matter of Matthew returning to his absolute forward position at Mk 2.23 and the Sabbath controversies: Plucking Grain on the Sabbath (Mk 2.23-28), and Healing of the Man with the Withered Hand (Mk 3.1-6). 191. See Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 250. 192. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 246–7.

292

Q in Matthew

These continue Mark’s narrative line of controversy and opposition that escalates to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk 3.22-30). The earlier transfer of Mk 3.13-19 (Choosing of the Twelve) to Mt. 10.1-4, and much of Mk 3.7-12 (Healings by the Sea) to Mt. 4.24-25, brings the Beelzebul Accusation close both in narrative distance and focus. The return to Mk 2.23 at Mt. 12.1 also marks Matthew’s resumption of uninterrupted adherence to Markan order. The reason is clear: the major difficulties in reconciliation of Mark and Q order have been resolved. In Q, Matthew has used up all the material to the end of the Q 10 Commissioning except Q 6.43-45 (Mt. 12.33-35) and Q 10.23-24 (Mt. 13.16-17). He has already pulled the Our Father and Prayer Instruction (Q 11.2-4, 9-13) forward into the Sermon on the Mount. The Beelzebul Accusation stands next in Q (Q 11.14-23). Matthew works from Mk 2.23 forward through the remaining controversy pericopes; his Markan utilization therefore converges on Q at the Beelzebul Accusation.193 For the Accusation Matthew principally follows Q with some echoes of Mark. This accords not only with the scroll medium but also with memory competence as the basis of source utilization: these together constrain towards principal use of one source where source materials overlap.194 At the end of ch. 12, having worked through the Q Beelzebul/Demand for a Sign sequences, Matthew has used up quite a bit of the material in Q. What remains is thematically apt for integration with topical ‘pegs’ in the remainder of Markan narrative line. As with his previous adjustments Matthew succeeds in building Mark’s and Q’s distinctive configurations of the tradition right into the Gestalt of his new artifact. While he follows Q in placing the Beelzebul Accusation after the Commissioning, and mostly follows Q in reproducing the sequence itself,195 he connects it into the Mark 2–3 narrative line. He follows the Beelzebul Accusation forward through its Q sequels: Request for a Sign (Q 11.16, 29-32/Mt. 12.38-41) and the Return of the Unclean 193. It is not clear why Luz regards Mt. 12.22-45 ‘als einen in seiner Position durch die Markusquelle veranlaßten, aber von Matthäus wie üblich durch zusätzliche Q-Stoffe [i.e. Q 11.27-32, Demand for a Sign] erweiterten Textabschnitt’ (‘Matthäus und Q’, p. 210). 194. The CEQ rightly leaves open the question of whether Matthew continues to follow Q (Luke makes a substitution) or follows Mark for the Strong Man Unit (Mt. 12.29/Mk 3.27). See Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 246–7, for discussion. 195. See Davies and Allison, Matthew VIII–XVIII, pp. 332–3, Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 246–7, and Damm, Ancient Rhetoric, p. 257, for analysis.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

293

Spirit (Q 11.24-26/Mt. 12.43-45). At the same time he adopts the Markan setting for the Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit by pulling the Q parallel forward from Q 12.196 In Mark the opposition to Jesus, which culminates in the Beelzebul Accusation, is in reaction to Jesus’ extension of the authority manifest in his healings into areas the religious elites regard as encroachments upon God’s prerogatives. Though Q contains a hint of that as well (Q 7.31-35), the Q Beelzebul Accusation follows close upon the rejections evoked by the mission. Matthew succeeds in bringing these two emphases into a single line. f. The Markan Transpositions: Summing Up (1) Redaction Criticism and Source Criticism. Matthew’s transpositions solve the technical problem of combining two sources of different genre that present common material in divergent sequences. The problem of the transpositions yields to no other explanation. This is not to set up a false opposition between redaction-critical and source-utilization approaches to the transpositions. Source-utilization exigencies are the medium through which Matthew brings his Christological, theological, and moral program to expression.197 In fact it is futile to try to separate out didactic and technical elements of his utilization actions from each other. ‘Encore faut-il rappeler’, remarks Neirynck, ‘que, dans ce remaniement même, le rédacteur pouvait s’inspirer de ses sources’.198 The media realities of Matthew’s world and scribal tradent practices set both the possibilities and the parameters for his re-actualization of the tradition. He grounds his redactional program, and his new gospel artifact, upon the authority of his two sources; their very configurations of the tradition are woven together into his work. Matthew’s objectives are similar to those Tigay attributes to the scribal redactor of the Samaritan Pentateuch who consolidated the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of the Jethro and Sinai epiphany pericopes: ‘The main task of the redactor…was to reconcile dissimilar accounts of the same events. By interweaving their details in sequence, he facilitated their harmonious

196. The Request for a Sign is a noteworthy instance of Matthew not reflexively attaching Q material to an obvious Markan ‘peg’, i.e. the Mk 8.11-12 parallel (Mt. 16.1-2), but keeping it in its Q sequence. 197. Syreeni, Making of the Sermon, p. 13. 198. Neirynck, ‘La rédaction matthéenne’, p. 33. Luz observes: ‘Not only the sequence of Mark 1.4–2.22 but also that of Q are completely preserved in Matthew 3–9… The unique contribution of Matthew consists only in the insertion of additional material from later sections (Mark 4.35–5.43). Nevertheless, the reader has the impression of a completely new creation’ (Matthew 1–7, p. 42).

294

Q in Matthew

coexistence.’199 Similarly apropos to Matthew’s project is Jens Gerlach’s assessment of the compiler of the Corpus Parisinum, whose correlation of sources ‘manifestiert sich nicht in der säuberlichen Aneinanderreihung autonomer Sammlungen, sondern in der transformierenden Verknüpfung derselben zu einer neuen Einheit’.200 (2) Q a Literary Artifact. Q exerts a literary and normative influence upon Matthew’s source-utilization equivalent to Mark’s. Disturbances in Markan order in Matthew 4–12 occur where Markan and Q order of cognate materials diverge. The Markan transpositions are a matter of Matthew adjusting Mark to Q’s order; the outcome is the bringing of Mark’s and Q’s different sequencing of these episodes into a coherent line. Failure to give the Q factor its due is the effect of the sub-literary Q conception. Only when Q is taken as a normative, strongly cohering literary artifact do the Markan transpositions become intelligible. In fact – and in striking contrast to the widespread notion that Matthew brings order to a rudimentary Q – Matthew in his composition of both the Sermon on the Mount and chs. 8–12 exploits Q’s literary organization. (3) Identical Utilization Practices for Mark and Q. Q’s functional equivalency to Mark in Matthew’s repertoire of sources is corroborated by Matthew’s application of the same methods to his utilization of each. Differences in his treatment of Mark and Q are only apparent, a matter of genre, that is to say, the effect of their different ratios of narrative to instructional materials. Matthew usually appropriates Q material out of order not ad hoc but in a double forward movement: he reaches forward from his absolute position, itself gradually advancing, in Q, and then moves down through the targeted materials in order. Q’s topoi organization gives him his navigational aids for these memory-based utilization actions. Less frequently he reaches back from his absolute forward position to retrieve materials. The result is the oft-observed conservation of the relative order of transposed Q materials on a baseline of gradual movement forward from Q 3 to Q 19. An identical utilization pattern appears in Matthew’s Markan transpositions.201 In the major transpositions Matthew reaches forward from Mk 2.1 to Mk 4.35 – rivaling any of his forward movements in Q – proceeds to Mk 5.20, returns to his absolute position for Mk 2.1-22, reaches forward again to Mk 5.21-43 and again to 6.6b-13, before returning to his new absolute 199. Tigay, ‘Conflation as a Redactional Technique’, p. 76. 200. Gerlach, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor?” ’, p. 88. 201. Neirynck, ‘Matthew 4.23–5.2’, pp. 40–1.

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

295

position at Mk 2.23. Because of Mark’s narrative genre Matthew’s retrieval movements in Mark are rarer than they are in Q; relative to Matthew’s position at the verge of the Mark 6 Commissioning his appropriation of Mk 3.17-19 (Naming of the Twelve) might be regarded as such. The basic pattern is the same observed for his utilization of Q: steady forward progress from his absolute position, and transpositions that maintain Mark’s relative order in sequences consisting of heterogeneous materials. Youngquist’s description of Matthew 5–7 and Matthew 10 as ‘expansions of Q, because Q’s speeches have been preserved almost completely intact…with other material added into Q’s sequence’,202 applies equally well to Matthew’s expansion of Mark’s Day at Capernaum, using its beginning (Mk 1.21-22) and end (Mk 1.29-34) to frame the Sermon and additional healings, including the transposed Mk 1.40-45. As he does in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew transposes not only Q materials but also Markan materials to expand the Commissioning and to build out his own topoi structures within it. He brings Mk 6.34 (Sheep Without a Shepherd) forward from the Feeding of the 5000 and retrieves Mk 3.16-19 (Naming of the Twelve), making them inaugural elements of the Commissioning (Mt. 9.36 and Mt. 10.2-4 respectively). Reaching forward as far as for any Q transposition, he pulls Mk 13.9-13 into the Commissioning (Mt. 10.17-22) and more specifically into his persecution and martyrdom topos. Much is made of how Matthew attaches Q materials to Markan ‘pegs’, but here Matthew attaches a transposed Markan passage to the Q ‘peg’: ‘Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves’ (Q 10.3/Mt. 10.16a). The Mark 13 persecution sequence in its turn is the attachment point for Matthew’s transposition of Fearless Confession (Q 12.2-9/Mt. 10.26-33). As he does on a number of occasions with Q, Matthew decomposes Markan sayings clusters and recycles the elements into his own topoi constructions. Mark 9.33-48 is a case in point. Matthew reassigns Mk 9.41 to the Commissioning (Mt. 10.42) and Mk 9.49, the Salt saying, to the Sermon (Mt. 5.13/Q 14.34-35), where he follows the Q version with some influence from the Markan. He uses the remainder of this Markan cluster as the starting point for his Community discourse (Mt. 18.1-9). He assigns the four sayings of Mk 4.21-25 to Mt. 5.15; 10.26; 7.2, and 13.12 respectively.203 202. Youngquist, ‘Matthew and Q’, p. 160. 203. It is relevant that all have Q parallels (Mk 4.21/Q 11.33; Mk 4.22/Q 12.2; Mk 4.24/Q 6.38; Mk 4.25/Q 19.26), and all appear in Matthean contexts with a strong Q complexion, where one might from case to case need to decide whether he is conflating the Mark and Q sayings or just using the Q version instead of the Markan, or the Q version with reminiscences of the Markan. In any event, this usage is consistent with

296

Q in Matthew

In the course of attaching more material to each he inverts the order of Mk 13.33-34 (Mt. 25.13-15) and Mk 13.35 (Mt. 24.42), much as for the same purposes he inverts the order of Q 10.13-15 (Mt. 11.20-24) and Q 10.16 (Mt. 10.40). That interventions of this sort into Markan material are less frequent than for Q is a matter of genre. Mark is predominantly narrative, has less in the way of sayings materials, and narrative sequences by definition are not amenable to being broken up and redistributed. Matthew’s freer distribution of Q material is a function of its genre: heterogeneous sayings material organized in intelligible sequences. This explains why it is mostly Markan sayings materials that get shifted around. With adjustments for genre, Matthew’s treatment of Q and Mark is exactly symmetrical; he applies the same editorial policy and utilization procedures to both.204 (4) M Units. In contrast to their density in the Sermon on the Mount, M materials appear much less frequently in Matthew 8–12. Nevertheless when they do appear they are fulfilling the same function we observed in the Sermon: affixing Markan and Q source materials coherently to each other and into the larger redactional structure of the Gospel. This is clearly so for the healing and exorcism doublets (Mt. 9.27-34), which form the critical link between the last long Markan transposition and Matthew’s shift to the Commissioning in Q order and the transposed Q 7 Baptist sequence. In this case also we see Matthew working up M units from the tradition of his normative sources.205

the small number of doublets in Matthew. Matthew pulls Mk 4.25 forward into an earlier Markan sayings-cluster (Mk 4.10-12) on the parables (Mt. 13.12), a Markan topos that Matthew expands in his signature way using Q and M materials as well as the transposed Mk 4.25, thus in the course of expanding and reorganizing the Parables discourse. The variant in Mt. 25.29 is most likely Q (Q 19.26). 204. Luz draws the wrong inference from greater frangibility of Q, taking it not as a simple function of its genre but as indicating its sub-literary form or that its genre coherence as a ‘collection of material’ allowed Matthew to ‘cut Q in pieces’ (‘Looking at Q’, p. 584). More accurately Stanton: Matthew’s utilization amounts to a ‘development of the genre of Q’ (Gospel for a New People, pp. 67–8). 205. The nature of these M units brings to mind Swanson’s comments on the 11QT materials he labels ‘Expansions’ – material in the Temple Scroll which cannot be traced to a biblical source: ‘It is in the unattributable material that the particular viewpoint of the author is mostly likely to be recovered… [M]uch of the non-biblical material is a necessary part of the editorial process of creating a smooth-reading text. Secondly, the author/s make the effort of casting their own material in biblical language’ (Temple Scroll, p. 231, original emphasis).

6. Q and Matthew’s Markan Transpositions

297

(5) Consistent Application of Topos Principle. Matthew’s Markan transpositions are usually regarded as anomalies that for their explanation require sophisticated redaction-critical analyses. But Matthew’s utilization actions in chs. 8–9 and in the larger context of chs. 8–12 simply apply, on a larger scale, his usual approach to coordinating Q material with Mark: by topic within the discourses on the one hand, and by means of topical ‘pegs’ along the Markan narrative line on the other. All Matthew’s source-correlation actions are applications, on different scales, of the same simple topos principle: bringing together topically cohering materials in an intelligible way. Matthew inserts the Q 6 Sermon, which lacks any Markan equivalent, at the first narrative mention of Jesus’ didache at Mk 1.22. The additional Q materials that Matthew sweeps into the Sermon using his supplemental topoi lack obvious topical attachment points to the Markan narrative. Already in the Sermon on the Mount, and then to a greater extent in the Matthew 10 Commissioning, we see Markan material combined with Q and M materials in Matthew’s new topos constructions. The ‘peg’ technique itself is nothing more than the same topos principle at work. The only difference from the Sermon is that the Markan narrative line is the source of the topoi (peg) chain – in fact it is by this means that the Discourses themselves are connected into the Markan narrative line. The topos technique, therefore, is what serves to reconcile the Markan narrative genre with the Q instructional genre. Chapters 8–12 are again a matter of Matthew topically correlating Markan and Q material, the only difference being the scope of the parallel Commissionings and Beelzebul Accusations. There is no ‘dramatic shift in compositional technique’206 between the first and second parts of Matthew’s Gospel. There is no shift at all. Matthew’s rearrangement of double tradition and his Markan transpositions turn out to be elements of a single utilization strategy. Matthew’s utilization strategy and procedures bear upon our understanding of the history of the Synoptic tradition, and naturally the Synoptic Problem, but also upon certain disputed questions in Christian origins.

206. Boring, ‘Convergence’, p. 601.

Chapter 7 Q i n M at t h ew : W h at D i f f eren ce D oe s I t M ake ?

Matthew’s appropriation of Q and Mark is not an ideological project of suppressing ‘Q Christianity’ and ‘domesticating’ it to kerygmatic Christianity, but an elegant scribal solution to a tough source-utilization problem. Our analysis of Matthew’s utilization strategy for Mark and Q naturally has implications for the Synoptic Problem debate, but also for our understanding of the transmission of the Jesus tradition in the early Jesus communities and for wider questions of Christian origins. 1. Matthew’s Scribal Memory Competence Matthew’s scribal identity is a well-worked theme in Matthean scholarship. Attention has been directed, however, mostly to the intellectual elements of his scribal identity, for example his use of Scripture, his apocalypticism, and not so much to his technical utilization practices. Synoptic scholarship’s weak grasp of scribal competencies and ancient media has contributed to this. Thompson says characteristically: ‘We may wonder how Matthew could have kept all these details in his head as he combined the various stories into one coherent narrative. It seems somewhat artificial and unrealistic… [T]he accumulated evidence suggests that such thoroughgoing editorial work cannot be attributed to a mere scribe.’1 Matthew’s scribal competence is particularly evident in his memory control of his sources. His source-utilization is an exemplary case of brain–artifact interface: the fusion of a written cultural artifact with memory such that it becomes operationalized as part of one’s cognitive apparatus. The stabilization afforded by the written medium makes it possible for Matthew to perform what look like complicated manipulations of his sources through simple cognitive operations that follow the schematic, organizational lines of the works themselves. His utilization actions 1. Thompson, ‘Reflections’, p. 388, emphasis added.

7. Q in Matthew

299

are not signs of an extraordinary memory but of a trained, expert memory competence in both sources. Matthew’s application of the topos technique to coordinate his sources is consistent with this, for topoi sequence was a strategy for gaining and exercising memory mastery of a source. Through memory competence one overcame the physical limitations of the scroll. One could navigate the work with the assistance of memory, not at random but by following the organizational pathways that constituted it as a work. Matthew’s utilization patterns accord with how Mark and Q, and their constituent elements, would have been generated out of memory as living performative traditions. Mark and Q, Byrskog comments, ‘were not present as external sources of reference only, but as living traditions which [Matthew] had actively internalized’.2 Matthew has so internalized his tradition that it has become his language of thought: he thinks with and through the Mark and Q tradition. When working up M materials he draws from the raw materials of his sources.3 Matthew’s cultural tradition, laid down in Mark and Q, functions as his memory thesaurus, an internalized, habituated language. This determined conservation of the tradition, which at the same time subjects the tradition to certain transformations – to variation – is evident at every level all the way up to Matthew’s re-presentation of Mark and Q materials on the large canvas of chs. 4–12. At each point one sees the transmission of the received tradition that at the same time is a cultivation of that tradition. 2. Normativity of Mark and Q Matthew’s memory-grounded utilization patterns show that both Q and Mark are normative for him and his community. Matthew is determined to consolidate the normative tradition in its received artifactual forms while simultaneously engaging it with the tradent community’s contemporary social and historical exigencies. His project is an activation of the core cultural memory function of the tradition: to ground the community in its formative past by representing the community’s present realities and predicaments within the symbolic world of the tradition itself, or as Luz has demonstrated, by making the contemporary narrative of the community a variation upon its foundational narrative. Indeed, a dramatic shift in the historical horizon of the tradent community, perhaps experience of a historical rupture of some sort, is very likely what has called forth Matthew’s consolidation project – a comprehensive marshalling of the tradition for 2. Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher, p. 349. 3. Ibid., p. 356.

300

Q in Matthew

its extension into dramatically altered contexts of reception such that the community’s vital connection to its normative past is secured. ‘Especially in times of radical change and disaster’, Werner Kelber says, ‘the medium of scribality is entirely suitable for undertaking a productive retrieval of the past so as to point a way out of the crisis’.4 Matthew’s scribal project is like that of the scribes who redacted the Babylonian Talmud: ‘the attempt’, says David Stern, ‘to construct a unified tradition which can assemble and encompass the manifold heritage of the past’.5 Matthew and Luke’s independent pursuit, in the latter two decades of the first century, of projects of tradition-consolidation involving Mark and Q is not a just-too-incredible coincidence but a well-attested strategic response to momentous cultural, historical, and social change.6 For their part, Mark and Q likewise are artifacts of scribal consolidating enterprises, in their case of pre-documentary tradition. They are ‘oral-derived texts’ in the fullest sense. 3. Mark and Q: Christianities in Conflict? If in the earliest period diverse Jesus movements struggled for survival under the growing shadow of emergent hegemonic orthodoxy, there is little evidence of it in Matthew’s utilization of Mark and Q. Both are 4. Kelber, ‘Case of the Gospels’, p. 58. 5. David Stern, ‘On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds., Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 227–52 (249). 6. The increased stabilization of Hebrew Bible texts after the destruction of Second Temple society is another case in point (see Eugene Ulrich, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 [ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1998], pp. 79–100 [83]), likewise the standardization of the Homeric epics against local textual traditions in the wake of the collapse of the classical polis society (the social framework for rhapsodic transmission of Homer) with the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms (Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 274–8; see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, pp. 28–9), and perhaps also the stabilization in the transmission of the Babylonian Talmud after the loss of continuity ‘with past modes of learning’ with the closing of the geonic yeshivas in the eleventh century (Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 100; also Daphna Ephrat and Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Institutionalization of Tradition: The Growth of the Geonic Yeshiva and the Islamic Madrasa’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 107–37 [114]). In this regard Q experienced the fate of the collections taken up into Justinian’s comprehensive compendium of Roman law: ‘Dabei hat die Überlieferung der juristischen Schriften durch die Arbeit der Kommissionen Justinians insofern erheblichen Schaden genommen, als das Interesse an der Primärüberlieferung der umfangreichen juristischen Abhandlungen abnahm’ (Horster, ‘Literarische Elite?’, p. 193).

7. Q in Matthew

301

equally and unproblematically normative for him. Matthew’s operations upon Mark and Q are a pragmatic solution to technical utilization problems raised by their different configurations of common material. Matthew goes to pains not only to conserve Q and Mark’s specific configurations of the tradition but to build these configurations, and thereby the authority of his sources, right into the Gestalt of his new gospel artifact. Like the Deuteronomistic scribes, Matthew ‘go[es] out of his way to demonstrate continuity with older traditions’.7 His practice accords with the scribal ethos. Scribes were custodians and transmitters of foundational cultural tradition in its received artifactual forms. New scribal artifacts were founded upon that tradition. A gauge of a work’s authority was its capacity to generate further texts, from its augmentation in the course of its transmission all the way to its transformation into another work.8 Matthew’s competence in both sources shows the foundational status of both Mark and Q. His enterprise is at the same time a programmatic consolidation and a fresh actualization of that tradition. That at the same time he brings his own theological vision to expression goes without saying, but it is a vision arising out of the tradition. Matthew’s utilization strategy is facilitated by Mark’s and Q’s conceptual affinities, the substantial areas of common ground in the Mark and Q tradition, the many points at which their materials cross each other. Matthew’s ‘peg’, or topos, method of integrating his sources successfully exploits this feature of his Mark and Q tradition. Even the large transpositions in chs. 8–12 are a matter of Matthew aligning cognate Mark and Q sequences. Q’s narrative allusions easily find Markan narrative antecedents. The commonalities extend even to their similar dispositions of the tradition: the Commissioning, Beelzebul Accusation, and the Day of the Son of Man are prominent landmarks in both sources.9 Q and Mark’s overlapping elements, and their equivalent treatment by Matthew, point to their origins in a common sphere of tradition.10 Their independence of 7. Morrow, ‘Mesopotamian Scribal Techniques’, p. 313. 8. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 18; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 234–40. 9. Neirynck points out that Luke’s insertion at Mk 10.1 of the material extending from the Q 9–10 Mission to the Q 17 Day of the Son of Man, thus between the Mk 6/Lk. 9 and Mk 13/Lk. 21 counterparts of these Q units, ‘produce[s] the effect of a duplication of the Marcan story line’ (‘Synoptic Problem’, p. 592). ‘This may be due to the insertion of a second source in the outline of Mark.’ Incidentally, this confirms that in the Travel Narrative Luke continues to take Q seriatim, inserting L materials here and there. 10. Schröter surveys the conceptual and material commonalities in detail (Erinnerung, pp. 436, 450–1).

302

Q in Matthew

each other is evidence of the wide distribution of that register of tradition. That they function alongside each other as normative artifacts of the tradition independently in the Matthean and Lukan communities attests not only to their shared normative grounds but to a common matrix of tradition within the far-flung networks of primitive Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean. It is hard to reconcile Q’s manifest normativity for Matthew with the notion that it represents a radically distinctive formation in early Christianity. Nevertheless this is the role it is pressed into playing in dramas of an emergent orthodoxy suppressing or ‘domesticating’ earlier forms of Christian belief. The view that Q is radically distinctive depends on construing it as an enclosed textual and theological world, a literary isolate from which one then reifies a theologically bounded, autonomous community. Behind the non-narrative genre one infers a non-narrative community, behind an instructional work a community with a wisdom Christology, one that reveres Jesus as a sage and finds his significance primarily in his ‘word’. This Q community is an artifact of modern literarycritical and print categories: the literary work as autonomous, externally objectified, and self-contained. In fact the boundaries between the written and oral registers of the tradition were porous, and particularly so in the earliest period. Q’s lines of reference passed through indistinct textual and genre boundaries into the wider matrix of early Christian tradition and memory. It goes without saying that this matrix was multi-centered and in theological ferment as the Jesus tradition reacted with local circumstances and as the early communities explored the tradition’s connections with the wider field of scriptural and cultural signification. The reification of Q into a community distinct in belief and praxis rests on the correlation of distinct genres to distinct communities, each with a distinct theology and Christology, a fallacy that owes something to the old correlation the form critics made of ‘form’ to sociological Sitz. Without wishing to deny that writing projects are ideological projects, we can point out that the genre distinctions between Q and Mark are pragmatic and conventional. Mark inscribes the foundational story, the ‘master commemorative narrative’ formative of a movement’s identity. Q is instructional, inculcating the corresponding ethical norms; its presentation of Jesus as a sage corresponds to its genre and its corresponding pragmatic function. Respectively Mark and Q comprise what Jan Assmann identifies as the ‘formative’ (narrative) and ‘normative’ (ethical) dimensions of cultural memory.11 This compatibility is corroborated by Matthew’s 11. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 141–2.

7. Q in Matthew

303

source utilization. Both Mark and Q are normative in Matthean circles. Matthew is keen to appropriate the authority of both, and he is able to consolidate them into a single work with relative ease.12 This hardly means that Mark and Q emerge from the same place on the theological and Christological spectrum, or that they have the same provenance. On both counts there is much to suggest that they do not. But Matthew’s incorporation of Q is no ‘suppression’, or ‘domestication’ of it to the Markan kerygmatic perspective, an operation often presented as a debased form of Christianity overwriting the purer form to which Q attests, a romanticizing of Q that among other things owes something to form criticism’s privileging of the ‘saying’ in the history of the tradition. Matthew’s utilization actions are a strategy for solving the technical problem of combining two normative sources such that their sequences are not only reconciled but woven into the fabric of the new composition. 4. Q a Proxy for Galilean Christianity? Our results raise doubts about whether Q can be taken as a proxy for an exotic, isolated Galilean Christianity. Claims of radical difference for Q are frequently found together with the claim that it represents a distinct Galilean Jesus movement. A body of serious scholarship has developed around this claim, reinforced recently by Giovanni Bazzana’s monograph, which draws extensively upon the evidence of Egyptian documentary papyri to defend the Galilean ‘village scribes’ Sitz for Q’s origins.13 This is not the place to give the village scribes, Galilean Christianity theory the 12. Even Luz, hardly a Christian origins revisionist, is sufficiently affected by the genre fallacy that he regards the unity of the ethical tradition and the narrative tradition as Matthew’s theological achievement: ‘The most important basic theological decision of Matthew was to take the Gospel of Mark as the basis from which alone Jesus’ proclamation can be correctly illuminated. This means theologically: He has tied the ethical proclamation of Jesus concerning the kingdom of God to the history of God’s actions with Jesus. In this way, it becomes the proclamation of grace. Here it becomes clear how inappropriate is the alternative between theological independence and dependence on the sources’ (Matthew 1–7, p. 44, original emphasis). There is no way to show, however, that there was ever a serious distinction between these two lines of the tradition in Matthean circles, and there is certainly no evidence of it in Matthew’s utilization procedures. Of course this does not mean that Matthew is unable to impress a theological complexion upon his sources, or that their consolidation does not have theological consequences. 13. Giovanni B. Bazzana, The Kingdom of Bureaucracy: The Political Theology of Village Scribes in the Sayings Gospel Q (BETL 274; Leuven: Peeters, 2015).

304

Q in Matthew

attention it merits, but our analysis does raise questions about some aspects of it that we can touch on briefly. The village scribes Sitz has affinities to the sub-literary Q conception; it goes back to John Kloppenborg’s correlation of what he took to be Q’s modest level of literary formation to the modest literary capacities of village scribes.14 William Arnal puts the point as follows: ‘[T]he composition of the Q traditions was undertaken by persons with the characteristics of village scribes…rural scribes who were moderately, but not spectacularly, educated’.15 Matthew’s Q-utilization indicates, however, that it existed for him as coherent, well-organized work, though, to be sure, it is hazardous to draw precise inferences to Q’s level of literary formation. But given the pervasiveness of topos/rubric organization in works redacted and transmitted by elite scholars, it is difficult to follow Kloppenborg in his view that Q’s topical organization indicates that it ‘does not show the same sort of self-conscious and studied composition expected in products of elite scribal establishments’.16 The notion of a Galilean provenance for Q owes quite a bit to Gerd Theissen’s theory that wandering Galilean itinerants were the tradents of the Q materials. Kloppenborg’s demonstration of the scribal character of Q, however, was difficult to reconcile with wandering itinerants. As Arnal puts it, ‘Do itinerants who claim to have given up all wealth and social connections, carry around just enough money in their nonexistent purses (so Q 10:4) to buy paper and hire scribes?’17 Turning the tradents of Q into marginalized Galilean village scribes neatly squared this circle. As noted, serious scholarly work has gone into trying to find additional warrants for the village scribes hypothesis; it cannot be dismissed simply by pointing out contingent factors in its origins. But here we raise just one 14. John S. Kloppenborg, ‘Literary Convention, Self-Evidence, and the Social History of the Q People’, in Synoptic Problems, pp. 237–65 (245–7) (first published 1991); idem, ‘Variation’, pp. 115–18. 15. William E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), p. 159. Willi Braun estimates the literary competencies of the Q framers at a rather higher level, while still wanting to place them among the ‘Galilean small-town scribal intelligentsia’ (‘Socio-mythic Invention, Graeco-Roman Schools, and the Sayings Gospel Q’, MTSR 11 [1999], pp. 210–35 [223]). 16. Kloppenborg, ‘Literary Convention’, p. 245. On the other hand he says that Q ‘resembles the organizing techniques of the more sophisticated instructions’ (Formation, p. 318). We note that even so elite a scholar as Favorinus could write and circulate, as a work, the Hypomnemata, a perfunctorily organized collection of his reading excerpts. 17. Arnal, Village Scribes, p. 45.

7. Q in Matthew

305

question for it that arises out of the analysis of Matthew’s utilization: How can Q’s ‘otherness’ in primitive Christianity, its purported Christological and geographical separateness from other streams of early Christianity, be reconciled with its normativity for Matthew and its independent reception as such by both Matthew and Luke? Likewise, given that in antiquity a work’s dissemination ‘se fait en “circuit fermé” ’,18 that is, by circulation along social networks constituted of personal relationships, how did Q even come to be transmitted to Matthew, let alone receive foundationally authoritative status? Here the Galilean village scribes proposal ironically starts to come into conflict with the 2DH itself. The more one identifies Q with the boutique issues and unique experiences of a circumscribed, occupationally specialized tradent group in a bounded geographical area – in Arnal’s words, with a ‘faction…within the scribal bureaucracy of Lower Galilee’19 – the more pressing the problem becomes. The greater the emphasis on the ‘difference’ of Q, the greater the tension with the 2DH itself, and consequently the more one must resort to conflict-themed narratives of ‘suppression’ or ‘domestication’. Arnal suggests that Q’s posited earlier redactions ‘were of very restricted currency’, and that it was the final version of the work that found some circulation outside of Galilee, though its disappearance suggests that even its final form ‘was not widely distributed’.20 Bazzana reasons that Q’s narrow range of reference to the interests of ‘sub-elite local administrators’ accounts for ‘why it might have been so short-lived’.21 Q’s was a ‘chance survival’ owing to its ‘cannibalization’ by Matthew and Luke.22 Sarah Rollens identifies the conundrum: ‘On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine Q being a success when we consider redactional additions, which indicate very likely rejection of the Q tradents. On the other, we must grapple with the reality that Q survived long enough to circulate and end up in Matthew and Luke’s hands, which means that it had been preserved to some degree within a wider group of people who considered it to be a meaningful collection 18. Salles, Lire à Rome, p. 156. 19. William Arnal, ‘The Trouble with Q’, Forum 3rd Series 2 (2013), pp. 7–77 (68). 20. Arnal, Village Scribes, p. 162. More recently Arnal suggests that posited Christological shifts from Q1 (sage), to Q2 (son of man), to Q3 (son of God) might be evidence ‘of an increasing effort [of the original tradents] to connect their ideals with those of individuals…outside of the limited Q compositional circles’, though what he has in mind is a rapprochement with Judean intellectual circles, not kerygmatic synoptic circles (‘Trouble with Q’, p. 54). 21. Bazzana, Kingdom of Bureaucracy, p. 162. 22. Ibid., p. 317.

306

Q in Matthew

of ideas.’23 Though Luz does not draw thick lines of isolation around Q, he locates Q’s tradent communities ‘in Galilee and the surrounding area’, and so he too must account for its convergence with Mark.24 To this end he first conceives these Q communities as the forerunners of the Matthean communities. He then tells a story of flight from Galilee to Syria during the Jewish War, ‘where they learned of the Gospel of Mark…which significantly influenced and modified their perspective’, and he attributes the merging of Q and Markan perspectives to Matthew’s theological genius.25 Boring tells a similar story, though with a different twist: the Matthean community was ‘founded’ by Q group messengers in early in the 50s; after the Jewish war it was joined by a Mark-bearing group: ‘Without surrendering its earlier convictions based on its use of Q for many years…some strikingly new elements and emphases entered the life of the community’.26 There is nothing implausible about these stories, but their aetiological function is obvious: once a Galilean tradent community for Q is posited, a story must be told that gets it out of Galilee into contact with Markan circles of Christianity. The better course seems to be to look for an alternative to Q as a proxy for a Galilean Jesus movement, one that better accounts for the hard evidence of its utilization by Matthew and Luke.27 5. Synoptic Problem Showing that Matthew’s arrangements of double and triple tradition are an elegant solution to the technical problem of combining Mark and Q does not prove the 2DH true and other utilization hypotheses false. What it amounts to is a test of the 2DH’s viability at two of its vulnerable points. The divergent order of the Matthean double tradition vis-à-vis Luke is a favorite target of 2DH critics, and from time to time also the singularity of Matthew’s Markan transpositions. We see that the 2DH is able to generate a robust, economical account of these purported anomalies, one grounded, moreover, in ancient media conditions and practices. Matthew’s reordering of the double tradition and his Markan transpositions – usually treated as 23. Rollens, Framing Social Criticism, p. 197. Kloppenborg recognizes the problem but solves it by proliferating Q copies: enough copies were made for Q to ‘fall into the hands of Matthew and Luke’ (‘Literary Convention’, p. 238). 24. Luz, ‘Looking at Q’, p. 585. 25. Ibid.; also idem, Matthew 1–7, pp. 44, 49. 26. Boring, ‘Convergence’, p. 588. 27. Simon Joseph has recently made a cogent case for Q’s Judean provenance (Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 186–9). Another possibility is Syria.

7. Q in Matthew

307

unrelated – are elements of a single utilization strategy, of a single utilization gesture. Are other utilization hypotheses able to explain Matthew’s and Luke’s different configurations of double and triple tradition materials not only economically but also consistent with ancient media conditions and practices? The evidence that they can is less than encouraging.28 After Derrenbacker’s Ancient Compositional Practices, the FGH was really the only hypothesis left standing as an alternative to the 2DH.29 Some FGH advocates have tried to rise to the challenge and ground Luke’s Matthean utilization in ancient media, especially after the debacle of Goulder’s reverse-scrolling account. We have seen that these attempts – Poirier’s wax tablets proposal; Watson’s ‘oral-interpretation’ account of Luke’s utilization of Matthew, to mention two of the more notable – do not get off the ground. Watson’s complicated ancillary account of Luke’s editorial approach to Matthew, moreover, compares unfavorably to the single utilization strategy the present study predicates of Matthew’s use of Q and Mark. Watson makes the usual claim of parsimony for the 28. Anyone hoping to find engagement with ancient media realities in the most recent set of FGH essays (Markan Priority Without Q: Explorations in the Farrer Hypothesis [ed. John C. Poirier and Jeffrey Peterson; LNTS 455; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark], 2015) will be disappointed. Eric Eve (commendably) makes some reference to orality and memory, but too much in the mode of Watson – to give Matthew and Luke the compositional license the FGH must attribute to them (Matthew and Luke are ‘ “reworking” their sources rather than “redacting” [or “editing”] them’ [‘The Devil in the Detail: Exorcising Q from the Beelzebul Controversy’, pp. 18–43 (18–19)]). Heather Gorman does not go beyond comparing Luke’s order to the rhetorical dispositio and correlating some Lukan word choices to stylistic recommendations found in the rhetorical handbooks (‘Crank or Creative Genius? How Ancient Rhetoric Makes Sense of Luke’s Order’, pp. 62–81). 29. I am not aware of any substantive response to Derrenbacker from the Griesbach side. James W. Barker attempts to rehabilitate, after Derrenbacker and Downing’s critique, the micro-conflation and ‘unpicking’ operations the FGH and the Griesbach Hypothesis must impute to Luke and Mark (‘Ancient Compositional Practices and the Gospels: A Reassessment’ [paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, 24 November 2014]). Barker adduces some interesting case studies as analogies, but it is hard to know how much weight to give to an analysis that methodologically rules out the memory factor from ancient contexts (p. 19). John Kloppenborg offered the response to Barker’s paper, raising a number of thoughtful criticisms, for example, that what Barker treats as case studies of micro-conflation are not (‘Assimilation, Harmonization, Conflation: Comments on James Barker’s “Ancient Compositional Practices and the Gospels” ’). Remarkably, the just-published version of Barker’s paper (JBL 136 [2016], pp. 109–21) is simply a touched-up version of the SBL paper that ignores Kloppenborg’s critique.

308

Q in Matthew

FGH – ‘concerned with a single process in which Luke edits Matthew’, as opposed to the 2DH’s purported ‘double redactional process’ (that is, two sources).30 But the FGH’s claim to greater economy is a sham: its claims for parsimony at one end must always be paid for by complicated accounts of Luke’s utilization at the other end. Watson ends up attributing to Luke four distinct utilization policies: (1) Luke follows Matthew, with selected Matthean additions to Mark, when Matthew is following Markan order (Appearance and Preaching of the Baptist); (2) Luke follows Mark first, then goes back and separately aggregates Matthean additions to Mark (his most frequently followed policy); (3) Luke follows Matthew rather than Mark (Matthew’s positioning of the Beelzebul Accusation along with the additions to Mark); (4) Luke follows Matthew as well as Mark (Beelzebul Accusation followed by Blessed the Womb, a doublet of Jesus’ True Family, the latter appearing in Lk. 8 in its Mk 3 order).31 This gives us less reason than ever to fear that the FGH can compete with the 2DH when it comes to economy. With ingenuity and judicious resort to ad hoc explanations to get over the rough spots, advocates of the different source hypotheses can produce redaction-critical accounts consistent with the source relations posited by the hypothesis. But this cannot show that the hypothesis is sound, only that taken on its own terms it has plausibility.32 It has been difficult for the debate to get past a weighing of the relative plausibility of competing hypotheses and the redactional accounts they generate. Neville’s statement, ‘on the two-gospel hypothesis, Mark’s first two major transitions at Mk 1.21-22 and 3.7-12 can be understood to have been motivated by the same redactional concern, namely, to omit the lengthy blocks of teaching in Mt 5.3–7.27 and Lk 6.20-49, which are similar enough to have been construed as two versions of the same sermon’,33 is an example of tautological relationship between redaction-critical accounts and the source hypotheses they purport to demonstrate. Of course no data are self-interpreting, that is, make sense independent of some theoretical framework or other that puts the data in coherent relations. But one advantage of the present study is that it shows that it is the sequence 30. Watson, ‘Q as Hypothesis’, p. 399. 31. Ibid., pp. 413–14. 32. This is the distinction between a valid argument and a sound argument. A valid argument has good logic: that is, if the premises were true, the conclusion would have to be true. A sound argument is valid, plus it has true premises. Thus its conclusion has to be true as well (my thanks to my philosophy colleague Dr. Chip Bolyard for this clear expression of the difference). 33. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, pp. 332–3.

7. Q in Matthew

309

of the double tradition attested by Luke that renders Matthew’s Markan transpositions intelligible. Though this postulate nicely fits the theoretical framework of the 2DH, as neutrally stated above it stands outside the cycle of self-referential redaction-critical arguments endemic to Synoptic sourcecritical debate. It does not take what a utilization hypothesis entails of the Synoptic writer and turn it into a subjective intention of the writer raised to a faux-objective editorial principle. It coheres with ancient media and scribal realities, which themselves serve as an independent control on the source hypothesis.34 Invoking Matthew’s redactional-theological program is corroborative, that is, it does not bear the burden of the argument. To put it now less neutrally: the existence of a written source with an order attested best by Luke’s Gospel accounts for Matthew’s rearrangements of Mark in chs. 8–12 and his return to Markan order at 12.1. Other findings then further cohere with this, for example, that Matthew’s patterns of utilization are the same for both the double and triple tradition. The 2DH is remarkably resilient. A viable hypothesis is one that is able to respond to criticism and emerge stronger and increase its explanatory range as a result. Hypotheses that fail to respond to rational critique fade away or survive on cult followings. The 2DH has been on the receiving end of much criticism. It continues to demonstrate its capacity to address its perceived vulnerabilities, while at the same time showing its coherence with the media conditions and practices of the ancient world. We see why the 2DH continues to provide the best basis, not just for accounting for Synoptic relationships, but also for working on other pressing problems in Christian origins.

34. A measure of Goulder’s acuity is that he sought for both these external controls for the FGH with (a) his lectionary theory of Matthew’s transpositions of Mark (Midrash and Lection, pp. 313–18), (b) his midrash theory of Matthew’s expansion of Mark, and (c) his reverse scrolling account of Luke’s use of Matthew.

B i b l i og ra p h y

Ancient Sources Apollonius Sophista, Homer Lexicon (ed. Immanuel Bekker; Reimer: Berolini, 1883). The Corpus Parisinum: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text with Commentary and English Translation (A Medieval Anthology of Greek Texts from the Pre-Socratics to the Church Fathers 600 B.C.–700 A.D. (ed. Dennis Searby; 2 vols.; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2007). Diogenes’ Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (trans. R. D. Hicks; 2 vols.; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1925). Favorinus, Memorabilia and Omnigena Historia, in Eckhart Mensching, Favorin von Arelate: Der erste Teil der Fragmente Memorabilien und Omnigena Historia (Texte und Kommentare 3; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963). Joannis Stobaei Anthologium (ed. Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense; Berlin: Weidmann, 1884). Lucian, ‘How to Write History’, in Lucian VI (trans. K. Kilburn; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1978). Pliny the Younger, Letters and Panegyricus (trans. Betty Radice; 2 vols.; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Porphyry, Ennead, vol. 1: Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus (trans. A. H. Armstrong; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Quintilian, Institutes (trans. H. E. Butler; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22). Scholarly Literature Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Alexander, Loveday, ‘Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels’, in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 71–111. ———. The Preface to Luke’s Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ———. ‘What Is a Gospel?’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels (ed. Stephen C. Barton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–33. Allen, Willoughby C., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907). Allison, Dale C., ‘The Structure of the Sermon on the Mount’, JBL 106 (1987), pp. 423–45.

Bibliography

311

Andersen, Øvind, ‘Oral Tradition’, in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, pp. 17–58. Arnal, William E., Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). ———. ‘The Trouble with Q’, Forum 3rd Series 2 (2013), pp. 7–77. Assmann, Aleida, ‘Schriftliche Folklore: Zur Entstehung und Funktion eines Überlieferungstyp’, in Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christof Hardmeier; Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 175–93. —‘Was sind kulturelle Texte?’, in Poltermann, ed., Literaturkanon, pp. 232–44. Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann, ‘Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Merten, Schmidt, and Weischenberg, eds., Die Wirklichkeit der Medien, pp. 114–40. Assmann, Jan, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, pp. 67–82. ———. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992). ———. ‘Kulturelle und Literarische Texte’, in Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms (ed. A. Loprieno; Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 59–81. ———. ‘Kulturelle Texte im Spannungsfeld von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, in Poltermann, ed., Literaturkanon, pp. 270–91. ———. Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000). Aune, David E., ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Oral Tradition in the Hellenistic World’, in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, pp. 59–106. Avenarius, Gert, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (Meisenheim am Glan: Anto Hain, 1956). Bacon, B. W., ‘Editorial Arrangement in Matthew VIII.–IX’, Exp 8 (1920), pp. 200–213. ———. Studies in Matthew (New York: Henry Holt, 1930). Baddeley, Alan D., Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1999). ———. ‘Psychology of Remembering and Forgetting’, in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (ed. Thomas Butler; Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 33–60. Bagnall, Roger S., Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). Barker, James W., ‘Ancient Compositional Practices and the Gospels: A Reassessment’, JBL 136 (2016), pp. 109–21. Bartlett, F. C., Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bauckham, Richard, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Baum, Armin D., Der mündliche Faktor und seine Bedeutung für die synoptische Frage (Tübingen: Francke, 2008). Baumgarten, Albert I., The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era (JSJSup 55; Leiden: Brill, 1997). Bäuml, Franz H., ‘Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory’, NLH 16 (1984–85), pp. 31–49. ———. ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 237–65. Bazzana, Giovanni B., The Kingdom of Bureaucracy: The Political Theology of Village Scribes in the Sayings Gospel Q (BETL 274; Leuven: Peeters, 2015).

312 Bibliography Beare, Francis W., The Gospel According to Matthew: A Commentary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). ———. ‘The Mission of the Disciples and the Mission Charge: Matthew 10 and Parallels’, JBL 89 (1970), pp. 1–13. Becker, Hans-Jürgen, ‘Texts and History: The Dynamic Relationship between Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah’, in Cohen, ed., The Synoptic Problem, pp. 145–58. Beit-Arié, Malachi, ‘Transmission of Texts by Scribes and Copyists: Unconscious and Critical Interferences’, BJRL 75 (1993), pp. 33–51. Ben Zvi, Ehud, ‘Introduction: Setting an Agenda’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 1–29. Ben Zvi, Ehud, and Michael H. Floyd (eds.), Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). Bergemann, Thomas, Q auf dem Prüfstand: Die Zuordnung des Mt/Lk-Stoffes zu Q am Beispiel der Bergpredigt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). Berger, Klaus, Die Gesetzesauslegung Jesu (WMANT 40; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1972). Berntsen, Dorthe, and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory’, MemCogn 32 (2004), pp. 427–42. Betz, Hans Dieter, The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, including the Sermon on the Plain (Matthew 5:3–7:27 and Luke 6:20–29) (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Bilabel, F., ‘Librarius’, PW 13 (1926), cols. 137–9. Bird, Graeme D., Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: The Witness of the Ptolemaic Papyri (Hellenic Studies 43; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Bjork, Robert A., ‘Retrieval Inhibition as an Adaptive Mechanism in Human Memory’, in Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (ed. Henry L. Roediger and Fergus I. M. Craik; Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 309–30. Blum, Erhard, ‘Historiography or Poetry? The Nature of the Hebrew Bible Prose Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. L. T. Stuckenbruck, S. C. Barton, and B. G. Wold; WUNT 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007), pp. 26–45. Bonner, Stanley F., Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Bloch, Maurice E. F., How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998). Booth, Alan D., ‘The Schooling of Slaves in First-Century Rome’, TAPA 109 (1979), pp. 11–19. Boring, Eugene, ‘The Convergence of Source Analysis, Social History, and Literary Structure in the Gospel of Matthew’, in SBL 1994 Seminar Papers (ed. E. H. Lovering; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), pp. 587–611. Bornkamm, Günther, ‘Der Aufbau der Bergpredigt’, NTS 24 (1978), pp. 419–32. ———. ‘The Stilling of the Storm in Matthew’, in Bornkamm, Barth, and Held, eds., Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, pp. 52–57. Bornkamm, Günther, Gerhard Barth, and Heinz Joachim Held (eds.), Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew (trans. Percy Scott; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963). Botha, Pieter J. J., ‘ “I am writing this with my own hand…”: Writing in New Testament Times’, Verbum et Ecclesia 30 (2009), pp. 1–11. ———. ‘New Testament Texts in the Context of Reading Practices of the Roman Period: The Role of Memory and Performance’, Scriptura 90 (2005), pp. 621–40.

Bibliography

313

———. ‘ “Publishing” a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism’, in Weissenreider and Coote, eds., The Interface of Orality and Writing, pp. 335–52. Boudon-Millot, Véronique, ‘Oral et écrit chez Galien’, in Colloque la médicine grecque antique: actes (ed. Jacques Jouanna and Jean Leclant; Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres/de Boccard, 2004), pp. 199–218. Bowman, Alan K., and Greg Woolf, ‘Literacy and Power in the Ancient World’, in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–16. Božič, Dragan, and Michel Feugère, ‘Les instruments de l’écriture’, Gallia 61 (2004), pp. 21–41. Braun, Willi, ‘Socio-mythic Invention, Graeco-Roman Schools, and the Sayings Gospel Q’, MTSR 11 (1999), pp. 210–35. Broer, Ingo, ‘Die Antithesen der Bergpredigt: Ihre Bedeutung und Funktion für die Gemeinde Matthäus’, BK 48 (1993), pp. 128–33. Brooke, George J., ‘The Qumran Scrolls and the Demise of the Distinction between Higher and Lower Criticism’, in New Directions in Qumran Studies: Proceedings of the Bristol Colloquium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (J. G. Campbell, W. J. Lyons, and L. K. Pietersen, eds; London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2005), pp. 26–42. ———. ‘Some Scribal Features of the Thematic Commentaries from Qumran’, in Römer and Davies, eds., Writing the Bible, pp. 124–43. Brown, Michelle P., ‘The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York’, BritLibJ 20 (1994), pp. 1–16. Bruner, Dale Frederick, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 1, The Christbook: Matthew 1–12 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2004). Bucking, Scott, ‘On the Training of Documentary Scribes in Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic Egypt: A Contextualized Assessment of the Greek Evidence’, ZPE 159 (2007), pp. 229–47. Bultmann, Rudolf, ‘What the Sayings Source Reveals about the Early Church’, in The Shape of Q: Signal Essays on the Sayings Gospel (ed. John S. Kloppenborg; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), pp. 23–34. Burger, Christoph, ‘Jesu Taten nach Matthäus 8 und 9’, ZTK 70 (1973), pp. 272–87. Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). Burkert, Walter, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (trans. Margart E. Pinder and Walter Burkert; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Burkett, Delbert, Rethinking Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004). ———. Rethinking Gospel Sources: The Unity and Plurality of Q (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). Burridge, Richard A., ‘The Gospels and Acts’, in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C.–A.D. 400 (ed. Stanley E. Porter; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 507–32. Butzer, Günter, ‘Meditation’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (ed. Gerd Ueding; 12 vols.; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 1016–23. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘A Century with The Sitz im Leben: From Form-critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond’, ZNW 98 (2007), pp. 1–27. ———. Jesus the Only Teacher: Didactic Authority and Transmission in Ancient Israel, Ancient Judaism, and the Matthean Community (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994).

314 Bibliography ———. Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000). Calinescu, Matei, ‘Orality in Literacy: Some Historical Paradoxes of Reading’, YJC 6 (1993), pp. 175–90. Carr, David M., ‘Orality, Textuality, and Memory: The State of Biblical Studies’, in Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, pp. 161–73. ———. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008). ———. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (CSML 34; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Carruthers, Mary, and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Casey, Maurice, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Cauderlier, Patrice, ‘Les tablettes grecques d’Égypte: inventaire’, in Lalou, ed., Les tablettes à écrire, pp. 63–96. Cavigneaux, Antoine, ‘Scribes, Mesopotamia’, in Brill’s New Pauly (ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmut Schneider; Leiden: Brill, 2006), cols. 105–8. Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books, Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (trans. Lydia G. Cochrane; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Chaytor, John Henry, ‘The Medieval Reader and Textual Criticism’, BJRL 29 (1941–42), pp. 49–56. Christes, Johannes, Sklaven und Freigelassene als Grammatiker und Philologen im Antiken Rom (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979). Clanchy, M. T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1993). Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997). ———. ‘Material Symbols’, PhilPsych 19 (2009), pp. 291–307. ———. ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More’, Theoria 54 (2005), pp. 655–68. Clark, Kenneth Willis, ‘The Posture of the Ancient Scribe’, BA 26 (1963), pp. 63–72. Clivaz, Claire, ‘The Prose Writer (ΣΥΓΓΡΑΦΕΥΣ) and the Cultures of Author and Scribes: The Examples of Galen and the Anonymous Author of Luke–Acts’, in Römer and Davies, eds., Writing the Bible, pp. 159–76. Cohen, Shaye J. D. (ed.), The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature (BJS 326; Providence: Brown University Press, 2000). Cohen, Yoram, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009). Corbier, Mireille, ‘L’écriture en quête de lecteurs’, in Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, pp. 99–118. Cotton, Hannah M., ‘The Languages of the Legal and Administrative Documents from the Judaean Desert’, ZPE 125 (1999), pp. 219–31. Cotton, Hannah M., and Ada Yardeni (eds.), Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Naḥal Ḥever and Other Sites (DJD 27; Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

Bibliography

315

Cribiore, Rafaella, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). ———. The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). ———. Writing, Teachers, and Students in Greco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). Dagenais, John, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Damm, Alex, Ancient Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem: Clarifying Markan Priority (BETL 252; Leuven: Peeters, 2013). Davies, Philip R., and Thomas Römer (eds.), Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism, and Script (Durham: Acumen, 2013). Davies, W. D., and Dale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1: Introduction and Commentary on Matthew I–VII; vol. 2, Commentary on Matthew VIII–XVIII (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988–1991). de Vet, Thérèse, ‘The Joint Role of Orality and Literacy in the Composition, Transmission, and Performance of the Homeric Texts: A Comparative View’, TAPA 126 (1996), pp. 43–76. Derrenbacker, Robert A. Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL 186; Leuven: University Press, Peeters, 2005). ———. ‘The External and Psychological Conditions Under Which the Synoptic Gospels Were Written: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem’, in Foster et al., eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 435–57. ———. ‘Greco-Roman Writing Practices and Luke’s Gospel’, in The Gospels According to Michael Goulder (ed. Christopher A. Rollston; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 61–83. ———. ‘ “The Medium Is the Message”: What Q’s Content Tells Us about Its Medium’, in Metaphor, Narrative, and Parables in Q (ed. Dieter T. Roth, Ruben Zimmermann, and Michael Labahn WUNT 1/315; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014), pp. 207–19. Derron, Pascale, Pseudo-Phocylide Sentences (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986). Dickey, Eleanor, Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Didier, M. (ed.), L’Évangile selon Matthieu: Rédaction et théologie (BETL, 29; Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1972). Doane, A. N., ‘The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer’, OT 9 (1994), pp. 420–39. ———. ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 75–113. Doane, A. N., and Carol Braun Pasternack (eds.), Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Donker van Keel, K., and B. J. J. Haring, Writing in a Workmen’s Village: Scribal Practice in Ramesside Deir El-Medina (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2003). Doole, Andrew J., What Was Mark for Matthew? An Examination of Matthew’s Relationship to His Primary Source (WUNT 344; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2013).

316 Bibliography Dorandi, Tiziano, ‘Den Authoren über die Schulter geschaut: Arbeitsweise und Autographie bei den Antiken Schriftstellern’, ZPE 87 (1991), pp. 11–33. ———. ‘Zwischen Autographie und Diktat: Momente der Textualität in der antiken Welt’, in Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechsischen Kultur (ed. Wolfgang Kullmann and Jochen Althoff; ScriptOralia 61; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993), pp. 71–83. Downing, F. Gerald, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem’, JBL 107 (1988) pp. 69–85. ———. ‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus Antiquities and the Synoptic Gospels’, JSNT 9 (1980), pp. 29–48. ———. ‘Waxing Careless: Poirier, Derrenbacker, and Downing’, JSNT 35 (2013), pp. 388–93. ———. ‘Writers’ Use or Abuse of Written Sources’, in Foster et al., eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 523–50. Dundes, Alan, Forward to John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. x–xi. Dunn, James D. G., ‘Altering the Default Settings: Re-envisioning the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 139–75. ———. Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). ———. ‘Matthew as Wirkungsgeschichte’, in Neutestamentliche Exegese im Dialog: Hermeneutik – Wirkungsgeschichte – Matthäusevangelium (Festschrift Ulrich Luz; ed. Peter Lampe, Moises Mayordomo-Marin, and Migaku Sato; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 149–66. ———. ‘Q1 as Oral Tradition’, in The Written Gospel (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald Hagner; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 45–69. Dyck, Andrew R., ‘The Fragments of Heliodorus Homericus’, HSPh 95 (1993), pp. 1–64. Edwards, Richard A., ‘Matthew’s Use of Q in Chapter Eleven’, in Logia: Les Paroles de Jésus – the Sayings of Jesus (ed. Joël Delobel; BETL 59; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1982), pp. 258–75. Ego, Beate, ‘Im Schatten hellenistischer Bildung: Ben Siras Lern- und Lehrkonzeption zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, in Schaper, ed., Die Textualisierung der Religion, pp. 203–21. Ehlers, Widu-Wolfgang, ‘Auribus excam oder Der intendierte Rezitator – Produktionsund rezeptionsästhetische Aspekte der Mündlichkeit antiker Texte’, in ScriptOralia Romana: Die römische Literature zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (ed. Lore Benz; Tübingen: Narr, 2001), pp. 11–42. Eikelman, Dale F., ‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and its Social Reproduction’, CSSH 20 (1978), pp. 485–516. Elman, Yaakov, ‘Authoritative Oral Tradition in Neo-Assyrian Scribal Circles’, JANESCU 7 (1975), pp. 19–23. ———. Authority and Tradition: Toseftan Baraitot in Talmudic Babylonia (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1994). ———. ‘Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 52–99. Elman, Yaakov, and Israel Gershoni (eds.), Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Elsner, Monika, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Thomas Müller, and Peter M. Spangenberg, ‘Zur Kulturgeschichte der Medien’, in Merten, Schmidt, and Weischenberg, eds., Die Wirklichkeit der Medien, pp. 163–87.

Bibliography

317

Ephrat, Daphna, and Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Institutionalization of Tradition: The Growth of the Geonic Yeshiva and the Islamic Madrasa’, in in Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 107–37. Ericsson, Anders K., ‘Superior Memory of Mnemonists and Experts in Various Domains’, in Roediger, ed., Learning and Memory, pp. 809–17. Eve, Eric, ‘The Devil in the Detail: Exorcising Q from the Beelzebul Controversy’, in Poirier and Peterson, eds., Markan Priority Without Q, pp. 18–43. Eyre, Christopher, and John Baines, ‘Interactions between Orality and Literacy in Ancient Egypt’, in Schousboue and Larsen, eds., Literacy and Society, pp. 91–119. Fantham, Elaine, ‘Two Levels of Orality in the Genesis of Pliny’s Panegyricus’, in Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (ed. E. Anne Mackay; MnemosyneSup 288; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 221–37. Feldman, Carol Fleisher, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Literacy and Orality (ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 47–65. Fenton, J. C., The Gospel of Matthew (PNTC; Middlesex: Penguin, 1963). Finkelberg, Margalit, and Guy G. Strousma (eds.), Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (JSRC 2; Leiden: Brill, 2003). Finnegan, Ruth, ‘Introduction: or, Why the Comparativist Should Take Account of the South Pacific’, in South Pacific Oral Traditions (ed. Ruth Finnegan and Margaret Orbell; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 6–29. ———. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). ———. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). ———. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research (London: Routledge, 1992). ———. ‘What Is Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material’, in Oral Literature and the Formula (ed. Benjamin A. Stolz and Richard S. Shannon III; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), pp. 127–55. Fishbane, Michael, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). ———. ‘From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism’, in Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 64–78. Fishman, Talya, ‘Guarding Oral Transmission: Within and Between Cultures’, OT 25 (2010), pp. 41–56. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., S. J., The Gospel According to Luke (I–IX) (AB 28; Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1981). Fleddermann, Harry, Mark and Q: A Study of the Overlap Texts (BETL 122; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1995). Floyd, Michael H., ‘The Production of Prophetic Books in the Early Second Temple Period’, in Prophets, Prophecy, and Prophetic Texts in Second Temple Judaism (ed. Michael H. Floyd and Robert D. Haak; London: T&T ClarkInternational, 2006), pp. 276–97. ———. ‘ “Write the revelation!” (Hab 2:2): Re-imagining the Cultural History of Prophecy’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 103–43. Foley, John Miles, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

318 Bibliography ———. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). ———. ‘Literary Art and Oral Tradition in Old English and Serbian Poetry’, in OralFormulaic Theory: A Folklore Casebook (ed. John Miles Foley; New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 337–77. ———. ‘Memory in Oral Tradition’, in Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, pp. 83–96. ———. ‘Orality, Textuality, and Interpretation’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 34–45. ———. Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). ———. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). ———. Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, and Martin S. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Forbes, Clarence A., ‘The Education and Training of Slaves in Antiquity’, TAPA 86 (1955), pp. 321–60. Ford, Andrew, ‘From Letters to Literature: Reading the “Song Culture” of Classical Greece’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 15–37. Foster, Paul, ‘The M-Source: Its History and Demise in Biblical Scholarship’, in Foster et al., eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 591–616. ———. ‘Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research’, JSHJ 10 (2012), pp. 191–227. Foster, Paul, Andrew Gregory, John S. Kloppenborg, and Joseph Verheyden (eds.), New Studies in the Synoptic Problem: Oxford Conference, April 2008 (Festschrift Christopher M. Tuckett; BETL, 239; Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2011). Fraade, Steven D., ‘Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim,’ OT 14 (1999), pp. 33–51. Frankemölle, Hubert, Matthäus Kommentar I (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1994). Friedman, Shamma, ‘The Primacy of Tosefta to Mishnah in Synoptic Parallels’, in Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual, and Intertextual Studies (ed. Harry Fox and Tirzah Meacham; Jerusalem: KTAV, 1999), pp. 99–121. Fuller, Reginald H., ‘Classics and the Gospels: The Seminar’, in Walker, ed., The Relationships Among the Gospels, pp. 173–92. Gamble, Harry Y., Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). ———. ‘Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon’, in Horton, ed., The Earliest Gospels, pp. 26–39. Gatzweiler, K., ‘Les récits de miracles dans l’Évangile selon Matthieu’, in Didier, ed., L’Évangile selon Matthieu, pp. 209–20. Gerhardsson, Birger, The Gospel Tradition (ConBNT 15; Lund: Gleerup, 1986). Gerlach, Jens, ‘ “Der gedankenlose Excerptor”? Anmerkungen zur Praxis byzantinischer Gnomologen und ihrer philologischen Erfassung’, in Selecta colligere I: Akten des Kolloquiums ‘Sammeln, Neuordnen, Neues Schaffen. Methoden der Überlieferung von Texten in der Spätantike und in Byzanz’ (Jena, 21.–23. November 2002) (ed. R. M. Piccione and M. Perkhams; Allesandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003), pp. 69–93.

Bibliography

319

———. Gnomica Democritea: Studien zur gnomologischen Überlieferung der Ethik Demokrits und zum Corpus Parisinum mit einer Edition der Democritea des Corpus Parisinum (Serta Graeca 26; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2008). Gnilka, Joachim, Das Matthäusevangelium, Teil I: Kommentar zu Kap. 1,1–13,58 (Freiburg: Herder, 1986). Goldhill, Simon, ‘The Anecdote: Exploring the Boundaries between Oral and Literate Performance in the Second Sophistic’, in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (ed. William A. Johnson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 96–115. Goodacre, Mark, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). Goody, Jack, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ———. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ———. The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2000). Goulder, Michael D., Luke: A New Paradigm (JSNTSup 20; 2 vols.; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989). ———. Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974). Gorman, Heather M., ‘Crank or Creative Genius? How Ancient Rhetoric Makes Sense of Luke’s Order’, in Poirier and Peterson, eds., Markan Priority Without Q, pp. 62–81. Gourinat, Jean-Baptiste, ‘Aëtius et Arius Didyme sources de Stobée’, in Reydams-Schils, eds., Thinking Through Excerpts, pp. 142–201. Greenstein, Edward L., ‘Misquotation of Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume (ed. Barry Walfish; Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), pp. 71–83. Grundmann, Walter, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1971). Guelich, Robert A., The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco: Word Books, 1982). Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication (trans. William Whobrey; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Gundry, Robert, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982). Häfner, Gerd, ‘Das Matthäusevangelium und seine Quellen’, in The Gospel of Matthew at the Crossroads of Early Christianity (ed. Donald Senior; BETL 243; Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 25–71. Hägg, Tomas, ‘Orality, Literacy, and the ‘Readership’ of the Early Greek Novel’, in Contexts of Pre-novel Narrative: The European Tradition (ed. Roy Eriksen; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 47–81. Hagner, Donald, Matthew 1–13 (WBC 33A; Dallas: Word Books, 1993). Hahn, Ferdinand, ‘Zur Verschriftlichung mündlicher Tradition in der Bibel’, ZRGG 39 (1987), pp. 307–18. Hanks, W. F., ‘Text and Textuality’, ARA 18 (1989), pp. 95–127. Haines-Eitzen, Kim, ‘ “Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing”: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity’, JECS 6 (1998), pp. 629–46. ———. Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

320 Bibliography ———. ‘Scribes, Greece and Rome’, in Encyclopedia of Ancient History (ed. Roger Bagnall, Kai Bordersen, Craig Champion et al.; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 6086–7. Hanson, Ann Ellis, ‘Ancient Illiteracy’, in Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, pp. 159–98. Harnack, Adolf, The Sayings of Jesus: The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Luke (trans. J. R. Wilkinson; London: Williams & Norgate; New York: Putnam, 1908). Harris, William H., Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Haslam, Michael W., ‘The Homer Lexicon of Apollonius Sophista: Part I. Composition and Constituents’, CPh 89 (1994), pp. 1–45. ———. ‘The Homer Lexicon of Apollonius Sophista: Part II. Identity and Transmission’, CPh 89 (1994), pp. 107–19. Hawkins, John C., ‘The Arrangement of Materials in St. Matthew viii.-ix’, ExpTim 12 (1900–1901), pp. 471–74. ———. Horae Synopticae: Contributions to the Study of the Synoptic Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd ed., 1909). ———. ‘Probabilities as to the So-called Double Tradition of St. Matthew and St. Luke’, in Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 96–138. ———. ‘Three Limitations to Luke’s Use of St. Mark’s Gospel’, in Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 29–94. Hayes, Christine, ‘Halakhah le-Mose mi-Sinai in Rabbinic Sources: A Methodological Case Study’, in Cohen, ed., The Synoptic Problem, pp. 61–117. Heil, Christoph, ‘Antike Textverarbeitung: Zum Verhältnis von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit bei Homer und im Spruchevangelium Q’, in Das Spruchevangelium Q und der historische Jesus (SBAB 58; Stuttgart: KBW, 2014), pp. 27–40. Heil, C., G. Harb, and M. Hölscher (eds.), Built on Rock or Sand? Q Studies – Retrospects, Introspects, and Prospects (BETL; Leuven, Peeters, forthcoming). Held, Joachim Heinz, ‘Matthew as Interpreter of the Miracle Stories’, in Bornkamm, Barth, and Held, eds., Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, pp. 165–299. Henaut, Barry, Oral Tradition and the Gospels: The Problem of Mark 4 (JSNTSup 82; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993). Hezser, Catherine, ‘The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Late Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalmi and the Roman Law Codes’, in The Talmud Yerushalmi and GraecoRoman Culture, vol. 1 (ed. Peter Schäfer; 2 vols.; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1998), pp. 581–641. ———. Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ 81; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). ———. ‘Roman Law and Rabbinic Legal Composition’, in Fonrobert and Jaffee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud, pp. 144–64. Holladay, Carl R., ‘Jesus’ Ministry in Galilee in Matthew 8–10’, in Gospel Images of Jesus in Church Tradition and in Biblical Scholarship (ed. Christos Krakolis, Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, and Sviatoslav Rogalsky; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), pp. 337–48. Hopkins, Keith, ‘Conquest by Book’, in Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, pp. 133–58. Horsley, Richard A., Revolt of the Scribes: Resistance and Apocalyptic Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010). Horsley, Richard A., Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley (eds.), Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006). Horsley, Richard A., with Jonathan A. Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999).

Bibliography

321

Horster, Marietta, ‘Literarische Elite? Überlegungen zum sozialen Kontext lateinischer Fachschriftsteller im Republik und Kaiserzeit’, in Antike Fachschriftsteller: Literarischer Diskurs und sozialer Kontext (ed. Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003), pp. 176–97. Horton, Charles (ed.), The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – the Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45 (JSNTSup 259; London: T&T Clark International, 2004). Humphrey, J. H. (ed.), Literacy in the Roman World (JRASup., 3; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991). Hurtado, Larry W., ‘Oral Fixation and New Testament Studies? “Orality”, “Performance”, and Reading Texts in Early Christianity’, NTS 60 (2014), pp. 321–40. ———. ‘What Do the Earliest Christian Manuscripts Tell Us about Their Readers?’, in The World of Jesus and the Early Church: Identity and Interpretation in Early Communities of Faith (ed. Craig A. Evans; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011), pp. 179–92. Hutchins, Edwin, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, JoP 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77. Hymes, Dell, ‘Breakthrough into Performance’, in Folklore: Performance and Communication (ed. Dan Ben Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein; The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 11–74. Ihm, Sibylle, Ps.-Maximus Confessor: erste kritische Edition einer Redaktion des sacroProfanen Florilegiums Loci Communes (Palingenesia 73; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001). Innes, Matthew, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in Early Medieval Society’, PastPresent 158 (1998), pp. 3–36. Isaac, Benjamin, ‘The Babatha Archive: A Review Article’, IEJ 42 (1992), pp. 62–75. Jacob, Christian, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian’, in Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire (ed. David Braund and John Wilkins; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 85–100. Jaffee, Martin, S., ‘Gender and Otherness in Rabbinic Oral Culture: On Gentiles, Undisciplined Jews, and their Women’, in Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, pp. 21–43. ———. ‘The Oral-Cultural Context of the Talmud Yerushalmi: Greco-Roman Rhetorical Paideia, Discipleship, and the Concept of Oral Torah’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 27–73. ———. ‘Rabbinic Authorship as a Collective Enterprise’, in Fonrobert and Jaffee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud, pp. 17–37. ———. Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Jakobson, Roman, and Petr Bogatyrev, ‘On the Boundary between Studies of Folklore and Literature’, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska; trans. Herbert Eagel; repr.; Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971), pp. 91–93. Johnson, William A., ‘The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose’, ZPE 100 (1994), pp. 65–68. ———. ‘Oral Performance and the Composition of Herodotus’ Histories’, GRBS 35 (1994), pp. 229–54. ———. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). ———. ‘Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity’, AJPh 121 (2000), pp. 593–627.

322 Bibliography Joseph, Simon, Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (WUNT 2/333; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2012). Jouanna, Jacques, Hippocrate: Pour une archéologie de l’École de Cnide (Collection d’Études Anciennes 141; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2nd ed., 2009). Junack, Klaus, ‘Abschreibpraktiken und Schreibergewohnheiten in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Textüberlieferung’, in New Testament Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis: Essays in Honour of Bruce M. Metzger (ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee; Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 277–95. Kahn, Charles H., ‘Writing Philosophy: Prose and Poetry from Thales to Plato’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 139–61. Kaster, Robert A. Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Kelber, Werner H., ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism’, OT 17 (2002), pp. 55–86. ———. ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as Processes of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22. ———. The Oral and the Written Gospel (repr., Philadelphia: Fortress, 1997). ———. ‘The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as Mnemohistory’, in Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber (RBS 74; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 265–96. Kennedy, George, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, in Walker, ed., The Relationships Among the Gospels, pp. 125–55. Kenney, E. J., ‘Books and Readers in the Roman World’, in Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2: Latin Literature (ed. E. J. Kenny and W. V. Clausen; 2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3–32. Kingsbury, Jack Dean, ‘Observations on the “Miracle Chapters” of Matthew 8–9’, CBQ 40 (1978), pp. 559–73. Kirk, Alan, ‘The Composed Life of the Syriac Menander’, SR/SR 26 (1997), pp. 169–83. ———. The Composition of the Sayings Source (NovTSup 91; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ———. ‘ “Love Your Enemies”, the Golden Rule, and Ancient Reciprocity (Luke 6:27– 35)’, JBL 122 (2003), pp. 667–86. ———. ‘Some Compositional Conventions of Hellenistic Wisdom Texts, and the Juxtaposition of 4:1–13; 6:20b–49; and 7:1–10 in Q’, JBL 116 (1997), pp. 235–57. Klahr, David, William G. Chase, and Eugene A. Lovelace, ‘Structure and Process in Alphabetic Retrieval’, JExpPsy 9 (1983), pp. 462–77. Kloppenborg, John S., Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000). ———. The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (SAC; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987). ———. ‘Literary Convention, Self-Evidence, and the Social History of the Q People’, in Synoptic Problems, pp. 237–65. ———. ‘On Dispensing with Q? Goodacre on the Relation of Luke to Matthew’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 210–36. ———. ‘Oral and Literate Contexts for the Sayings Gospel Q’, in Heil, Harb, and Hölscher, eds., Built on Rock or Sand?, pp. 1–24 (typescript). ———. Synoptic Problems: Collected Essays (WUNT 329; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014). ———. ‘Variation and Reproduction of the Double Tradition and Oral Q?’ in Synoptic Problems, pp. 91–119.

Bibliography

323

Knoop, Ulrich, ‘Zum Verhältnis von geschriebener und gesprochener Sprache: Anmerkun­gen aus historischer Sicht’, in Homo scribens: Perspektiven der Schriftlichkeitsforschung (ed. Jürgen Bauermann, Hartmut Günther, and Ulrich Knoop; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), pp. 217–29. Koester, Helmut, ‘GNOMAI DIAPHOROI: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity’, in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, pp. 114–57. Konstan, David, ‘Excerpting as a Reading Practice’, in Reydams-Schils, eds., Thinking Through Excerpts, pp. 9–22. Kümmel, Werner Georg, Introduction to the New Testament (trans. Howard Clark Kee; Nashville: Abingdon, rev. ed., 1975). Lalou, Élisabeth (ed.), Les tablettes à écrire de l’antiquité à l’époque modern (Brepols: Turnhout, 1992). Lambrecht, Jan, The Sermon on the Mount: Proclamation and Exhortation (GNS 14; Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985). Larsen, Mogens Trolle, ‘What They Wrote on Clay’, in Schousboue and Larsen, eds., Literacy and Society, pp. 121–48. Last, Richard, ‘Communities That Write: Christ-Groups, Associations, and Gospel Communities’, NTS 58 (2012), pp. 173–98. Lausberg, Heinrich, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study (ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson; trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton; Leiden: Brill, 1998). Lewis, Naphtali, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). Lewis, Naphtali, Yigael Yadin, and Jonas Greenfield, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989). Lewis, Nicole Denzey, and Justine Ariel Blount, ‘Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices’, JBL 133 (2014), pp. 399–419. Lionarons, Joyce Tally, ‘Textual Appropriation and Scribal (Re)Performance in a Composite Homily: The Case for a New Edition of Wulfstan’s De Temporibus Anticristi’, in Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context (ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons; Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2004), pp. 67–93. Loprieno, A. (ed.), Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales (repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 2000). Luce, T. J., Livy: The Composition of His History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Luz, Ulrich, ‘Intertexts in the Gospel of Matthew’, HTR 97 (2004) pp. 119–37. ———. ‘Looking at Q Through the Eyes of Matthew’, in Foster et al., eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 571–89. ———. ‘Matthäus und Q’, in Von Jesus zum Christus: Christologische Studien (Festschrift Paul Hoffmann; ed. Rudolf Hoppe and Ulrich Busse; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 201–15. ———. Matthew 1–7: A Continental Commentary (trans. Wilhelm C. Linss; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989). ———. Matthew 8–20: A Commentary (trans. James E. Crouch; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). ———. ‘Die Wundergeschichten von Mt 8–9’, in Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament (ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne with Otto Betz; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987), pp. 149–65.

324 Bibliography Macdonald, M. C. A., ‘Literacy in an Oral Environment’, in Writing in Ancient Near Eastern Society (Festschrift Alan R. Millard; ed. Piotr Bienkowski, Christopher Mee, and Elizabeth Slater; Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 426; New York: T&T Clark International, 2005), pp. 49–118. Machan, Tim William, ‘Editing, Orality, and Late Middle English Texts’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 229–45. Mack, Burton, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). ———. Rhetoric and the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). Malafouris, Lambros, ‘The Brain-Artefact Interface (BAI): A Challenge for Archaeology and Neuroscience’, SocCogAffectNeurosci 5 (2010), pp. 264–73. ———. ‘The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate’, in Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (ed. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004), pp. 53–62. Mandel, Paul, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 74–106. Mandler, Jean M., Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984). Mandler, Jean M., and Nancy S. Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, CognPsych 9 (1977) pp. 111–51. Marichal, Robert, ‘Les tablettes à écrire dans le monde romaine’, in Lalou, ed., Les tablettes à écrire, pp. 165–85. Mathys, Hans-Peter, ‘Goldene Regel (Judentum)’, TRE, vol. 13, pp. 570–73. Mattila, Sharon Lea, ‘A Question Too Often Neglected’, NTS 41 (1995), pp. 199–217. McDonnell, Myles, ‘Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’, CQ ns 46 (1996), pp. 469–91. Mejer, Jorgen, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978). Melve, Leidulf, ‘Literacy – Aurality – Orality: A Survey of Recent Research into the Orality/Literacy Complex of the Latin Middle Ages’, SO 78 (2003), pp. 143–97. Mensching, Eckhart, Favorin von Arelate: Der erste Teil der Fragmente Memorabilien und Omnigena Historia (Texte und Kommentare 3; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963). Merten, Klaus, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg (eds.), Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (Opladen: West­ deutscher Verlag, 1994). Miller, George, ‘Information and Memory’, SciAm (August 1956), pp. 42–46. Mirza, Sarah Zubair, ‘Oral Tradition and Scribal Conventions in the Documents Attributed to the Prophet Muhammed’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010). Montanari, Franco, ‘Correcting a Copy, Editing a Text: Alexandrian Ekdosis and Papyri’, in From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship (ed. Franco Montanari and Lara Pagani; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 1–15. Morgan, Teresa, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge Classical Studies; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Morrow, William S., ‘Mesopotamian Scribal Techniques and Deuteronomic Composition: Notes on Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation’, ZARG 6 (2000), pp. 303–13.

Bibliography

325

Mournet, Terence C., Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q (WUNT 2/195; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2005). Müller, Jan-Dirk, ‘The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to Print’, in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication, pp. 33–44. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, ‘Representations of Oral Tradition in Medieval Irish Literature’, LangCommun 9 (1989), pp. 143–58. Nasr, Sayyed Hossein, ‘Oral Transmission and the Book in Islamic Education: The Spoken and the Written Word’, in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (ed. George N. Atiyeh; Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 57–70. Neirynck, Frans, ‘The Gospel of Matthew and Literary Criticism: A Critical Analysis of A. Gaboury’s Hypothesis’, in Didier, ed., L’Évangile selon Matthieu, pp. 37–70. ———. ‘La rédaction matthéenne et la structure du premier évangile’, in Evangelica: Gospel Studies – Etudes d’évangile. Collected Essays by Frans Neirynck (ed. F. van Segbroeck; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1982), pp. 3–33. ———. ‘Matthew 4:32–5:2 and the Matthean Composition of 4:23–11:1’, in The Interrelations of the Gospels (ed. David L. Dungan; BETL 95; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Peeters, 1990), pp. 23–46. ———. ‘Synoptic Problem’, in New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), pp. 587–95. Nelson, David W., ‘Oral Orthography: Early Rabbinic Oral and Written Transmission of Parallel Midrashic Tradition’, AJS Review 29 (2005), pp. 1–32. Neusner, Jacob, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York: Garland, 1987). Neville, David J., Mark’s Gospel – Prior or Posterior? A Reappraisal of the Phenomenon of Order (JSNTSup 222; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002). Niebuhr, Karl-Wilhelm, Gesetz und Paränese (WUNT 2/28; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987). Nilsson, Martin P., Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, vol. 2, Die Hellenistische und Römische Zeit (Munich: Beck, 2nd ed., 1961). Nissinen, Martti, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted, and Invented: Orality and Writtenness in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 235–71. O’Brien O’Keefe, Katherine, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (CSASE 4; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Olson, David R., The World On Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Oppenheim, A. Leo, ‘The Position of the Intellectual in Mesopotamian Society’, Daedalus 104 (1975), pp. 37–46. Otter-Beaujean, Anke, ‘Schriftliche Überlieferung versus mündliche Tradition – zum Stellenwert der Buyruk-Handschriften im Alevitum’, in Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East (ed. A. Otter-Beaujean, K. Kehl-Bodrogi, and B. Kellner Heinkele; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 213–26. Palmer, N. Humphrey, ‘Lachmann’s Argument’, NTS 13 (1966–67), pp. 368–78. Parássoglou, George M., ‘ΔΕΞΙΑ ΧΕΙΡ ΚΑΙ ΓΟΝΥ: Some Thoughts on the Postures of the Ancient Greeks and Romans When Writing on Papyrus Rolls’, Scrittura e Civilita 3 (1979), pp. 5–22. Parkes, M. B., Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991).

326 Bibliography Parks, Ward, ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, in Comparative Research On Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (ed. John Miles Foley; Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), pp. 511–32. ———. ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 46–61. Pearce, Laurie E., ‘The Scribes and Scholars of Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (Jack M. Sasson, ed.; 4 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 2265–78. Pelliccia, Hayden, ‘Two Points about Rhapsodes’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds., Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 97–116. Pelling, C. B. R., ‘Plutarch’s Adaptation of His Source-Material’, JHS 100 (1980), pp. 127–40. ———. ‘Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives’, JHS 99 (1979) pp. 74–96. Petersen, William L., Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (VCSup 25; Leiden: Brill, 1994). Piper, Ronald A., Wisdom in the Q-Tradition: The Aphoristic Teaching of Jesus (SNTSM 61; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Poirier, John C., ‘The Roll, the Codex, the Wax Tablet, and the Synoptic Problem’, JSNT 35 (2012), pp. 3–30. Poirier, John C., and Jeffrey Peterson (eds.), Markan Priority Without Q: Explorations in the Farrer Hypothesis (LNTS 455; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015). Poltermann, Andreas (ed.), Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen interkulturellen Kommunikation und Übersetzung (Berlin: Schmidt, 1995). Poynton, J. B., ‘Books and Authors’, Greece & Rome 3 (1934), pp. 94–104. Quinn, Kenneth, ‘Poet and Audience in the Augustan Age’, ANRW II.30.1 (1982), pp. 75–180. Rabinowitz, Mitchell, and Jean M. Mandler, ‘Organization and Information Retrieval’, JExpPsy 9 (1983), pp. 430–39. Raible, Wolfgang, ‘Zur Entwicklung von Alphabetschrift-Systemen’, in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991), pp. 5–42. Rainy, Anson F., ‘The Scribe at Ugarit’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3 (1969), pp. 126–46. Rapp, Claudia, ‘Holy Texts, Holy Men, and Holy Scribes: Aspects of Scriptural Holiness in Late Antiquity’, in The Early Christian Book (ed. William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran; Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007), pp. 194–224. Redford, Donald B., ‘Scribe and Speaker’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 145–218. Reiser, Marius, ‘Die Stellung der Evangelien in der antiken Literaturgeschichte’, ZNW 90 (1999), pp. 1–27. Reydams-Schils, G. (ed.), Thinking Through Excerpts: Studies in Stobaeus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). Rhoads, David, and Joanna Dewey, ‘Performance Criticism: A Paradigm Shift in New Testament Studies’, in From Text to Performance: Narrative and Performance Criticism in Dialogue and Debate (ed. Kelly R. Iverson; BPC 10; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), pp. 1–26. Richard, Marcel, ‘Florilèges Grecs’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique 5 (1964) cols. 475–512.

Bibliography

327

Robbins, Vernon K., ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition and the Pre-Gospel Traditions: A New Approach’, in The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism (ed. Camille Focant; BETL 110; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1993), pp. 111–47. ———. ‘Rhetorical Composition and the Beelzebul Controversy’, in Burton L. Mack and Vernon K. Robbins, Patterns of Persuasion in the Gospels (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1989), pp. 161–93. ———. ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act in Plutarch and the Gospels’, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (ed. Duane F. Watson; JSNTSup 50; Sheffield: JSOT Press,1991), pp. 142–68. Robinson, Fred C., The Editing of Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Robinson, James M., The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). ———. Jesus According to the Earliest Witness (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007). ———. ‘ “LOGOI SOPHON” ’: On the Gattung of Q’, in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, pp. 71–113. ———. ‘The Matthean Trajectory from Q to Mark’, in Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Bible and Culture (Festschrift Hans Dieter Betz; ed. Adela Yarbro Collins; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 122–55. Robinson, James M. (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 3rd ed., 1990). Robinson, James M., and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). Robinson, James M., Paul Hoffmann, and John S. Kloppenborg (eds.), The Critical Edition of Q (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress; Leuven: Peeters, 2000). Rodríguez, Rafael, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (LNTS 407; London: T&T Clark International, 2010). ———. Oral Tradition and the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014). Roediger, Henry L. (ed.), Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, vol. 2: Cognitive Psychology of Memory (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008). Rollens, Sarah E., Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project in the Sayings Gospel Q (WUNT 2/374; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014). ———. ‘ “Why Do You Not Judge for Yourselves What Is Right?” A Consideration of the Synoptic Relationship Between Mt 5,25–26 and Lk 12,57–59’, ETL 84 (2010), pp. 449–69. Rollston, Christopher A., ‘Scribal Curriculum During the First Temple Period: Epigraphic, Hebrew and Biblical Evidence’, in Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, pp. 71–101. Römer, Thomas, and Philip R. Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Römer and Davies, eds., Writing the Bible, pp. 1–9. Rosenthal, Franz, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (AnOr 24; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1947). Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, LangCommun 9 (1989), pp. 175–91. Rovner, Jay, ‘Rhetorical Strategy and Dialectical Necessity in the Babylonian Talmud: The Case of Kiddushin 34a–35a’, HUCA 65 (1994), pp. 177–231. Royse, James R., Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

328 Bibliography Rubin, David C., Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Russo, Joseph, ‘Prose Genres for Performance of Traditional Wisdom in Ancient Greece: Proverb, Maxim, Apothegm’, in Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece (ed. Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 49–64. Salles, Catherine, Lire à Rome (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992). Sanday, W., ‘The Conditions under which the Gospels Were Written, in Their Bearing Upon Some Difficulties of the Synoptic Problem’, in Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 3–26. Sanday, W. (ed.), Studies in the Synoptic Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911). Sanders, E. P., ‘The Argument from Order and the Relationship Between Matthew and Luke’, NTS 15 (1969), pp. 249–61. Sanders, E. P., and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989). Sanderson, Judith, An Exodus Scroll from Qumran: 4QpaleoExodm and the Samaritan Tradition (HSS; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). Sato, Migako, Q und Prophetie: Studien zur Gattungs- und Traditionsgeschichte der Quelle Q (WUNT 2/29; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1988). Schäffer, Peter, ‘Aufbau und redaktionelle Identität in der Hekhalot Zutarti’, in HekhalotStudien (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1988), pp. 50–62. ———. ‘Zum Problem der redaktionellen Identität von Hekhalot Rabbiti, in HekhalotStudien (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1988) pp. 63–74. Schams, Christine, Jewish Scribes in the Second Temple Period (JSOTSup 291; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998). Schaper, Joachim (ed.), Die Textualisierung der Religion (FzAT, 62; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2009) Schellenberg, Annette, ‘A “lying pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8)? Orality and Writing in the Formation of the Prophetic Books’, in Weissenreider and Coote, eds., The Interface of Orality and Writing, pp. 285–309. Schellenberg, Ryan S., Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). Schmidt, Brian B. (ed.), Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2015). Schnackenburg, Rudolf, Matthäusevangelium 1,1–16,20 (NEB; Würzburg: Verlag, 1985). Schousboue, Karen, and Mogens Trolle Larsen (eds.), Literacy and Society (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1989). Schröter, Jens, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997). Schweizer, Eduard, The Good News According to Matthew (trans. David E. Green; Atlanta: John Knox, 1975). Searby, Denis M., The Corpus Parisinum: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text with Commentary and English Translation (A Medieval Anthology of Greek Texts from the Pre-Socratics to the Church Fathers 600 B.C.–700 A.D. (2 vols.; Lewiston: Mellen, 2007). ———. ‘The Intertitles of Stobaeus: Condensing a Culture” ’, in Reydams-Schils, eds., Thinking Through Excerpts, pp. 23–70.

Bibliography

329

———. ‘Non-Lucian Sources for Demonax, With a New Collection of “Fragments’, SO 83 (2008), pp. 120–47. Senior, Donald, Matthew (ANTC; Nashville: Abingdon, 1998). Sharpe, John Lawrence III, ‘The Dakhleh Tablets and Some Codicological Considerations’, in Lalou, ed., Les tablettes à écrire, pp. 127–48. Shiner, Whitney, Proclaiming the Gospel: First-century Performance of Mark (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003). Sijpesteijn, P. J., ‘A Scribe at Work’, BASP 16 (1979), pp. 277–80. Skeat, T. C., ‘The Origin of the Christian Codex’, ZPE 102 (1994), pp. 263–8. Skydsgaard, Jens Eric, Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro’s de Re Rustica (ARID 4; Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1968). Small, Jocelyn Penny, ‘Artificial Memory and the Writing Habits of the Literate’, Helios 22 (1995), pp. 159–66. ———. ‘Memory and the Roman Orator’, in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric (ed. Jon Dominik and Jon Hall; Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), pp. 195–207. ———. Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997). Smith, Daniel A., ‘From Parable to Logion: Oral and Scribal Factors in the Composition of Q’, in Heil, Harb, and Hölscher, eds., Built on Rock or Sand?, pp. 1–33 (typescript). ———. ‘Matthew and Q: The Matthean Deployment of Q and Mark in the Apocalyptic Discourse’, ETL 85 (2009), pp. 99–116. Smith, Eliot R., and Sarah Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, in Social Cognition (ed. Marilynn B. Brewer and Miles Hewstone; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 5–27. Snyder, H. Gregory, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews, and Christians (London: Routledge, 2000). Squire, Larry R., and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999). Stanton, Graham H., ‘Early Christian Preference for the Codex’, in Horton, ed., The Earliest Gospels, pp. 40–9. ———. A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992). ———. Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Starr, Raymond J., ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ ns 37 (1987), pp. 213–23. ———. ‘Lectores and Roman Reading’, CJ 86 (1991), pp. 337–43. Steele, John M., ‘Late Babylonian Ziqpu-star Lists: Written or Remembered Traditions of Knowledge?’, in Traditions of Written Knowledge in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (ed. Dahlia Bawanypeck and Annette Imhausen; Münster: Ugarit, 2014), pp. 123–51. Stern, David, ‘On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds., Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 227–52. Stemberger, Günter, ‘Mündliche Tora in schriftlicher Form: Zur Redaktion und Weitergabe früher rabbinischer Texte’, in Schaper, ed., Die Textualisierung der Religion, pp. 222–37. Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Streeter, B. H., The Four Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1930). ———. ‘On the Original Order of Q’, in Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 141–64.

330 Bibliography Sutton, John, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary; Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010), pp. 189–225. ———. ‘Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris; New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 37–55. Swanson, Dwight D., The Temple Scroll and the Bible: The Methodology of the 11QT (STDJ 14; Leiden: Brill, 1995). Sweeny, Armin, A Full Hearing. Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Syreeni, Kari, The Making of the Sermon on the Mount: A Procedural Analysis of Matthew’s Redactoral Activity, Part 1: Methodology and Compositional Analysis (Helsinki: Soumalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987). Talbert, Charles, ‘Oral and Independent or Literary and Interdependent? A Response to Albert B. Lord’, in Walker, ed., The Relationships Among the Gospels, pp. 93–102. Talmon, Shemaryahu, ‘Oral Tradition and Written Tradition, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period’, in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, pp. 121–58. ———. ‘The Textual Study of the Bible – a New Outlook’, in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (ed. Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 321–400. Taylor, Vincent, ‘The Order of Q’, in New Testament Essays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 90–94. ———. ‘The Original Order of Q’, in New Testament Essays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 95–117. Tedlock, Dennis, ‘The Speaker of Tales Has More Than One String to Play On’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox Intexta, pp. 5–33. Thom, Johan C., The Pythagorean Golden Verses with Introduction and Commentary (RGRW 123; Leiden: Brill, 1995). Thomas, Christine M., ‘Word and Deed: The Acts of Peter and Orality’, Apocrypha 3 (1992), pp. 125–64. Thomas, Johannes, Der jüdische Phokylides: Formgeschichtliche Zugänge zu PseudoPhokylides und Vergleich mit der neutestamentlichen Paränese (NTOA 23; Freiburg: Universitäts Verlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). Thomas, Rosalind, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ———. Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ———. ‘Prose Performance Texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the Late Fifth and Early Fourth Centuries’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 162–88. ———. Review of Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity, CPh 95 (2000), pp. 486–90. Thompson, Dorothy J., ‘Language and Literacy in Early Hellenistic Egypt’, in Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (ed. Per Bilde; SHC 3; Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1992), pp. 39–52. ———. ‘Literacy and Administration in Early Ptolemaic Egypt’, SAOC 51 (1992), pp. 323–36. Thompson, William G., ‘Reflections on the Composition of Mt 8:1–9:34’, CBQ 33 (1971), pp. 365–88.

Bibliography

331

Tigay, Jeffrey H., ‘Conflation as a Redactional Technique’, in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 53–96. Tödt, H. E., The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition (trans. Dorothea M. Barton; Philadelphia: SCM/Westminster, 1965). Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (CSOLC 22; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Totelin, Laurence, Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fourth- and Fifth-century Greece (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Tov, Emanuel, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (STDJ 54; Leiden: Brill, 2004). Tuckett, Christopher M., ‘Arguments from Order: Definition and Evaluation’, in Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (ed. Christopher M. Tuckett; JSNTSup 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), pp. 197–219. ———. Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996). ———. The Revival of the Griesbach Hypothesis: An Analysis and Appraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Tyson, Joseph B., ‘Sequential Parallelism in the Synoptic Gospels’, NTS 22 (1975–76), pp. 276–308. Ulrich, Eugene, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1999). ———. ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 79–100. Valantasis, Richard, The New Q: A Fresh Translation with Commentary (New York: T&T Clark International, 2005). Valette-Cagnac, Emmanuelle, La lecture à Rome: Rites et pratiques (Paris: Belin, 1997). van Hook, LaRue, ‘Alcidamas Versus Isocrates: The Spoken Versus the Written Word’, Classical Weekly 12 (1919), pp. 89–94. Van Seters, John, ‘Prophetic Orality in the Context of the Ancient Near East: A Response to Culley, Crenshaw, and Davies’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, eds., Writings and Speech, pp. 83–8. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Vanstiphout, H. L. J., ‘Memory and Literacy in Ancient Western Asia’, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (ed. Jack M. Sasson; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 2181–96. ———. ‘On the Old Babylonian Eduba Curriculum’, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East (ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald; Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 3–16. Verhoogt, A. M. F. W., Menches, Komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris: The Doings and Dealings of a Village Scribe in the Late Ptolemaic Period (120–110 B. C.) (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Wachsmuth, Curt, Studien zu den griechischen Florilegien (Berlin: Weidmann, 1882). Walker, William O. Jr. (ed.), The Relationships Among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978). Wansbrough, Henry (ed.), Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (JSNTSup 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991).

332 Bibliography Watson, Francis, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). ———. ‘Q as Hypothesis: A Study in Methodology’, NTS 55 (2009), pp. 397–415. Webb, Ruth, ‘The Progymnasmata as Practice’, in Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (ed. Yun Lee Too; Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 289–316. Wedderburn, Alexander J. M., Jesus and the Historians (WUNT 269; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2010). Weissenreider, Annette, and Robert B. Coote (eds.), The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (WUNT, 260; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010). Westenholz, Joan Goodnick, ‘Oral Traditions and Written Texts in the Cycle of Akkade’, in Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural? (ed. Marianna E. Vogelzang and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout; Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992), pp. 123–54. Whisenant, Jessica, ‘Let the Stones Speak! Document Production by Iron Age West Semitic Scribal Institutions and the Question of Biblical Sources’, in Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, pp. 133–60. Whittaker, John, ‘The Value of Indirect Tradition in the Establishment of Greek Philosophical Texts, or the Art of Misquotation’, in Editing Greek and Latin Texts: Papers Given at the Twenty-Third Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 6–7 November 1987 (ed. John N. Grant; New York: AMS, 1989), pp. 63–95. Whitaker, Richard, ‘Orality and Literacy in the Poetic Traditions of Archaic Greece and Southern Africa’, in Worthington, ed., Voice into Text, pp. 205–17. Wiefel, Wolfgang, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (ThHK 1; Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1998). Wifstrand, Alfred, Epochs and Styles: Selected Writings on the New Testament, Greek Language and Culture in the Post-Classical Era (ed. Lars Rydbeck and Stanley E. Porter; trans. Denis Searby; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2005). Williams, Megan, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Williams, Ronald J., ‘Scribal Training in Ancient Egypt’, JAOS 92 (1972), pp. 214–21. Wilson, Walter T., The Mysteries of Righteousness: The Literary Composition and Genre of the Sentences of Pseudo-Phyocylides (TSAJ 40; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1994). Wire, Antoinette, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance (BPC 3; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). Wittern, Renate, ‘Gattungen im Corpus Hippocraticum’, in Gattungen wissenschaftlicher Literatur in der Antike (ed. Wolfgang Kullmann, Jochen Althoff, and Markus Asper; ScriptOralia 95; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), pp. 17–36. Wolf, Alois, ‘Medieval Heroic Traditions and Their Transitions from Orality to Literacy’, in Doane and Pasternack, eds., Vox intexta, pp. 67–88. Worthen, J. B., and R. R. Hunt, ‘Mnemonics: Underlying Processes and Practical Applications’, in Roediger, ed., Learning and Memory, pp. 145–56. Worthington, Ian, ‘Greek Oratory and the Oral/Literate Division’, in Worthington, ed., Voice into Text, pp. 165–77. Worthington, Ian (ed.), Voice into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Wrege, Hans-Theo, Die Überlieferungsgeschichte der Bergpredigt (WUNT 9; J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1968).

Bibliography

333

Youngquist, Linden, ‘Matthew and Q’ (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 2003). ———. ‘Matthew, Mark, and Q: A Literary Exploration’, in Mark and Matthew I (ed. E. M. Becker and A. Runesson; WUNT 271; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2011), pp. 233–61. Yuen-Collingridge, Rachel, and Malcolm Choat, ‘The Copyist at Work: Scribal Practice in Duplicate Documents’, in Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, Genève, 1–21 août 2010 (ed. Paul Schubert; Recherches et Rencontres 30; Geneva: Droz, 2012), pp. 827–34. Yunis, Harvey, ‘Introduction: Why Written Texts?’, in Yunis, ed., Written Texts, pp. 1–14. Yunis, Harvey (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Zeller, Dieter, Die weisheitliche Mahnsprüche bei den Synoptikern (FzB 17; Würzburg: Echter, 1977). Zelnick-Abramovitz, Rachel, ‘Look and Listen: History Performed and Incribed’, in Between Orality and Literacy: Communication and Adaptation in Antiquity (ed. Ruth Scodel; OLAW 10; Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 175–96. Zetzel, James E. G., Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (New York: Arno, 1981). Zimmermann, Ruben, “Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments,” in Der Macht der Erinnerung (ed. O. Fuchs and B. Janowski; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 131–67. Zumthor, Paul, ‘Body and Performance’, in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication, pp. 217–26. ———. Oral Poetry: An Introduction (trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy; Theory and History of Literature 70; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

I n d ex of R ef er e nce s Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Exodus 2.23 241 4.22 119 6.9 119 11.4 119 12.1 125 13.9 119 14.12 119 Leviticus 19 212 19.2 212 19.18 202, 212 Deuteronomy 11 241 22.1-12 119 27 241 2 Kings 12.11 67 2 Chronicles 24.11 67 Psalms 22.2 lxx 275 24 192 34 192 37 191, 192 119.1 192 119.2 192

Proverbs 19.17 202 Isaiah 53 244 53.4 245 Jeremiah 11.1 241 Lamentations 1.11 241 Ezekiel 34.14 lxx 275 34.15 lxx 275 Micah 3.4 241 Zechariah 7.13 241 New Testament Q 3–7 257 3 218, 220, 260, 273, 287, 294 3.7-9 181 3.8 217 3.9 216–18, 273 3.16-17 173, 181 4 260, 287 6–7 236

6

165, 211, 214, 217– 20, 223, 246, 260, 261, 271, 273, 277, 278, 281, 284, 287, 289, 297 6.20-49 236, 256, 280, 284, 290 6.20-23 177 6.20 255 6.21-49 277 6.27-49 177 6.27-36 177, 191, 192, 199, 211, 214, 215 6.27-35 176, 181 6.27-28 200 6.29-30 200 6.31 214 6.32-34 200 6.33-34 201 6.35 200, 201 6.36 156, 200, 212 6.37-42 155, 177, 181, 211, 217, 271 6.37-38 156, 215 6.38 295 6.39-40 212, 271 6.39 156, 211, 280

6.40

155, 156, 211, 235, 263, 271, 272, 288 6.41-42 156, 215 6.43-45 177, 181, 216–19, 226, 235, 236, 292 6.43-44 218 6.43 218 6.44 217, 218 6.46 219 6.47-49 220 7–13 236 7–11 261 7 227, 232, 255, 257, 260, 261, 268, 273, 274, 284, 287 7.1-10 220, 225, 226, 235, 236, 242, 244, 251–3, 256, 260, 262, 268, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286, 288, 290 7.1 280–2, 284, 285 7.15-35 235 7.18-35 181, 226, 227, 230, 234, 236, 244, 255, 261, 264, 266–8, 273, 275, 277, 278, 285, 286, 288–90 7.18-23 254 7.18 267 7.19 274

Index of References 7.22

230, 243, 244, 255, 268, 274, 284–6, 288, 290 7.31-35 267, 273, 286, 293 7.34 267 9–10 301 9 236, 260 9.57–10.16 227 9.57-62 177, 266 9.57-60 235, 249, 252, 253, 264, 266, 287, 288, 290 9.57-59 226, 229, 230, 236, 243, 251 9.58–10.16 244 9.58 265 9.59-60 265 10 232, 236, 255, 257, 261, 268, 272, 274, 277, 278, 286, 287 10.2-16 230, 236, 272, 277, 287 10.2-12 266 10.2-11 177 10.2 226, 235, 275 10.3-16 226, 235 10.3-12 235 10.3-6 265 10.3 273, 295 10.4 304 10.10-12 266 10.12-15 226, 230, 261, 274 10.13-15 235, 236, 266, 273, 275, 296

335 10.13 274 10.16 177, 235, 273, 274, 296 10.21-24 177 10.21-22 226, 230, 235, 261, 274, 276 10.23-24 226, 230, 235, 236, 261, 276, 292 11 165, 193, 206, 208, 210, 214, 215, 219, 223, 236, 260, 261, 278, 279, 286 11.1-4 165 11.2-13 177 11.2-4 165, 177, 181, 205, 213–16, 276, 287, 292 11.9-13 165, 176, 177, 205, 213–16, 276, 292 11.11-13 181, 287 11.14-32 230, 291 11.14-26 177 11.14-23 177, 181, 226, 253, 276, 277, 292 11.14-15 235, 269, 276 11.16 226, 235, 253, 276, 292 11.17-23 235 11.24-26 226, 235, 236, 276, 293

336 Q (cont.) 11.28-36 181 11.29-36 208 11.29-35 177, 279 11.29-32 226, 235, 236, 253, 276, 292 11.33-36 154 11.33 193, 208, 223, 295 11.34-36 165, 208, 210, 215 11.34 207 11.37-32 292 11.39-52 277 11.39-51 279 12 165, 210, 214, 215, 223, 261, 265, 271–3, 276, 277, 279, 293 12.2-12 176, 177, 181 12.2-9 155, 235, 265, 295 12.2 295 12.10 226, 235, 236, 261, 276 12.11-12 235 12.22-34 177, 215 12.22-32 208, 210, 211, 215 12.22-31 165, 176, 177, 181 12.24 210 12.31 211 12.33-34 165, 177, 181, 207, 208, 210, 211, 215 12.33 207 12.35-46 177, 181 12.39-46 277, 279 12.39 152 12.49-59 177

Index of References 12.49-53 155 12.49 196 12.51-53 181, 235, 265 12.51 196 12.53-56 277 12.53 196 12.54-56 196 12.57-59 165 12.58-59 196 13 216, 218– 20, 223, 236, 261, 279 13.18-21 276 13.18-19 226, 235 13.20-21 226 13.21-22 235 13.23-29 236 13.23-27 236 13.23-24 165, 216, 218 13.24-30 177 13.25-27 165, 216 13.25-26 219 13.26 219 13.28-29 216, 220, 235, 236 13.34-35 177, 279 14 193, 265, 271, 272, 279 14.1 153 14.11 177, 280 14.16-24 177 14.16-23 279 14.25-27 235, 265, 271 14.26-27 177 14.26 155 14.27 155 14.34-35 177, 193, 295 15.4-5 277, 279

16

165, 193, 199, 210, 214, 223, 279 16.13 165, 194, 195, 198, 199, 207, 209, 210, 215 16.14-15 194 16.16-18 194, 195, 198, 199, 209 16.16-17 194 16.16 194, 195, 226, 274 16.17 165, 194, 195, 198 16.18 165, 194, 195, 198, 223 17 265, 301 17.1-2 277, 279 17.1 223 17.3-6 277 17.3-4 279 17.6 279 17.21-37 279 17.23-37 177 17.23 153 17.33 155, 177, 265, 271 19 277, 294 19.12-26 279 19.26 295, 296 Matthew 1–11 250, 254 1.2–12.21 228 2.19-23 252 3–12 257–60 3–11 254, 256–9 3–10 273–5 3–9 293 3–4 259 3 257, 260 3.2 273

3.7 218 3.10 273 4–12 224, 262, 263, 277, 280, 294, 299 4–10 263, 287, 288 4–9 271, 272, 276 4 257, 260, 262, 263, 277 4.5 220 4.12-17 252, 263 4.13–8.17 285 4.13-17 285 4.13 282, 283 4.14–9.34 263 4.14-16 283 4.17 264, 273, 282, 283 4.18-22 225, 227, 231, 252, 263, 264, 282, 283, 285, 287 4.18-20 283 4.23–11.30 225 4.23–10.1 245 4.23–9.35 285 4.23–7.29 263 4.23–5.2 225, 227, 231, 237, 239–41, 255, 281 4.23-25 242 4.23 225, 227, 232, 237– 40, 243, 245, 254, 263, 264, 272, 281–3 4.24–8.16 285 4.24-25 292 4.24 237, 239, 244, 281

Index of References 4.25 238-40 5–10 245 5–7 162–4, 221, 225, 232, 236, 239, 242, 260, 261, 281, 285, 295 5 257 5.1-5 184 5.1-2 238, 239 5.1 239, 264 5.2–7.27 231 5.2-11 255 5.2 231, 237 5.3–7.27 308 5.3-12 190, 255 5.3-11 184, 286 5.4 191 5.10-12 267 5.13-16 193, 201 5.13 202, 213, 223, 295 5.14-16 209, 213 5.15 295 5.16 201 5.17-20 193, 194, 198, 201, 214 5.17-19 160 5.17 195, 196, 201, 214 5.18 195 5.19-20 196 5.20 201 5.21-48 202, 205 5.21-42 229 5.21-26 192, 196, 211 5.21-22 196, 197 5.22 196 5.23-24 196, 202 5.24 213 5.25-26 196 5.25 198 5.27-32 192 5.27-30 197, 209

337 5.27-28 198 5.27 198 5.28 198 5.29-30 272 5.31-32 173, 198, 223 5.31 198 5.32 195, 198 5.33-37 199 5.38-48 184 5.38-42 173, 191, 192, 199, 200, 214, 215, 267 5.38-39 200 5.42 200 5.43-48 165, 191, 192, 199, 200, 211, 214, 215 5.44 192 5.45 201, 202 5.48 201, 202, 212 5.72-30 223 6.1–7.11 202, 214 6.1-4 188, 202, 204, 208, 214, 217 6.1 188, 201, 202 6.2-4 191 6.5-15 202, 203 6.5-14 211 6.5-8 203, 204 6.5-6 203, 214 6.7-8 188, 203, 204, 211 6.8 188, 203 6.9-13 165, 188, 204, 205 6.14-15 204-206, 208, 211 6.14 223 6.16-18 202, 207, 212, 214 6.19–7.27 187

338 Matthew (cont.) 6.19–7.11 187, 188, 191 6.19-34 267 6.19-24 188, 192, 207, 210 6.19-21 150, 188, 204, 207–9 6.19-20 210 6.19 188, 207 6.21 208, 209 6.22-23 150, 188, 207, 208 6.24 173, 188, 195, 202, 207, 209 6.25-34 187, 188, 203, 204, 207, 210, 267 6.25 267 6.26 210 6.31 267 6.32-33 204 6.32 203 6.33 211 7 257, 261 7.1-6 188 7.1-5 188, 191, 211–13 7.1-2 187, 211 7.1 212 7.2-5 187 7.2 223, 295 7.5 204, 213 7.6 187, 188, 212, 213 7.7-11 165, 188, 202, 204, 205, 213, 214 7.7-8 213 7.9-11 213 7.9-10 185 7.11 187, 205, 208

Index of References 7.12

195, 201, 202, 214 7.13-27 216 7.13-14 216, 236 7.13 216, 218, 219 7.15-20 184, 216, 218 7.15 217, 219 7.16-20 216 7.16-19 236 7.16 217, 218 7.19 217, 218, 273 7.21-27 184 7.21-23 219 7.22-23 216, 219, 236 7.23 216, 220 7.24-27 185, 220 7.28-29 220, 225, 238 7.28 231-33 7.31 165 8–12 1, 167, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 240, 277, 294, 296, 297, 301, 309 8–11 229, 242, 260 8–10 230, 274 8–9 230, 239, 242, 243, 245, 247, 249-52, 254–8, 260, 264, 268–71, 273, 285, 286, 297 8 248, 250, 253, 257, 260, 268

8.1–9.34 263 8.1-22 249 8.1-17 246, 248, 250 8.1-16 244 8.1-4 220, 225, 232, 233, 242, 247, 256, 262, 269, 270, 280–2, 285 8.1 261, 264 8.4 262 8.5-13 185, 220, 225, 235, 236, 242, 253, 256, 281, 282, 286 8.5-10 236 8.5 280, 283, 284 8.6 281 8.11-12 220, 235, 236 8.13 236 8.14-17 232, 233, 264, 280, 281, 283 8.14-16 256, 281 8.14-15 225, 242, 282 8.16-17 225, 242, 247, 253, 282 8.16 244, 281 8.17 244, 245 8.18–9.26 266 8.18–9.17 245, 246, 248 8.18–9.1 250 8.18-34 233, 253, 267, 282, 283, 289 8.18-27 229, 273 8.18-24 252

8.18-22

226, 235, 243, 246, 249, 251, 253, 265, 266, 288, 290 8.18-21 287 8.18 233, 249, 253, 265, 287, 288 8.19-22 234, 287 8.20 265 8.21-22 265 8.23–9.17 249 8.23-34 232, 233 8.23-27 226, 246, 249, 265, 266 8.28-34 226, 242, 249, 265, 266, 290 8.29 246, 249 8.34 248, 252 9–13 232 9 248, 250, 253 9.1-17 233, 244, 250, 252, 255, 266–8, 278, 289 9.1-8 226, 242, 249, 282, 290 9.1-7 280 9.1 266, 283, 284 9.2-17 250 9.2-5 267 9.3 270 9.6 266 9.8 248, 252, 266, 268 9.9-17 246, 251, 255, 282 9.9-13 226, 243, 249, 251 9.9-10 267

339

Index of References 9.9 266 9.10-11 267 9.10 266 9.11-14 267 9.11 270 9.14-26 247 9.14-17 226, 243, 247, 267 9.14 267 9.18-35 250 9.18-34 246, 248, 249 9.18-26 226, 232, 233, 242, 243, 248, 252, 253, 266, 268, 282, 289 9.18 243, 247, 269, 283 9.19-22 264 9.19 269 9.26 269 9.27-34 243, 251, 270, 271, 296 9.27-31 226, 242, 269, 270, 290 9.27 270 9.28-29 246 9.28 269 9.29 246, 269 9.31 269, 270 9.32-34 226, 242, 248, 269, 270, 290 9.33-34 253 9.33 253, 270 9.34 256, 264, 270, 272 9.35–11.1 263 9.35–10.42 255, 263 9.35–10.41 289 9.35-38 226, 271

9.35

232, 233, 239, 242, 245, 264, 271, 272 9.36 232, 253, 255, 256, 272, 275, 295 9.37-38 235 9.37 264, 275 10–12 270, 271 10–11 256, 272, 275 10 162–4, 227, 232, 243, 252, 257, 260, 261, 264–6, 268, 271, 287, 295, 297 10.1-42 268 10.1-16 232 10.1-14 233 10.1-4 226, 292 10.1 245, 252, 264, 266, 268 10.2-4 232, 233, 256, 272, 295 10.5-16 226 10.5-7 160 10.5-6 272 10.5 264 10.7 264 10.8 264, 269, 273 10.9-14 267 10.9-13 266 10.9-10 265 10.10-16 235 10.10 267 10.14-15 266 10.14 290 10.16-23 267 10.16 265, 267, 273, 295

340 Matthew (cont.) 10.17-42 226, 235 10.17-25 232 10.17-22 295 10.17-15 232 10.18 274 10.19-20 265 10.19 267 10.21-22 265 10.22-24 266 10.23 266, 290 10.24-30 155 10.24-25 263 10.24 271 10.25 272 10.26-33 265, 295 10.26 295 10.28-31 267 10.34-36 150, 265 10.37-39 265, 271 10.38-39 267 10.40 235, 263, 273, 274, 296 10.41 273 10.42 232, 255, 271, 295 11–12 230 11 227, 232, 251, 252, 254, 257, 261, 268, 273–5, 278 11.1-19 226 11.1 273 11.2-19 227, 235, 267, 268, 273, 290 11.2-16 275 11.2-6 254 11.2 254, 263, 267, 273 11.5 230, 243, 255–7, 268– 70, 274, 290 11.6 255 11.7-19 273

Index of References 11.12-15 160 11.12-13 195 11.12 274 11.16-19 267 11.19 267 11.20-24 226, 235, 273, 275, 296 11.21 274 11.24-27 276 11.25-27 226, 235, 274 11.28-30 226, 257, 275 11.40-42 273 12–28 256–8, 260 12 240, 244, 250, 252, 254, 257, 260–2, 270, 275, 276, 278, 292 12.1–16.12 251 12.1-16 233 12.1-14 244 12.1-8 226 12.1 227, 276, 278–80, 292, 309 12.9-14 226 12.15-21 226 12.15-16 239 12.22-45 291, 292 12.22-30 179, 226, 235, 253 12.22-24 180, 226, 269, 276 12.24-32 233 12.25-26 180 12.27 180 12.28 180 12.29 180, 292 12.30 180 12.31-35 226 12.31-32 235 12.33-35 235, 236, 292

12.36-37 226 12.38-42 226, 235, 253, 276 12.38-41 292 12.43-45 226, 235, 276, 293 12.46-50 226, 233 12.49 276 12.50 261 13 261, 271, 276–8 13.1-35 233 13.1-9 226 13.10-15 226 13.11 276 13.12 227, 232, 295, 296 13.13 276 13.16-17 226, 235, 292 13.18-23 226 13.24-30 226 13.31-33 276 13.31-32 226, 235 13.33 226, 235 13.34-35 226 13.36-52 226 13.53-58 227, 233 13.58 227 14 279 14.1-2 227 14.1 227, 250, 278 14.3-12 227 14.13-21 251 15.14 280 16.1-2 293 16.2-4 277 16.2-3 280 16.13–20.34 251 16.16-18 209 16.19-24 207 17.20 279 18 164, 250, 277 18.1-35 279 18.6-7 279

18.6 279 18.8-9 198 18.12-15 279 18.21-22 279 19 198 19.28 280 19.30 280 20.1-16 280 20.29-34 226, 269 21.21-22 205 21.33-46 279 21.43 276 22.1-14 279 22.25-40 202 23–25 164 23 217, 277 23.1-39 164, 279 23.1-29 150 23.1-2 279 23.6-7 279 23.12 280 23.15 238 23.25 217 23.27 217 23.28 217 24–25 250, 258 24 219, 277, 279 24.42-45 150 24.42 279, 296 24.43-51 277, 279 25 219, 279 25.13-15 296 25.14 279 25.15-29 279 25.29 296 28.16-20 251 Mark 1–3 270 1–2 227 1 261 1.4–2.22 293 1.14-15 263, 282, 283, 285

341

Index of References 1.16-20

225, 227, 231, 263, 282, 283, 285, 287 1.18-20 283 1.20–2.8 254 1.20 254 1.21-22 230, 240, 256, 295, 308 1.21 231, 232, 237–40, 278, 28083, 285 1.22 225, 231, 232, 238, 297 1.23–3.6 251 1.23–2.12 244 1.23-34 285 1.23-27 238 1.28 237, 239, 240 1.29-34 225, 232, 248, 256, 264, 268, 280, 281, 283, 284, 295 1.29-31 225, 235, 239, 242, 282 1.32-34 225, 231, 237, 239, 242, 251, 282-84 1.32 239, 240, 283 1.33 239 1.34 238, 240, 278, 284 1.35-39 282 1.35-38 284 1.39–6.13 225

1.39

225, 227, 231, 232, 237–40, 248, 256, 281, 283-85 1.40–2.22 235 1.40-45 225, 227, 232, 233, 242, 247, 248, 256, 262, 268, 269, 280–2, 284, 285, 295 1.43-45 270 1.43 270 1.45 232, 269, 270 2–6 261 2–3 227, 252, 275, 290, 292 2 247, 266, 268, 276, 278, 287, 290, 291 2.1–3.6 289 2.1-22 232–5, 244, 245, 249, 251–3, 255, 266–8, 278, 283, 284, 286–91, 294 2.1-12 226, 242, 249, 268, 280–4, 290 2.1 233, 253, 266, 278, 280, 283, 284, 290, 294 2.3-9 267 2.10 266 2.13-22 282 2.13-17 226, 249, 251 2.14 266

342 Mark (cont.) 2.15-16 267 2.18-22 226, 267 2.18 267 2.23–4.34 234, 289 2.23–3.35 288 2.23–3.12 232 2.23–3.6 244 2.23-28 226, 227, 232, 276, 278, 282, 291 2.23 235, 278, 279, 291, 292, 295 2.28–3.6 250 3 232, 240, 261, 271, 276, 278, 286, 308 3.1-6 226, 282, 291 3.3-19 271 3.6 289, 291 3.7-13 231, 237–9 3.7-12 226, 282, 292, 308 3.7-8 240 3.7 239 3.13-19 226, 227, 232–5, 256, 272, 282, 292 3.13 231, 232, 239, 240 3.16-19 295 3.17-19 295 3.20-30 291 3.20-21 282 3.22-30 223, 232, 277, 292 3.22-27 179, 226, 276, 282, 289, 290 3.22-20 253

Index of References 3.22

226, 242, 248, 252, 276 3.27 292 3.28-30 226, 282 3.31-35 226, 232, 282 4–5 254, 267, 268, 284, 286–8, 291 4 193, 199, 223, 227, 265, 276, 278 4.1-34 162, 282, 288 4.1-9 226 4.1-3 232 4.10-12 226, 232, 296 4.10 276 4.12 276 4.13-20 226 4.21-25 295 4.21 193, 223, 295 4.22 295 4.23–5.2 231 4.24 223, 295 4.25 227, 232, 295, 296 4.30-32 226 4.33-34 226 4.34–5.43 288, 289 4.34–5.20 289, 290 4.35–6.13 246 4.35–5.43 235, 244, 249, 254, 268, 269, 278, 286–8, 290, 293 4.35–5.21 286

4.35–5.20 227, 229, 232–4, 245, 249, 252, 266-68, 282, 283, 286, 287, 291 4.35-41 226, 229, 249, 265, 266, 278, 284 4.35 249, 283, 294 5 227, 247, 266, 268 5.1-43 278 5.1-20 226, 242, 249, 265, 266, 290 5.7 249 5.18 246, 266 5.20-43 229 5.20 253, 278, 291 5.21-43 226, 227, 229, 232–4, 242, 243, 246, 248, 250, 252, 253, 266, 268, 282–4, 286, 289, 290, 294 5.21 234, 278, 282–4, 290, 291 5.23 243, 269 5.24 269 5.35 254 5.43 271, 290 6 227, 255, 261, 268, 271, 272, 276, 278, 286, 288– 91, 295, 301

6.1-6

227, 232, 271, 286 6.6-13 223, 227, 232, 234, 268, 277, 286, 288, 294 6.6-12 256 6.6 226, 231–3, 235, 23739, 271, 272 6.7-13 162, 226, 232, 235 6.7-11 233 6.7 256, 264, 266 6.8-10 265 6.11 266 6.14-29 272, 274, 286 6.14-16 227, 278 6.14 227 6.17-29 227 6.30 272 6.32-34 251 6.34 232, 255, 256, 272, 275, 295 6.43-48 272 7.1-23 280 8.11-13 277, 280 8.11-12 226, 293 8.22-26 269 9 193, 272 9.14-29 279 9.33-50 197 9.33-48 295 9.33-37 162, 197, 279 9.38-50 272 9.38-40 197 9.41 197, 232, 271, 273, 295 9.42-50 162, 279

343

Index of References 9.42 197 9.43-48 197, 223 9.43-47 198 9.45 198 9.47 198 9.49-50 193, 197, 223 9.49 193, 295 10.1 301 10.3-4 223 10.11-12 223 10.11 198 10.12 198 10.23-31 280 10.31 280 10.46-52 226, 242, 269 11 206, 214 11.20-25 223 11.22-25 206 11.22-24 206 11.22 206 11.25 204–6, 208, 223 12.1-12 279 12.37-40 223, 279 12.38-40 162 13 162, 223, 226, 265, 271–3, 279, 295, 301 13.9-13 226, 227, 232, 261, 265, 295 13.12 265 13.33-34 279, 296 13.35-37 277 13.35 279, 296

6.21 191 6.27-36 184 6.27-35 200 6.37-42 184 6.43-45 184 6.46-49 184 6.47-49 185 7.1-10 185 8 308 8.1 272 9 301 9.51–18.14 49 9.57-60 234, 287 10 162 11.11-12 185 11.14-23 38, 179 11.14-15 180 11.15 38 11.17-18 180 11.17 38 11.19 180 11.20 180 11.21-22 180 11.23 180 11.34-36 150 11.37-54 150 12.33-34 150 12.39-48 150 12.49-53 150 12.54-55 280 13.23-24 216 13.25-27 216 13.26 216 13.27 216 13.30 280 14.1 152 18.15–24.53 49 21 301

Luke 3.1–9.50 49 6 240 6.20-49 308 6.20-23 184, 190 6.20 220

Romans 2.1-6 212 2 Timothy 4.13 50

344

Index of References

Apocrypha Tobit 4.7-11 202 Wisdom of Solomon 2–3 181 Ecclesiasticus 1.11–2.17 133 3.1-16 133 3.30–4.10 133 3.30 202 4.20–6.1 133 6.5-17 133 38.24–39.9 66 1 Maccabees 7.12 70 2 Maccabees 6.18 70 Dead Sea Scrolls 11QT 59.5-7 241 Mishnah Eruvin 10.10-14 24 Kiddushin 34a-35a 118, 119, 142 Tamid 3.7

24, 26

Palestinian Talmud Berakot 6a 68 Horayot 14a 68 Pesaim 28b 68

Sanhedrin 19d 68 Terumot 46b 68 Midrash Lamentations Rabbah 1.14 112 Josephus Jewish Antiquities 10.9.3 71 10.9.208 71 Classical and Ancient Christian Writings Alcinous Didaskalikos 152.2 123 Antonius I,31 84 I,32 84 I,33 84 I,34 84 I,50 84 Apollonius 73.5 76 136.17 76 158.8-21 76 159.27-33 76, 77 Aristotle Rhetoric 3.12 107 Arius Didymus Fr. 2 91 Fr. 20 91 Cassiodorus Institutiones 1.30.1 113

Corpus Parisinum 6 118-122 89 118 88, 140 119 88, 140 120 88, 140 121 88, 89, 140, 141 122 88, 89, 140, 141 123-125 89 123 89, 140 124 89, 140 125 89, 140 Cicero Epistulae ad Atticum 12.14.3 61 13.21a.1 61 Oratore 2.354-355 131 Epistulae ad familiares 16.21 47 Topica 1.5 143 Diodorus Siculus Library of History 1.2.4 58 Diogenes 4.5 77 6.6 65 8.47 77 5.777 77 8.532 46 Epiphanius Panarion 67.1.1-4 64 67.7.9 64 Euripides 297-99 92

Eusebius Historia ecclesiastica 6.23.2 34

Hermogenes Progymnasmata 1.10–8.14 175

7.115 74 7.170 74 8.340 74 9.204 75 9.214 76 9.247 75 9.295 75 9.512 75 10.123 74 10.227 75 12.330 74 12.382 75 12.58 75 12.97 75 16.217 74 2.326 74 20.15 74 20.16 74 21.431 75 23.196 75 23.95 74 24.218 74 24.319 76 24.349 74, 75

Hippocrates Diseases of Women 1.78 130

Iamblichus Protrepticus 13 123

Nature of Women 109 130

Jerome 155.3 64

Homer Iliad 1.149 76 18.553 74 61.192 75

Libanius Letters 119 98 419.1 93

Galen De libris propriis II.91-93 47 Pronostic 5 47 de comp med I.1 100 De Differentiis Pulsuum 8.591-92K 145 Gellius Attic Nights 9.4.5 52

Odyssey 1.198 74 3.344 74 3.388 74 4.618 74 4.704 74 6.122 74 6.133 74

345

Index of References

Livy History 33.21.1-5 59 40.2.6-3.2 58 42.10.0– 42.30.8 56 44.23.1– 45.4.1 56 45.17-25 56

Lucian How to Write History 5 106 Maximus 12 84, 85 17 84 Melissa Augustana 38 84 Plato Phaedo 67b8-10 123 Republic 7.521c6-8 123 Pliny the Younger Letters 3.5 43 7.17-20 29 9.36 144 1.20.9 29 3.5.14-15 43 Plutarch Brutus 22 58 Cicero 6.3-4 58 Polybius 18.41 59 23.9 58 Porphyry Life of Plotinus 8.1-7 143 8.5-7 143 8.9-12 143 Pseudo-Plutarch 1.2-3 91 1.9.1-6 91 1.9.1 91

346 Pseudo-Plutarch (cont.) 1.9.2-5 91 1.9.6 91 1.7.1-13 91 1.10 91 1.11.1-4 91 1.21.1– 22.3 91 1.27.1– 28.5 91 1.29.1-2 91 1.29.3-4 91 De liberis educandis 9e 93 Quintilian Institutio oratoria 1 Preface 7-8 47 1.1.19 93 2.11.7 47 5.10.20 132 10.3 44 10.1.19 96 10.3.17 144 10.3.31-32 42 10.6.17 144 10.7.30 43 11.2 131 11.2.27 134 11.2.36-39 134 11.27-28 132 11.39 132 Socrates Phaedrus 228d6-e3 100

Index of References Stobaeus 1.23-51 90 2.51-52 90 3.52-70 91 4.70-74 91 5.74-83 91 6.83-89 91 7.90-93 91 8.93-111 91 9.111-118 91 10.118130 91 11.130134 91 12.134137 91 13.137140 91 130.24-25 91 131.9-19 91 132.9– 133.11 91 133.12-15 91 133.16 91 133.17-23 91

Theon Progymnasmata 3.12-13 57

Theophrastus Causis Plantarum I.12.1 53 I.14.2 53 I.20.4 53 I.6.3-9 53 II.19.1 53 III.3.4 53

Inscriptions SAA 9 no. 1 25 9 no. 2 25 9 no. 3 25

Historia Plantarum I.10.1 53 I.7.1 53 VII.15.1 53 VIII.1.5 53

Varro de Re Rustica 40.3 53 44.3-46 53 Ostraca, Papyri and Tablets CIL XI 1236 65 Inschr. Dessau 7752 65 PHerc 1021 45 PLitLond 165 72 P.Petaeus 30 65

Shulgi B. 311-15 114

I n d ex of A ut hor s Alexander, E. S. 109, 117 Alexander, L. 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 106, 107 Allen, W. C. 158, 229, 231, 243, 284 Allison, D. C. 155, 185, 187, 212, 247, 250, 251, 263–5, 270, 273, 275, 292 Andersen, . 5, 99 Arnal, W. E. 304, 305 Assmann, A. 10, 22, 24, 95, 96, 112, 127 Assmann, J. 5, 6, 22, 27, 28, 66, 94–9, 102, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 127, 143, 300, 302 Aune, D. E. 10, 24 Avenarius, G. 34, 35, 45 Bacon, B. W. 153, 170, 244 Baddeley, A. D. 136, 139 Bagnall, R. S. 60, 62 Baines, J. 21, 69, 94 Barker, J. W. 307 Bartlett, F. C. 6 Bauckham, R. 50 Baum, A. D. 34 Baumgarten, A. I. 70 Baüml, F. 9, 21, 27 Bazzana, G. B. 303, 305 Beare, F. W. 153, 160, 242, 243, 272 Becker, H.-J. 111, 127 Beit-Arié, M. 61, 111 Ben Zvi, E. 13, 108, 111 Bergemann, T. 158, 190 Berger, K. 201 Berntsen, D. 136 Betz, H. D. 186, 189, 201, 205, 211, 212 Bilabel, F. 60, 64, 65 Bird, G. D. 109, 126, 148 Bjork, R. A. 139 Bloch, M. E. F. 11 Blount, J. A. 258 Blum, E. 40 Bogatyrev, P. 27

Bonner, S. F. 31, 71, 96, 104, 132 Booth, A. D. 62 Boring, E. 228, 258, 297, 306 Bornkamm, G. 186, 188, 189, 207, 211, 212, 214, 219, 224, 265 Botha, P. J. J. 29 Boudon-Millot, V. 11, 13, 47, 106, 107 Bowman, A. K. 30 Božič, D. 42, 43 Braun, W. 304 Bretone, P. 22, 23 Broer, I. 187 Brooke, G. J. 111, 113 Brown, M. P. 43 Bruner, D. F. 154 Bucking, S. 61, 63 Bultmann, R. 257 Burger, C. 242–4, 248, 264–6 Burke, P. 7 Burkert, W. 66 Burkett, D. 228, 229, 244, 248 Burridge, R. A. 39 Butzer, G. 97, 99, 143 Byrskog, S. 13, 41, 110, 122, 171, 183, 299 Calinescu, M. 10 Carr, D. M. 68, 69, 93, 97–100, 116, 119, 124, 143, 172, 180, 181 Carruthers, M. 43, 52, 93, 96–8, 100, 106, 119, 131, 132, 134, 137–9, 142–5, 148, 182, 183, 301 Casey, M. 50, 174 Cauderlier, P. 42, 43 Cavigneaux, A. 66 Chartier, R. 96 Chase, W. G. 135, 139 Chaytor, J. H. 124 Choat, M. 55 Christes, J. 72

348

Index of Authors

Clanchy, M. T. 27, 102, 138 Clark, A. 101, 138, 141, 147 Clark, K. W. 55 Clivaz, C. 67 Cohen, S. J. D. 69 Cohen, Y. 66 Corbier, M. 13, 104, 131 Cotton, H. M. 61, 62 Cribiore, R. 17, 30, 31, 42, 43, 47, 63, 64, 73, 93, 94, 97, 98, 104, 105 Dagenais, J. 4, 98, 110, 114, 115, 117, 124, 126, 182, 301 Damm, A. 39, 292 Davies, M. 269 Davies, P. R. 111 Davies, W. D. 155, 185, 247, 250, 251, 263–5, 270, 273, 275, 292 de Vet, T. 11, 12 Derrenbacker, R. A., Jr. 55–7, 142, 157, 167, 171–4, 189, 229, 291, 292 Derron, P. 134, 181 Dewey, J. 14 Dibelius, M. 153 Dickey, E. 46, 71–3 Doane, A. N. 3–6, 21, 115, 116, 124, 126, 146 Donker, van Keel, K. 61, 114 Doole, A. J. 155 Dorandi, T. 44–6, 52, 61, 72 Downing, F. G. 34, 49, 57, 171 Draper, J. A. 14 Duncan-Jones, R. P. 17 Dundes, A. 9 Dunn, J. D. G. 156, 159, 184, 185, 190 Dyck, A. R. 75, 79, 120 Edwards, R. A. 263, 264 Ego, B. 133 Ehlers, W.-W. 102, 105, 106 Eikelman, D. F. 98 Elman, Y. 68, 120, 129, 179, 300 Elsner, M. 107, 110 Ephrat, D. 300 Ericsson, A. K. 139, 147 Estes, W. K. 138, 139 Eve, E. 307 Eyre, C. 21, 69, 94

Fantham, E. 33 Feldman, C. F. 4, 27 Fenton, J. C. 243 Feugère, M. 42, 43 Finkelberg, M. 15, 20 Finnegan, R. 2–6, 8–10, 12, 20, 21 Fishbane, M. 40, 111, 112, 117, 118 Fishman, T. 121 Fitzmyer, J. A. 154, 187 Fleddermann, H. 180 Floyd, M. H. 11, 106, 111, 113 Foley, J. M. 3, 4, 7–9, 12, 20, 21, 27, 114, 122, 300 Forbes, C. A. 62 Ford, A. 107 Foster, P. 9, 222 Fraade, S. D. 98 Frankemölle, H. 187, 188, 202 Friedman, S. 126 Fuller, R. H. 48 Gaechter, P. 250 Gamble, H. Y. 13, 29, 34, 44, 55, 170 Gatzweiler, K. 247 Gerhardsson, K. 48 Gerlach, J. 41, 80, 86–9, 174, 294 Gnilka, J. 247 Goldhill, S. 32, 109 Goodacre, M. 187, 254 Goody, J. 6, 15, 24 Gorman, H. M. 307 Goulder, M. D. 191, 192, 202, 207, 212, 229, 230, 309 Gourinat, E. L. 90, 92, 133 Greenfield, J. 62 Greenstein, E. L. 241 Grundmann, W. 153, 160, 242, 250 Guelich, R. A. 186, 212 Gumbrecht, H. U. 107 Gundry, R. 161, 229, 230 Häfner, G. 254, 255, 263, 274, 275 Hägg, T. 105, 106 Hagner, D. 160, 186, 212, 247 Hahn, F. 153 Haines-Eitzen, K. 60–2, 64, 65, 111, 114 Hanks, W. F. 3, 5 Hanson, A. E. 17 Haring, B. J. J. 61, 114



Index of Authors

349

Harnack, A. 152 Harris, W. H. 12, 15 Haslam, M. W. 73–9, 121, 126, 130, 142 Hawkins, J. C. 156, 171, 228, 230, 242, 243, 250 Hayes, C. 23, 40 Heil, C. 153, 154 Held, J. H. 245, 246, 252, 263, 273, 275 Henaut, B. 158 Hezser, C. 15, 22–7, 44, 62, 71, 114, 122, 128 Hoffmann, P. 156 Holladay, C. R. 243 Holtzmann, H. J. 242 Hopkins, K. 15, 17, 62, 70 Horsley, R. A. 14, 70 Horster, M. 32, 41, 72, 300 Hunt, R. R. 135, 137, 139 Hurtado, L. W. 16, 18, 36, 104 Hutchins, E. 101, 138, 147 Hymes, D. 3, 5

Knoop, U. 11, 102 Koester, H. 259 Konstan, D. 52, 54 Kümmel, W. G. 243

Ihm, S. 86, 181 Innes, M. 11, 112 Isaac, B. 62 Jacob, C. 51, 52, 100

Macdonald, M. C. A. 17, 102 Machan, T. W. 110, 124 Mack, B. 38, 176 Malafouris, L. 101, 147 Mandel, P. 112, 129, 182, 300 Mandler, J. M. 136, 137, 140, 141, 183 Marichal, R. 16, 17, 43 Mathys, H.-P. 201 Mattila, S. L. 34 McDonnell, M. 61, 64 Mejer, J. 46, 52 Melve, L. 11 Mensching, E. 46, 77 Miller, G. 137, 140 Minnen, P. van 64, 66, 67 Mirza, S. Z. 12, 103 Montanari, F. 46, 73, 120 Morgan, T. 30, 31, 62, 133 Morrow, W. S. 118, 120, 301 Mournet, T. C. 156 Müller, J.-D. 117 Müller, T. 107

Jaffee, M. S. 13, 24, 26, 28, 40, 70, 100, 108, 112, 121, 125, 135, 138, 145 Jakobson, R. 27 Johnson, N. S. 136 Johnson, W. A. 30, 33, 51, 52, 65, 95–7, 102–7, 145 Joseph, S. 259, 306 Jouanna, J. 117, 121, 128 Junack, K. 104, 110 Kahn, C. H. 106, 132 Kandel, E. R. 147 Kaster, R. A. 16, 17, 30, 31, 63, 72 Kelber, W. H. 2, 3, 112, 122, 300 Kennedy, G. 45, 47, 48, 167, 171 Kenney, E. J. 32, 33, 58, 103, 124 Kingsbury, J. D. 244, 247 Kirk, A. 133, 136, 152, 178, 197, 199 Klahr, D. 135, 139, 141, 221 Kloppenborg, J. S. 35, 37, 113, 152, 155–8, 161, 163, 164, 166, 173, 177, 197, 220, 248, 255, 256, 262, 281, 304, 306, 307

Lachmann, K. 81, 260 Lambrecht, J. 186 Larsen, M. T. 10 Last, R. 38 Lausberg, H. 132 Lewis, N. 62, 63 Lewis, N. D. 258 Lionarons, J. T. 122, 124 Lord, A. B. 2, 5, 7–9 Lovelace, E. A. 135, 139 Luce, T. J. 56–9 Luz, U. 153, 155, 159, 160, 162, 166–9, 182, 186, 190, 195, 212, 222, 228, 233–5, 243, 247, 251–4, 256, 264, 267, 269–72, 275, 279, 292, 293, 296, 303, 306

Nagy, J. F. 114 Nasr, S. H. 122, 123 Neirynck, F. 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 236–9, 241, 244, 259, 262–4, 272, 278–81, 285, 289, 293, 294, 301

350

Index of Authors

Nelson, D. W. 112, 125, 127 Neusner, J. 138, 146 Neville, D. J. 228, 229, 232, 234, 239, 240, 242, 244, 287, 289, 291, 308 Niebuhr, K.-W. 194 Nilsson, M. P. 66 Nissinen, M. 22, 24–7, 127, 128 O’Brien O’Keefe, K. 10, 11, 105, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 127 Olson, D. R. 104, 138 Oppenheim, A. L. 67 Otter-Beaujean, A. 122 Palmer, N. H. 81, 260 Parássoglou, G. M. 55 Parkes, M. B. 72, 109 Parks, W. 3, 7, 12 Pearce, L. E. 66, 67, 69, 94, 99, 143 Pelliccia, H. 100 Pelling, C. B. R. 45, 54, 56–8 Petersen, W. L. 115 Peterson, J. 307 Piper, R. A. 152, 176 Poirier, J. C. 49, 307 Poynton, J. B. 33, 42, 43, 72 Queller, S. 135, 139, 140, 183 Quinn, K. 7, 15, 33, 44, 72, 103, 105, 106 Rabinowitz, M. 137, 140, 183 Raible, W. 104, 105 Rainy, A. F. 94 Rapp, C. 100, 113 Redford, D. B. 106 Reiser, M. 30, 35 Rhoads, D. 14 Richard, M. 81, 86 Robbins, V. K. 37, 38, 98, 175, 176 Robinson, F. C. 73 Robinson, J. M. 156, 165, 185, 204, 205, 214, 228, 257, 258 Rodríguez, R. 18, 19, 122, 180 Rollens, S. E. 71, 197, 306 Rollston, C. A. 66, 67 Römer, T. 111 Rosenthal, F. 68, 98, 111 Rouse, M. A. 43, 47, 49, 72 Rouse, R. H. 43, 47, 49, 72

Rovner, J. 119 Royse, J. R. 55, 111 Rubin, D. C. 6, 7, 9, 136 Russell, D. A. 59 Russo, J. 4 Salles, C. 32, 36, 305 Sanday, W. 55 Sanders, E. P. 228, 269 Sanderson, J. 113, 118 Sato, M. 167 Schäffer, P. 126 Schams, C. 70 Schellenberg, R. S. 39, 70, 111 Schnackenberg, R. 242, 243 Schröter, J. 152–4, 177, 301 Schweizer, E. 242–4 Searby, D. M. 51, 52, 79–81, 87–90, 133, 140 Senior, D. 247 Sharpe, J. L. III 43 Shiner, W. 36 Sijpesteijn, P. J. 113 Skeat, T. C. 51 Skydsgaard, J. E. 44–7, 50–3 Small, J. P. 43, 52, 54, 55, 97, 104, 131, 133, 144, 146 Smith, D. A. 157, 258 Smith, E. R. 135, 139, 140, 183 Snyder, H. G. 24, 47, 52, 53, 95, 99, 103 Spangenberg, P. M. 107 Squire, L. R. 147 Stanton, G. H. 42, 50, 186, 187, 228, 229, 262, 296 Starr, R. J. 33, 61, 105, 106 Steele, J. M. 120, 121 Stemberger, G. 108, 125 Stern, D. 300 Stock, B. 23, 102 Strauss, C. 7 Streeter, B. H. 151, 158, 162–4, 170, 184, 185, 190, 223, 230, 243 Sutton, J. 101, 138, 147 Swanson, D. D. 241, 296 Sweeny, A. 4, 6, 12 Syreeni, K. 154, 182, 186, 188, 192, 194–6, 200, 211, 214, 221, 224, 231, 250, 293



Index of Authors

Talbert, C. 56 Talmon, S. 14, 68 Taylor, V. 163–5 Tedlock, D. 9 Thom, J. C. 133 Thomas, C. M. 14 Thomas, J. 194 Thomas, R. 10–12, 28, 33, 96, 103, 107, 109, 115, 144 Thompson, D. J. 63, 67, 69 Thompson, W. G. 247, 264, 287, 298 Tigay, J. H. 241, 294 Tödt, H. E. 153 Tonkin, E. 4, 136 Totelin, L. 13, 23, 47, 50, 51, 105, 121, 125, 130, 131, 133 Tov, E. 60, 67 Tuckett, C. M. 155, 164, 231, 232, 244, 247, 248, 262, 265 Tyson, J. B. 161 Ulrich, E. 117, 126, 300 Valantasis, R. 157 Valette-Cagnac, E. 15, 17, 18, 32, 102, 103, 105–7, 110 van Hook, L. 44 Van Seters, J. 70, 114 Vansina, J. 2–4, 6 Vanstiphout, H. L. J. 27, 68, 94, 107, 111 Verhoogt, A. M. F. W. 64 Wachsmuth, C. 79–81, 83–5, 89, 90, 92 Watson, F. 149, 254, 259, 308 Webb, R. 31, 98

351

Wedderburn, A. J. M. 158, 160 Westenholz, J. G. 11, 21, 108, 114, 120, 124 Whisenant, J. 23 Whitaker, R. 12, 21 Whittaker, J. 123 Wiefel, W. 153, 154, 187, 242, 243 Wifstrand, A. 35, 100 Williams, M. 34, 64 Williams, R. J. 94, 135 Wilson, W. T. 134 Wire, A. 14 Wittern, R. 41, 53, 108, 121, 154 Wolf, A. 12 Woolf, G. 30 Worthen, J. B. 135, 137, 139 Worthington, I. 32, 33 Wrege, H.-T. 186, 250 Yadin, Y. 62 Yardeni, A. 61, 62 Youngquist, L. 229, 233, 234, 243, 250, 259–61, 265, 266, 268, 284, 288, 290, 295 Yuen-Collingridge, R. 55 Yunis, H. 10–12 Zeller, D. 176 Zelnick-Abramovitz, R. 107 Zetzel, J. E. G. 72, 124 Zimmermann, R. 95 Ziolkowski, J. M. 93, 97, 134, 135, 142, 143, 183 Zumthor, P. 5, 9, 21, 103, 123