Chapter 14 Critiqued:

• Doherty focuses mostly on the fact that “Q” does not mention Jesus’ passion, death, resurrection, or other elements that could relate to the historical Jesus in this section.
• However, interestingly, Doherty concedes that no ancient source ever testifies to the existence of, or mentions “Q.” Doherty wrote: “Even though there is no independent evidence for Q (such as an identifying reference to it in the ancient world), majority scholarship’s deduction that such a document did exist and was used by Matthew and Luke best accounts for that common material which they do have from Mark” (TJP:144).
• Doherty further indicates that he assumes that Q existed. For example, Doherty wrote: “The existence of Q as the source of the common material in Matthew and Luke is assumed in this book” (TJP:144).
• Doherty is not logically consistent. On the one hand Doherty argues that a historical Jesus did not exist because the earliest sources do not appear to insinuate that a historical Jesus existed.
• However, in contrast with what Doherty considers to be the earliest sources for data about the historical Jesus, there are no sources at all testifying to the existence of “Q.”
• Thus, using Doherty’s own reasoning, the evidence for a historical Jesus is stronger than the evidence for the existence of a document that Doherty argues does not portray Jesus as a historical figure.
• Doherty does, however, provide reasons for why most scholars today believe a “Q” document once existed. Doherty wrote: “When Matthew and Luke share a saying or anecdote with a similar wording, it is likely they are drawing on the same written source, and such units can be confidently included in the Q document” (TJP:145).
• Yet Doherty also concedes that “precisely identical wording is rare,” but then assumes that the differences are due to the evangelists making changes to “Q”’s contents “reflecting their own writing styles or fitting their individual editorial and theological agendas” (TJP:145).
• Eta Linnemann, a former believer in "Q," provides other reasons for why “precisely identical wording is rare.”
• Eta Linnemann wrote:
• “The Q hypothesis does not solve a problem but is rather a source of problems-which then require additional hypotheses to remedy” (BCOT:28).
• “The gospel data do not comprise a problem if we are willing to abide by what the data along with the documents of the early church tell us: The gospels report the words and deeds of our Lord Jesus. They do this partly through direct eyewitnesses (Matthew, John) and partly by those who were informed by eyewitnesses (Mark, Luke). In that case the similarities as well as the differences are just what one expects from eyewitness reminiscence” (BCOT:28).
• “In a word: There is no conclusive evidence for the use of an alleged source Q in Matthew and Luke. At best Q is an unnecessary hypothesis that has never functioned in a satisfactory manner” (BCOT:28).

 

• Doherty wrote: “Led by an influential Canadian scholar named John Kloppenborg (The Formation of Q, 1987), they identified the wisdom saying in Q as a separate stratum of material and labeled it Q1. These were assigned to the earliest stage of the Q document and judged to be essentially the product of the ‘genuine’ historical Jesus. The prophetic layer was labeled Q2 and assigned to a later stage when the original community preaching the kingdom began reacting to the failure of their message to win over wider segments of society. The sayings in Q2 were seen as unrelated to any sentiment expressed by the earlier, genuine Jesus and judged not to be his product” (TJP:147).
  

• Not all New Testament scholars believe Q was composed of layers.
  
  
• New Testament scholar, Dale C. Allison, Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary wrote:

“Patterson follows John Kloppenborg and those who believe that Q passed through at least two stages, the first of which was a wisdom document focused on Jesus’ words. Only at a secondary stage were apocalyptic sayings, including the apocalyptic Son of man sayings, added. As noted already, however, this hypothesis, although popular in certain circles, is hardly a firm result of criticism. The number of its adherents is not sufficient to permit us to speak fairly of a consensus as to how Q came into being or subsequently evolved. There is also the difficulty that even Kloppenborg’s Q1 contains sayings which seem to presuppose the final judgment to be at hand” (JONMP:122-123).

"Recently Kloppenborg himself 1 has remarked that items belonging only to his Q2, including the pronouncements of judgment, may well have been known to the community even at his Q1 stage and could even go back to Jesus, for ‘one must presume a basic continuity in eschatological outlook between Q1 and Q2 in spite of the changes in idiom’” (JONMP:123).

• The liberal Jesus Seminar scholar, Marcus Borg, wrote:

  “Though I accept the existence of Q, I am skeptical that we can separate Q into redactional layers (some scholars speak of Q1, Q2, Q3). I am even more skeptical about constructing further hypotheses based on a layering of Q” (TMOJTV:252).
  

• The New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman wrote:

“I’ve pointed out that we don’t have the Q source. Since we don’t have it, you might expect that scholars would be fairly cautious in what they say about it. But nothing is further from the truth. Books on Q have become a veritable cottage industry in the field. One of the most popular proposals that has fueled enormous speculation about all sorts of things is that not only can Q be reconstructed, but its entire prehistory and the social histories of the Christian communities lying behind it can be reconstructed as well. Not bad for a nonexistent source!

The most important aspect of this proposal relates to the undeniable fact that if Q was the source for the materials in common between Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark, then it was loaded with apocalyptic traditions. How to get around this problem? By arguing that Q in fact came out in multiple editions. According to this line, the original edition of Q didn’t have these traditions. They were added when the document was edited by later followers of Jesus with too much end-time on the brain. Thus Q as we have it (well, even though we don’t have it) may be an apocalyptic document. But in fact it provides evidence of a nonapocalyptic Jesus.

This is the kind of proposal that tends to appeal to people who are already inclined to be persuaded. But it’s easy to see its drawing power: in the earliest edition of this nonexistent source, Jesus is said to have delivered a lot of terrific one-liners, but uttered not a word about a coming Son of Man, sent from heaven in judgment.

Still, the proposal is enormously problematic. Let me repeat: Q is a source that we don’t have. To reconstruct what we think was in it is hypothetical enough. But at least in doing so we have some hard evidence, since we do have traditions that are verbatim the same in Matthew and Luke (but not found in Mark), and we have to account for them in some way. But to go further and insist that we know what was not in the source, for example, a Passion narrative, what its multiple editions were like, and which of these multiple editions was the earliest, and so on, really goes far beyond what we can know—however appealing such ‘knowledge’ might be” (JAPONM:132-133).

• Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, wrote:

“To begin with Q, while the existence of that document is very likely, it is far from clear that the supposed layers can be reconstructed, since so much depends upon subjective interpretations and individual opinions about the likely stages of the text’s internal evolution. Scholars disagree on many issues about the reconstruction of Q, arguing whether particular passages should in fact be assigned to that document, so obviously there is still more intense debate about which sayings should be placed in particular levels. The view that Wisdom sayings stand at the earliest stage of the tradition, with prophetic remarks evolving much later, looks very much like an a priori assumption. Q existed, but a core ‘Wisdom’ level of Q (sapiential Q, or Q1) is a much more speculative animal.

Similarly, it is very dubious that all the remarks about the imminent end of the world date from a later stage of composition, presumably during the terrifying social upheavals that the Jesus community faced in the 60s and 70s” (HG:68-69).

Notes:

1. John Kloppenborg, “The Sayings Gospel Q and the Question of the Historical Jesus,” HTR 89 (1996), p. 337. On this subject see further C.M. Tuckett, “On the Stratification of Q,” Semeia 55 (1992), pp. 213-22. On p. 214 he writes: “One must remember that theories of different stages in the development of Q concern the growth of a single body of tradition in Christian history. In distinguishing different layers within Q, one is not distinguishing two quite separate strands of Christian tradition which never had contact with each other…Rather one is envisaging a process whereby an earlier tradition is adopted and positively evaluated, so that the older tradition is re-‘published,’ albeit with further additions and possible redactional alternatives. A priori one would therefore expect a firm measure of continuity between the different levels.”

2. See pages 170 and 185, for example.