Gospel Development Theories Are All Bunk: Engagement with Pharisees 7

In this final installment of my series on the Pharisees in the Gospels, I reply to the last argument I could find in Dr. Keener's commentary on John. This is an attempt to use redaction criticism to line up John's account of the messengers from the Pharisees and treat it as a redactive adaptation (i.e. at least partially non-historical) of statements in Luke and Matthew. The astonishing thing is that these statements in Luke and Matthew aren't about messengers coming to John the Baptist at all! In fact, they aren't even about anyone explicitly asking John the Baptist any questions at all! On the face of it, the scene in John's Gospel in which messengers from the Pharisees come to John the Baptist is unique and *not* a parallel passage to anything in the Synoptics. Nonetheless, Keener treats it as if it is a parallel and then tries to argue that John both "eliminates" the crowds following John the Baptist and also "narrows" the interest in John the Baptist's identity and whether he's the Messiah from the crowds to the Pharisees. Obviously, John the Baptist was a figure of great interest to many people in that region. The Synoptics record that the crowds as well as Herod Antipas speculated (after John's death) about whether Jesus might be John the Baptist risen from the dead. With his popularity and fiery preaching, John the Baptist was a natural focus of curiosity. It should be unsurprising that *both* the crowds *and* the religious leaders (of various kinds) wanted to know if he thought of himself as the Messiah. John's Gospel isn't "narrowing" anything by reporting that priests, Levites, and Pharisees were all involved in a delegation asking him about his self-conception, while Luke reports that the common people were wondering if he was the Messiah.This argument illustrates just how badly conceived and badly argued redaction criticism really is, lacking in commonsense recognition of human motives and their outworkings in the Gospels.