Call for Papers: Gospel Interpretation and the Q Hypothesis

I'm happy to post the following call for papers for a conference next June in Roskilde, Denmark:

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Call for papers

“Gospel Interpretation and the Q‐Hypothesis”

International Conference, 21 to 24 June 2015, Roskilde (Denmark)

Organizers: Mogens Müller, Stefan Nordgaard, Heike Omerzu

This year, in June, a group of colleagues from Copenhagen held a conference on the topic of ‘Luke’s Literary Creativity’. The conference, which was headed by Prof. Mogens Müller, gave rise to a lively discussion about the Q‐hypothesis and other possible ways of explaining the similarities between Luke and Matthew, including, above all, the Farrer, a.k.a. the L/M, hypothesis. The debate was so energetic and inspiring that we, the team of organizers, decided that we quite simply had to follow up on it with another conference exclusively devoted to the topic of Luke and the synoptic problem and with the participation of both Q‐believers, Q‐sceptics and scholars who as yet remain undecided on the issue.

We have now started organizing the conference and a number of the world’s leading scholars on the topic — Stefan Alkier, Eve‐Marie Becker, Mark Goodacre, Christoph Heil, Werner Kahl, John Kloppenborg, Shelly Matthews, Clare Rothschild, Hildegard Scherer, Christopher Tuckett, and Francis Watson — have agreed to participate. We feel confident that the conference will be able to significantly further the debate between Q‐believers and Q‐sceptics, and we wish to invite anyone with an interest in the issue of the synoptic problem to submit a paper proposal for the conference. In order to allow enough time for discussion we will select up to six papers.

Paper Proposals (not exceeding one page) are to be submitted to Prof. Mogens Müller (mm@teol.ku.dk) or Prof. Heike Omerzu (ho@teol.ku.dk) no later than 1 February 2015.  

Applicants will be informed by 20 February 2015 whether or not their papers have been accepted. Papers accepted for the conference will be distributed in advance among all participants and will be discussed rather than read at the conference. We intend to select respondents for each paper who will introduce the discussion by a critical examination of its argument. In order for us to be able to distribute the papers in advance, accepted papers (not exceeding 20 pages) should be submitted by 23 May 2015. After the conference, contributors may be invited to submit their papers for publication in a collected volume edited by the organizers.

The conference is free of charge. It will be held at Comwell Hotel in Roskilde (Denmark) (www.comwellroskilde.dk). All expenses for food and accommodation (though not travel) will be paid for by the organizers.

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The conference call (PDF) is also available here.

Q or not Q? Is there any shift?

Michael Goulder

Chris Keith asked earlier today whether I was still in the minority about Q.  His post generated a decent comments thread as well as a monster comments thread on Facebook (which is so often now the more lively place for conversation on these things).  I don't doubt for a moment that the Farrer theory is still the minority position, but I have been glad to see a good number of people coming over to the side of the angels as time has gone on.

I certainly feel much less lonely than I did fifteen or twenty years or so ago when it was automatically assumed in the USA that anyone who denied the existence of Q must also, of necessity, deny the existence of Marcan Priority too.  Indeed, Q sceptics probably thought the earth was flat too, and that Elvis was still alive.  I well remember Stephen Patterson describing the view as even more obscure than Griesbach.

It was something of a shock to me to discover just how deeply embedded belief in Q seemed to be, especially after I was cocooned by my Oxford education, where, in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be sceptical about Q (E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, John Fenton, Eric Franklin and later, John Muddiman).

Michael Goulder (above) always used to feel that he was "contra mundum" on Q and he was delighted when Ed Sanders declared his (moderated) support for his theory in the book he co-authored with Margaret Davies in 1990.  I have been lucky to have found myself a little less isolated, but even if that were not so, I would not be ashamed to find myself in the same camp as two of the finest minds (I would say the two finest minds) in NT studies in recent decades.

But now, Anthony Le Donne wants to know just how popular the Q theory is these days -- and you can vote over on the blog he shares with Chris Keith -- Do You Q?  So who do you side with?

Memories are short in the blogosphere, but a handful of regular readers may remember that back in 2007 there was a similar poll run by Brandon Wason.  The poll itself has now gone, but my post on it survives.

Update: revised link.  Already interesting results. If you have not done so already, go and vote now!

Q, Doctor Who and the difference between "lost" and "hypothetical"

Regular readers will know that I am not averse to finding an excuse to talk about the rich potential for analogies between scholarship on Christian origins and Doctor Who (e.g. recently The canon of Doctor Who and the canon of the New Testament).  This is one of those occasions where reflection on the one world provides a helpful way of thinking about the other.

Those familiar with the world of Doctor Who will know that this has been a momentous week for the longest running science fiction show ever.  One of the tragedies of 1960s British television is that the BBC routinely failed to save television programmes after they had been broadcast.  Many programmes were wiped and some were simply binned.  For the last generation or so, obsessive fans and collectors have been frantically trying to find lost copies of programmes missing from the archive, especially Doctor Who.  This week was truly momentous in that nine lost episodes of Doctor Who were announced as having been found, returned to the BBC, and digitally remastered and released.  The star of these episodes is Patrick Troughton, the second doctor, who earlier played Paul of Tarsus (1960).  The nine episodes comprise two stories, "The Web of Fear" and "The Enemy of the World", both of which are classics.  I am savouring the new episodes.

I have sometimes thought about the analogies between the lost episodes of Doctor Who and the lost writings of early Christianity.  There is something extraordinarily exciting when early Christian writings are rediscovered, an excitement that for scholars of early Christianity parallels the excitement felt by Doctor Who fans when lost episodes turn up.  The most recent hoard was true bounty too.  It was a cache that enabled us to watch two almost complete stories for the first time.  Previously, only episode 1 of "Web of Fear" and episode 3 of "Enemy of the World" were available, but now we can watch both serials almost in their entirety.

It's rather like the way that for many years we had only a few fragments of the Gospel of Thomas.  P.Oxy. 1, 654 and 655 were three Greek fragments of Thomas discovered in Oxyrhynchus at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.  Like episode 3 of "Enemy of the World", and episode 1 of "Web of Fear", we previously had only a fraction of the Gospel of Thomas available.  Then, just as all the rest of "Enemy of the World" and most of "Web of Fear" turned up this week, so too the whole of the Gospel of Thomas turned up in the big cache of finds in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.

When you have only fragments of texts, or only parts of a story, you find it all the more tantalizing to want to see more.  And when you do see more, there is nothing quite like it.  The excitement of rediscovering an authentic piece of something so special knows no parallel.

There is also something of an interesting contrast here.  My academic friends and colleagues like to tease me about Q, the hypothetical source behind Matthew and Luke's double tradition material, against which I have been a vocal opponent.  They like to suggest that perhaps one day Q, like the missing episodes of Doctor Who, will also turn up.  They can, of course, fantasize all they like, and I thoroughly enjoy the teasing, but there is an interesting point here.

One of the reasons that students often struggle with the concept of Q is that it is a hypothetical work, unattested in antiquity.  It is solely a scholarly construct.  In the case of the Gospel of Thomas, we knew of such a text from antiquity because people like Origen mentioned it.  We knew of the existence of the work by citation even though for many years there was no detailed textual attestation to its content.  Just as in the case of the Doctor Who missing episodes, we knew that it had once existed, but it had been lost.

Q is not like that.  It is important to remember the difference between "lost" and "hypothetical".  A work is rightly described as "lost" when we know that it once existed, when it leaves some kind of trace in conversations among those who witnessed to its existence.  But there is no reference, as far as we can tell, to Q, in antiquity.  We can't find anything, anywhere that attests to its existence.  It is a solely a scholarly construct, based on the notion that Matthew and Luke accessed Mark independently, a postulate that requires a hypothetical writing to have existed.

This is not to say, of course, that Q is problematic because it is hypothetical.  If Q were the best way to explain the close textual agreement in the double tradition between Luke and Matthew, then that would be sufficient reason to postulate its existence.  My point here, though, is to remember what kind of theory the Q theory is.  It is a theory about a hypothetical source.  It is not a theory about a lost source.

Although the rhetorical appeal of titles like The Lost Gospel (Burton Mack) and The Lost Gospel Q (Marcus Borg) is obvious and to be expected, it is worth underlining that Q is not really a "lost gospel" at all.  It is a scholarly construct.  Moreover, the attraction of trying to find "lost" writings , an attraction I very much share, should not obscure the fact that there is a world of difference between a writing we know to have existed and a writing we have constructed as a scholarly endeavour.

Q and Q reading the Critical Edition of Q!

Many thanks to AKMA for for this one.  I had said:

"Anyway, I love this cartoon in which those two famous Qs read the British magazine Q.  It would be even better if they were reading the Critical Edition of Q, but you can't have everything."

And now, here are Q and Q reading Q!

Q is for . . . . Q and Q reading Q

We reached the stage of my New Testament Intro class today when we were looking at the question of Q.  It's tough to teach because one has to explain to puzzled students why Q is a credible theory, and why it is the dominant one in the field.  Luckily for me, I have an "out" in that I am sure there never was a Q, and I can explain why the standard arguments for its existence are problematic.

I sometimes wonder how far famous fictional Qs like Desmond Llewelyn's Q in James Bond or John de Lancie's Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation make our Q feel rather exotic.  Perhaps it's a problem for the Q theorists because the most famous Qs are fictional.  Perhaps it's a help to them because it gives their hypothetical source a certain frisson.

Anyway, I love this cartoon in which those two famous Qs read the British magazine Q.  It would be even better if they were reading the Critical Edition of Q, but you can't have everything.  The cartoon dates back to 2010, from Neil Cameron's excellent A-Z of Awesomeness, previously mentioned here.

Matthean and Lukan Special Material, Part 2

Last week I posted part one of my review of Brice Jones, Matthean and Lukan Special Material in Matthean and Lukan Special Material, Part 1. I focused there mainly on Jones's selection of M and L passages, which is derived from Mark Allan Powell's partial list in the Fortress Introduction.

In the second part of this review, I will look at Jones's essay, "Literary Relationships Among the Gospels", which he uses to explain the role played by M and L in discussions of the Synoptic Problem.

Jones's essay forms Chapter 1 of the book (1-17) and is subtitled "A Brief Introduction to the Synoptic Problem and Matthew and Luke's Special Source Material".  He defines the Synoptic Problem and provides a little history (2-3), introducing the Griesbach Hypothesis (4) and explaining the Two-Source Theory (5), briefly offering arguments for it (6) before answering objections (7-8). Jones then introduces M and L, the main topics of the book, looking at how they functioned in Streeter's work (8-10) and in scholarship today with special reference to Stephenson Brooks and Kim Paffenroth (10-13).  The remainder of the chapter (13-17) explains the presentation and selection of data in the rest of the book.

Jones's essay typifies an approach to Synoptic Problem introduction that I have often criticized, working on the basis of the Two-Source Theory and refracting the Synoptic data through that theory.  Thus there is no encouragement for the new student to attempt to understand the data first, to study the Synopsis without prejudice to a particular way of describing the evidence.

The dominance of the Two-Source Theory is expressed in other ways in the chapter.  The Griesbach Hypothesis and the Two-Source Theory each have their own diagrams (4-5) but the Farrer Theory does not.  This is also important for new students, where visualizing a theory can greatly help in properly understanding it.   And while I am grateful to Jones for his brief reference to my work (7), I am a little disappointed to see no reference to my main book on the topic which is called The Case Against Q.

Jones lists Streeter's five points in favour of Marcan Priority (6), most of which are simple descriptions of how Matthew and Luke proceeded if they used Mark and several of which are reversible.  I think there are better arguments for Marcan Priority than those offered by Streeter and, on the whole, those supporting the "Two Gospel Theory" have had little trouble demonstrating this.  References to more recent literature by Two Gospel advocates might have helped here, especially Beyond the Q Impasse and One Gospel from Two.

Somewhat surprisingly, Jones does not offer any arguments in favour of the Q hypothesis and appears to regard it as established on the basis of Streeter's arguments for Marcan Priority.  He does, however, discuss three arguments against the Two-Source Theory (7-8), the Mark-Q overlaps, the minor agreements and the hypothetical nature of Q.  I will deal with each in turn.

(1) Mark-Q Overlaps.  Jones notes that there are Mark-Q overlap passages but does not explain why they are problematic for the Two-Source Theory.  He says:

Most advocates of the Two-Source hypothesis, however, do not think that the Mark-Q overlaps pose any real threat, since two independent yet similar traditions are bound to have existed prior to the composition of the Gospels as we know them (7).

Jones is right that advocates of the Farrer theory draw attention to the Mark-Q overlaps, but they do not do so because they think it surprising that "independent yet similar traditions" existed.  This would be a weak argument, and it is not one that I have seen. The difficulty with Mark-Q overlaps is not a general one about the plausibility or otherwise of overlapping materials.  Rather, it is specific: this data set contradicts the claim that Matthew and Luke never agree against Mark in major ways, and it contradicts the claim that Luke never takes over Matthew's redaction of Mark.  These are used as arguments for the existence of Q, arguments that are contradicted by this data set.

(2) Minor Agreements.  Jones refers to "the few cases where Matthew and Luke agree on wording with each other against Mark" (7), drawing attention specially to the minor agreement at Mark 14.65, and asking "How is this to be explained if Matthew and Luke did not know each other and the story is not found in Q?" (7).

Jones suggests that they could have been caused by shared oral tradition, or by corruption of the texts or by harmonization (though he does not explain how the last two differ).  The difficulty with the oral tradition theory is that several of the key minor agreements, including the one at Mark 14.65, feature verbatim agreement in Greek including the use of hapaxes in the Gospel in question.  The difficulty with the text-critical explanation is that it cuts both ways -- harmonization is as likely if not more likely to have diminished the number of minor agreements than to have increased them.

(3) A Hypothetical Document.  Here Jones writes:

Another difficulty is that the theory requires a hypothetical document, which is not physically attested outside of the Gospels.  This position is especially popular among advocates of solutions to the Synoptic Problem that posit Matthean and Lukan dependence.  There are difficulties in sustaining this argument, however, and most scholars tend to believe that the Two-Source Hypothesis makes the most sense of the data. (8). 

Jones here characterizes the position he is arguing against in such general terms that it is difficult to know what he is referring to.  It is true that Q sceptics will often have contexts in which noting Q's hypothetical nature will be relevant.  I have, for example, often noted the flexibility that its hypothetical nature allows for the redaction critic.  Similarly, I have drawn attention to problem of scholarly works that fail to mention its hypothetical nature, and so on.

That Q is hypothetical is a fact.  It is not an "argument" or a "position".  The question is whether positing a hypothetical text is the best way of explaining the double tradition in Matthew and Luke and the best way of establishing this is to look carefully at the evidence.

What is the trouble with Q?

In a recent article in Bible and Interpretation, Dan Smith reflects on The Trouble with Q.  But the troubles he is talking about are not those niggles that make some of us question the existence of Q, the Minor Agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark, the Mark-Q overlaps, the weakness of the arguments for Luke's independence from Matthew and so on, but the way that many scholars fail to take the implications of the Q theory seriously.  Like Kloppenborg, Dan draws attention to facile appeals to Q's hypothetical nature by those who refuse to think through what the existence of Q means for our reconstructions of Christian Origins.

But is this really the trouble with Q?  I am puzzled by Dan's focus on scholars who are uninterested in the Synoptic Problem and Q.  Those who have not invested time in studying the problem are unlikely to want to engage seriously with the implications of the hypothesis.  In my own experience, the same set of scholars, the so-called "lazy" believers in Q, are equally unwilling to invest time in engaging with Q sceptical scholarship like my own. 

It is never easy in scholarship to find yourself in a position where you are telling other people that they should be interested in what you are studying.  Engaging other scholars' interest is always tough, and it is especially tough in areas like the study of the Synoptic Problem, which requires a lot of hard work and a degree of technical expertise. 

There is always the option, though, of seeking out dialogue partners among those who are already interested in the problem.  Dan alludes to those who do not accept the existence of Q but he does not mention them by name, much less engage them directly.  Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my memes relates to the Farrer Theory getting ignored in scholarship, but I am usually in those contexts talking about introductory-level works, textbooks and the like.  It is, however, something that happens in the higher-level work too.

The problem is that there is a major alternative to the Q hypothesis and critical engagement with it can help to clarify and focus the bigger picture questions that Dan mentions here, about the degree of diversity in early Christianity, in particular the question of the role played by Jesus' death.  Dan talks about engaging with people who may help with refining the Q hypothesis, but a healthy hypothesis is also one that engages with those who are attempting to refute it.

Let me offer one example of how this works.  Dan talks about taking seriously Q's silence about the salvific death of Jesus, the resurrection and the term "Christ".  Arguments about silence are often worth hearing and in the case of a text like the Gospel of Thomas, its silence on these same features is indeed worth some serious thought.  There is a difference in the case of Q, however, that makes any study of its silence problematic.  Given that the document is reconstructed on the basis of Matthew's and Luke's double tradition, there is always the possibility that it is not Q that is silent on the matters in question but that Matthew and Luke are silent in their witness to Q's contents.  

Dan talks about what he regards as similar difficulties in reflecting on Matthew, noting that there are many things we do not know about Matthew, its author, whether he wrote other materials and so on.  But we do have textual witnesses to Matthew that are pretty clear about the scope, parameters and wording of the work, the very things that are absent in the case of Q.   Indeed, the absence of any kind of textual witness to Q is one of the things that invites us to consider the alternative, that the kind of close verbatim agreement that Dan discusses may be evidence not for a lost document but for a direct link between Matthew and Luke.  

In other words, the hypothetical nature of Q is indeed relevant in this discussion.  Dan is right that the hypothetical nature of Q should not be used as an excuse for a refusal to think.  The real issue, though, is that Q's hypothetical nature is an invitation always to think about live alternatives.  To imagine a world without Q is surely one of the best ways of testing a model where Q is central.

To put it another way, what are the chances that Dan's essay will be noticed by those who are his targets?  At least the Q sceptics are willing to have the conversation.

The Origin of the Symbol "Q"

An anonymous writer on the Sheffield Biblical Studies blog has a nice post on Why was ‘Q’ named ‘Q’: because ‘Q’ comes after ‘P’? in which s/he quotes R. H. Lightfoot's contention that the symbol "Q" did not originate in Germany but rather in England.  J. Armitage Robinson claimed that he used it in the 1890s as the letter coming after "P" in the alphabet.  For him, "P" stood for "Peter", the alleged source of Mark's Gospel.

It's a great myth of origins and while it is quite possible that Robinson introduced the term "Q" independently of the German scholarship, there is no question that the term is in fact first used in the German scholarship.  Frans Neirynck shows that the use of "Q." as an abbreviation for Quelle goes back to Eduard Simons, Hat der dritte Evangelist den kanonischen Matthäus benutzt (Bonn: Universitäts-Buchdruckerei von Carl Georgi, 1880).  It is then used as "Q", without the dot, from 1890 onwards, by Johannes Weiss, and with full critical self-awareness by Paul Wernle in 1899.  Some bibliography:

Frans Neirynck, "The Symbol Q (=Quelle), ETL 54 (1978): 119-25

Frans Neirynck, "Once More: The Symbol Q", ETL 55 (1979): 382-3

Frans Neirynck, "Note on the Siglum Q", Evangelica II (BETL 99; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), 474

See too the helpful summary in:

James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann and John S. Kloppenborg. The Sayings Gospel Q in Greek and English: with Parallels from the Gospels of Mark and Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), 23-4

Q: Do you want to believe?

Courtesy of C. J. Schmidt over on Question Assumptions.

It's tough being a sceptic.

On the Pedagogical Advantages of the Q hypothesis and the Importance of Simplicity

I shared some thoughts the other day On the Pedagogical Advantages of the Q Hypothesis, suggesting that it can act as an appealing and tangible symbol of participation in academic study of the New Testament.  There is no Q in the Bible, but there is a Q in the scholar's canon, and it quickly and effectively makes the point that Higher Education is not about Bible Study.

I have also noticed other pedagogical advantages in teaching Q.  The architecture of the Two-Source Theory has an elegance, a simplicity that lends itself very nicely to teaching introductory students.  The genius of the theory is that it is able to assign a document to each major type of tradition.  People find it difficult to grasp the complexity of the Synoptic data, but refracting the data through the theory can be helpful and clear.

If one is looking to simplify the data, there are broadly two key types of material in the Synoptics, triple tradition and double tradition.  The Two-Source Theory enables the teacher to link a documentary source with each of those basic data sets.  Triple Tradition is essentially Mark's Gospel -- Matthew and Luke are copying Mark.  Double Tradition is Q -- Matthew and Luke are copying Q.

The same essential elegance is taken a step further in Streeter's classic Four-Source Theory, according to which one adds in Special Matthew and Special Luke and assigns a document to each, M and L, so that we end up with four types of material -- triple, double, Special Mt and Special Lk -- and four documents -- Mark, Q, M and L.

In fact, the model is so elegant and straightforward that I enjoy teaching it myself, and explaining how the Two-Source Theory nicely maps onto the data that it is isolating and describing.

The difficulty with the model is, sadly, that the data is not quite as simple as the model requires.  Triple tradition is contaminated throughout with material that should not be there, with major and minor agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark.   Double Tradition is not its own unique data set but often flows into Triple Tradition, requiring the postulation of Mark-Q overlaps in order to make sense of the evidence.

Luckily, at an introductory level, one does not need to introduce the complications like the Minor and Major Agreements, and the discussion can remain on the kind of general level that keeps the model functional.  The genius of  the Two-Source Theory is that it works so well on a general level.  It's only those who linger for a little longer who find out that the devil is in the detail.

On the Pedagogical Advantages of the Q hypothesis

In a comment on my post Another Introduction to the Bible, Another Chance to Ignore the Farrer Theory, one commenter (James) asks why this kind of phenomenon recurs in the introductory textbooks and he offers some interesting suggestions. Here is one of my thoughts on the issue.

There is a huge pedagogical advantage in making Q critical orthodoxy in introductory courses because it is a tangible expression of participation in proper academic New Testament studies. It is a symbol that one is doing critical scholarship and not Bible Study, that one is engaging in the academy and not the church.

The fact is that Q is not an element in most Christian Bible Studies. One of the big issues for many in teaching introductory courses on the New Testament is in persuading the students that this is going to be different from Bible Study. Q is a bit like pseudonymous authorship of the Pauline epistles -- it is something that some teachers use as a recognizable distinguishing marker that what we are doing is something different, something academic, something critical.

That is not to say that all those who advocate Q do it solely for its pedagogical advantages, of course. Many do it because they have engaged in serious study, they are familiar with the evidence, and have come to that solution. My point, though, is that Q can provide a useful shortcut, a speedy but concrete symbol of the difference between a historical approach and a confessional one.

Under such circumstances, it remains an attractive but also a useful hypothesis.

Ideological Convenience of Q

Over on the Bible Films Blog, Matt Page has an enjoyable post about The Ideological Convenience of Q. He expresses well something I hinted at in the first chapter of The Case Against Q.

If we were to dispense with Q, it would not be without tears. For Q has been all over the world, loved by everyone, feminists and liberation theologians, the sober and the sensational, the scholar and the layperson, a document with universal appeal. Indeed one of the keys to its success has been its ability to woo both conservatives and radicals alike. While conservatives, for example, are drawn by its early witness to sayings of Jesus, others have seen its lack of a Passion Narrative as witnessing to an alternative stream of early Christianity, one not based on the proclamation of a crucified Christ. For those at one end of the theological spectrum, Q can give us a document of Jesus material from before 70, written within a generation of the death of Jesus. For those at the other end of the spectrum, Q aligns itself with the Gospel of Thomas to form a “trajectory” in early Christianity that contrasted radically with emerging orthodoxy, and which only “canonical bias” can now obscure from our view (The Case Against Q, 16-17). 

In general, though, I am disinclined to spend too long worrying about possible ideological underpinnings of theories.  In the end, it's the truth that counts and I would rather spend an afternoon in the company of the Synopsis, working with the data, than an afternoon speculating about the the ideological motivations of the scholars.

Incidentally, that line "all over the world, loved by everyone" comes from Laurel and Hardy, "Beau Hunks", but I doubt that anyone spotted the subtle allusion.  Sadly, the degree of overlap between those who love Laurel and Hardy, and those who love the Synoptic Problem is small.

Most Embarrassing Book Meme: "The Q Document"

I was tagged by Deane Galbraith in the "Most Embarrassing Book Meme" (see also Jim West, Mark Stevens, James McGrath and others) and after a perusal of my shelves during a spare five minutes during my office hours today, here is mine.  As I mentioned recently, I am a fan of a full range of Qs and my embarrassing book is another of these:

The book is The Q Document by James Hall Roberts, a sensationalist novel published in 1964, akin to James H. Hunter's The Mystery of Mar Saba published in 1940. James Hall Roberts is actually a pseudonym for Robert L. Duncan (1927-1999) and in case you can't catch the wording on the back cover, it reads:

"Why did Red China want the Q document?

Why did the Vatican send someone to buy it?

Why did the Nazis believe it even though its discoverer was a Jew?

Why did a Catholic priest now contemplate murder because of it?

What did the Q document  reveal?"

My Favourite Qs

I am always surprised when people expect me to want to denigrate Q. As it happens, I am a big fan of Q -- I even "like" it on Facebook.   So it is good to see Jim Linville bringing up the question of the existence of Q as a possibility for a Science Fiction section at the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco next year.  And James McGrath invokes my name in the expectation that I may not be convinced.

Actually, I am a complete sucker for the comparison between fictional Qs and had a go at it back in my 2001 introductory textbook, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze, Chapter 5:

“Q”, the letter used for the hypothetical source that allegedly lies behind much of Matthew and Luke, sounds mysterious and intriguing. On our way through the maze, here is something that has a sense of the thrilling. To many, the term “Q” quickly conjures up images from James Bond or Star Trek. Perhaps, the reader will think, this “Q” will be like the James Bond character “Q”, played by Desmond Llewellyn, ever able to provide some suitable new gadget appropriate to the occasion, equipping us ready to help us out of some implausible yet dangerous situation. Or perhaps it will be like the “Q” of Star Trek: The Next Generation, an ever powerful, strangely illusive, oddly irritating presence always lurking on the sidelines to divert us from conducting our affairs in the way we would like.

Without doubt, the study of Q does carry a thrill for many scholars and students of the New Testament. Some think that this lost source provides us with a window onto the earliest years of the Christian movement, and the work of uncovering Q is now often likened to the work of excavating material in an archaeological dig. Not surprisingly, the “discovery” in modern times of this lost document has led to something of an industry in New Testament scholarship, attempting to reconstruct its wording, its theology, its history, its origin. But before any of this is possible, there is a prior question, a question sometimes ignored, that requires careful attention: what is the evidence for this hypothetical document? How do we know that Q existed? Is the hypothesis based on solid ground or might the Q of Gospel scholarship turn out to be as fictional as the Qs of James Bond and Star Trek?

A little predictable, perhaps.  But no one else was making the comparison at the time, and it was irresistible.

Q in the Top 7 Lost Bodies of Work (That Would Have Changed Everything)

Speaking of Q, my friend NT Wrong helpfully draws attention to the 7 Lost Bodies of Work (That Would Have Changed Everything), which features "The (Supposed) Lost Sayings of Jesus".  "The Q Document, if it exists, is probably the single most influential thing recorded, like, in the history of ever," the page claims.  It goes on to espouse a maximalist position on what Q may have contained, including "more specific writings from Jesus on, say, slavery, or homosexuality, or abortion, or women's rights. Or gun control".

In other words, it sounds much more interesting than the Critical Edition.

Until, of course, we remember that the reconstructed text of Q does have a bit to say about slavery, a whole story about a centurion who says to his slave, "'Do this,' and he does it" (Q 7.8), behaviour apparently commended by Jesus (Q 7.9).  Is it not also Q that commends the faithful and wise slave ("Blessed is that slave", Q 12.43) and condemns the unfaithful slave to being "cut in pieces" (Q 12.46)?

Q is for . . . . Q and Q reading Q

Neil Cameron has put together a fantastic A-Z of Awesomeness and it features a fine representation for "Q" (left), featuring Q and Q reading Q.  Unfortunately, the Q that Q and Q are reading is Q the popular British magazine and not Q the hypothetical text, but it's still a great cartoon.

Incidentally, the A-Z also features excellent illustrations covering Buffy bravely battling Beelzebub and the Doctor Who Defeating Doctor Doom in a Deadly Disco Dance-Off.

Thanks to Jeff Peterson for pointing this out to me, via the Unreality site.

NT Pod 26: The Case Against Q, Programme Notes

I uploaded the latest episode of the NT Pod yesterday, NT Pod 26: The Case Against Q. It is the fourth and final episode in the current series of back-to-back episodes on the Synoptic Problem that I have been running in tandem with my New Testament Introduction class here at Duke.

For those who may be interested in reading more about this topic, I have a few suggestions. The New Testament Gateway has a section on the Synoptic Problem, which gathers together different resources on the issue, including websites like Stephen Carlson's Synoptic Problem Home Page and Mahlon Smith's Synoptic Gospels Primer.  There is also a Books and Articles for those who want to take things a little further.

I have a website related to the specific topic of this podcast and it is called the Case Against Q Website.   This has been on the web now for 13 years, which is quite a long time in internet history.  When I had a book published on the topic in 2002, I turned the site into a companion site for that book.  Now eight years later, I am wondering about turning it back into a free-standing site.  But that does, of course, depend on whether I can find the time to update it.   You can find lots of material on the topic there, including articles by Farrer, Goulder and me about the Farrer theory, which affirms Marcan Priority but dispenses with Q.

NT Pod 25: Q

Well, it was inevitable that in the end I would get to Q on the NT Pod. So to have waited until episode 25 might be thought of as some kind of achievement. This latest episode is the third in a back to back series on the Synoptic Problem, beginning with NT Pod 23: What is the Synoptic Problem? and continuing with NT Pod 24: Was Mark the First Gospel?. I am running these episodes alongside my New Testament Introduction course which I am teaching at Duke at the moment.

I had initially planned to do three back to back episodes on the Synoptic Problem, but decided that it would be better and fairer to take one episode to lay out the case for Q, the current one, and then to give my reasons for disagreeing with that case in the next episode. That one will be along soon.

I have also continued with the extended episodes of the NT Pod, using recordings of the lectures, and I will blogging those here in due course. In the mean time, NT Pod subscribers will already have received them.

Mark Allan Powell on the Synoptic Problem

In my previous post, I offered some enthusiasm for the splendid looking new textbook for introductory New Testament classes, Introducing the New Testament by Mark Allan Powell, published by Baker. Regular readers will not be surprised to see me revisiting something of a bête noire in complaining about the way that the Synoptic Problem is treated in introductory texts, and there is no exception here. I must admit that the personal disappointment on this occasion was a little more pronounced than usual. It is several years now since I complained about the way that the Synoptic Problem gets treated in introductory books (The Case Against Q, Chapter 1), and I have done what I can, through books, articles, websites, blogs, to try to generate some awareness of a major alternative to the consensus view. Sometimes, this has met with success. But all too often, I have felt like Kierkegaard's clown, and no more so than here, apparently having made next to no impact on the way that the debate is framed, let alone the solutions that are offered. Let me try to explain why, and please forgive me for focusing in a major way on something that is clearly peripheral to Mark Allan Powell's interests, as it is to many other scholars. The difficulty for people like me is that the introductory textbook can do more than anything else in embedding ideas in students' minds, and it is a shame if they are not even given the framework within which to explore the problem in a balanced way.

Powell's discussion of the Synoptic Problem (here called "the Synoptic Puzzle", 92-100), presents the Two-Source Theory as the solution to the Synoptic Problem and gives the Griesbach Theory as the main alternative (diagrammed on 97, sidebar on 99). I am grateful to Mark Allan Powell for adding a sentence about the Farrer theory (99) after I drew attention to the lack of mention in the manuscript, but all the books under "For Further Reading" are by defenders of the Two-Source Theory, and there are no arguments provided for the existence of Q. Q is largely taken for granted, and then explained. New students, therefore, do not have any framework within which they are able to question Q at the same time as affirming Marcan Priority.

The website provides some supplementary materials, but here things are no more encouraging. There are Chapter 4 flashcards that give "Two Source Theory", "Q", "M", "L", "Four Source Theory" and "Griesbach Theory". Note that Marcan Priority is treated only in partnership with the Q hypothesis and not separately. Under "Extra Content", 4.5 Proposed Solutions to the Synoptic Problem (also available as a PDF), four solutions are listed, "Augustine's Solution", "The Two-Gospel Hypothesis", "The Two Source Hypothesis" and "The Four-Source Hypothesis". In a summary on the "Status of the Synoptic Puzzle in the Twenty-First Century", the Farrer theory and its proponents are not even mentioned.

Then under 4.6, there is Evidence to Support the Two-Source Hypothesis (also available as a PDF). Given the absence of any arguments for the existence of Q in the book itself, I was interested to see what the grounds would be here. Four arguments are given as "Evidence That Matthew and Luke Were Produced Independently of Each Other". All will be familiar to those who have spent any time studying the Synoptic Problem, alas:

(1) With regard to sequence of events, Matthew and Luke frequently agree with one another and with Mark, but they never agree with one another against Mark. This suggests that Mark served as a basic outline used independently by both Matthew and Luke, who sometimes followed him and sometimes did not. If (as an alternative proposal suggests) Mark had copies of both Matthew and Luke and produced an abbreviation of their works, we would expect instances in which Mark departed from a sequence of events followed by both Matthew and Luke, but that never happens.

This argument is problematic because it is expressed in terms of opposition to the Griesbach Theory. The fact that Luke usually follows Mark's order is not a problem for adherents of the Farrer theory, for whom Luke is prioritizing Mark over Matthew and, like Matthew, using it as "a basic outline". The "never" is also incorrect since there are minor Matthew-Luke agreements against Mark in order.

(2) Neither Matthew nor Luke ever includes the other’s additions to the Markan text.

This is simply an error. The reason that the Two-Source Theory invokes categories like "Mark-Q overlaps" and has to spend time discussing "Minor Agreements" is that there are many triple tradition passages in which there are substantial agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark.

(3) The likelihood that either Matthew or Luke used the other as a source is reduced by what would then be inexplicable omissions of material.

The argument from omission is always a problematic one, not least given the fact that every theory has to cope with omission at some point. It often simply amounts to a statement of what we would have done if we were one of the evangelists. The only example Powell gives of an implausible omission by Luke is Matt. 25.31-46 (Sheep and the Goats). If I were Luke, I don't think I would include it, with its characteristically Matthean judgement day scenario of divisions into two groups, sheep and goats, wheat and tares, wise and foolish, good and bad, and eternal hell-fire for the second group. But that may not be right; it is always a guess to say why we imagine that Luke omitted any material, likewise with the huge chunks omitted from Mark, including material we might think to have been congenial.

(4) The material that Matthew and Luke have in common but that is not found in Mark is never found at the same place in their Gospels.

This is another error. One of the difficulties for the Q theory is that Matthew and Luke sometimes integrate double tradition material with triple tradition material, especially in Matt. 3-4 and Luke 3-4, but also elsewhere. The reason that there is a category called "Mark Q overlap" is that "the material that Matthew and Luke have in common but that is not found in Mark is" sometimes "found at the same place in their Gospels."

So, once we get to arguments for the existence of Q, they are not especially impressive, which is a shame given that the actual text seems to express some confidence in the existence of Q. All in all, I remain optimistic, though. Where Q is sustained either by ignoring the arguments against it, or by reproducing weak arguments in its favour, it is surely only a matter of time before an Introduction to the New Testament is produced that at least takes seriously the Q sceptical view.

Thomas and Q again

I have often talked about the argument for the existence of Q that appeals to the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, most recently on the blog in a post on The Gospel of Thomas and Q, and most fully in print in the last chapter of The Case Against Q. Since my attention has turned to Thomas, I have returned again to the argument that aligns Q and Thomas. I notice that in studies of the Gospel of Thomas, the alleged similarity with Q acts to anchor Thomas (or early versions of Thomas) to the first century, on the grounds that Thomas shares a genre with Q. This genre is on a general level logoi sophōn ("Sayings of the Wise"), but more specifically "the Sayings Gospel", and it fell into disuse with the triumph of narrative Gospels. Q was absorbed into Matthew and Luke; Thomas was lost. Q must, of course, predate Matthew and Luke, so it it helps us to anchor the genre to the mid first century.

It is difficult for Q sceptics like me to know quite how to react to this kind of argument except to note that without Q, Thomas (or an earlier version of Thomas) looks a little more isolated as a first century text. Q and Thomas together are the major players in the Koester-Robinson inspired model that sees a Passion-free Christianity as a key trajectory in Christian origins. Thomas on its own would have a lot of work to do. It is unsurprising, therefore, that those influenced by the Koester-Robinson model are always adherents of the Two-Source Theory.

I remain puzzled by the argument that aligns Q and Thomas. Earlier today, I came across yet another iteration of the argument and it goes like this:

The discovery of The Gospel of Thomas in 1945 silenced those who claimed that there was no analogy in early Christianity for a collection of Jesus sayings without a narrative framework. (Robert E Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 157).

Van Voorst does not name these scholars who were “silenced” and I begin to wonder if in fact they existed at all. Who are these scholars, often alluded to but never named, who were sceptical about the existence of Q but who were silenced by the discovery of Thomas? It is possible that the general impression results from a misreading of Austin Farrer's "On Dispensing with Q", in which he attempted to point to the generic peculiarities of Q, but it may be that his point was too sophisticated to be persuasive, and his apparent ignorance of Thomas (in the late 40s and early 50s) too striking to carry the day.