judge

No you don't underdstand. Of course this can happen. what is incredulous is that here, of all places, no one is willing to delve into the detail of what they hold to be true.

Stop and think a minute about it. It is ironic. religious people are criticised here (and rightly so) because they believe by faith and not according to the evidence.

But even you won't go so far as to propose a theroy we can test.



Well then if you believe it happened then you must be able to narrow it down.

100 CE? 200CE? 300 CE? 400CE? 500CE?

Kosh

What evidence is there for narrowing it down?

Diogenes the Cynic

Sure. Here you go.
There are plenty of copies. You can even find a couple of them in your bible.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
If two independent authors can be shown to have copied from a common written source (as can be shown with Matthew and Luke), then that source must have existed at some point. QED.

For the purpose of my point upthread, though, it doesn't even matter. "Q" is just a word for the common material in Matthew and Luke which did not come from Mark. I was pointing out that none of that material is present in GJohn, indicating that John was probably unaware of the non-Markan synoptics. Where the Q material originated could not be less relevant to that point.

Renee

It's been years since I studied the ins and outs of the Christian texts, so thanks for refreshing my memory. Just to be sure I haven't mixed things up, I thought if we arranged the texts in the order they're thought to have been written we'd get:

• Most of Paul's letters (think one was/is disputed?)
• Mark
• Matthew
• Luke
• John
• Revelations

Renee

mens_sana

Then there are also some other books that never existed, among them: The Book of Jashar, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah.

Evan

Hi Renee,

Most observers would consider this sequence to be reasonably accurate. Paul's authentic letters are dated to the 50s and early 60s. The letters that are most frequently presumed not to have been written by Paul include 1&2 Tim, Titus, and Ephesians, which are dated to the late first or early second centuries.

As far as the Synoptic Gospels are concerned, Mark is widely (but not universally) recognized as the earliest, with an assumed composition date in the range of 68 to 73. Most scholars assume Matthew was a product of the 80s or early 90s, and Luke followed Matthew. However, Luke is in many respects more remedial in its treatment of the Jesus traditions than is Matthew. Martin Hengel places Mark in the late 60s, Luke c.75-80, and Matthew around 90. It is difficult to assign dates with precision, but there are excellent reasons for believing Mark > Luke > Matthew to have been the chronological sequence of the Synoptics (contrary to conventional wisdom).

GJohn is a mixed bag. As Diogenes pointed out earlier in this thread, it is a multi-layered text. Much of the narrative portions of the text may indeed be quite primitive, predating even Mark. The original Johannine narrative was subsequently overlayed with theological and expository expansions, and the edited/expanded text is what constitutes the canonical gospel. GJohn, in the form we inherited it, did not appear until late in the first century or the first decade of the second century.

My impression is that many scholars are comfortable dating The Revelation in its canonical form to the latter end of the reign of Domitian (81-96 CE).

Evan

Anduin

I think that we need a new logical fallacy for this line of reasoning. “Argumentum ad curia” would do nicely. Why a fallacy? Because I see it displayed repeatedly all over the internet by people who are not lawyers and have no idea of how real courts operate. They usually argue incorrectly about evidence and court admissibility, possibly by having read Grisham or other popuar fiction. It is not true whatsoever that “if it was not recorded, it did not happen”, where on earth did you get that idea?

Legal evidence accepted in court comes in different levels. Inference and circumstantial evidence are perfectly acceptable in absence of documentary evidence. Even documentary evidence can be subject to analysis if it is believed that it could be forged.

In the case of Q, there would be more than enough expert testimony to at least warrant its acceptance in court. There would be doubt as its actual content, but to say that it would not be admissible is horrendously wrong.

Evan

I certainly agree with you that the fact that a Q manuscript has never been found is not sufficient grounds to deny Q's existence. However, I would be cautious about claiming that it can be shown that Matthew and Luke were independent, and that they copied from a common source. Neither of those premises has ever been proven, nor can they be. The entire Q hypothesis rests on exceedingly thin ice.

Evan

RUmike

Evan, would you care to elaborate on why the Q hypothesis "rests on exceedingly thin ice"?

Toto

The case against Q

Mark Goodacre's Case against Q website