The No.1 reason for rejecting Farrer

In the beginning, scholars interested in the relationship between Luke and Matthew were confident of two things. First, Matthew could not have used Luke because Matthew is first generation and Luke second (an assumption that no longer holds). Second, Luke could not have used Matthew because this would require Luke to dismember Matthew's supreme achievement, the Sermon on the Mount.
 
In conversations I've had with semi-interested scholars and students over many years I’ve learned that the most common objection to the theory that Luke used Matthew (as proposed by the Farrer Hypothesis – FH), is the way if requires Luke to treat Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. This is a sticking point that sticks. The Sermon on the Mount is so well known that even relatively casual observers can register the problem. Why would Luke remove and scatter the innards of Matthew's Sermon, leaving behind the shorter, less memorable Sermon on the Plain?

For Farrer theorists there must be a reason, since they are convinced, on other grounds, that Luke used Matthew. The problem can only lie, therefore, with the subjective halo that surrounds the Sermon on the Mount. If that bubble could be burst, then this prime reason for rejecting the FH could be overcome. Accordingly, FH supporters have, over the years, ventured pragmatic, aesthetic, procedural, theological and literary motivations for FH Luke's behaviour.[1] The problem with all these approaches, however, is that they end up placing FH Luke in a minority of one. Matthew’s is by far the most widely quoted Gospel from the second century onwards and, in the course of that time, no one has ever complained about his Sermon being too long, too rich in content, too comprehensive, insufficiently aesthetically pleasing, too theologically insubstantial, or too out of step with literary expectation. Rather, as Luke Timothy Johnson puts it: "In the history of Christian thought - indeed in the history of those observing Christianity - the Sermon on the Mount has been considered an epitome of the teaching of Jesus and therefore, for many, the essence of Christianity".[2]   For nearly two millennia, therefore, Matthew 5-7 has been the go-to place for the ethical teaching of Jesus. If Farrer’s Luke thought his readers would prefer it if he scattered this resource amongst the unrelated content of Luke 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, and 16, then he was wrong. Comprehensively wrong.

At this point I step back and return to the beginning. The Farrer theorists’ mistake, so far as I can see it, is that they absorbed the early assumption that Matthew could not have used Luke.[3] This caused them to equate good evidence of direct copying between Luke and Matthew with good evidence that Luke used Matthew. This then fuelled their conviction that, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem, Luke must have had a motive for dismantling Matthew’s Sermon. In consequence, they have engaged in ever more detailed explanations for what that reason might have been. But why keep pushing water up this hill? Why not go with the flow?

Under the Matthean Posteriority Hypothesis (MPH), in which Matthew used Luke, all the water runs in the same direction. Now, just as Matthew puts flesh on the skeleton provided by Mark’s Gospel to create his more popular Matthew’s Gospel, so he also puts flesh on the skeleton provided by Luke’s Sermon on the Plain to create his more popular Sermon on the Mount. With the most popular objection to the FH thus turned on its head, a new question arises. What could be the number one reason for rejecting the MPH?[4]  

[For a more detailed discussion of how FH Luke and MPH Matthew use one another's Sermons, see the video 'Did Matthew use Luke?']

[1] Austin Farrer began this process in, ‘On Dispensing with Q’, in Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Blackwell, 1955) 65, where he defends Luke’s right to make of his ‘garden’ whatever he will, regardless of the aesthetic disapproval of onlookers. Michael Goulder, in Luke: A New Paradigm (Sheffield Academic Press,1989) 347, expresses the view that, ‘Matthew’s Sermon is far too long. Who can take in so much spiritual richness in a single gulp?’ Mark Matson, in, ‘Luke’s rewriting of the Sermon on the Mount’, in Questioning Q, (SPCK, 2004) 64, argues that Luke’s reordering has a “distinctive theology”. Mark Goodacre, in ‘Re-Walking the ‘Way of the Lord’: Luke’s Use of Mark and his Reaction to Matthew’, in, Luke’s Literary Creativity (Bloomsbury, 2016), suggests that Mark’s ‘Way of the Lord’ is the motif that guides the distribution of Luke’s source material. Joel Archer in, ‘Ancient Bioi and Luke’s Modification of Matthew’s Longer Discourses’, New Testament Studies (2022) 76-88, argues that Luke shortens Matthew’s long speeches to conform them to the standard set by other ancient biographies.

[2] Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘The Sermon on the Mount’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford University Press, 2000) 654 - quoted by Joel Archer in the article noted above.

[3] The absorption of this assumption also applies to proponents of the Two Document Hypothesis – in which Matthew and Luke independently used both Mark and Q. It was their lack of engagement with this option that caused Mark Goodacre similarly to disregard it. Thus, in The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (Continuum, 2001) 108, he states: "The theory that Matthew has read Luke ... is rarely put forward by sensible scholars and will not be considered here".

[4] I set out to identify the biggest problem with the MPH in ‘Gnat’s Camels and Matthew’s use of Luke’ 

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