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Re: Q and Papias



Steve,

>	I am still waiting for an argument that adequately accounts for the
>poorer quality Greek that consistently characterizes Mark over against 
>Matthew or Luke from those who reject the argument that Matthew and Luke have
>improved the markan text.  Why would one consistently downgrade the quality
>of a text that one is editing?

    You won't get this from me because I don't argue for Matthew copying Mark
or Mark copying Matthew.  The evidence you are looking for only makes
sense if one is confident that that is what happened. IF that's not the way it
worked, then it doesn't matter.  I can see Mark using his own knowledge/style
 of Greek to come up with a text you judge to be inferior to Matthew.  We have
(if we reject Papias) virtually no idea who wrote Mark, what his/her interests
or background were, his/her audience, or anything, so you're taking a big 
leap I'd say to the conclusion that you can't see Mark making Matthew worse
to the extent that he has, even if that is what happened.  ZIZ don't know how
fluent Mark was in Greek, what conditions he wrote under or much of anything
else, so how could I possibly say what he was or was not capable of 
doing in terms of writing inferior Greek.  Note that I am not 
arguing for Matthean priority.  Nor am I arguing for markan priority.  I can't
find a convincing literary-based hypothesis for the relationship fo the
Synoptics, but I could easily conceive of Mark, for whatever reason, needing
to write terse, "low-brow" Greek given a better Greek tet to look at and
steal from.  Perhaps "steal" isn't the right word, but what if Mark did 
copy from matthew, but wanted to somewhat disguise that by doing the same sort
of poor paraphrasing doen in term papers?

Ken Litwak