Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Yes, thanks, that's very useful.

Blood wrote:"Q" is merely New Testament critics trying to come up with their own "Documentary Hypothesis," since they are not allowed to posit that gospel writers could invent material about the Savior.

In principle, the Q business has indeed a bit of this problem. Much of it is simple conjecture, and the attempt to reconstruct such a document strikes me as an exercise in futility. I don't doubt that there were lots of collections with sayings floating around - the Gospel of Thomas or texts like Jesus Sirach are evidence for that - but I'm not sure whether going further than that makes much sense. Which leaves us with a second-hand Papias and his logia by some Matthew.

Q seems a bit more straightforward than ye olde JEDP hypothesis. A now-lost text shared between two Gospel authors... make of it what you will, but it's a pretty mundane idea overall. It is one of several, mutually exclusive attempts to crack the synoptic problem.

Yes, because there's no possible way ancient theologians simply wrote things out of their imaginations. That's impossible.

^?? But what difference would that make though? Whether or not ancient theologians did or didn't "simply write things out of their imaginations" makes no difference as to whether or not there was a Q document. Like Peter Kirby said, it's simply a hypothesis to explain the verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke. The problems only arise when scholars go about using the Q hypothesis as "evidence" for their attempts to reconstruct the Historical/Mythical Jesus and Christian Origins. But at it's core, the Q hypothesis is simply an explanation of literary significance, not historical. You're pressing hard to suggest that it was simply "invented" in order not to think that there was fabrication going on. I think most scholars accept that there was probably some proportion of that going on (as to how much, or which passages in particular, is a different issue though)

Can someone sum up what is wrong with the hypothesis that Matthew copies, expands on, and "corrects" Mark, and Luke copies, modifies (by subtraction and addition)/"corrects" Mark and Matthew, and there was no Q?

Someone may say, but Luke certainly would have used the unique stuff in Matthew if he'd been working from Matthew. But isn't that circular?

^I don't think there's much "wrong" with that idea. They're all just hypotheses at the end of the day. The Farrer hypothesis seems to be making something of a comeback recently. Here's some of the reasons why many scholars tend to favor Q over the Farrer hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrer_hyp ... nd_against

Thanks, toejam. The reasons against the Farrer hypothesis all seem to collapse into circularity, as I read what you linked. But perhaps a deeper reading than I can give just now (e.g. reading Streeter et al.) would reveal that they don't.

I'm not sure there is a smoking gun against the Farrer hypothesis, but I'm not sure there's one against Q either.

Peter Kirby wrote:Q seems a bit more straightforward than ye olde JEDP hypothesis. A now-lost text shared between two Gospel authors... make of it what you will, but it's a pretty mundane idea overall. It is one of several, mutually exclusive attempts to crack the synoptic problem.

Oh, I agree that it is a perfectly fine idea. That's why I mentioned other sayings collections. I'm just not sure whether reconstructing Q makes much sense.

Peter Kirby wrote:I'm not sure there is a smoking gun against the Farrer hypothesis, but I'm not sure there's one against Q either.

Goin' fishin' again, PK?