Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 15:11:08 -0400 From: Kevin Johnson To: M.S.Goodacre@bham.ac.uk Cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Original GThomas/Q Narrative Mark - Sorry for the lag time. At 10:46 AM 4/22/98 GMT, Mark Goodacre wrote: > I dug around in previous correspondence on this > and will quote just a little pertinent to this one from Dec. 17 1997. (In the following discussion, the triple >>> is Mark G., the double >> is Steve Davies and the single > is Mark G.) --------------------- >>> 2. Since Q is quite different (though with points of contact) >>> from NMM, it will not do to say that the Farrer Hypothesis makes >>> little difference to theories on Christian origins. >> >> I don't recall anything >> that would support this claim. NMM lets you say "here's what pre- >> Matthean Jesus traditions look like." So does Q. I still don't know >> what the difference would be. > > The differences are 1). Q has recognised parameters. There are > things that are in and things that are not in. I'm sure you have noticed how the parameters of Q seem to shift depending upon the date and title of the publication you happen to be reading. However, the basic tenet that Q is a subset of NMM seems unassailable enough - Q (at least as it was originally defined) is only that portion of NMM which is paralleled in Luke. > 2). Q is all in one > place. If Q is a document, and everyone thinks that it is, then one > can study it as a document (once one has reconstructed it). This argument, that Q is most commonly understood as a document while NMM may have contained oral traditions, is likewise a valid distinction, although it is conceivable that either Q or NMM was derived from written documents or an oral tradition or both (though this last possibility suggests that "Q" could have been more than one source). > 3). As > such, Q has recoverable distinctive features in a way that > 'pre-Matthean Jesus traditions' do not. Here, I take it (and please correct me if I'm wrong), you are tactfully questioning some of the documentary approaches to Q, such as Kloppenborg's stratification of it. And your point is well taken that such approaches take quite a lot for granted (that Q was a document available in practically the same form to Mt & Lk; that it exhibited specific theological tendencies we can recover; that it contained exactly these sayings [with some exceptions which differ according to the current author's particular bias]; that it underwent multiple, theologically-motivated redactions; and so on). >... The pre-Matthean >traditions have been interacted-with by Matthew and the hope that we >could regain access to them via Luke disappears as soon as one sees >that Luke's source is Matthew. I must respectfully disagree here. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that Luke knew Matthew, it does not necessarily follow that Luke did not know Matthew's sources. If we consider just one example: the Lord's Prayer, which is found only in Q (and in the Didache), we find that Luke's version is much the briefer of the two. If Luke has derived his version of the Lord's prayer from Matthew, he has done it with pruning shears. Are there theological grounds on which Luke's omissions may be explained as deliberate and are they consistent with the manner in which Luke has edited Mark? Or, on the other hand, is Luke just faithfully presenting the prayer as he finds it in his source? Moreover, in an analogous situation, I have seen cases where Thomas presents a saying one way, Mark presents the same saying another way, and Luke parallels Mark while adding a "new" element - an element that was originally in Thomas! For example, the synoptic saying about the bridegroom is preceded by a question about fasting (Mk 2:18, Mt 9:14, Lk 5:33). In the parallel saying (#104) in Thomas, this question (or better, statement) involves both fasting and prayer. In Mark (followed by Matthew) the question involves fasting only. But Luke, like Thomas, mentions prayer as well. So I think that it is quite possible that Luke preserves traditions which pre-date Matthew just as, in this case, he retains a pre-Markan tradition. In terms of the Q situation, my view is that Luke had access to both Mt & Mk and also to parallel versions of some of the NMM material. And BTW (on the general topic of Q and Thomas), when Coptic Thomas was first published, Thomas was roundly declared to be "not Q." That is, despite their overlapping contents and their similarity of form, Thomas was found to be dissimilar from the reconstructed Q. However, it seems to me that in cases where Thomas contains a saying which is closely paralleled in Mt & Lk, appeal to Q is unnecessary (and, perhaps, unjustified) since Thomas could have served as the common, non-Markan source of the saying. For example, Q 6:39 (the blind leading the blind) is closely paralled by Thomas 34. The same is true of Q 10:2 (the laborers into the harvest) and Thomas 73. The possibility that Thomas (rather than a hypothetical Q document) served as the source of these sayings and others in Lk and Mt cannot be automatically discounted. - Kevin (kjohnson@truesoft.com)