The problem I had last year with the statement above in yellow was pretty narrow. If Luke knew Matthew, and he omitted some attractive material in Matthew from his own gospel, then that surprises some oberservers. There is no possibility for Luke to omit material from Q, however, and so Luke's relationship with Q cannot surprise in the same way that his relationship with Matthew potentially can.The hypothetical Q gospel also has a surprising feature: it is a sayings gospel which, prior to the discovery of Thomas, was deemed unlike any known gospel in that regard. It was not crafted to avoid that surprise. It was simply the intersection of common content that is not from Mark.the numerous surprising omissions in Luke (if he knew Matthew)
It seems intuitive to me that real things with fixed features are more likely to have surprising features than hypothetical things crafted to avoid surprise ...
It doesn't make sense to penalize Q (as a hypothesis) simply because someone somewhere decided to destroy the last surviving copy of it. It would be like disregarding the theory of evolution because of "missing links", or saying the missing links make the theory less likely to be true. If we have reasons to think those no-longer-existing things used to exist, the bias against "hypothetical things" using some "razor" doesn't make sense to me.
I didn't make any strong claims about that, but I did wonder about possible methodological issues beyond the obvious that the available evidence was largely exhausted in the formulation of the Q family of hypotheses. Then again, maybe what I noticed is simply an aspect of that problem, not a different or additional difficulty.
Regardless, I was exploring the question, not claiming to solve it.
Statistics: Posted by Paul the Uncertain — Wed Feb 28, 2024 3:36 pm