I also see another reason why Albert must be inclined to like N.T. Wright - he is a serious, highly regarded Scripture scholar who does not favor the Q hypothesis. His explanation is refreshingly different from most of the "synoptic problem" solutions you tend to hear and seems to me like very reasonable and historical because it thinks outside the box of narrowly modern textual criticism. What I mean is that he critiques people who take it for granted that first-century peasants in a chiefly oral culture will think about collections sermons and sayings the same way that modern academics and scribes think about texts instead of how people think about sermons or lectures they hear. It has the virtue that it is very reasonable and Occam's razor-s away why it should be a problem that the Beatitudes, Our Father, Sermon on the Mount/Plain are different in Matthew and Luke (and Mark), and explains why insular modern academic types (and those who receive their Scriptural formation from them) should think it is a "problem" but most people throughout most of history (including the people who decided on the canon of Scripture) are not worried by it. In the extended post I quote a passage of about one page from Jesus and the Victory of God.
The fact that Jesus was an itinerant prophet meant, clearly, that he went from village to village, saying substantially the same things wherever he went. Local variations would no doubt abound. Novelty would spring up in response to a new situation, or a sharp question or challenge. But the historical likelihood - and it is very likely indeed - is that if he told a parable once he told it dozens of times, probably with minor variation; that if he gave a list of (what we call) 'beatitudes' once, he gave such a list, probably with minor variations, dozens of times; that he had regular phrases with which he urged repentance, commended faith, encouraged the desperate, rebuked those he considered hard-hearted, spoke words of healing. The chances of his finding totally new things to say all the time, so that everything he said he said once and once only, must be reckoned at nil. Theissen's picture, of those who had heard him comparing memories and coming up with similar, though not identical, ways of retelling his stories, rings thoroughly true.
We have already mentioned the enormous implications that this has for synoptic criticism [he treated this at length in his previous book, but I am giving you this one because it is a nice short summary --T.A.]. Within the peasant oral culture of the day, Jesus must have left behind him, not one or two isolated traditions, but a veritable mare's nest of anecdotes, and also of sentences, aphorisms, rhythmic sayings, memorable stories with local variations, and words that were remembered because of their pithy and apposite phrasing, and because of their instantly being repeated by those who had heard them. Again and again he will have said cryptic words about having ears to hear, about the first being last and the last first, about salt and light, and particularly about Israel's god and his coming kingdom. My guess would be that we have two version of the great supper parable, two versions of the talents/pounds parable, and two versions of the beatitudes, not because one is adapted from the other, or both from a single common written source, but because these are two out of a dozen or more possible variations that, had one been in Galilee with a tape-recorder, one might have 'collected.' Anyone who suggests that this is not so must, I think...have no historical imagination for what an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, would look like. Even the anachronistic semi-parallel of a modern traveling lecturer or preacher will make the point: once one hears the lecture or sermon two or three times, even if it is delivered impromptu with local variations, one will be able to reproduce considerable parts of it. One may accurately guess that any of Jesus' followers who had been with him for even a few days could have told some of Jesus' stories, or announced some of his characteristic words of welcome and warning, with close accuracy to the original.
-- N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, pp. 170 & 171
Proof of my language-loving nerdiness: I actually scanned the title to figure out that there was no Q before I started reading. :x
Posted by: Lindsay | June 25, 2007 at 07:01 PM