Summarizing My Methods

 I did promise a summary :)  So here it is:

Guiding Principles, Part 4: Authorial Methodology

We now move from the why of textual causes (i.e. the authors' motivations, namely story and theology) to the how of textual causes.  The "how" (methodology) runs parallel to the "why" (motivation), and will explain most of the phenomena that the authors' motivations cannot.  I argue that almost every gospel author, whether canonical or apocryphal, was trying to combine at least two textual sources into one.  This results in two primary mechanisms for the influence of those sources on the new text:

Guiding Principles, Part 3: Story and Theology

The next set of principles deal with how the authors themselves handled the texts they had.  In other words, what caused them to write what they wrote?  What were their motivations?  What caused them to make their textual decisions?  When looking for explanations, often one is looking for causes, and since textual history is what we are studying, the causes of that history are exactly what we are looking for.

I propose that the NT authors were motivated by two primary factors: story, and theology. 

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".

Guiding Principles, Part 1: Evidence-Based Reasoning

Before getting underway, I thought it might be helpful to write up a statement of principles, to show how we should approach a solution to the synoptic problem.  The next few posts will state these principles, with a summary at the end.  The principles themselves are fairly simple, but a slightly detailed explanation of them could prove illuminating.  Hopefully it won't prove too boring :) and at any rate it will be over with soon enough.  I won't be going in to too much detail; just enough to explain where I'm coming from, and why I think my solution is the best.