Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis by Eric Eve

Abstract

Reviewed by: Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis by Eric Eve Daniel Glover eric eve, Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis (LNTS 592; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021). Pp. viii + 247. $115. Eric Eve's Relating the Gospels is a new study on the Synoptic Problem, arguing in favor of the Farrer Hypothesis. E. proposes that offering attention to memory and the scribal and authorial practices of imitation in the ancient world help to demonstrate the plausibility of Luke's use of Matthew and Mark. He dialogues with recent advances in memory studies and scribal compositional practices to argue in seven chapters for the plausibility of Luke's use of Matthew. The first chapter introduces the book and specifies that E. has confined this study to "comparing the viability of the Farrer hypothesis with that of its principal competitor, the Two Document Hypothesis" (3). It is somewhat disappointing that the more recent Matthean [End Page 356] Posteriority Theory did not feature prominently in this book. While no book can do everything, even a surface level engagement with this recent literature in the footnotes would have been desirable. The next two chapters supply the book's method. In chap. 2, E. establishes different models of engagement with memory studies in relation to the Synoptic Problem and how these models can help support the assumption of Marcan priority. Most interesting here is the discussion of scribal composition. E. offers evidence that scribes had a profound capacity for memory and the memorization of texts. The literary elite valued not only rote memorization of lines of text for recitation but also creative memory, which allowed for an interaction with texts even amid their performance. The best scribes could recite passages from a given text that shared a theme, word, or character, rework passages around other and different themes, sometimes recite a narrative in reverse order, and all of these on demand. Those interested in composition would often practice the same sorts of recollecting techniques just described but in combination with other literary works in order to produce a new, creative retelling or reworking of those older sources. These sorts of practices of creative rewriting, therefore, challenge Alan Kirk's argument (Q in Matthew [LNTS 564; London: T&T Clark, 2016]) that the Gospel authors would have been restrained by the logical ordering of written materials. (E. helpfully complicates this argument by pointing out that whatever rearranging would be necessary on Luke's use of Matthew, would also be necessary on Matthew's use of Q.) To be sure, E. does not attribute to the Gospel authors the same level of ability as those elite scribes, but he takes for granted that they would have had access to some of these same practices. In chap. 3, E. places this vision of scribal practice into conversation with recent work on ancient paideia. E. suggests that, while progymnastic exercises of reordering and rearrangement cannot account for every instance of Luke's use of Matthew, they do help the reader to anticipate the types of changes Luke would have made to Matthew, especially once one considers Luke as engaging in typical scribal practices of creative memory. The next three chapters wade "into the weeds" as close, comparative, and exegetical studies of the double and triple tradition. In chap. 4, E. discusses and evaluates significant similarities between Matthew and Luke, especially in the sayings material, but also between the first few chapters of Matthew and Luke. E. himself lists eight thematic and verbal parallels that are difficult to explain without some sort of literary dependence. He finds much the same sort of information in their narratives of John the Baptist, the temptation, and the resurrection. Luke's scribal creativity manifests throughout his Gospel, but E. observes the significance of Luke's imitative rewriting of the narrative of Samuel's infancy narrative in the composition of Jesus's birth and early years. There we find an analogue for the kind of creative alterations to Luke's Septuagintal source that we may observe in Luke's Matthean source under the Farrer Hypothesis. Eve's last two chapters deal with problem passages in Luke, including...