Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 06:05:57 -0400
From: E. Bruce Brooks <brooks@asianlan.umass.edu>
To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Thomas/Q Project

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On: Thomas/Q Project
In Response To: Bob Schacht's Summary of Voting
From: Bruce

I have been following the Thomas/Q Project with absorbing interest, and am
grateful to Bob Schacht for his lucid summary . . . 

[which by the way printed out almost correctly on my Netscape Navigator
E-mail facility, but not from the archived version in Findmail, which
reduced the table to an impenetrable paragraph; the [Attachment
Thomas#Q.rtf] entry, underlined in the archive version, produced for me on
clicking a File Not Available message. What am I doing wrong?]

. . . I find the data to be extraordinarily suggestive, and am preparing a
query for general comment, but in the meantime, could Mark Goodacre (or
Stevan Davies, or anybody else) state for me and perhaps for others: of
what hypothesis was this project a test? I take the point of departure to
be Stevan's message of 16 June 98 (5:39 PM), commenting on Mark's earlier
message therein quoted, and ending "Yes. We have to look into this. Where
is Koestler's list?" Stevan's proposal then followed in his message of 16
June 98 (10:02 PM). 

Tentatively, it seems to me that the origin is the dialogue between the
statements (1) "I'm convinced that a high percentage of earliest Jesus
sayings were proverbs and so when something can be a proverb it probably
was one. The Luke version is proverbial, albeit more wordy than needed and
I'd be prone to think it original against Mt and GTh," (2) "Luke's form of
Q sayings is generally supported by Thomas against Matthew," and (3) "But
not always! See above." 

What sequence of texts is implied here? I can read statement (1) as
envisioning the sequence Q > Luke > Mt/Thos, and statement (2) as
countersuggesting the sequence Q > Luke/Thos > Mt, in which case the
project to test the relative affinity of Mt/Thos vs Luke/Thos makes
experimental sense, since its results would tend to support one over the
other. But I suspect that the writers may easily have had other and more
complex text sequences in mind, or even authorial/redactional agendas
rather than text sequences per se. 

Clarification most welcome. We know we're wiser, but what exactly have we
learned?

	Bruce