Embellishments in the Gospel of Mark.

[Jehanne]

Darrell Bock “All of this evidence appears to point to a date in the 60s”.

J.A.T.Robinson

John Wenham (well, AD 40 isn't the 60s, but in the spirit of the challenge...!)


To be clear, I'm not going to argue for a pre-70 dating.


Two points from the OP:

Far too much is attempted with Q. To use a document whose existence is hypothetical is building on very weak foundations. Q could have been a person, a fluid oral collection document, simply a set of things regularly repeated, or nothing at all.

More importantly, whilst attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus rule out use of special status for Mark and others, standard historical techniques plus some specific to NT historicity can be used in the normal ways to draw conclusions. We can learn a lot by treating the NT as a collection of historical documents with their own generally obvious biases.

Most Biblical scholars accept the existence of Q; it's mainstream.

[Vicki Q]

Most scholars accept the likelihood of Q, although some don't (e.g. Mark Goodacre) and support for it has declined a lot since the heady days of the Jesus Seminar. There's a whole world of ideas about it's existence, content, origins etc etc. My point would be that those placing weight on it or a particular form of it are building their house on sand (which BTW is a Q saying). I mean it might be a thing, or not.

Certainly those going down the Q1 Q2 Q3 route are having a laugh.

Q could just as easily be a person who talked to M and L rather than a document, for example.

[Jehanne]

Most scholars accept the likelihood of Q, although some don't (e.g. Mark Goodacre) and support for it has declined a lot since the heady days of the Jesus Seminar. There's a whole world of ideas about it's existence, content, origins etc etc. My point would be that those placing weight on it or a particular form of it are building their house on sand (which BTW is a Q saying). I mean it might be a thing, or not.

Certainly those going down the Q1 Q2 Q3 route are having a laugh.

Q could just as easily be a person who talked to M and L rather than a document, for example.

The Q source (also called Q document, Q Gospel, or Q from German: Quelle, meaning "source") is a hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (logia). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's oral tradition.[1][2][3]
Along with Marcan priority, Q was hypothesized by 1900, and is one of the foundations of most modern gospel scholarship.[4] B. H. Streeter formulated a widely accepted view of Q: that it was written in Koine Greek; that most of its contents appear in Matthew, in Luke, or in both; and that Luke more often preserves the text's original order than Matthew. In the two-source hypothesis, the three-source hypothesis and the Q+/Papias hypothesis Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q as sources. Some scholars have postulated that Q is actually a plurality of sources, some written and some oral.[5] Others have attempted to determine the stages in which Q was composed.[6]
Q's existence has been questioned.[6] Omitting what should have been a highly treasured dominical document from all early Church catalogs, its lack of mention by Jerome is a conundrum of modern Biblical scholarship.[7] But copying Q might have been seen as unnecessary as it was preserved in the canonical gospels. Hence, it was preferable to copy the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, "where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant".[8] Despite challenges, the two-source hypothesis retains wide support.[6]

Wikipedia -- Q Source

[Amarok]

Q doesn't exist