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>This allowed the Jesus Seminar and like-minded “Liberal Jesus” scholars to further solidify Jesus as a Cynic sage who never pronounced embarrassing End Time judgments of the world's end and hellfire
>But as Q scholars went deeper into the hypothetical subdivisions of a hypothetical source, the Farrer Hypothesis made a sudden comeback in a backlash of skepticism towards Q at the turn of the century, largely thanks to the internet presence of Mark Goodacre, a student of Michael Goulder, Farrer's primary student. One of the central planks of the Farrer Hypothesis is that there are “minor agreements” between Matthew and Luke against Mark that are not sayings from Jesus (the parts that Kloppenborg and others relegated to Q3), so Occam's Razor states that the simplest solution is usually the correct one: Luke used Mark as his primary source but took some sayings and events from Matthew as well. Now, the “minor agreements” are definitely a problem, and simply assigning them to one last update of Q is a poor solution since they would make little sense in that context. But there are far more examples in which Matthew and Luke expanded in different directions where Mark left off as well as many examples in which Luke is shown to have the more primitive version of a verse than Matthew, such as in the Lord's Prayer (Luke 11:2; Matthew 6:9). The problem is not that the Two Source and Four Source Hypotheses are too complicated. The problem is that they are too simple
>Despite the fact that the Synoptic gospels have so much content in common, there are also hundreds of derivations in the order of events such that Matthew and Luke appear to be jumping around a lot for no discernable reason. The Two/Four Source Hypotheses have more explanatory power because they provide reasons for the disorder: Matthew and Luke were switching between Mark and Q/M/L. More sources equals more complexity in weaving them together
