2 - The Literary hypothesis: some preliminary tests (Mt 3:1 - 9:17)

Summary

Antonio Gaboury listed Mt 3:1 - 4:11 as part of his section C, that is as material that was more worked over before it reached the Synoptic writers themselves. He thought that Luke knew this material at a more primitive stage of its development than did Mark and Matthew. Mt 4:12 - 9:17 he included in his section D, and he thought that Matthew knew this material at a more primitive stage than Mark and Luke. We may bear these theories in mind as we look at Mt 3:1 - 9:17, but we need not regard the claims to primitivity as guidelines in our own enquiry. We shall, however, take note of the fact, to which we alluded in the previous chapter, that some parts of this section of Matthew fall into that comparatively limited amount of Synoptic material where similarity of order among the pericopae coincides with a close verbal similarity in the texts of the different Gospels. Our intention in this chapter will simply be to begin that exercise of imagination to which we pointed earlier, and to attempt to ascertain whether the variations in the tradition as it is rendered by Matthew and by Mark seem particularly intelligible in the light of direct literary derivation. We shall be wondering, in fact, whether theories of literary derivation seem to account for the phenomena with such a high degree of probability that one or other of them must be correct.