Why are the Minor Agreements problematic for the Q Hypothesis?
Q: The case from the Minor Agreements has been answered by Q Theorists, hasn’t it? For many years the matter seemed to have been settled by B. H. Streeter’s The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan, 1924) and J. Schmid’s Matthäus und Lukas (Freiburg: Herder, 1930). More recently, confidence in Streeter’s and Schmid’s ‘divide and conquer’ approach to the Minor Agreements has wavered, and Frans Neirynck has led the defence of Luke’s independence from Matthew. The issue is certainly not a closed one. Q: Surely the problem for the case against Q is that the Minor Agreements are just that, so minor? Not really. Let me quote from Goulder and the Gospels (p. 126): If Luke has reconciled Mark and Matthew, this will have resulted in ‘a sliding scale of Matthean influence on Luke, from pure triple tradition passages which feature Minor Agreements, to Mark-Q overlap passages which feature more Mattheanisms, to double tradition passages where Luke is dependent solely on Matthew’. Th
