“Q” as a Lost Gospel?
“Q” as a Lost Gospel?
One proposed “lost gospel” is in a different category from the other ones for at least two reasons. First, “Q” is hypothetical — we have no actual manuscript of the document. I would not, however, for this reason make Q a less likely source than the others we have surveyed, and that is because of a second reason: Q is probably genuinely earlier than any of our extant, finished Gospels. Thus if there is a “Q,” it is one of our best sources for reconstructing Jesus’ teaching, although it must be taken in connection with other reasonably early sources.
The major problem in this case is not the date of the document, but that the version of “Q” some scholars are citing is essentially nothing more than a collection of sayings selected to fit their narrower reconstruction of Jesus. Since we concluded our survey of various approaches to Jesus research in ch. 2 by observing Burton Mack’s approach, it seems consistent to conclude this chapter on “other gospels” by commenting on the hypothetical “early” version of Q on which much of his case rests.
Many scholars recoil at Burton Mack’s announcement that “Q is . . . a new text that has recently come to light.”126 Scholars used the Q hypothesis through most of the twentieth century, so what Mack implies is that his circle’s understanding of Q is a recent “discovery.” To put the matter less charitably, the Q hypothesis has been coopted for a new agenda.127
I am among those who think the Q hypothesis quite likely (a number of respected scholars today do not even grant this point),128 but acknowledging and working from the hypothesis of Q is not the same as building a speculative hypothesis on a speculative reconstruction of a hypothetical document.129 Mack’s particular version of Q is not a consensus document of NT scholarship.
I will address Q more fully in the chapter on the Gospels’ sources, but should make a few comments about my own perspective here. I will draw on “Q” in my own reconstruction of sources about Jesus, but in doing so, I am clear that we know nothing about “Q” other than what we can reconstruct from Matthew and Luke (“Q” representing the material that they share in common). I had once considered “Q” simply a convenient label for any traditions (probably many of them oral) outside Mark that Matthew and Luke shared in common. It was working through the Synoptics together again in D. Moody Smith’s Luke seminar that convinced me that at least much of the Q material represents some shared written source, because Matthew and Luke often follow it in the same sequence.130 I should note, however, that some of my colleagues in that very seminar came to dispense with Q altogether. I suspect that none of us subscribed to the various editorial “layers” in “Q” that some scholars have found. Despite claims of consensus about Q in some circles, there is very much a lack of consensus about it.