"No Q for you!" says the "Q Nazi" (think "Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld).No Q?I don't yet know the answer, but I am most often looking at the gospel relationships as follows:
Mk -> *Ev
Mk and/or *Ev -> Jn
*Ev and maybe Mk -> Mt
Then finally Luke is aware of all the preceding gospels:
Mk -> Lk
*Ev -> Lk
Mt -> Lk
Jn -> Lk
I'm not accusing you or anyone here of being a real Nazi of the kind being forged even now in the politics across the world (whatever that means), but I am curious to know why it is so important to dispense with Q.
Personally I equate the hypothetical Q with the double tradition, but I think that efforts to seek bits of Q in Mark, etc., are overreach. I am not convinced that the Double Tradition was a single document but on that I am open to suggestions.
Going back to John Kloppenborg-Verbin's The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Jan 1, 1987), he compared Q to some other unrelated wisdom literature ("sapient sayings" collections), and cites several examples from Ancient Near East.
There was an alleged Synoptic-l online seminar I participated in (around 2000) where K. discussed his Q research. I asked him whether the source(s) behind the double tradition were introduced into Matt & Luke to soften Jesus's rough edges. I noted that the choice of (a) relatively bland collection(s) of wisdom sayings was possibly imported from non-Judean literature in order to redirect the public perception of Jesus away from association with Judean rebellion, and towards association with peaceful, and fairly harmless, folk sophists like Cynics.
This elicited some comments from other participants to the effect that "Q is plenty Jewish" and shows signs of having been "Judaized." I suggested back that the "judaizion" was due to the final editor, not the source(s). Kloppenborg himself was non committal, saying he was "developing something."
IIRC, this was shortly before he published Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Aug 4, 2000), when it was pretty clear that he had adopted the wandering itinerant Jesus thesis of Didache researchers like Gerd Theissen and Kurt Niederwimmer, (which started in earnest in the 1970s), to help him propose his explanation of the development of a hypothetical Q community which produced it.
There was influence from his protoge, William Arnal, in Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Oct 2, 2001), who modified Theissen's position to explain the composition of the Didache to explain how village scribes could have summarized Jesus' oral teaching into the source(s) we now call Q. IMHO, this was a mistake on K.'s part, but he's since published several books that discuss the subject of the "Q community" and his reconstruction of the full extent of "Q," so his course is set.
I have suggested in the past that what seems to have set off the likes of Michael Goulder & Mark Goodacre to oppose the very concept or need for Q, was that it implied that Church tradition was <shudder> wrong. Even though these two profess to be agnostics themselves, they are strongly attached to the social-gospel teachings of the western European Christianity the were brought up in. If church traditions can be wrong about the source for the double tradition, can it also be wrong about social justice teachings?
They sure hoped not, that was unthinkable. The Christian social-gospel was more important and valuable than the actual role Jesus played in the establishment of it.
What do you think of this?
DCH
Statistics: Posted by DCHindley — Sat Mar 16, 2024 3:49 pm