or ... Is there an invisible elephant in the room?
1) “Who is it that struck you?”
An argument against Q
In a fine post two years ago over at Vridar, Tim Widowfield explained a "slam-dunk" argument against the existence of Q, but also the defense against this argument.
Mark Goodacre puts it this way:There are many, many Minor Agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark. A good number of them can easily be explained on the assumption that Matthew and Luke are independently redacting Mark, coinciding in their attempts to polish up his literary style, to alter his harsh view of the disciples, his less reverential view of Jesus and so on. However, there is an irresolvable rump of arguments that simply will not go away. One of the most interesting occurs . . . when Jesus is being mocked:
Matthew 26.67-68 Mark 14.65 Luke 22.64 Then they spat
into his
face, and struck him; and
some slapped him, saying,
‘Prophesy to us, you
Christ! Who is it that
struck you?‘And some began to spit
on him, and to cover his
face, and to strike him,
saying to him,
‘Prophesy!‘
And the guards received
him with blows.Now the men who were
holding Jesus mocked him
and beat him; they also blind-
folded him and asked him,
‘Prophesy!
Who is it that
struck you?’
(Goodacre 2001, p. 146)
On other occasions, Goodacre has emphasized the fact that these are five consecutive words (τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε) found in both Luke and Matthew but not in Mark. Moreover, they appear in the passion narrative, which the great majority of scholars believe Q did not have. Initially, on the surface at least, this argument seems quite sound.
The counter-argument
Tim continued.
But what happens when we start digging? ...
Goodacre is partially correct when he says that Q theorists find the taunting question in Matthew distressing. He writes:On the whole, they are troubled by it since they realize that it challenges the notion of Luke’s independence from Matthew, the premise behind the Q theory. The leading defence here is that Matthew did not contain the words Who is it that struck you? The theory is that these words were added by Luke and that scribes of Matthew then interpolated them into their versions of Matthew. This is a process known as ‘conjectural emendation’, where a scholar proposes an emendation to the text with no warrant anywhere in the textual tradition — no known text of Matthew is without these words. Conjectural emendation is usually practised sparingly by Gospel scholars, and it is particularly problematic here, where the primary reason for practising it is to defend an already troubled synoptic theory, the Q hypothesis.
(Goodacre 2001, p. 146)
But he glosses over the undeniable fact that the Matthean account has oddities that require explanation. We’ve already mentioned the fact that the blindfolding of Jesus appears to be missing, which renders problematic the command to guess who hit him. Note well, too, that Matthew has not so much omitted Mark’s “cover his face” as converted it to “spit in his face.
Only in Luke’s gospel do we get the unmistakably clear picture of the captors taunting Jesus in a mocking game — which, along with the substantially different order of events, has led some scholars to infer that the third evangelist was following a secondary source. In fact, B.H. Streeter believed that both the veiling of the face and the taunting question (tis estin . . .?) were originally present only in Luke.In Mark the mockers spit on His face and slap Him and cry, “Play the prophet now!” In Luke they veil His eyes and then, striking Him, say, “Use your prophetic gift of second sight to tell the striker’s name.” Each version paints a consistent picture; but, if one half of Luke’s picture is pieced on to Mark and the other half to Matthew (as in the ℵ B text), both are blurred, with the result that in the accepted text Matthew’s version dulls the edge of the taunt in Mark, but does not succeed in substituting the quite differently pointed taunt in Luke.
(Streeter 1924, p. 327)
Streeter continues by arguing that the passage in Matthew represents one of the extremely rare cases in which the text of one gospel has influenced another, with no extant copies left to prove it.Assimilation of parallels is a form of corruption which can result, and, as I have shown, has often actually resulted, in producing an identical corruption along more than one independent line of transmission. I suggest that for once this has happened along all lines.
(Streeter 1924, p. 327)
In other words, we know that a great deal of variation exists among all manuscripts. It would seem likely that in at least some rare cases, every copy we have of a gospel is “wrong” at some point, and that the original reading is lost forever. Streeter reminds us that the NT manuscripts abound with variations.The minor agreements which I have examined above include all that are sufficiently striking to be worth discussing in detail. The residue are agreements still more minute. Of these textual assimilation is the probable explanation. Indeed, it would perhaps be a better explanation of some of those which in the earlier part of this chapter I have attributed to the coincident editorial activity of Matthew and Luke. Very few of the scholars who have treated of this aspect of the Synoptic Problem appear to me to have an adequate appreciation of the immense amount of variation that exists, even between MSS. of the same family, in regard to just the kind of small points that are here involved, such as the order of words, interchange of prepositions especially in composition, substitution of one conjunction for another, the use of the article with proper names, and the like.
(Streeter 1924, p. 328, emphasis mine)
According to Streeter, scribes who were writing well before the first manuscripts we possess “corrected” their versions of Matthew so that “Who is it that struck you?” appears after “Prophesy, you Christ.”
It seems that Tim's goal was to explain the arguments and counter-arguments of an interesting example and to present a fair case. Nevertheless, I tend think that he could have added a point.
Goodacre replied to the counter view that Matthew's version may not be as strange as it seems at first glance. If many spit in Jesus' face then in Matthew's view Jesus may have seen little or nothing. Matthew may have considered that as sufficient. Tim showed that it is easy to explain why Matthew' could have omitted the veiling of the face:
Matthew wishes to remind us of Isaiah 50:6, in which the obedient servant of God endures similar abuse.I gave My back to those who strike Me,
And My cheeks to those who pluck out the beard;
I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting.
(NAS, 1977)
(Notice that since the translators of the New American Standard (1977 edition) were absolutely certain that this passage is a prophecy concerning Jesus, they capitalized the personal possessive pronouns.)
The suffering servant leans into the beating. He presents his cheeks gladly as they pull out his beard by the roots. He refuses to cover his face, despite the ultimate indignity — being spat on in the face. Matthew has thus taken a passage in Mark in which Jesus is spat upon, hooded, and beaten, and has modified it into an echo of the prophecy in Isaiah. They are fulfilling prophecy while at the same time asking him to, “Play the prophet, you so-called Christ!”
But the more I think about it the more it seems to me that in both versions, Matthew's and Luke's, is an invisible elephant in the room – the word “Prophesy!“ ...