Sorry for the length of this comment but there are several points raised here that demand a response.
Tony writes: There’s no reference to a Q, by any of the New Testament writers, by the early Christians, or by the Church Fathers.
pb: Well St. Papias from the early 2nd century (who is the earliest witness we have concerned with the question of how the gospels were written) speaks of Matthew composing not necessarily a narrative but logia (sayings?). True, he also says this was in the Hebrew dialect while Q (if it existed) would have been in Greek but this only heightens the mystery. Holding that Matthew contributed the sayings of Jesus fits Papias as well as the data of the synoptics themselves. No one else bothered to remember the list of sayings because they were forever immortalized in Matthew’s and later Luke’s enhancement of Mark’s gospel. Why is this so implausible?
Undoubtedly the evidence for Q is almost wholly circumstantial. But very often in life this is the only kind of evidence available to us. See God, existence of.
Tony continues: We are (to accept a hypothetical document) in this case alone, for there is no similar assumption made about any other text supposed to have existed in the ancient world.
pb: People only care immensely about the synoptic problem, Tony because people care immensely about the gospels and how they came to be. There;s no getting around that basic fact. No one much cares about how Dante wrote the Inferno or how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet because at the end of the day these works just are not nearly as important as the gospels. And no one is forcing you to accept the 2 source solution to the synoptic problem. But without recourse to “Q” or something like it,, you’d be hard pressed to explain how the gospels came to be. Which is why the large majority of NT scholars either hold to it or at least are unable to dismiss its existence out of hand.
Tony again “How does the supposititious Q help us understand the words of Jesus, and live a Christian life? It doesn’t, not at all.”
pb: This is not a very telling criticism. The theory was not primarily intended to explain these things. It’s intended to tell us how Matthew and Luke went about putting together their respective gospels from their available sources. I care very deeply about how these evangelists did this because understanding how they used their sources tells me a great about them as authors and theologians---and as inspired Biblical authors their theology is normative for everyone else. And I dare suggest penetrating into the mystery of how and why they wrote what they did does shed light on what they think is important about Jesus and how his disciples should live.
Finally Tony writes, “It doesn’t matter to me whether or not Q existed.”
pb: Likewise you are free not to care whether the builder of your house used wood or bricks or stone or straw or whether the furnace is gravity, oil, or forced air. Or whether your hamburger is made of ham or beef. But your understanding of your own dwelling space and food will be artificially impoverished with such lack of intellectual curiosity. Since you distrust “modern” thinkers consider Aristotle. As I recall one needed to know all four causes (material, formal, efficient and final) to fully understand a thing. Research into the synoptic problem properly done sheds a great deal of light on the first three causes where the gospels are concerned. Thomas Aquinas would have enthusiastically approved.
- petebrown
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