I really enjoy blogger-cooler discussions when they happen amongst the biblioblogs, the latest being a discussion on Q (see here).

I confess I haven’t read a ton on this subject, though I intend to. I also have stated that I still lean to the existence of Q.

This weekend’s discussion has coincided with a presentation that I am preparing on the gospels as eyewitness tradition. I’m basing my presentation on Bauckham’s work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. While preparing my keynote, a thought hit me that I thought I’d put out there. It may have been stated elsewhere and I’ve just not seen it.

Papias says regarding the gospel of Matthew:
“Therefore Matthew put the logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could.”

Now, I’m no Papias scholar but I know the general discussion regarding this passage: NT scholars either flatly say its incorrect, or we surmise that Matthew may have taken notes in Hebrew/Aramaic which later came into the Greek gospel of Matthew. Bauckham has taken the former view with some further nuance.

Now, Mark Goodacre in one of his posts discusses the verbatim agreements between Matt and Luke and says this is indicative of a literary connection ? not just a connection to an oral source. Obviously, his conclusion is that Luke used Matthew.

Now the idea that struck me is that the Farrer theory can actually allow us to take Papias’ words at face value in a way that the 2-source theory cannot. The 2-source theory has to assert that Matthew was written in Greek, which leads to the assertions about Papias’ comment mentioned above. But, if there was no Q, then there is nothing holding us back from believing Matthew was originally written in Hebrew/Aramaic as Papias said. The only thing we would then assert is that the original Semitic gospel of Matthew was soon after translated into Greek. The Greek version was the one used by Luke.

I find this thought intriguing. Has any scholar actually asserted this already? Are there any negatives to this idea? I’d appreciate any discussion on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 4:41 pm by Danny Zacharias and is filed under synoptic problem, Q. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.