Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 22:52:47 -0400 (EDT) From: William Arnal To: Stevan Davies Subject: Re: Q2 and Thomas On Mon, 8 Apr 1996, Stevan Davies wrote: > But let's leave Klop and Mack aside and bring ol' Marcus Borg > on stage for awhile. He himself believes, and he has insisted in > print that it is the consensus among scholars, that > Jesus was not an apocalypticist and therefore sayings such as the > future Son of Man sayings are later creations. At the risk of giving offense again, Borg's assertion here is CRAPOLA. There's no such consensus. Borg just uses this to escape having to make the argument himself. I figure that's just sheer laziness. The really weird thing is, Borg touts this "consensus" without himself, I believe, accepting Q's stratification. Go figure. > So, evidently, there was a collection of rather savage > Kingdom of God as vengeance sayings circulating prior to > Q2. Wouldn't that imply pretty strongly that Q1 would have > known them but deliberately chose to leave them out? > > The only other alternative is that they came into being between > the time of Q1 and Q2 in some other community than Q. Subsequently > those sayings, or at least their ideology, was picked up by Q and > Mt Mk Lk Pl and it was known to Jn and Th. I don't find this as difficult a scenario as you evidently do. Who knows how much time elasped between Q1 and Q2? Presumably, there could be an oral tradition developing between the two, in which many of these sayings= were composed. And Q2 redaction probably supplied some more. The other thing is that Q2's ideology did not emerge out of thin air. Polemic due to frustration is a way of explaining why Q2 utilized an apocalyptic ideology that was "already in the air", but it does not explain why Q2 chose THIS vehicle as opposed to a range of others that might also have sufficed (and in fact it played with several: the invocation of John, the= deuteronomistic scheme, the prophets, Wisdom personfied, etc.). For it to= have occurred to the Q2 redactor that apocalypticism was a good way to rationalize the Jesus traditions, it's quite possible a nudge in this direction was needed. Why not say that nudge was the fact that the oral tradition at this point was already doing so to some degree, but with slightly less choler than Q2 employed? So it's not like Q2 INVENTED apocalypticism (as I've said before), and so we're spared of the embarrassment of having to explain why Q2, which was not a source for Thomas, John, Mark, etc., managed to disseminate its ideology all over the place anyhow. And if this strikes one as GROSSLY hypothetical, let me= point out that it's not much different than saying that e.g., Mark is redactionally interested in portraying Jesus as the Son of God, even though this is a theme that was already SECONDARILY present in the tradition. > So, enlighten me WA or somebody. Where did the Q style > day of the Son of Man sayings come from? The Q people > didn't make them up (Klop) and Jesus didn't make them up > (Borg). Or did Jesus make them up? Isn't that the simplest > hypothesis that fits the evidence, even Klop's Q1/Q2 evidence? Schurmann ( along time ago): They were made up somewhere in between. If we're going to assume a creative oral tradiotion, why balk at this? But let's look at the Son of Man sayings in Q. I'll just list references,= rather than citing the text in full (I'm lazier than Davies on this score!), and I'll assume for the sake of argument that "Son of Man" is original Q even if only one evangelist using this specific wording. They are: Q 6:22. This text is from the FIRST layer of Q. Mack puts it in Q2, but sloppily and for all the wrong reasons. If anyone wants to dispute me on this, I'll argue it, but for now, all I'll just hope y'all will take my word for it. There is a parallel to this text in Thomas (68, 69), but the= Thomas parallel does not contain reference to Son of Man. The term is used as a title for Jesus himself. Q 7:34: This is from Q2. There is not Thomas parallel. The term is used as a title for Jesus himself, specifically NOT the resurrected or returning Jesus. Q 9:58: This is from the FIRST layer of Q. The reference in Q is to either Jesus as a human being, or to human beings in general. Therfe is a= Thomas parallel (86), and it is the ONLY parallel in Thomas with which used shares a reference to "Son of man". Q 11:30: This is Q2, and refers to the Son of Man as a Jonah-like sign for "this generation." This is probably apocalyptic for Q, given its context, but the saying itself does not require an apocalyptic interpretation. And it is unclear whether the son of man refers to Jesus being a prophet of repentance, and acting as a "sign" in that sense, or whether it refers to Son of Man as judge, who will serve as a self-evidence "sign." There is no parallel in Thomas. Q 12:8: Q2, I think, with no Thomas parallels. This is the "eschatological correlative" -- whoever confesses Jesus, the Son of Man with confess in heaven. Again, this is only apocalyptic in context, it assumes something of a disparity between Jesus himself and this son of man figure, and does not require an apocalyptic judgement scene. In many ways, it is little different from "whoever knows me knows him who sent me," etc. Q 12:10: Q2, an absolutely incomprehensible saying about blasphemy against the Son of Man. It LOOKS like the term refers to Jesus here, since a CONTRAST is made with the spirit, in which case the saying is decidely NOT apocalyptic. There is a Thomas parallel (44), which seems to retain the same sense as Q, but which does not refer to "the son of man", only to "the son". Q 12:40: Q2. No one knows the hour of the coming of the Son of Man. Oddly, there is a Thomas parallel here (21, 103; as well as: 1 Thess 5:1-2, Mark 13:35, 2 Peter 3:10, Rev 16:15!). NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THESE PARALLELS REFERS TO THE SON OF MAN (wow!). Many of the parallels are apocalyptic without using the son of man terminology, while Thomas is not= apocalyptic at all: it's more a warning to know what to expect, and be prepared, much like the parable of the assassin. Q 17:24, 26, 30: all from Q2, no Thomas parallels, all refer to the PAROUSIA of the Son of man and are clearly apocalyptic. Equally clearly, they all were part of the little apocalyptic speech which gets incorporated into Q at this point. Q 22:28: Q2, possibly apocalyptic, refers to the exaltation of the Son of man and the judging activity of his followers. It's rather muted, though. No Thomas parallel. I have not attempted to tabulate Marcan parallels to these, but it could be done easily enough. Stats for Thomas: 1. Absolute use of *prome* (The Man): 7 (?), 8 (as replacement for "kingdom," apparently). 2. Son of man, singular: #86 (used in sense of "human being," but perhaps with connotation of "righteous" human being, or perhaps Jesus himself). 3. "Sons of man": 28,= 106: sense is of saved human beings in the second case, humans generally in the first. #86 is the only parallel with "son of man," #106 is paralleled in the synoptics, but without this term. SO: where does all this tedium lead us? It suggests several things to me:= 1. First and foremost, the son of man sayings, even in Q, are not at all homogeneous. They mean different things at different times, and do not even seem to refer consistently to Jesus. This should be something of a tip-off that Q redaction did not create the term, and was not even particularly redactionally interested in it: at least not enough to smooth out the references and make them consistent. 2. While the term appears much more frequently in Q2 than in Q1, it does occur twice in Q1, and even is used inconsistently in these two references. So Q1 already knows of a tendency to call Jesus the son of man, certainly in 6:22, maybe in 9:58. 3. Thomas also emplys the term inconsistently. He uses it much less frequently, but does not show an aversion to it. He uses it in places where his parallels do not, which suggests that we should be careful about talking about a Thomas tendency to delete the term. But he also fails to use it in places where his parallels have it. In at least one instance (the hour when the theif is coming=A9, the tradition supports Thomas against Q -- Son of Man is almost certainly secondary, because no other traditions agree in having it. 3. Only once does the term appear in parallel Q/Thomas material, and here with an unclear referent. It is in any case not apocalyptic in either source. 4. The only strongly, unequivocally apocalyptic references to teh Son of Man occur in a single cluster, unparalleled in Thomas. I believe (off the= top of my head -- I didn't check) that Marks shares some of this material, so it's reasonable enough to conclude that at some point, pre-Q2, apocalyptic son of man sayings developed. In sum: all of this suggests to me what Schurmann already said: that Son of Man appears to arise secondarily in the oral tradition (it is only VERY infrequently shared in independent parallel material), and yet does not appear as part of the redactional interest of Q (or Thomas, for that matter; Mark is a different story). But even more importantly, it suggests that Son of Man was circulating in the tradition WITHOUT apocalyptic connotations. In fact, judging from the instances enumerated, most of the time "Son of Man" in Q is either not apocalyptic or is so only by virtue of the context in which it appears: with the exception of 3 instances in chapter 17, "Son of man" in the tradition does not have a clear apocalyptic reference. Q, apparently inherited the term, was interested enough to interpret it apocalyptically where such a reading was fairly obvious already, but was not enough interested to emend it in other instances. It's all much more complicated, I guess, than a lot of this discussion would imply. > Or was this a later invention and, if so, by whom and why? > What's going on here? I don't know. Do the Son of Man stats I've offered suggest anything more specific than what I've said? Or even something contrary (God forbid!) to= what I've said? Would it help to work in Marcan parallels and see what they tell us? Etc. Agaian, I think this is a case of something arising post Jesus and pre documents, and it seems so incredibly inconsistent that it's hard to tell what happened. I would suggest that the term "son of man" was loaded enough, or mysterious enough, that once it worked its way into the tradition, it could be harnessed to a variety of uses. This does not prove that the term didn't originate with Jesus or didn't have apocalyptic connotations at that point. But it does suggest that the that= mere presence of the term prior to documentary redaction does not in itself indicate that Jesus was an apocalyptist. This, coupled with the remarks I made in response to Maureen's recent post, suggest to me that the apocalyptic Jesus is not the OBVIOUS or commonsense view (Sanders takes that rhetorically FAR too often IMHO), and requires as much defense= and substantial argumentation as the sapiential Jesus. Comments? And apologies for typos and such; also any failures to make sense -- I was interrupted half way through, and tried to pick up my thread again, I'm not sure how successfully. I'd apologize for length, too, but anyone who has read this far probably doesn't mind anyway. later, Bill