Q – Alas, No Star Trek Included
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 5/29/2007 12:25 AM 
Categories: Scholarship, Canonical Gospels, Christianity, Textual Criticism, History, The History of the Book, Church Fathers, Historical Jesus, The Bible, ISLAM, The Apostle Paul
Categories: Scholarship, Canonical Gospels, Christianity, Textual Criticism, History, The History of the Book, Church Fathers, Historical Jesus, The Bible, ISLAM, The Apostle Paul
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Yes, Q is a theory.So's what keeps planes up in the air.
So's gravity.
Most people seem to think that 'theory' implies a lot more white space than it does. For specialists 'theory' means 'not all the esoteric details have been worked out to a fine point', that there are still 'how's left open. Long ago, it used to be a theory that the heart circulated blood. Through advances in medical technology we can now observe blood circulating through the heart of a living person, we know a great deal about what causes the heart to beat, how it beats, how its chambers and valves work, and that no other organ is a candidate for keeping blood circulating: it's no longer a theory.
Gravity is a theory not because any scientist doubts its effects or disagrees on the phenomena related to it — it is a theory because scientists do not know exactly what mechanism makes it work. We cannot put gravity, itself, under a vastly powerful electron microscope and watch it working - we can only watch the effects of gravity and make educated guesses about what, exactly, is going on.
Q is like that. All New Testament scholars agree that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke share a string of passages (nicknamed "Q", allow popups and click on the Q* here) that are almost identical - but with small differences. Specialists in folklore, in oral literature, in proverbs and sayings, in ancient court stenographers, in traditional written literature, and historians have examined them from every angle - they still argue about the small technical details, but New Testament scholars almost universally agree that Matthew and Luke each had a list (memorized or written, probably in Greek) of important things Jesus had said. For example:
Another parable he put before them, saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." (Mt 13:31-32, RSV)
He said therefore, "What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches." (Lk 13:18-19, RSV)
What is going on? (I could list 105 similar passages in Matthew and Luke but I'd hate to type that much.)
Q is not a new idea. It was not invented by the Jesus Seminar or by any contemporary scholar - it was first suggested by a philosopher named Weisse in 1838. Over the next 169 years historians and scholars have tested his suggestion from every angle, reconsidered it, altered it. They began with the assumptions of Christian tradition: that Matthew and Luke had written the very words of Jesus as eyewitnesses, or that one or the other had copied from his fellow evangelist - yet historians had to set aside each of these suggestions as they did not explain why the two gospels differed. (For example, Matthew has Jesus' landmark sermon take place on a mountain while Luke locates the same talk on a plain.) Direct copying or eyewitness accounts do not explain the features of each gospel in Greek, and they do not explain the details of the similarities and differences between the string of almost-identical passages. Historians did not do this setting aside cheerfully, they were reluctant to differ from Christianity's own account of how the gospels came to be, but the evidence forced them to conclude that Matthew and Luke had each, independently, copied from a source that listed some sayings of Jesus: Q
We've never found a manuscript of Q. Scores of early Christian works exist only in a single surviving copy (we don't even have a complete copy of any of the four canonical gospels from before 200 CE); there are at least 33 early Christian works that we know are lost (Q is not listed among them): book copying was expensive, old books didn't survive well outside of the deserts of Egypt or Central Asia, and books that were not repeatedly commissioned to be copied by interested (and at least somewhat wealthy) patrons vanished from use and history, victims of the organic nature of paper* and leather.
(Technically, 'parchment' or 'papyrus' rather than true paper - but both are just as organic and just as susceptible to rot and disintegration.)
But before either Matthew or Luke were written we know that early Christians remembered and looked to the words of Jesus for several reasons. One was Paul - when the apostle says he does or does not have 'a saying of the Lord' as guidance for a particular issue or circumstance, he means a short, memorable phrase. Paul says very little about Jesus' life (since he knew Jesus' brother I find this endlessly exasperating). He mentions none of the healings or the feedings or the walking on water. If Paul were all that was left of early Christian literature, we could fit what we knew of Jesus' earthly life into a thimble, and he does not quote any sayings of Jesus, directly.
(There are also isolated sayings (called agrapha) of Jesus in the Church Fathers, in other early Christian texts, and in some Muslim sources - we know people remembered and repeated (and probably invented or misattributed, as well) sayings of Jesus.)
New Testament scholars fascinated by Q began to reconstruct what Q looked like before Matthew and Luke each put their spin on it (each gospel author made small changes in wording and emphasis.) So what do we make of:
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like. He said to them, "It is like a mustard seed, {It} is the tiniest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of heaven."
It looks a great deal like the early 20th century reconstructions of Q, of the source in front of Matthew and Luke, but it is actually an ancient text - the Gospel of Thomas, saying 20. (Hm, Coptic again....). Thomas has 67 parallels to Q, some of which look simpler (and thus likely older) than the form of the same saying in either Matthew or Luke. The existence of the Gospel of Thomas also makes the larger point that 'sayings gospels' - simple lists of Jesus' sayings with no life story, few miracles, and few anecdotes (and in both Q and Thomas' case, no crucifixion...)* were used by early Christians.
* When one lists the entire corpus of early Christian literature about Jesus' life and words, a minority of these texts are interested in describing (or in working out the theological significance of) Christ's death. This does not mean that Jesus did not die on the cross: historians are confident that's how he met his end after (in some way) antagonizing the Roman provincial government - but the dominant issue of early Christian literature was working out how and why Jesus was related to the divine (Was he an inspired, but quite human, prophet? Was he an angel? Was he somehow the Jewish God in human form - but not like the Roman gods who also appeared on earth in human form?), the cross and resurrection were not topics of universal early Christian interest.
(The term "Q" is German, it's an abbreviation of the German word for "source" (Quelle.) Much of the early work on Q was done by German scholars and Q, itself, was already taken as a given by German scholars in the 1920's. Scholars who spoke other languages read this work and kept the word in German - 'Q' has the advantage of not standing for much else in English, no dreary late-night moments of research will be spent wondering what Quagga have to do with the four evangelists... (Don't laugh: one late and dreary night over Coptic I mistook "Zostrianos" for "Zoro". I don't recommend mixing colonial California with Gnosticism, it's very very strange.))
New Testament scholars are still arguing about some of Q's technical details - there are 74 Q sayings in the Gospel of Mark. Did Mark use Q or something like Q? How? There are 13 in the Gospel of John - same questions. What about the Gospel of Thomas? What about the agrapha? (Few of these parallels are exact: if they were perfectly identical this would be an open and shut case.) No New Testament scholar disagrees that Matthew and Luke share long, similar identical stretches of Jesus' sayings; the majority agree that Q (a common source) explains what's there; many could start a discussion by walking into a room full of colleagues and announcing something definitive about why Luke mentions an egg (Lk 11:12) when Matthew mentions bread (7:9) - or perhaps a near-fistfight if they said something especially startling about Q and John (or Mark.) We're arguing about details that require reading Greek with a fine-toothed comb (and perhaps an occasional bit of Coptic or Arabic) - but the Q and its contents are not contested by most New Testament scholars.
Walking into a professional conference and announcing that Q is part of your research will cause no one to bat an eye - they will pat you on the back at finding a specialization in your studies (everyone needs at one) and steer you towards your colleagues who also focus on Q ... and continue talking as they were before. (Nor is it a matter of 'believing' in Q, Q not a doctrine in any religion that can be believed or apostatized from - and scholars don't 'believe' the concepts in their field, they test them with the rigor of the Consumer's Union lab to see whether they stand up or not. Every scholar would be delighted if their own idea carried the day over an older one, and every working scholar is on the lookout for older ideas that can be modified or proved incompatible with what we currently know - in linguistics, in archaeology, in history, from discoveries in other fields of study.) At the very least, one's name is repeated in the same breath with that idea, for as long as the idea holds currency — just as Weisse's is, 169 years later.
Sources:
The Q/Thomas Reader (In this readable introduction, Q takes up about 40 pages.)
The Critical Edition of Q (In this work that summarizes and footnotes every significant discussion of Q (in all its aspects and potential appearances) over 175 years of scholarly testing and analysis, Q takes up about 560 pages.)
I warmly recommend you read the first (and the Introduction of the second) before emailing me: it will serve as a FAQ (and if you ask me something either book can answer I will simply direct you to one of them.)
-Kushana
Note to self: talk about textual criticism, how the Bible was written, how the New Testament was written, how the Gospels were written, history of religions, Markan priority, Matthean priority, the synoptic Gospels, eyewitness theories, Markan parallels, the little apocalypse, the Quran (Koran), Special M, ancient manuscripts, scribes.
well...sort of;explanation;in the sciences a theory is an explanation
for information/phenomena that have
been observed, verified through extensive testing.
Its above hypothesis-an educated guess based on observation-but below a law-something seen as unlikely to be disproves no matter how often tested.
What we would call fact. So evolution is theory & fact.
A 95-98% confidence level is typically used; that's better we have doing almost anything else.
It has nothing to do w/understanding the phenomenon/process-evolution is a theory, but we have quite a good idea of how it basically works.
Gravity's a theory because no one
really suggests toasters will start flying anytime soon. How blood circulated was 1rst a hypothesis,
then became a theory/fact.
See?
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Just to make a diagram of your explanation:
Law
Theory
Hypothesis
(I'm trying to explain the 2-5% uncertainty; I think most people would guess its far bigger and they might not follow why it's, in fact, so small.)
Thank you for the refresher -- I think you may have quite a bit to say about my next post.
-Kushana
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