Adam

Thanks, David, excellent article you linked on Post #6. But before finishing it I clicked on spin's link in Post #7 on "Excavating Q". Both are scholarship of the highest order, but I disagree with Kloppenborg on method of stratification between Q1 and Q2, however, because I don't believe he has used literary means of separating them. He seens to differentiate based on sociology. Whereas in Johannine studies Brown and others work out a community that preserves and develops a text, Kloppenborg sees a Q1 community in Galilee that lived for decades the radical Cynic itinerancy of the Charge to the Disciples.

K is saying that we know so much about 1st Century Galilee that we know how they lived and what they wrote. My thought is that K is projecting what we find in Q into an assumption of how many people in Galillee lived between 30 and 70 CE. Nor is he relying simply on Josephus (usually thought to be the best source for this period), because he refutes Josephus on many points. Many here on FRDB would say this means he has no basis for what he believes about Q and Galilee

Yes, Q would have to be preserved by a community, whether it's oral tradition or a written document--unless (as many here think) the gospels were made up as a fiction or (as I think) Q and other gospel sources were written down by eyewitnesses. So the extremes touch (much of FRDB and me), but this would leave us both rejecting Kloppenborg. The two chapters spin linked to did not give the epistemological method for how K knew such a community existed (other than it generated its own rationale and attributed it to Jesus?).

Vorkosigan

Q need not have been preserved by a community, or invented by one. For all we know, someone who wished to give the impression of community backing wrote Q.

David, this is a very useful table. Does this mean that GThom is dependent on Q. Also, how does Q relate to Mark?

Adam

I have long believed, Vork, that it is evident that GThom is dependent on Q, in spite of the Jesus Seminar canonizing it as an independent witness. I thus see GThom as proving that written Q document(s) underlie GMark as well. Even before GThom came to light, many scholars realized that, but without seeing GThom they couldn't agree on any particular verses.

As for your first paragraph, you and I agree that in spite of all the elaborate scholarship cross-referencing each other and arguing which community wrote it, we don't know anything about such a community. One or two people could have written it; you say as fiction and I say as eyewitness notes. That it is so choppy favors my view.

Vorkosigan

Q and Mark are somehow related. I don't know how yet.

Adam, choppiness occurs because the document was split up and used in different ways by different authors. It proves nothing either way.

Assuming there was even one document.

Adam

You're acknowledging quite an elaborate process for a fiction. Makes it quite a conspirary, huh? And that's just for Q, with about a dozen other constituents as well.

tanya

Thanks for the clarification, and as always, your humility is an inspiration.

This is an obviously amateurish (feckless comes to mind!) response, to your suggestion to commence an arduous journey, investigating the synoptic problem. I wonder if it may prove more fruitful, to examine not those areas of text which agree or overlap, with one another, practically or essentially, verbatim, as your chart embraces, but rather, those relatively far fewer passages which clearly, and unequivocally reveal differences, despite addressing the same, or similar issue, with focus on identifying which version represents a correction of the text, as opposed to a simple copying procedure.

The issue, in my opinion, goes back to Abbot and Costello, who's on first? If Matthew was written first, in whatever language, then, those who followed, using Matthew as a template, ought to have corrected one or more errors in Matthew's text. Were the errors corrected? If 30% of the text is identical, between two versions, I don't see how we can deduce precedence. But, if one can illustrate, even, only two, significant errors in one gospel, errors which have been corrected, in one or both of the other gospels, then, it would seem to me, more reasonable to claim, irrespective of the quantity of text overlapping between the two versions, that the version(s) with the errors corrected, must have succeeded the version with the errors uncorrected.

So, we need a new chart. haha....quelle travail.

Adam

However, the science of textual criticism is based on the opposite premiss, that copyists introduce errors. Thus the earliest manuscript has fewer errors. Of course, you're talking about a different kind of error, something of substance. But why is the later writer going to know there is an error or know what correction to make?

Jaybees

I've never understood the need for postulating a distinctive Q. There were undoubtedly plenty of folk tales, oral legends, "first hand" accounts, and maybe even a few written fragments for the gospel writers to draw from...along with borrowing freely from each other. And, then, those writings were copied, sometimes badly, sometimes with massive interpolations.

So why some mysterious "Q" hovering out there that supposedly was at the root of the Christ legend?

outhouse

becsue we have a few different authors with the same material, and we know they copied Gmark.

and 100% of the original material is gone, and only 99.9% of the slightly older copies are missing. and then the percentage increase with time. we have very little from the second century and they for the most part are fragments.


so its no suprise a common source doesnt exist. its actually expected



the root is, with sayings, we have a possibility to get as close to first century theology many attribuite to jesus. it wasnt later roman dogma added to a jewish movement

andrewcriddle

Basically there is too much verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke in passages not found in Mark to be explained by a common tradition.

Either Matthew knew of Luke or Luke knew of Matthew or they both knew some lost document.


Andrew Criddle