For more than a century, the most commonly held understanding concerning the relationships among the Synoptic Gospels has been the “two source” theory. This explanation assumes the priority of Mark and claims that another source, Q (from Quelle, German for “source”), lies behind the significant amount of non-Marcan material shared by Matthew and Luke. Although the bibliography on Q has always been weighty (see Longstaff and Thomas), developments over the past decade have led to the annual compilation by the Society of Biblical Literature of a Q bibliography in an effort to keep abreast of the rapidly proliferating publication in this field (see Scholer).
The vastness of the Q literature is shaped in large part by two related issues, the first the discovery of and resulting research on a complete version of the Gospel of Thomas (found in 1945 among the Coptic documents at Nag Hammadi and only available for widespread scholarly research for a few decades). The second issue grows from the past decade’s explosion of debate about the historical Jesus, led by the scholarly descendants of the so-called New Questers. The former permitted the possibility of envisioning a formally organized and published collection of Jesus’ sayings as an early gospel genre, while the latter raised the stakes in determining which data about Jesus were both earliest and most authentic.
James Robinson and Helmut Koester, who have both worked intensively on the Nag Hammadi documents, provided background to the recent discussion about the genre of Q. Koester proposed four kinds of early gospel forms behind both the later canonical and extracanonical gospels: sayings collections, aretologies, revelation discourses, and passion gospels. Robinson envisioned “trajectories” in the emergence of early Christian literature, and situated the genre of Q and the Gospel of Thomas as “sayings of the wise” in a trajectory from Proverbs to the Sayings of the Fathers.
In the past decade the direction of this research has been further influenced by John Kloppenborg’s proposal that Q was originally shaped as a collection of six wisdom speeches, providing a kind of subversive ethical instruction. Kloppenborg’s argument and its use by most scholars since the 1987 publication of The Formation of Q have interpreted this wisdom base in Q as within the framework of pious Judaism. A more radical reworking is found in Burton Mack’s thesis that the Q sayings collection reveals the wisdom, not of traditional or even revolutionary Jewish piety, but rather of a Galilean Cynic mostly influenced by cosmopolitan Hellenistic ideas. While the discussion of wisdom forms in the earliest Q materials is part of a longer-term repudiation of the old Schweitzerian thesis that Q was eschatological and prophetic, some scholars, such as Migaku Sato, continue to claim that foundational Q represents prophetic rather than wisdom forms.
While the genre discussion has largely turned around Q’s representation of specific forms, a more subtle shift, discussed by Neirynck, has also led to a renaming of Q by some scholars. A decade ago Kloppenborg stated without hesitation that Q was not a gospel, but by 1996 he, as well as many others, had come to refer to Q itself as the “Sayings Gospel Q.” Thus genre questions have become a means of reaching both behind the canonical gospel texts which are all that now remain as witness to Q’s existence, and forward to claim a status for Q that forces its consideration together with the canonical gospels and other extracanonical gospels fragments.
This perspective is reflected in the 1994 publication of The Complete Gospels, a collection which includes everything from the Sayings Gospel Q and the Gospel of Thomas, which it dates in the mid-first century, to the canonical gospels and several second-century Jewish-Christian gospels. This renaming reflects the stated assumption that there were several diverse groups of Jesus believers from the earliest times, together with the unspoken assumption that those groups had little contact with or influence over one another.
John Dominic Crossan’s declaration that The Complete Gospels contains “everything you need to empower your own search for the historical Jesus” underlines the significance for Q studies of the second major issue, the ongoing and often clamorous search for the Jesus of history. As has been noted, Mack uses Q to find a Jesus who was a Galilean Cynic. Crossan’s presentation of the historical Jesus is more carefully crafted, portraying the historical Jesus as a radical Galilean Jewish peasant. Although Crossan himself has dealt extensively with historical questions regarding the crucifixion, he shares with other Q scholars the hypothesis that Q itself represents the views of Jesus believers who attached great significance to the ethical teachings of Jesus but much less importance to his death (and hence also resurrection).
Such assertions about the earliest Jesus-believing communities reflect the influence of Q-related historical Jesus research on other discussions about early Christianity. Based on the absences of a passion narrative in Q as well as in the Gospel of Thomas, Mack and Patterson argue that Q reveals a very early group of Jesus believers who were not “Christians.” That is, for this group, or for two groups chronologically and theologically analogous, neither christological reflection nor a concept of Jesus as an exalted Lord influenced their identity.
A host of other studies using various social scientific methodologies have sought to identify the identity and the theology of the “Q community.” Here the diversity of perspective is as broad as in most other areas of Q studies. Tuckett sees Q as representative of Jewish Christianity, and Catchpole agrees that “Q Christians” were conservative about Torah and the Temple. On the other hand, Piper proposes that Q reflects the wisdom traditions reflected among the Hellenists described in Acts 6 and 7. Robinson sees the Q community as poor, while Levine suggests that the text reveals both poor mendicants and more wealthy supporters, for whom equality was required within each segment but not among the two.
While scholars have used Q to study the historical Jesus and aspects of early Christianity, they have also worked to define a reconstructed text of Q. In 1997 The International Q Project announced the completion of a final text reconstruction and databases on two centuries of Q reconstruction work. A one-volume Critical Edition of Q in a Synopsis, Including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas, with English, German and French Translations of Q and Thomas is in preparation by Fortress and Peeters Presses, edited by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John S. Kloppenborg. Several volumes of the proposed 31-volume databases, entitled Documenta Q: Reconstructions of Q Through Two Centuries of Gospel Research, Excerpted, Sorted, and Evaluated have appeared (see Carruth and Garsky).
Scholars orchestrating a reconstruction of the text of Q have gone on to pursue questions of the tradition and composition history of the document. As already noted, Kloppenborg asserts six wisdom instructions in an original layer of Q. The second layer of Q represents the addition of eschatological and polemical sayings. The majority of Q scholars, including Jacobson, Koester, Levine, Piper, Robinson, Sato, and Uro, now accept some form of the thesis that several Q strata exist. Mack argues for three levels in the development of Q: Q1, composed of aphoristic material, Q2, made up of prophetic pronouncements, and Q3, fragmentary additions of a mythological nature.
A notable minority of New Testament scholars do not accept the two-source theory, or at least the existence of Q as it has been proposed as a defined, published document reflecting a multilayered redactional history. Werner Kelber, whose work has long emphasized the importance of orality at the earliest stages of formation of biblical traditions, continues to insist that Q does not represent a literary source. Another small but active minority opts for a revival of the Griesbach hypothesis: the priority of Matthew with Mark’s dependence on Matthew and Luke, and no need for a hypothetical Q source (see Tuckett 1983 and the works of Bernard Orchard and William Farmer).
Michael Goulder accuses many scholars of blindness toward other proposals which seek to handle the common source material in Matthew and Luke. In a dialogue carried on in large part with Christopher Tuckett, whom Goulder honors for being a “hard-liner,” that is, one of the few Q scholars who continue to maintain strictly two sources rather than an infinite regress of hypothetical lost documents, Goulder argues that Q and Matthew are not distinguishable theologically. Among his many additional arguments against Q, based on extensive commentaries on Matthew and on Luke, Goulder also points out words held in common by Matthew and Luke, added to Mark 14:65 (tis estin ho paisas se;). Since according to the two-source hypothesis, the passion narrative contains nothing from Q, one must either argue that all the Matthean manuscripts of that passage were corrupted, or see these words as evidence that Luke could have known and used Matthew. The latter conclusion reflects Goulder’s views.
Etta Linnemann argues against the existence of Q on several grounds. She enumerates actual word-for-word parallels in Greek, which by her count represent fewer than half of the total number of word parallels in proposed Q. Further, she states that the sequence of the double tradition varies widely in Matthew and in Luke. Finally, she argues that the Gospel of Thomas is too late to function as an analogy for an early “sayings” gospel.
E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davies agree that from a broad perspective the two-source theory and related Q hypothesis handle the data reasonably well. When more detailed analysis is undertaken, however, the problem of the minor agreements between Matthew and Luke or the overlaps between Mark and Q require either a continually expanding Q, the pushing of data back toward unknown earlier documents or strata, or shifting the problem to the Mark-Q relationship. They argue that most New Testament scholars have long accepted some uncertainty and complexity of the history of traditions behind the Synoptic Gospels, while referring in general terms to the two-source theory. They thus call for a more overt admission of this uncertainty.
Luke Timothy Johnson, while not refuting the existence of a source or sources “Q,” considers as dubious the effort to “reify this hypothetical source into a self-contained composition with its own theology” (138). While he agrees that diversity characterized the early Christian movement, he insists that the Synoptic traditions about Jesus reflect a unified common thread. That thread, for Johnson, is the shared experience of Jesus’ resurrection.
In a 1996 paper, Kloppenborg again surveys the history of Q studies. While maintaining the two-source thesis and the existence of Q as a separate identifiable document, he seeks to break the link between Q research and historical Jesus studies. Specifically, he declares that most Q scholars now agree that Q itself is an intentional document with a theological intent. Criticizing those who continue to use Q as a “grab bag” of dominical sayings to prove any particular point about the historical Jesus, he instead insists that Q, like the canonical gospels, is not directly about Jesus. He argues that the formative stratum of Q, composed to promote a realized eschatological ethic for Jesus believers, was later shaped by redaction to defend a particular portrait of Jesus. This picture included an acceptance of the suffering generally understood to be the lot of wisdom, but not personalized in relationship to Jesus’ death.
Kloppenborg asserts that Q is not too far removed from Jesus himself, but that the same claim can also be made for Mark and the Gospel of Thomas. The fundamental importance of The Sayings Gospel Q, he suggests, is as a witness that from the earliest times Jesus believers reflected in diverse ways on the meaning of Jesus’ life, teachings, and death. Reflecting a delicate challenge to some of his Q colleagues, he insists that the compositional history of Q cannot be tied to claims for historical authenticity of the material presented. Further, he argues that his Q research reflects tradition history but not necessarily social history. Thus, the form and theology of Q must be used with great caution in any effort to define a Q community. Finally, based on recent research on the performative nature of Q, Kloppenborg seems to be inching toward a recognition of the likelihood of Q orality (it is, after all, a “sayings” gospel) and thus to more flexibility in determining its place in the shaping of gospel traditions.
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