Arguments from Silence
Arguments from Silence
Mack assumes that ideas not present in what he identifies as the earliest recension of Q were not held by Q’s compilers. If Mack wishes us to apply this methodological assumption consistently and rigorously, there was actually quite little the “Q community” believed. If we cannot assume their early Christian context on the basis of what they do clearly have in common with early Christianity, perhaps we cannot assume their broader Jewish or Greco-Roman context either. In short, a consistently minimalist approach must insist that they believed only seven pages of wisdom sayings and nothing else.145
If we assume Mack’s document for the sake of argument, it originally focused primarily on ethics; but does a community that produced a manual of ethics believe in nothing other than ethics? No one would accept this thesis if it were applied to Qumran’s Manual of Discipline (1QS) or to most of the later rabbinic tractate Aboth.
As an example of how Mack’s approach functions, one may take his argument that the Q people did not accept Jesus’ Messiahship, since his severely edited version of Q does not affirm that teaching.146 But assuming that Jesus’ Messiahship was not accepted by the earliest Jewish Christians, when did the idea arise? Diaspora Jews might believe in a messiah,147 but our evidence generally indicates less messianic sentiment among Jews outside Palestine than among Jews within Palestine.148 And messianic speculation certainly would not arise among Gentile Christians who had not first borrowed it from Jews: Gentiles had no messianic categories, and for Greeks “Christ” often simply became Jesus’ last name. Who then invented Jesus’ messiahship?149
If one argues that the authors of Q, as part of the early Jesus movement, accepted other tenets that all surviving evidence indicates that all Jesus’ known followers believed, one offers an argument (rightly or wrongly) on the basis of some explicit evidence we do have.150 By contrast, dismissing all the concrete evidence we do have and then constructing a hypothesis on the basis of silence offers only a specious argument.151 What a document says may provide us some insights concerning the community it addresses, but what it does not say tells us very little, especially in a seven-page document addressing a particular issue (as Mack makes Q1 out to be).
Yale professor Leander Keck made this case rather strongly in an influential article in 1974.152 As Keck puts it, given the randomly preserved and situation-specific character of the early Christian sources,
. . . can we convert silence into absence? That is, can we argue that the “silence” with regard to certain forms and traditions in the literature in hand shows that the material itself was absent from the community? . . . Can the theology and ethics of a community be inferred from one strand of tradition? For example, was the church which developed and used Q dependent on this material alone?153
It is unfortunate that some scholars have continued to neglect this important methodological caution.