Evangelicals, Trump and a Quick Bible Study

[The Grand Nudger]

It's a hypothesis about how a literary tradition developed, not who said what to whom. It very much -is- the assertion of the markan two source hypothesis that mark was first, matthew depended on mark and added a few things, and luke depended on them both and added a few things.

The adding a few things, in both instances, is a Q or source candidate.

An interesting wrinkle, though, is that the author of luke contends to have been unware of any written gospels (but does appear to have written much of acts).

[Jehanne]

The source of the Q Hypothesis is, essentially, a venn diagram of when and how the synoptic gospels agree and disagree.

One of two things must be true. Some order of the synoptic gospels resolves the synoptic problem, the double tradition problem, and the triple tradition problem..... or some order -plus- the addition of an (or many) unknown sources account for the synoptic problem, the double tradition problem, and the triple tradition problem.

IDK if it fits to call it apocryphal, though. It's status as apocrypha, in this context, is an accident of history and not a comment on it's state as fundamental to christian belief.

I don't doubt the existence of Q, only the claim that Mark used Q as a source.

[Fake Messiah]

It's a hypothesis about how a literary tradition developed, not who said what to whom.  It very much -is- the assertion of the markan two source hypothesis that mark was first, matthew depended on mark and added a few things, and luke depended on them both and added a few things.  

The adding a few things, in both instances, is a Q or source candidate.

An interesting wrinkle, though, is that the author of luke contends to have been unware of any written gospels (but does appear to have written much of acts).

But why would there have to be a Q? Like I said earlier if we take that Mark wrote his gospel first and then Matthew copied him adding a few new stuff like let's say Sermon on the mount with Jesus saying "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" why would that necessarily need to be from the Q and not from Psalm 37:11 that goes "But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity."?
Or why couldn't he put in stuff from other books?

[The Grand Nudger]

"Other books" is Q.

More elaborately -

There are direct lifts from mark in both matthew and luke. Long strings of characters copied verbatum, even parentheticals copied, even mistakes. Luke agrees with mark against matthew and matthew agrees with mark against luke but only rarely do matthew and luke agree against mark. Additionally, there are large amounts of material common to luke and matthew that do not exist in mark at all.

As for the notion that mark also used q as a source - we know that mark had a source. The same simplicity that's used to assess notions of additional sources is used here. At the very least, much of what was in mark didn't contradict q, if there were a q. That would have been expected to yield more agreement by luke and matthew against mark. It would have been even more troublesome, in effect, to the synoptic problem. Multiplying problems by reducing entities.

Even in the two source hypothesis it's possible that, ultimately, one source was used. We simply describe a portion of that source as markan due to it's presence in the text, which was an accident of history. However, for purposes of explanation of effect considered, this is equivalent to a two source hypothesis as all that's being explained is how the differences and agreements between the Now Markan source and later texts came to arise.

This needs to be said. None of these texts, absolutely none of them, were the product of a single author let alone the author by namesake. That's why no explanation that boils down to a single man taking one text from some other single man and making shit up himself fits. Even in single source ordering solutions that's a non starter.

[GrandizerII]

It's a hypothesis about how a literary tradition developed, not who said what to whom.  It very much -is- the assertion of the markan two source hypothesis that mark was first, matthew depended on mark and added a few things, and luke depended on them both and added a few things.  

The adding a few things, in both instances, is a Q or source candidate.

An interesting wrinkle, though, is that the author of luke contends to have been unware of any written gospels (but does appear to have written much of acts).

But why would there have to be a Q? Like I said earlier if we take that Mark wrote his gospel first and then Matthew copied him adding a few new stuff like let's say Sermon on the mount with Jesus saying "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" why would that necessarily need to be from the Q and not from Psalm 37:11 that goes "But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity."?
Or why couldn't he put in stuff from other books?

I haven't checked the previous responses here, so apologies if there's a context I'm missing. Q is a thing (according to many scholars) because of the commonalities between Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

But why would there have to be a Q? Like I said earlier if we take that Mark wrote his gospel first and then Matthew copied him adding a few new stuff like let's say Sermon on the mount with Jesus saying "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" why would that necessarily need to be from the Q and not from Psalm 37:11 that goes "But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity."?
Or why couldn't he put in stuff from other books?

I haven't checked the previous responses here, so apologies if there's a context I'm missing. Q is a thing (according to many scholars) because of the commonalities between Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark.

I've always found it helpful to think of Q as the variety of sources - both oral and textual - which provided a rough framework for the Synoptics. Since we know that (as TGN said) none of the Gospels have the claimed authorship and none of them have a single author, it's reasonable to suppose that that the compilers of the Gospels were - to a significant extent - drawing on earlier source material.

In a way, it's a lot like Monmouth's Historia - written as fact, but based on folklore and earlier ballads.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

I've always found it helpful to think of Q as the variety of sources - both oral and textual - which provided a rough framework for the Synoptics. Since we know that (as TGN said) none of the Gospels have the claimed authorship and none of them have a single author, it's reasonable to suppose that that the compilers of the Gospels were - to a significant extent - drawing on earlier source material.

In a way, it's a lot like Monmouth's Historia - written as fact, but based on folklore and earlier ballads.

Boru

So Q can be anything? Like what about King Arthur? Would you say that he had a Q?

But instead of waiting for a reply, I'll tell you further why it seems to me there was no Q. I guess you are trying to say that something existed before the first gospel was written and that we could call that Q, but it doesn't have to be the case. Just like when people started writing stories about King Arthur there was no Q, as well as with Robin Hood, Snow White, or when people write books and make movies about Santa...

There were myths and ideas about King Arthur but there was no Q. And when it comes to Jesus there were ideas about some messiahs. Like one of the survived documents from that period "The Apocalypse of Adam", makes references to a redeemer, a messiah-figure and even the idea of a virgin birth, but it nowhere makes any allusion to a real, historical messiah, living and preaching in Galilee, Judea, or anywhere else. And it seems that Paul was writing about some heavenly messiah who didn't live on Earth.
So if Mark was reverse engineering Paul to write his (1st) gospel then it seems to me that he didn't use Q because when he was writing about Jesus' life, like crucifixion, he could have used Q but he didn't. Instead, he used Jesus ben Ananias's story from Josephus, he used Psalm 22, and the rest of Torah. I mean why use all that if he had Q? And then that last part after Mark 16:8 that is known to be added by later generations, was that also from the Q or someone just made-up some shit?

So it seems Mark had Paul whose views and writings were tampered with later on to make it seem like he was writing about the carpenter from Galilee, like giving him more epistles that he didn't write but that was written by early Christians who falsely claimed that Paul wrote them. "The Apocalypse of Adam" could have also been tampered with to make it look like it was about Jesus, but they skipped that one and it was lost until 1945.

[GrandizerII]

The traditional Q argument isn't that Mark used Q. Matthew and Luke did.

[The Grand Nudger]

The arthur legend is a great example.

We'll use Monmouth as a standin for Luke, and Monmouth makes a conveniently familiar claim. That though the events were known, he wasn't aware of much in the way of a written history of arthur. He then claims to have been given a most ancient text™, by a friend, and with that and the works of gildas, bede, and nennius spins his arthur myth.

The question being, if there were such a text, could we tease out passages that, given the relationships between all known sources, might suggest some portion of the body of an unknown source shared by two or more members of the various literary traditions that, together, make up the arthur myth?

Approached from another angle, if there were such relationships, would this not pose an equivalent synoptic problem of arthur?

Now I want to have some fun with it. We should keep in mind that none of the answers to these questions will verify the contents of any of the respective literary traditions. Our hypothetical q of arthur, above, may have been the original source for gildas, bede, and nennius.....and perhaps they all heard the story and thought "this is obvious bullshit...an exaggerated king", and wrote him in as a minor footnote of tribal politics. Monmouth, armed with those men's work but not the knowledge of their own source, may see those three men as establishing the historicity of a character in an unbiased way - and armed with the contents of this unknown (to us) q document re-expounds upon the mythical elements left out by other sources. Incredulous, as it were, that people didn't write more about this amazing guy.

To bring it back round to the new testaments synoptic problem, q can be pretty much anything, yes. It may be an oral tradition but we expect that there was some written form that shared tradition authors referred to. This, in order to explain not just the presence of shared material, but it's ordering, grammar, spelling, etc. An anthology of beliefs recorded as a survey, address, or soliloquy can serve the purpose. A common favorite is a hypothetical collection of sayings - teacher of wisdom type stuff.

[Jehanne]

It may be an oral tradition

If Matthew & Luke wrote independently of each other, as is the common view among critical New Testament scholars, then Q almost certainly existed as an extant document.  Oral traditions change over time, and so, Matthew & Luke would have similar content but not exact words if Q did not exist as a document that they were copying from.  In any case, the authors of Matthew & Luke were not eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus, as is evidenced by the fact that they copied and compiled so much material from other sources.