Forced-Choice Logic
Forced-Choice Logic
The assumption that the earliest version of Q must include either eschatology or wisdom, but cannot include both, typically rests on the still less likely assumption that these genres of thought are theologically incompatible.154 (We briefly addressed this sort of forced-choice logic with regard to genres, above.) Leander Keck bolsters his case against communities that believed only particular documents by appealing to first-century Jewish texts:
Surely Qumran has shown us that the same community uses and produces multiple forms which function side by side. It is tantalizing to imagine how the Qumran community would have been reconstructed if the total finds from the caves had been limited to the Hymns and the Genesis Apocryphon!
“Since Qumran shows us divergent ideas, as well as diverse forms,” he contends, whoever seeks “to reconstruct discrete communities and theologies on the basis of rigorous logical coherence alone” must bear the burden of proof.156 Other scholars have noted the blend of wisdom and eschatology in such early Jewish sources.157 Ben Witherington similarly complains:
Arguing there was a Q community is rather like arguing there was a Proverbs community, or an Aboth community. Besides the fact that it is wholly an argument from silence, with no data outside of Q by which to check such a view, where is there any precedent in early Judaism for such a community?
The related view that Q must include only one outlook fails to fit what we know of much of either early Judaism or early Christianity.159
Single communities used different documents in multiple genres that expressed multiple interests. The Qumran community seems interested in its founder’s teachings; many scholars have attributed many of the community’s hymns to the same founder. Besides hymns, the same community employed a manual of discipline, eschatological texts like the War Scroll, and pesher interpretations of the Old Testament. More specifically, single documents sometimes freely mixed wisdom and apocalyptic thought;160 no necessary boundary in antiquity rendered these categories mutually exclusive.161
Indeed, one need not search as distantly as Qumran to discern authors, documents or communities that combine divergent perspectives. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each freely combine narrative with sayings, and eschatology with wisdom (especially in Matthew). If Matthew did not find Mark and “Q” irreconcilable, 162 if Mark himself may have used Q at points,163 why need the original users of Q have found narratives intolerable? Why need the first users of a first edition of “Q” have found wisdom and eschatology incompatible, when that edition’s supposed editors felt free to add the alternative perspective to the same document? If “Q” were so incompatible with the canonical Gospels, why would Matthew and Luke make such abundant use of a source so dramatically antithetical to their theology?164
The wisdom version of Q that Mack accepts as the earliest recension seems more determined by the conclusion that he and some of his colleagues wish to arrive at than by any other consistent or objective method. He uses “Q” as an anti-“Gospel” that, by virtue of its greater antiquity, trumps claims to accurate Jesus tradition in the early Gospels we actually do have. Thus J. Andrew Over-man, chair of classics at Macalaster College, understandably complains about Mack’s earlier Myth of Innocence:
The data that constitute historically reliable information about Jesus are largely based on a particular version of Q. There is great trust in our ability to determine which traditions are “early” and which are “late.” The selection of what is authentic material frequently seems arbitrary.