The Rigid Rule of Deliberateness

In this last segment on the rigidity of critical scholars, I examine a bad methodological assumption--that if the wording of parallel passages is somewhat similar, but there are small differences, these differences very likely resulted from *deliberate editing* (redacting, substituting, etc.) of the earlier version of the story. This rule is also wrongly applied to the evangelists' quotations of Scripture. Critical scholars rigidly ignore far more natural and non-deliberate causes of such differences, including quoting partially from memory, using notes (and memory) from a written source rather than having the source open at all times, variations of witness testimony, and just telling a story partially in one's own words, without consciously making each word the same as or different from the words in some other document. This rigid assumption of deliberateness is often implausible to the point of silliness, yet it lies at the heart of the so-called "successes" of redaction criticism. Those "successes" are then treated as an objective discovery which is used to bully harmonizers. Moreover, the triviality of some of the differences is used to underwrite non-trivial claims of deliberate fact-changing.