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Normally, I mix my own notes in with appropriate quotes. I make an exception here because my selected quotes mostly illuminate the vulnerability of scholarship to trends and unreliable assumptions. The main arguments are less well represented because their complexity doesn’t lend itself to brief quotable excerpts.
Not being expert in the field, I found Edwards’ book both illuminating and challenging. In support for his arguments, he offers detailed information about the Synoptic Gospels and the relevant languages. His critical assessments of previous work in the field were particularly engaging.
Edwards does not address, but accepts without reservation, the role of the Gospel of Mark as a source for the other Synoptic Gospels.
With respect to the Hebrew Gospel, Edwards’ main points (paraphrasing liberally from his own summary, but also highlighting a few details from the main text) are:
The Hebrew Gospel appears to have been used by some Jewish-Christian groups to the exclusion of the Greek gospels: the Nazarenes had the original, and the Ebionites reportedly had modified it. Both these modifications and the efforts to disassociate Christianity from Judaism (cf. the Epistle of Barnabas) might have been factors in the failure to preserve it.
Aside from one noted error (claiming an extra reference by Jerome), Edwards’ case for the existence, authority, and language of the Hebrew Gospel, and its source relationship to Luke, appears solid.
With respect to the position of canonical Matthew among the Synoptic gospels, Edwards argues that:
Again, this seems sensible.
Edwards goes on to suggest canonical Matthew was probably named in his honor because it also was aimed at a Jewish audience. While likely done on that basis, the attribution seems more likely to have stemmed from confusion than from consciousness of its separate origin.
With respect to the other common source, aside from Mark, for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Edwards’ conclusions are a little harder to summarize:
That last assertion, from Edwards’ Introduction, gives me pause. I had always regarded the hypothetical Q source (for German “Quelle,” meaning simply “source”) as having no particular characteristics not discernible from the few traces left in the two Gospels. Among scholars in the field, the concept has been narrowed to a document with very specific characteristics, based on extended and perhaps doubtful chains of reasoning.
The concept of Q as a “sayings source” is one bone of contention. Edwards’ own data show remarkably little narrative in the portions common to Matthew and Luke but not to Mark. A bit of circumstantial context does not appear to me to invalidate the primary description of the work as “sayings,” any more than the opening line, “A priest, a minister and a rabbi walked into a bar...” need be regarded as a “narrative element” somehow distinct from the subsequent punch line.
One reason the concept of a “sayings source” may have narrowed is the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, which seems to have been compiled partly from material dug out of the canonical gospels or their sources, and deliberately shorn of contextual narrative.* Some Greek fragments of Thomas were published as “Sayings of Jesus” at the end of the 19th century, and the later appearance of the complete Coptic version increased its visibility.
Even if we regard a Thomas-like collection of context-stripped “sayings” as inadequate, and disregard Schleiermacher’s questionable interpretation of Eusebius, we are left with the content shared by canonical Matthew and Luke but independent of Mark. Whether we call it Q or the Synoptic Sayings Source or the Double Tradition (Edwards’ preference), the only alternative to a separate, lost source is that one of these gospels was a source for the writer of the other.
That leads to more complexities: it would imply either that canonical Matthew was written first (and Edwards argues, convincingly, the opposite), or that whoever wrote it used Luke as a source, but carefully avoided all material that Edwards connects to the Hebrew Gospel. It seems unlikely that this would be done because of an antipathy to Hebrew originals: canonical Matthew appears to have been aimed at Jews and quotes extensively from Hebrew scripture. An effort to avoid redundancy, because the Hebrew Gospel was already known to the audience, would scarcely have been taken to such extremes: the parts of Luke heavy with Hebraisms are so precisely unrepresented in canonical Matthew as to indicate its author made no use of any source containing them.
A separate source used by both authors seems simpler. What we have of it appears to be mostly sayings-plus-context, returning us to the general notion of Q, though perhaps shorn of some modern scholarly elaborations. In fact, the strongest argument for a narrative structure in this source might be the fact (dug out of a list in one of Edwards’ footnotes) that Matthew 8:1-4 and Luke 5:12-16 are textually closer to each other than to their presumed source, Mark 1:40-45, which could mean their shared source also incorporated some, at least, of the content of Mark.
* Others (notably the Jesus Seminar) consider Thomas, or some preliminary form of it, among the earliest written gospels. This neatly justifies the notion that such collections of context-free sayings were the basis for much of the gospel tradition. Q’s presumed character is supported by Thomas, and Thomas’s priority by Q. The theory is symmetric, well-rounded—in short, apparently circular.