neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:16 pmI don't know about medieval studies but where to ancient historians or classical scholars arrive at anything comparable to a Q document?
Can you give me examples of what you are thinking of?
Sure:
A. B. Bosworth, "History and Artifice in Plutarch's Eumenes," in Plutarch and the Historical Tradition, pages 63-64: Plutarch describes how, on his way under guard to Antigonus’ camp, Eumenes harangues his former troops and asks for death (Eum. 17.6–11). There is no such incident in Diodorus, who skips rapidly over the distasteful business, nor for that matter in Nepos who is, if anything, more laconic. For comparison we must turn to Justin, who has the same story of Eumenes’ address to the Silver Shields and, as tends to happen when rhetoric is at issue, his wretched travesty of an epitome broadens into a fairly full reproduction of his exemplar, Pompeius Trogus. It coincides remarkably with Plutarch. .... [There] is material common to both versions. Each has a minimal amount of extra detail and slight variation in the rhetorical shaping, but it is beyond doubt that the two speeches come from a common source.
Why a common source? Why not assume that Plutarch is simply copying directly either from Justin or from Trogus, whose work Justin epitomized? Well, because it is commonly held that
Plutarch wrote independently both of Trogus and of Justin. If Plutarch was independent of Justin/Trogus, but has stuff in common with Justin/Trogus, then both must depend upon a common source (and this source both is lost to history and, to the best of my knowledge, goes unmentioned by Plutarch). This is the same basic structural process as arguing that Luke and Matthew are independent of one another; therefore both must have relied on a third source (Q).
If you wish to point out that classicists do not pile slenderer and slenderer hypotheses upon this hypothesis like Q scholars do, boy, I hear ya.
As far as I know, they postulate the common source and do not do much with it beyond that (they do not dream up entire "Q communities" and trace their history through the darkness). So, if
that is your point, I am in full agreement. But I cannot always tell what your point is, and I happen to know that the mere postulation of a lost source used in common by two extant sources (like Q with relation to Matthew and Luke) is hardly a rare thing in classical, ancient, and medieval history.
Here is another example, also from Plutarchian scholarship:
Christopher Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian, page 46: The desire to supplement Thucydides is visible elsewhere. At Alc. 20–1, for instance, he gives an unusual amount of detail, especially names, concerning Andocides’ imprisonment, and at Per. 29–33 there is a marvellous nest of stories concerning the outbreak of the war; in each case he is filling out cases where Thucydides was reticent. In the last third of Alcibiades (and Lysander and Agesilaus are similar) he similarly supplements Xenophon with material from elsewhere, especially for exploits which show Alcibiades at his most bold, resourceful, or cunning: the way he enticed the enemy out of Cyzicus, for instance, or the confident bluff which won over Selymbria, or the ruse which took Byzantium (28, 30, 31). Most of this material is anecdotal, though some will come from historiographic sources (these last cases are close enough to Diodorus to suggest that both draw on the same historiographic tradition).
Again, the common sourcing from "the same historiographic tradition," as opposed to Plutarch simply copying from Diodorus, is necessitated by the common argument that Plutarch wrote independently of Diodorus:
Edward M. Anson, Eumenes of Cardia, A Greek Among Macedonians, pages 35-36: When the different methodologies and objectives are taken into account, the three narratives still bear a remarkable similarity. Moreover, while an argument from silence is hardly the best evidence, it appears clear that Plutarch did not use Diodorus’ history. While there are references to Hieronymus’ history (Plut. Pyrrh. I7. 7, 21. 7, 27. 8; cf Demetr. 39. 5), and Plutarch is not averse to name dropping, there are no references to Diodorus anywhere in the corpus of Plutarch’s writings.
And there are many more examples of scholars arguing that Plutarch used a source for materials which bear no parallels to extant texts. (These cases are not analogous to Q, since Plutarch is the only extant source which bears the material in question; they are more like Streeter's M or L, or like a lot of people's proto-Marcan sources.) Sometimes most scholars agree that a source was used; sometimes most scholars agree (or have come to agree) that Plutarch is simply being creative; and at other times there is debate on whether or not a source was used.
neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Mon Nov 27, 2017 7:15 pmAre you able to use the same methods by which you detected the various sources in that Mark pericope discussed earlier in detecting Luke's sources in 3:1-18? Or do we need to have Mark, Matthew and Isaiah all with us to identify them?
In the case of Luke 3.1-18? No. But in other cases, yes. I gave an example of this earlier:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3616&p=77915#p77890 (Luke 5.12-16), and there are quite a few more. We can in no way expect seams like that to happen every time; that would be crazy. We are basically waiting patiently for the author to slip up, and s/he is not necessarily going to slip up every single time s/he writes a new pericope.
So, in Luke 3.1-18,
if we did not have Mark and Matthew to hand, I would almost certainly not know (with the tools at my disposal so far) that Luke sourced most of that passage from other texts. It has been my intent for a while now, however, to find instances (like Luke 5.12-16) of certain kinds of seams which we
can tell have resulted from source manipulation, and then see if we can find the same kinds of seams in Mark. I think we can, and I have made those arguments, moving from the known (seams in Luke or Matthew based on following Mark) to the unknown (seams in Mark based possibly on following somebody else). I do not expect you to agree with them, but that has been an interest of mine for some time.
I ask that question because I think "Luke" is writing like a real author, creatively adapting his sources (Mark and Matthew in particular) to produce a new story. .... It is difficult to imagine "Luke" studying the various sources before him and marking different passages in each of them to see how he can combine them, or studying two similar narratives and working out how he has to somehow use them both. Luke has worked with his sources to create something new and it would be difficult to describe his narrative as an artless "patchwork".
Honestly, I fail to see how the Arabic Diatessaron fails to qualify as your patchwork text, then. It adds very little to the four gospel texts, takes very little away, and is woven together phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, and block by block; also, it is very
easy to imagine the harmonist studying the various sources before him and marking different passages in each of them to see how he can combine them; I am not even sure how else s/he could have done it. If neither the Arabic Diatessaron nor Luke 3.1-18 qualify as what you are talking about, please give an example (even hypothetical, if necessary) to let me know.
I don't think Luke demonstrates the same awkward or less awkward tell-tale signs of piecing together different sources as source critics sometimes (often) argue is the way Mark wrote. That sort of analysis suggests a process of writing that I don't think anyone practised.
Have you read Goodacre's argument to the contrary ("Fatigue in the Synoptics")? He documents several examples of telltale awkwardness in Luke's editing of Mark and Matthew/Q.
As a reminder of something I have said several times before, if you ever think you hear me arguing that Mark did something to hypothetical sources
other than what Matthew and Luke did to Mark and either each other or Q, then you have probably misheard me. My whole method is to look at how Luke and Matthew treated Mark (or at how other ancient authors treated their sources), seeking telltale signs of editing, and upon finding them applying that knowledge to Mark to see whether he shows any of the same signs.
[Luke] has various sources in front of him, has assimilated them well in his creative brain, and proceeds to make a new cake from all the ingredients. That's not uncommon for authors, not even for ancient ones.
Really? I would love some examples. Ken Olson, for instance, has made the following claim (in his Master's thesis):
From this brief survey, it appears that classical writers did indeed combine or “conflate” different written sources. Such conflation, however, was achieved by the interweaving of different episodes, what we may call “block-by-block” or “macro” conflation, rather than close conflation of different accounts of the same episode, which we may call “close” or “word-by-word” or “micro” conflation. The usual procedure of a classical author with more than one source was to choose one source as the basis for his account for any single episode.
And I have found quite a few claims by other scholars confirming this same claim, including several claiming that Plutarch followed only one source at a time for each episode or topic.
And I have found this to be the case for Josephus, as well, in his use of Chronicles and King(dom)s, at least so far. I have been largely unable to find ancient texts besides the gospels and the Diatessaron which seem to bounce back and forth between different sources
in the same pericope/episode (as we find in Luke 3.1-18 and rather many other passages in the synoptics). So please let me know if you have viable examples from other ancient texts; I have been on the lookout for them.
I actually have some thoughts about why the gospels might show this kind of interweaving of different sources and other ancient texts might not, but I have to be relatively sure that other ancient texts actually do not do this, and it is slow going, to say the least.
(If you
did not mean that you knew of examples of texts which used sources line by line like we find in Luke 3.1-18, then please just ignore this part.)
neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Mon Nov 27, 2017 7:30 pm
Ben has led me to rethink something I earlier wrote. When I said I do not believe the way the evangelists are said to have composed their gospels has any parallel in the wider literary culture of the day, I see now that I over-spoke. What was on my mind was the view of someone looking at a range of sources before him and more like an editor than an author attempting to piece this and that piece from each together to create a new story. "Mark" is sometimes depicted as writing like that.
I do not think that Mark simply pieced stuff together like an editor (with no authorial aspirations), but not because it never happened in antiquity. I think some of the extant Diatessara are examples of someone taking sources (the gospels) and stitching them together, with little or no authorial input of his/her own.