Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 23:54:57 -0500 (EST) From: William Arnal To: Stevan Davies cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Q2 and Thomas On Sun, 31 Mar 1996, Stevan Davies wrote: > Maureen Smith wrote: > > Am I correct in assuming that Crossan, the Jesus Seminar, and Mack > > took Q1 to be the only part of the Q with authentic sayings of Jesus > > and took Q2 to be the work of redactors and thus not attributable to > > the historical Jesus? But if Kloppenborg says the redactors drew on > > traditional materials, how could the Jesus researchers make this > > assumption? > > These are deep waters indeed. You are definitely clued in to what is > happening. Those you mention do tend to take Kloppenborg's analysis > to mean that the apocalyptic son of man sayings may be dismissed, > although by Kloppenborg's argument you wouldn't think they should be. > But doesn't K. presume that they arose after the time of Jesus as a > response to the rejection of his authentic sapiential message? Or is First, Maureen is PARTLY correct in assuming that the usual suspects listed above have in fact corrupted the pure Gospel of Kloppenborg. It's not QUITE so crass as "Q2" is completely inauthentic. Yet, flipping through _Five Gospels_ I can find lots of Q1 material that's pink or red, and lots of Q2 that's grey. So what's going on here? I THINK that what's probably happened is that since Q1 is earlier than Q2, it's assumed not so much that it's individual traditions are more accurate, but that its overall conceptualization of Jesus is more accurate. Q2's image of Jesus, plausibly in my opinion, can be pretty easily explained away as a development out of Q1, regardless of the provenance of individual traditions. And since Q1 appears to be almost as bedrock as we can get, it's assumed that there's no better overall conceptualization of Jesus. But the consequence of this not-unproblematic-but-still-reasonable chain of inferences is the way it rebounds back on the documents. If Q1's overall opinion of Jesus is in the back of your mind when you are assessing individual sayings, obviously the sayings that are going to have the best chance of getting a red or pink vote are (drum roll...) from Q1! And the once the tenor of Q2 is judged secondary, it's pretty easy to reject the sayings that best match that tenor -- i.e., those from Q2! A more nuanced and sophisticated view COULD proceed from all the assumptions above, but look for non-Q2-redacted versions of the Q2 sayings, i.e., not assume that the saying itself is inauthentic just because Q2 has redacted it from its perspective. And in fact the Thomas parallels confirm the validity of such a procedure: they lack the (secondary and "inauthentic") redactional interests of Q2 and offer us ways of seeing these individual traditions "unmarred" by this (particular) secondary interference. Of course, Thomas provides his own interference, and I have questions about the sometimes rather simple equation of Q1's redactional interests with the histoical Jesus. If so, he CERTAINLY wasn't the peasant Crossan makes him out to be. Which brings us to Davies' question: I don't think K. assumes the "authenticity" of Q1's message, although he would raise the question: how could such an early view develop if Jesus, were, say, an apocalyptic preacher? But be that as it may, there is no easy equation in any of his work of Q1 with the historical Jesus. He does appear to regard Q2's redactional themes as explicable developments, but that does not mean that the individual traditions which serve as vehicles for those interests are necessarily secondary. > that just Mack? And if those arose later, mainly *because* they are > in Q2, wouldn't it follow that other Q2 sayings also arose later by It would certainly follow -- but I don't THINK that's the logic at work. If it is, you're right, and they're certainly wrong. > that logic? If so, then, why are they in Thomas? Or is Thomas a valid > means to test which Q2 sayings are reliable? And, yet, what little we I suspect that the only thing Thomas can do in this regard is to help us establish which features predate either Q's OR Thomas' redaction, but without prejudice to the point at which the traditions entered the document. Y'know what I mean? If a tradition appearing in Q (1 or 2) appears in Thomas, we can be reasonably sure that a)neither Q (1 or 2) nor Thomas (at any point) actually composed the saying; b)that whatever features the two have in common predate the incorporation of the tradition into either work (and hence are not DUE to redaction, even if the tradition was incorporated at a later redactionmal stage); c)that wherever the parallel traditions depart from each other, this may be due either to the redactional modification of either or both Q & Thomas, OR due to differing modifications made during oral transmission. Hence the oral tradition that lies behind Thomas 78//Q7:24-26 certainly was not composed by either Q or Thomas, certainly contained a reference to the wilderness, reeds shaken by the wind, and luxorious clothing, and was formulated as a set of rhetorical questions. However: its application to John may be a result of Q2 redaction (whence it was incorporated into the document), or the elimination of reference to John may be a result of Thomas redaction (for reasons that elude me), OR the saying could have pursued different oral trajectories. My best guess is that the last line in Thomas is Thomas redaction (making it an anti-wealth polemic), the last line in Q's version is Q2 redaction (linking John with prophets) and that the association or disassociation of the pericope with John the Baptist (I can't even guess which is prior) occured at the oral stage. But I draw these conclusions on the basis of known tendencies of Q2 and Thomas, and not from the mere fact of the parallel. > know about Thomas' bias tells us he would have eliminated apocalyptic > son of man sayings! Yes. It was Koester who made the observation that Thomas and a possible early stage of Q would similar in this respect, and I think your observation reveals the fallacy of drawing any historical conclusions from such an observation. But the stratification of Q is made on other grounds; and even before this, Schurmann had argued pretty plausibly that "son of man" represented secondary developments of the tradition and notably that these secondary developments PREDATE the redaction of Q -- so "son of man" references were not created by Q readction, but incorporated by it. > I hope I respond before Bill does so that he can address these > remarks as well as Maureen's. Hope I've managed. G'night, all. Bill