The Farrer hypothesis, especially as defended by Michael Goulder, has often been faulted for its supposed reliance on an anachronistic and technically impracticable understanding of Luke’s compositional practices. A closer look at the arguments against Farrer and Goulder, however, reveals a number of problems with this charge, including (but not limited to) its dependence on an inadequate understanding of how works were actually composed in antiquity. Goulder’s suggestion that Luke worked backwards through Matthew, in particular, has received a certain amount of criticism, but that scenario is shown here to be both technically feasible and perfectly in keeping with the way the ancients sometimes worked. Perhaps the greatest problem with the arguments made against the Farrer hypothesis is that they ignore Luke’s likely use of the wax tablet as a compositional aid—a medium that would have allowed Luke to rearrange Matthew’s material as freely as Farrerians suppose.
The patterns of verbal agreement between the gospels have long been considered a key for solving the synoptic problem, and a subdiscipline within gospel source criticism of tabulating and interpreting these patterns of agreement has slowly emerged in the name of gathering the most objective evidence available. Studies of the verbal agreements have steadily grown in their sophistication (esp. in combinatory analysis), as well as in their appreciation for the nature of the gospel text as something more than a mere compilation. The question of whether this approach can substantially further the field, however, has yet to be answered. This article surveys and critiques all published statistical studies of the verbal agreements known to the author.
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