Subject: Replication of strings

From: "Vinton A. Dearing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 11:18:26 PST

If I understand Jim Deardoff, we do not have, say, five examples of 
10-word duplications, three of 15-word duplications, and one of 
20-word duplications. If the scheme is the-longer-the-fewer, I do not 
understand why this would be expected in "independently edited 
works."  In short, I need information "for dummies" including the 
meaning of "independently edited works" and "purposeful replication 
by the Gospel writers and/or a translator [why "a translator" instead 
of "translators"?]." Could I have the title, etc., for the 
publication of Theodor Zahn's theories? 
     Again, if I understand Jim, Ulrich Schmid and I have discussed 
these replications in communications to the list. I said I believed 
that the Gospel authors independently came upon scraps of written 
information that they believed were correct and copied them. Schmid 
questioned whether such a belief did not unnecessarily multiply the 
sources for the Gospels. I replied that to suppose the scraps had 
first been collected was to interpose an additional source between 
them and the Gospels.
     We seem not to be approaching the problem from the same 
direction as Jim, so I would very much like to know more about his 
reasoning.
     Vinton A. Dearing

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From: Jim Deardorff <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 13:42:25 -0700 (PDT)

> direction as Jim, so I would very much like to know more about his 

Vinton,

I failed to properly state that we do see a nice regular decrease like 
you suggested, but only up to a point.  We have 31 or so replications of
4-word strings, 23 of 5-word strings, 15 of 6-word strings, 11 of 7-word
strings, etc., in a nice exponential distribution, but this ceases at 10
words and beyond.  This is in the Luke-Matthew "Q" parallels.  Past
there we find great excesses, with strings occurring even of length 23,
24....27.  (This made use of N-A 21; I'll repeat soon for N-A 26 and see
if results differ significantly.)  These latter have caused W. R. Farmer,
B. C. Butler and others to assume a direct textual dependence between Mt
and Lk, as opposed to the independence assumption of the 2-document
hypothesis.  

As far as I know, Theodor Zahn was the first to postulate, using the
Augustinian tradition, that Matthew first came out in Aramaic (to agree
with Papias and the external evidence), then the writer of Mark used
Aramaic Matthew in writing his gospel in Greek, and considerably later the
translator of Matthew into Greek utilized Mark.  This is in his
_Introduction to the New Testament_, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1909), pp. 570f.  This could be extended to the writer of Luke using both
Aramaic Matthew and (Greek) Mark, and the translator of Matthew having
both Mark and Luke in front of him.  Zahn, and later Voste, reasoned that
the translator of Matthew could well have replicated strings of words from
Mark (I don't know if they discussed his utilizing Luke in the same manner
or not) as a matter of convenience or guidance or out of respect while
doing his transaltion (and using the LXX some then too); Butler found
these reasons insufficient and so believed that Matthew was translated
into Greek before Mark was written.

Only one translator (at most) is involved here, as only Matthew has been
argued strenuously by some to have been first written in Aramaic or
Hebrew.

Here's the way I reason it.  For independently edited works, e.g., two
editors each independently translating from a Semitic source document into
Greek, they may perforce have used the same three Greek words in a row at
one point in expressing a thought within a parallel, but then the odds are
less than one (e.g., 0.7) that the next word (4th) they used would be the
same word; then the odds would be 0.7 x 0.7 that the 5th word would be the
same, and so on as one thought is completed and the next begins -- in the
statistical average.  This reasoning leads to the exponential fall-off
distribution which one finds holds out to strings of length 10 or so. 
Then, I think a definite reason is needed to explain why this exponential
doesn't continue to hold well past this point; if it held it would mean
that strings of length 15, say, in the case of Mt-Lk, should be very rare
or non-existent, and strings as long as 20 or 27 certainly wouldn't exist. 

I feel the same reasoning holds if one editor uses another's works without
translation being involved, but feels the need to make many editorial
alterations in order to improve the text, and/or to better express his own
theology, etc.  You'd again expect the exponential fall-off of numbers of
strings as the strings got longer.  But it only holds on the statistical
average if you have a large enough data sample, which I believe the
synoptic gospels do provide.

So far I've only come across one "test" case as a check.  This involved
the parallels between the LXX's 2 Chr 36, Ezra & Neh 7:73-8:12 versus 1
Esdras.  The results showed a nice exponential decline for the
distribution of duplicate strings, without any longer strings occurring
past the point where their expected number (from the exponential curve)
had become significantly less than one.  Although it's always difficult to
be at all sure that one translation or editing is independent of
another's, the result suggests that the two texts in this test case were
independent, or at least that there was no purposeful replication of
longer strings of words by the later translator/editor.

Regarding the scrap hypothesis, there would have to be a lot of scraps
hypothesized, and then you'd need to reason why the two writers so often
(between Mk & Mt or between Mk & Lk) used these scraps in the same order
and context.  As I see it, you'd need about 30 scraps just to explain the
numbers of unexpectedly long strings occurring within the "Q" parallels. 

Jim Deardorff