Scholarship Gone Wrong

This evening I was glancing over an online textual commentary by Wieland Willker on the Gospel of Mark (A Textual Commentary on the Gospels [Bremen: 2006], volume 2, "Mark"). While the commentary is not as nice as Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament or some other critical commentary, it is over all interesting enough, and somewhat useful due to the amount of material it gathers and presents for each variation unit it discusses.

Having read the material on the famous variant of Mark 1.1, I passed on to the equally famous variant found in Mark 1.2. Willker notes that, due to the singular nature of the variant in verse 1 and the fact that verses 2 and 3 appear to be grammatically subordinate, some scholars postulate that the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, like its end, is textually corrupt. This postulation seems unnecessary to explain the data, but one could see how it might make a little sense.

However, when Willker comes to the famous 'en to Esaia to prophete' variant in verse 2, he makes what I think is a very poorly based assumption and consequent consideration. He writes (p. 10), "Both Mt and Lk omit the Malachi part of the LXX quotation! This is very unusual. Why omit it, when they found it in Mark? Although both cite it later at Mt 11.10/Lk 7.27. Is it possible that Mt and Lk read a different opening of Mark than we have today?"

Here Willker stumbles in the mess of the source criticism of the Gospels. He takes as fact the theory of Markan priority which maintains that the evangelists Matthew and Luke used the Gospel of Mark as the basis for their gospels (and it is usually also claimed that their extra material was largely drawn from a hypothetical document called 'Q'). This theory of Markan priority is not without its strong points and has been probably the most widely accepted 'solution' to the so-called Synoptic Problem in recent (last hundred years) scholarship, boasting such advocates as F. F. Bruce (cf., for example, chapter four of his The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?). However, their are other theories with other strong support and respected proponents. The fault, then, lies not in Willker's support of the theory of Markan priority, but in his assumption of it (despite the variety of opinion on the matter amongst good scholars) to the point that he is willing to suspect, or at least consider, significant textual corruption (which is not evidenced in manuscripts) rather than question his prefered theory of the source of the Gospels. I would suggest that this is an instance of bad scholarship, and demonstrates a poor arrangement of values and priorities.