There is the possibility that behind our present Gospels lies a substantial document that tells of the preaching and teaching of Jesus. The "document" used by the Evangelists Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels no longer exists in an independent form, but with painstaking care this document can be reconstructed from these two Gospels, even though the precise length and wording of the document in the form received by Matthew and Luke is not known. Biblical scholars call this lost gospel, Q (from the German word Quelle which means source) . The Q-hypothesis rests on very solid grounds and most scholars accept it.Using critical literary methods, leading scholars have undertaken the challenging and formidable task work of reconstructing Q. Because Q's theology and its written expression is either contemporary with the Apostle Paul's writings or possibly even antedates Paul's, we have in Q one of the earliest writings, if not the earliest writing in Christianity.
The reconstructed Q is almost entirely different from what we find in Paul, and its view of Christianity challenges us to rethink the very beginnings of Christianity itself. It is a document that interprets the meaning of Jesus in a way that is significantly different from the portrayals of him in the biblical Gospels.
The form of the document that lay before Matthew and Luke also clearly reflects the later theological perspectives of the community of Christians that produced it over a period of thirty to forty years.
For detailed information, a study can be downloaded at: http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=8b9b0f1fe2f6807ecbc2820d750a9568
The Sayings of Jesus
by Doug Mason 5 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Doug Mason
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Satanus
Cool. This would be interesting to peruse. Thanks.
S
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Satanus
I just zoomed through the q document part. Thanks, again. Seems like a jewish reformer, talking to a corrupt jewish establishment and society.
S
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yadda yadda 2
"The form of the document that lay before Matthew and Luke also clearly reflects the later theological perspectives of the community of Christians that produced it over a period of thirty to forty years."
This assertion, made in 1986 by the author of that document, Ivan Havener, reflects a traditional form criticism view that has been seriously undermined in recent years. Mr Havener makes this comment without providing any evidence to back it up.
There is increasing evidence and scholastic opinion that ancient note-taking and oral tradition practices worked more towards preserving oral community tradition of a person very important to that community rather than the tradition quickly becoming corrupted by theologically biased distortions. In any event, the Q document, if it existed, would have pre-dated the gospels by quite some margin, so Havener's statement that the document was 'produced' over a period of thirty or forty years is unrealistic. Most scholars now believe the gospels were written within 30-50 years after Jesus death, so the Q document would have been written well before that, perhaps even before Jesus died or very shortly thereafter (even sceptical bible scholars are increasingly acknowledging that note-taking was common and even likely amongst Jesus earliest disciples). The chances of any significant 'theological perspectives' by the earliest Christian communities creeping in and distorting the original eye and ear-witness testimony found in any source Q document is therefore remote, contrary to Havener's assertion.
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Narkissos
"Q" scholarship has reached such a level of complexity (especially in the wake of Kloppenborg) that it no longer provides a simple solution to the "Synoptic problem" as it once seemed to do. But it has certainly contributed to an increased awareness of the formal and ideological diversity of the Synoptic logia within each Gospel (including Mark), none of which being reducible to a completely "free" composition serving one "author's" single and consistent agenda. Iow all writers at every stage of the development of the Gospels had to deal with constraints besides their own ideas and doctrines. And whether a Q document existed or not upstream of the extant Synoptics, Q (re-)constructions still offer interesting transversal perspectives on particular "trends" in early Christianity which may not be so apparent from a one-book context.
Another interesting page on the topic: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/q.html
This being said, when tentative reconstructions of the Gospel (pre-)history are really attentive to the details they can get way more complicated than the most sophisticated forms of the Two-Source hypothesis, as illustrated by the work of French scholar Marie-Emile Boismard: even if his precise models of reconstruction are debatable, the basic assumption that the Gospels might have influenced each other (and possibly have been influenced by several other works like the so-called Q) at different stages of their development is quite compelling imo.
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Leolaia
I don't have time here to discuss the OP (I'm leaving for Tokyo), but Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q is a good place to start for evidence against the Q hypothesis.