The Roll, the Codex, the Wax Tablet and the Synoptic Problem

Abstract

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.

Texts, Tables and Tablets: A Response to John C. Poirier

“…I am always pleased when a colleague takes my work (Derrenbacker 2002; 2005; 2011) in the Synoptic Problem seriously, as John C. Poirier did in a recent issue of JSNT (Poirier 2012), for the Synoptic Problem remains an esoteric subset of an already esoteric guild. I am also pleased that Poirier agrees with my fundamental thesis, namely that Synoptic source critics need to take seriously the ways in which ancient writers worked with source material and the mechanics of ancient book production.…”

“…However, Poirier does take F. Gerald Downing and me to task in our arguments that, on the Farrer Hypothesis (FH), particularly as articulated by Michael Goulder, 1 Luke’s use of Matthew makes little sense mechanically and is inconsistent with what we know about ancient compositional practices. Instead, Poirier concludes that ‘Farrer’s and Goulder’s shared vision of Luke is completely at home in the first-century world, as are those aspects distinct to Goulder’ (Poirier 2012: 24).…”

“…2.5.3–2.6.4, Clement ‘evidently did not go forward through his scroll of [Philo’s] De Posteritate but turned it backwards’ (van den Hoek 1988: 152). This, argues Poirier, is evidence that ‘[m]oving backward through a roll is not an unknown practice’ (Poirier 2012: 12).…”

Questioning the Feasibility of the Major Synoptic Hypotheses: Scribal Memory as the Key to the Oral–Written Interface

“… 11. John C. Poirier refers to a number of examples of using physical support for one’s sources, such as the ‘table-like structure’ found in room L30 (the scriptorium) at Qumran. See Poirier 2012: 15-16. …”

Waxing Careless: Poirier, Derrenbacker and Downing

“…Our attention is helpfully drawn by John C. Poirier, 'The Roll, the Codex, the Wax Tablet and the Synoptic Problem', to aspects of the physical processes of writing in the Graeco-Roman world of the early Christians (Poirier 2012). Wax tablets, whose prevalence at the time he is able to show is widely evidenced, could, at least in theory, allow for more flexibility in the collation of literary sources, specifically between the Synoptic evangelists, than has been allowed for by, among others, F. Gerald Downing and Robert A. Derrenbacker.…”