Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 13:25:07 -0400 (EDT) From: William Arnal To: Stevan Davies Subject: Re: Q2 and Thomas On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Stevan Davies wrote: > > If I understand Mack and Kloppenborg correctly, they > > believe that the Q2 redactions were created in response to the > > negative reaction the Q1 community had received. > > This is certainly true for Mack. I don't know about Kloppenborg. Maybe > you can elucidate, or William Arnal might. OK -- yes, Kloppenborg does appear to think that Q2 as a document was generated at least in part because of the reception had either by Q1 or by the people responsible for Q1 (I'm not sure we should think in terms of Q1 getting a bad review in JBL). But we have to maintain the distinction between incorporation into a document and redactional creations. How come no one makes this mistake when we talk about Mark? Say Mark was written around 66-70. Does anyone really think that that means that every story in Mark dates from 66-70? So why do we do this with Q? Since we distinguish between the oral circulation of much or Mark's material PRIOR to 66-70, and 66-70 as the date at which Mark sewed thatr material together, and his composition at the time of various redactional seams and comments (say, to be uncontroversial, the first verse of the gospel), why can't people imagine the same for Q? So, at the point at which Q2 is composed, this is what happens: a)the Q folks (i.e., the collection of people responsible for Q1) get irritated because they feel their ethos as expressed in Q1 is being marginalized or leading to their marginalization as a group; b) they take their already-written Q1 and add material to it: some of this material is orally-circulating (for instance, the Son of Man sayings, or 3:16, or the healing of the centurion's boy, etc.) but it's addition to Q1 is REDACTIONAL. It's not created by the Q2 hand, but the Q2 hand is responsible for placing it in the document; c)in the act of placing this material in the document, some of it already serves their purposes largely as is, and remains intact; d)some requires redactional modification; and e) some pericopes were probably created wholescale to support Q2's perspective. On this last point, MOST Q scolars are conservative, and very few instances are offered up as redactional creations. Marz has argued for redactional composition of 12:49-50; I have argued (QUITE against the grain of most scholarship) for the redactional composition of 3:7-9, 17. But we're not dealing with a huge amount of material here. > Before W.A. goes flying up the wall let me remind you that Klop.'s > stratification is not based on these principles but on redaction > critical grounds that produce the result of Q2 having apocalyptic and > judgmental elements which is another thing altogether. Thus your > parenthetical comment is not true. Did you receive Arnal's summary of Klop? > If not I can forward one to you. Thanks for sparing me the tirade, with necessary subsequent apologies. I'm quite sick of making this point (and I don't mean primarily on this list). No one seems to get it, but it's not that hard. > Here's how I understand the situation. > > 1. There was an oral tradition labeled, now, (misguidedly > misleadingly) "sapiential" and much of Q1 is sapiential. Much of > Thomas is also sapiential with a good bit of overlap. Either both > Q and Thomas drew on that oral tradition, or Thomas drew on Q > for some of what GTh has of that or vice versa Q drew on Thomas. Agreed in theory: but I think it's nearly impossible to make any kind of case that either of these documents borrowed from each other, at any stage in their development (barring, of course, scribal corruption of our one complete copy of Thomas to assimilate it to Matthew and Luke -- but that's not quite the same thing, is it?). There's no evidence of Thomas' redactional interests in Q anywhere, nor vice-versa, so far as I can tell. Same goes with order of material. > 2. There are judgemental sayings in Q2 and in GTh. Either they > also circulated in common oral tradition or, again, Thomas drew on > Q for those sayings or vice versa Q drew on Thomas. As above. Q2 did not INVENT judgement per se. It just incoporated it into a document that didn't have it yet. I'd like point out that the Son of Man sayings in Q2 show NO sign of redactional composition; they are slightly at variance with Q2's redactional interests, and in Q appear to have been glossed or emended at a later date. Also: in MY (idiosyncratic) opinion, Q2 invented the title "coming one" (erchomenos) in order to reinterpret and correct the Son of Man imagery. > 3. Kloppenborg argues that Q2 is chronologically later than Q1 but > does not, as W.A. reiterates with some frequency, conclude strongly > that the Q2 sayings were invented at that time by the Q people. He > leaves it quite open that the Q2 sayings also circulated orally and > were selected by Q to add to Q1 to produce Q2. In this case Thomas > also could have selected some of the same sayings from the same oral > pool. Q would be choosing them to fit an ideological agenda, Thomas > just wrote 'em down for no discernable purpose (Thomas does not > share Q2's ideological purpose, at any rate). Well, even though Thomas is peculiar document, I hate to concede "with no discernible purpose" and prefer the parenthetical implication: "for his own purposes. Sayings which were not judgemental in the Q2 sense were made so either by their mere incorporation into the document, or by modification (the best example I can think of is the healing of the Centurion's boy, which appears in John, but with no polemical interest whatsoever; but also: John's preaching in 3:16, which is also in Mark, is used for a markedly different purpose than in Mark). Sayings which aleady "fit" Q2 were probably incorporated as is. Same with Thomas: overtly judgmental stuff gets toned down and re-figured to suit Thomas' purposes, while other traditions, which Q2 modifies in a polemical direction, Thomas modifies differently, or leaves intact. The best example off the top of my head is Q 7:24-26/Thomas 78 -- Q adresses this in such a way that the expectations of the people are criticized, and by incorporating in teh same block as 7:23 and 7:31-35, turns it into polemic in which John and Jesus are allies again st "this generation." In Thomas, it doesn't refer to John, and is a critique of wealth. > B. Thomas has some of those Q2 sayings and so Mack's thesis that they > were invented by the Q community to serve the mythmaking > self-justifying god-hates-everybody-but-us tendencies of that later Q > community is shown to be false. Since the Q1 sayings as they appear in > Thomas do not show any signs of identifiable Q redaction (relying on > Patterson here) it is highly unlikely that Thomas took either Q1 or > Q2 sayings from Q itself and hence Thomas undermines this element > of Mack's thesis. And, come to think of it, this is Mack's MAIN > thesis in his Lost Gospels book, i.e. that Q2 sayings were invented > by the later Q people and thus give us good insight into the > development of that community. > > It seems to me that the Q2//Thomas parallels challenge Kloppenborg's > thesis but they don't by any stretch of the imagination destroy it. > But don't those parallels DESTROY Mack's thesis? [Unless he can > show literary dependence by Thomas on Q, which he hasn't.] I don't think, for the reasons I've said before, that it even challenges Kloppenborg's thesis. BUT: to whatever extent Mack is serious in imagining that all of Q2's material was invented by Q2 redaction (does he really say this? or are his readers still failing to distinguish between redaction-as-collection and redaction-as-composition?), the presence of such parallels in Thomas does indeed destroy his thesis. I tend to like Mack for his tendency to be liberal in assigning material to deliberate readactional composition (I think our guild is WAY too conservative on this: we have some unrealistic notion of a reified "tradition" out there, and seem to write off any real live human intentionality -- Mack counteracts such tendencies). But to the extent that he does this by forcing earliest Christianity into a series of boxes (called "communities") with linear developments between them, he's taken a conceptual step backwards AND is unsupported by teh evidence. Actually, the evidence that to mind absolutely destroys Mack's view (if it's as presented) is Davies' observations of the tendencies of FORMS in Mark/Thomas and Q/Thomas parallels. If, as I believe, this tendency is consequence of Thomas having access to pre-Q2 unredacted traditions (which in a way begs the question, I suppose Mack would counter), the fact that they do NOT take developed chreia form in Thomas suggests that Q2 redacted them in this direction, whereas Mark already possesed chreiai in his pre-redactional tradition. There's no reason for Thomas to strip chreia frames from Q sayings and not from Markan material. And so this suggests a vault of pre-redactional Q2 oral sentence material, which means Q2 did NOT invent these traditions. Does that make sense? Bill