Guiding Principles, Part 2: Parsimony, and Textual Parsimony

Two principles will be guiding our theorizing about gospel sources: parsimony in general, and a specific kind of parsimony appropriate to NT studies, namely what I will call "textual parsimony".




The most important theoretical principle is that of parsimony in general (also commonly refered to as "Occam's Razor").  Parsimony has served the natural sciences incredibly well, and so seems to be an excellent principle for arriving at the most secure knowledge possible even in the humanities.  It is not very useful for arriving at the most complete knowledge available, due to its nature--the most parsimonious solution is the simplest solution, and this can often lead one to solutions that are too simple, hiding elaborations in a system that may not be necessary, but which are nevertheless real, just because that's the way the system happened to develop.  But parsimony helps establish a minimum explanatory framework, that can then be built upon in a systematic way.  It often reveals the most essential elements of a system, the most irreducible problems, and the conceptual solutions to those problems.  While again, those solutions might turn out to be too simple, they at least highlight what must be explained one way or another.  In some ways it is an interpretive equivalent to regression analysis, a way of dividing the order within a system from the chaos.

The second theoretical principle is a kind of corollary of the first: whenever possible, eliminate hypothetical texts.  As mentioned above, hypothetical texts can be multiplied without limit, creating any number of synoptic solutions that one likes.  We want to avoid creating solutions due to our prejudices; we want the correct solution.  The best and most correct solution, therefore, will use only texts that we already know of, whenever possible.  It's true that we do continue to discover new texts over time, but parsimony/Occam's Razor tells us to minimize this expectation.  So if we must hypothesize new texts, we will do it as infrequently as possible.  In other words: we have all the texts.  And the texts we have are the only ones we can use.  If we need a justification for this, one argument is that Western scholars have already made their great foray into the locations of ancient texts, during the last two centuries of imperialism (please note I am speaking broadly; I don't think Morton Smith's visits to Mar Saba, for example, were done under the auspices of imperialism).  The chances are that if there were new texts to be discovered, they would have been found already.  Now, I don't deny that there could still be more texts out there to be found (and in fact I think there probably are), but we can at least say that there is a good chance that if a text is available to be found, then we should have already uncovered evidence for it one way or another.  As for any remaining discoveries, the principle of evidence tells us to stick with what we know, and only to expand our theories once the evidence becomes available.  In other words: we must be patient.