APPENDIX 2 - Mack’s Case for aWisdom Q
APPENDIX 2
Mack’s Case for a Wisdom Q
To avoid digressing at further length in the text to address Burton Mack’s rejection of eschatological elements at the earliest stages of the Jesus movement, I have chosen to revisit some of his argument in this appendix. He contends that Q was originally only a sayings-gospel focused on wisdom sayings.1 How does he know this? He finds two basic arguments to support this position. We will start with his second argument because it depends on the first and can be addressed more quickly. Once one has postulated this original Q and knows what to look for by excluding material that does not fit what one hypothesizes Q must have been, one has a small amount of material left. This material, Mack finds, fits together quite well with reasonable transitions of thought.2
It is not surprising that a document consisting largely of one kind of sayings (other sayings having been excluded) should cohere, but one may question just how smooth the transitions from one point to the next actually prove to be. Wisdom collections did not always strive for coherent arrangement, and the wisdom sayings left to Mack’s Q1 indeed could have been arranged more topically than they appear to be. (Moreover, some of the material that belongs together topically here already was together in the Gospels.) But if one must find convincing transitions, the “seams” Mack finds into which later material was interpolated offer evidence of such transitions in so few instances that they can easily be attributed to coincidence. Mack offers a methodology that is not falsifiable: once one has arrived at a very brief Q1 by other means, one can undoubtedly discern patterns even if one decides to completely rearrange the material.
This boils Mack’s real arguments for a convincing Q1 Wisdom text down to one argument: a genre of wisdom or sayings collections existed.3 No one disputes that such a genre existed, nor even that such a genre could have existed among early Christians. But when our extant sources for Q itself include at least a minimal amount of narrative (not to mention sayings other than wisdom sayings), why is it any more reasonable to place an early form of Q in this genre than to place a finished Gospel like Mark or Matthew in it? Perhaps merely because Q, being a hypothetical source, is more easily reshaped with less protest; perhaps also because Q, whose exact contours remain in dispute among various circles of scholars,4 is less familiar to the average reader of Mack’s thesis.
Does Mack have any specific evidence that Q was a wisdom or sayings-source? He believes that he does. It helped, he declares, when “Another example of the genre was found, the sayings gospel known as the Gospel of Thomas.”5 “The Gospel of Thomas looked very much like Q,” he contends; “35 percent of the sayings in Thomas had parallels in Q.”6 But when he affirms that Thomas looks like the sayings-gospel Q, Mack simply assumes what he claims to prove: that Q is a wisdom sayings-gospel. The overlap in content between the two also sheds far more light on Thomas than it sheds on Q. Thomas is, as we have noted, a second-century work, reporting sayings known from the canonical Gospels and/or traditions behind them, including Q.7 Of course Thomas has resemblances to Q material! (Thomas itself is also not “wisdom” sayings in the same way that, say, Proverbs is.)
But let us say, for the sake of argument, that Q is (or uses) an early sayings-source. It is, after all, apparently mostly sayings, so an analogy with sources that are mostly sayings is possible. Why would disciples of an eschatological teacher not have preserved even eschatological sayings in this format?8 One may exclude the narrative within Q, but on what basis does Mack exclude some (eschatological) kinds of sayings? Even were we to agree with Mack that the eschatological elements from other Jesus traditions were added only later to this hypothetical recension of Q, on what basis must we suppose them less historical? Nor need we assume that those who employ a sayings-source would oppose as incompatible the use of narratives (another issue sometimes raised).
Mack contends for layers in Q, some being late and not authentic to Jesus (though not all who hold to layers in Q agree on which layers are earliest, and not all who do so believe that the later layers are inauthentic). Based on the likelihood that many later agrapha (sayings attributed to Jesus but not found in the canonical Gospels) are inauthentic, Mack argues for late sayings in Q.9 But most of these questionable sayings occur in documents of the second century or later, including his own sampling of late citations.10 If one argues for a late layer of sayings as early as Q on the basis of fabrications over a century later, one could as easily argue that any sayings from antiquity, including his “bedrock” sayings of Q, are fabrications. Certainly people in subsequent centuries made up sayings; this was not so common, however, in the first generation (as we noted in ch. 10). All of Q must be (at the latest) from the first generation to be used in Matthew, Luke, and (I believe) occasionally in Mark.
Mack’s idiosyncratic Q community is curious. Assuming that either no eyewitnesses who knew Jesus remained or (closer to his view) that they did not care about transmitting his life and teaching accurately, one still must contend with the relative unity of our sources. First-century documents indicate explicitly that Christians argued about issues like circumcision and food laws, but until the second century we find no evidence that some groups of Jesus people rejected other groups’ literary genres or accounts of Jesus’ sayings and deeds. To argue that such debates were widespread in the first century is to argue from silence, a silence made more ominous by the record of all sorts of other debates.
Further, for all the redactional differences among the Gospel accounts, they do not reflect very well many of the known debates among second- and third-generation Christians. The best Mack can do to say that Jesus abolished the food laws is Mark 7:15; yet without Mark’s explicit interpretive guidance in 7:19 (a remark Matthew not surprisingly omits) we would hardly know that this was Jesus’ point. Yet Mark did not simply compose a more appropriate saying to make his case.11
Mack claims that Q (i.e., his hypothetical Q1) “challenges the New Testament account of Christian origins by offering another, more plausible account of the first forty years.”12 Aside from the problem of how a hypothetically reconstructed source of wisdom sayings poses a potent challenge to a range of actual early Christian texts presupposing some major elements of common history, one must ask whether Mack’s account is indeed “more plausible.” The first forty years of Christian origins include most of Paul’s undisputed letters, which already identify Christ with divine wisdom and especially in the earliest text (1 Thessalonians)13 indicate considerable eschatological meditation (which can hardly be attributed to Greek influence). As a “Pharisee” (Phil 3:5; this was a largely Judean sect), Paul’s perspective was unquestionably rooted in Palestinian Judaism despite his profound ability (akin to that of many other Diaspora Jews) to articulate Jewish beliefs in broader Mediterranean terminology.14 Most Pauline scholars believe that Paul employs pre-Pauline creeds containing Aramaisms, some Palestinian Jewish doctrines and language such as “resurrection,” and even reflects the adoption of some Aramaic phrases into his churches.15
Mack’s reconstruction assumes a later fusion of a Christ cult and the Q-like Jesus movement,16 but our earliest written witness for Christianity, Paul, testifies of conflicts with Jerusalem church leaders (originally Jesus’ Galilean disciples) over Gentile relations, not over christology (Gal 2:1-14). The christology of our current “Q” is hardly “low” (as noted earlier in the book; e.g., Matt 3:11//Lk 3:16; Lk 6:47-49//Matt 7:24-27; Matt 23:37//Lk 13:34).17
Mack assumes that myth gave way to history in a Greco-Roman cultic environment, but the reverse process is far more likely. Myths and legends tend to grow over time, even from historical roots. Few Greek cults constructed histories from their myths, rarely being interested in biographical history. Starting with historical traditions, however, one can understand how mythic interpretation and cultus would arise in Greek culture while interest in history (and later historical writing) was maintained because of the actual origins of the movement. And whereas Palestinian Jewish writers could embellish history, they clearly sought to derive theology from what they believed was history, not from what would have appeared to be mythology created in the Diaspora.
Mack’s “original” Q, after “incompatible” material has been excised, runs to about seven pages.18 This material seems short for a definitive canon of wisdom sayings — at least if one wishes us to suppose that it represents the sum total of what this “community” believed. Why would someone want to turn a wisdom teacher with so little to say into a Messiah anyway, especially in a Palestinian or Diaspora Jewish context?19
Overman rightly observed on Mack’s earlier work:
Why is Q the bench mark against which all other recitals of the Jesus story are measured? Why are Pauline traditions or other early gospel traditions not given a similar place in the development of Christian beliefs and practice? In part the answer seems to be that this is due to Mack’s implicit preference for the Greek philosophic tradition, oftentimes as over against the traditions of Israel. For example, Jesus and John the Baptist are Cynic-like prophets and not prophets in the mode of Israel’s prophetic tradition (p. 86). Within Jesus’ social world Israel’s Scriptures and the Cynic poet Meleager would have had about equal influence (p. 64).
Because his version of Q is hypothetical, Mack can exercise greater freedom in emphasizing hellenistic while downplaying Jewish parallels. His case, then, runs directly counter to the best of the Third Quest’s desire to set Jesus securely in his first-century Galilean Jewish context.