Memory, Written Sources, and the Synoptic Problem: A Response to Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll

Abstract

Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll recently published in this journal the results of an experiment involving forty-three students, in which three groups were asked to write on six of eight topics.1 The first group was instructed to write a brief summary (less than a page) about the first two topics without consulting any written sources. For the second two topics, they were permitted unlimited reading of a prepared written source but had to return the source before writing their summary. (They were permitted to use the wording of the source, however, if they remembered it.) For the third pair of topics, they were permitted to use and retain the written source and to borrow from it for their summaries. The second and third groups of students were instructed to do the same with these same topics, but with the procedures regarding the use or nonuse of a written source applied at different times so as to produce writings on the same topic according to all three procedures. In this way, McIver and Carroll sought to determine what the phenomenon of sequential agreement might tell about an author's reliance upon oral and written sources. Ultimately, they hoped that this information might shed light on the composition of the Gospels. McIver and Carroll found that the summaries written without the use of a source (a source that existed but was not distributed to all the students) agreed with the source for 5.0% of the wording and averaged a maximum of 2.45 words in sequential order; summaries written after reading and returning a source agreed with the source for 15.3% of the wording and averaged a maximum of 5.43 words in exact sequence; and summaries for which a written source was retained while writing agreed with that source for 28.4% of its words, with their longest word sequences averaging 12.6 words.2 The real focus, as stated above, was the length of sequential agreements. McIver and Carroll write: While there is overlap between the various categories, it is clear that long sequences of 16 or more words belong exclusively to the group that retained the source and could copy from it. From the perspective of the development of a test for the presence of copying, the critical group is the group that returned the source before writing. The longest sequence of words in the exact order for almost all of them was fewer than 8. None of them had a sequence of words greater than 15. The experiments have also shown that this characteristic is accurate only for narrative material, and that it is possible that sequences of words from poems and shorter aphorisms might be remembered exactly. Thus it is now possible to state a general test to determine the existence of written sources: Any sequence of exactly the same 16 or more words that is not an aphorism, poetry, or words to a song is almost certain to have been copied from a written document, (pp. 679-80; emphasis original) McIver and Carroll next try to apply these insights to the Synoptic Gospels. They present a table identifying twenty-three passages containing sequential agreements of sixteen or more words, listing them according to length: 31, 29, 28, 28, 26, 26, 24, 24, 24, 24, 23, 23, 23, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 17, 17, 16, 16, 16. They pare down this list of parallel passages by removing seven short aphorisms or distinctive sayings and seven longer distinctive sayings.3 That leaves only the following agreements: 31, 28, 28, 24, 23, 22, 19, 17, 16. For McIver and Carroll's procedure, it is not the length but rather the location of these agreements that matters, as they take each sequence than sixteen words to reveal the existence of a written source for the section of Gospel material that the sequential agreement represents. The nine sequences listed above represent the following passages (as defined by Huck's synopsis) respectively: Matt 10:16-25//Mark 13:3-13; Matt 11:25-30//Luke 10:21-24; Matt 24:45-51//Luke 12:41-48; Matt 3:1-2//Luke 3:1-20; Matt 24:15-28//Mark 13:14-23; Matt 11:1-19//Luke 7:18-35; Matt 22:41-46//Mark 12:35-37; Matt 8:1-4//Luke 5:12-16; Matt 24:29-35//Mark 13:24-31. …