Toto

As has been pointed out to you, not everyone in the scholarly community agrees with Mack on the existence of Q, or on the existence of layers in Q that can be dated to a particular date. (Mythicist Earl Doherty does endorse his views on this question.)

There is a review here:

TimBowe

Do you agree with that review?

Toto

I don't agree with everything in that review, but I think you will find a general consensus that the existence of Q is speculative, that the layers of Q are even more speculative, and assigning a specific date to the "earliest" layers is highly speculative. You will find that this is true of a lot of Biblical studies and theories, even if they have been written by people with multiple PhD who enjoy wide respect among the scholarly community.

The excuse for this is that the surviving evidence is often flimsy, if any evidence has survived at all. But this means that you need to take all these theories with a grain of salt. It makes Biblical studies more like literary criticism than real history.

You need to realize that most people here have read all the the quotes that you keep posting. They don't mean very much. They are just speculation.

Now, speculation can be a fun game, and it can even be profitable. But there's more imagination than reliable knowledge here.

TimBowe

I think that the existence of Q is far from speculative.

dog-on

Present you reasons for thinking this is the case.

What evidence do you have that supports the existence of Q?

Thanks.

Celsus

I think Tim Bowe is trolling. Doing the same nonsense in the Political Forums

Amaleq13

Then you haven't actually read anything about it because it is quite clearly speculative in nature and every scholar I've ever read on the subject is quite open about that fact.

It is a hypothetical document.

andrewcriddle

The problem is that the existence of Q is nowhere near sufficient to support Burton Mack's case. You have to accept that Q as Luke and Matthew knew it, with its strong eschatological emphasis is a very different document from the original form of Q.

This seems a speculative position by any standards.

Andrew Criddle

show_no_mercy

I think Q is a very neat solution to the Synoptic Problem, but this by no stretch of the word means that it is or was an actual document. It's still a hypothetical document.

DCHindley

Mack is building on a foundation started by Pierson & Nabor way back in 1886:

If it be assumed, so runs their argument, that Christianity was in its real origin a Jewish sect which had liberal ideas in regard to the law and directed its expectation towards the Messiah, the antinomian sections of the Epistles represent documents of that period.

The present form of the letters is due to the fact that a later "Churchman" — the authors call him Paulus episcopus, and think that he may have served as model for the Paul of Acts — worked into them the second, milder set of ideas.

Paul & His Interpreters, pp 123-124.

While the Dutch Radicals ultimately rejected this position*, the idea of a libertine Jesus theology that was Judaized as part of an accommodation with more traditional Jewish followers, is alive and well in Gerd Thiessen's proposals, centered on the Didache, where Jesus is an itinerant Galilean charismatic "wisdom teacher" who creates a counter culture movement in reaction to Roman exploitation. Tell me this is not also reflected in Mack's image of Q, and the positions of others on the Gospel of Thomas and a Cynic-like Jesus!?

DCH

*Steck and van Manen adopting one in which

Christianity ... remained at first Jewish. But as time went on, and as it spread beyond Palestine, two different tendencies manifested themselves within it. One, as the result of contact with Gentiles, and no doubt in consequence of the destruction of the Jewish State, moved in the direction of attaching less and less importance to the law, while the other maintained the older stand-point. In general the development, due to the influence of Graeco-Roman ideas, proceeded without a struggle. Its goal was a " Catholicism " such as meets us in Justin.