Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 26:1 (Mar 1983)
Article: A Response To “Matthew And Midrash”
Author: Robert H. Gundry

JETS 26:1 (March 1983) p. 41

A Response To “Matthew And Midrash”

Robert H. Gundry*

Thanks to Douglas Moo for his kind words about my “persuasive defense of Matthean authorship and numerous fresh exegetical insights.” A genuine dialogue is taking place between him and me. He recognizes that evangelicals have too often turned a blind eye to synoptic problems. He also recognizes the tendentiousness of the synoptics and the resultant need to use redaction criticism. And he recognizes that differences of authorial intent and literary genre allow in principle a mixture of historical narrative and unhistorical embellishment without damage to a high view of Scripture. He only thinks that I have gone too far in seeing such a mixture in Matthew. As he refers to Donald Carson’s review of my Matthew commentary for a more detailed criticism, so I may refer to my paper, “A Response to Some Criticisms of Matthew,” which answers that review and other reviews by Philip Payne and Royce Gruenler. The paper consists of fifty-one pages and may be gotten by sending $1.00 to me at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California 93108.

Moo thinks that I almost always assume Matthean redaction wherever Matthew differs from Mark, and that the assumption suffers from lack of argumentation for Mark’s priority and from failure to allow for Matthew’s occasionally preserving more primitive tradition even if Mark wrote first. No one can speak to me of such an assumption, however, for at the beginning of my work on Matthew I had in mind to disprove Mark’s priority but came to the conclusion that the details of the text answer far better to Mark’s priority than to any other view. As for argumentation, my Commentary shows how thoroughly and economically Mark’s priority, plus Matthew’s literary and theological tastes, accounts for the wording of their parallel passages. This adequacy and economy offer a powerful argument, which Moo has failed to recognize as such. A critic will have to show in what ways the fit between hypothesis and textual phenomena is not so good as it appears to be. Otherwise we have no need to talk of more primitive traditions in Matthew.

My theory of an enlarged Q comes in for severer criticism. Moo argues that “many scholars in fact are not convinced that Q was a single written source of the sort Gundry supposes.” Yet as an equal matter of fact I myself am unsure whether Q was a single document. In particular, it seems doubtful to me that the nativity tradition (which I assign to an enlarged Q only in the sense that Q represents non-Markan traditions shared by Matthew and Luke) was written in the same document with the sayings tradition. But nothing in my thesis rides on the singleness of an enlarged Q. The crucial point is use of the same traditions, not Matthew’s and...