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| synoptic problem | |
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The recognition of 19th-century New Testament scholars that Matthew and Luke share much material not found in their generally recognized common source, the Gospel Of Mark , has suggested a ''second'' common source, termed the Q document. This hypothetical lost text —also called the Q Gospel, the '''Sayings Gospel Q''', the '''Synoptic Sayings Source''', the '''Q Manuscript''', and in the 19th Century '''The Logia '''— seems most likely to have comprised a collection of Jesus ' sayings. Recognizing such a ''Q'' document is one of two key elements in the " Two-source Hypothesis " alongside The Priority Of Mark . The two-source theory is the most widely accepted solution to the Synoptic Problem , which concerns the literary relationships between and among the first three canonical gospels (the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke), known as the Synoptic Gospels. Similarity in word choices and event placement shows an interrelationship. The synoptic problem concerns how this interrelation came to pass and what the nature of this interrelationship is. According to the two-source theory, Matthew and Luke both used the Gospel Of Mark , independently of one another. This necessitates the existence of a hypothetical source in order to explain the ''double tradition'' material where there is agreement between Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark. This hypothetical source is named ''Q'' for convenience. THE CASE FOR A COMMON SECOND SOURCE The existence of Q follows from the argument that neither Matthew nor Luke is directly dependent on the other in ''the double tradition'' (what New Testament scholars call the material that Matthew and Luke share that does not appear in Mark). However, the verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is so close in some parts of the double tradition that the only reasonable explanation for this agreement is common dependence on a written source or sources. Arguments for Luke's and Matthew's independence include:
Even if Matthew and Luke are independent (see Markan Priority ), the Q hypothesis states that they used a common ''document''. Arguments for Q being a written document include:
THE CASE AGAINST A COMMON SECOND SOURCE ). Their arguments include:
HISTORY If Q ever existed, it must have disappeared very early, since no copies of it have been recovered and no definitive notices of it have been recorded in antiquity (but see the discussion of the Papias testimony below). In modern times, the first person to hypothesize a Q-like source was an Englishman, Herbert Marsh , in 1801 in a complicated solution to the synoptic problem that his contemporaries ignored. Marsh labeled this source with the Hebrew letter ''beth''. The next person to advance the Q hypothesis was the German manner of speech". Rather than the traditional interpretation that Papias was referring to the writing of Matthew in Hebrew, Schleiermacher believed that Papias was actually giving witness to a sayings collection that was available to the Evangelists . In 1838 another German, Christian Hermann Weisse , took Schleiermacher's suggestion of a sayings source and combined it with the idea of Markan Priority to formulate what is now called the Two-Source Hypothesis, in which both Matthew and Luke used Mark and the sayings source. Heinrich Julius Holtzmann endorsed this approach in an influential treatment of the synoptic problem in 1863 , and the Two-Source Hypothesis has maintained its dominance ever since. At this time, Q was usually called the ''Logia'' on account of the Papias statement, and Holtzmann gave it the symbol Lambda (Λ). Toward the end of the 19th century, however, doubts began to grow on the propriety of anchoring the existence of the collection of sayings in the testimony of Papias, so a neutral symbol Q (which was devised by Johannes Weiss based on the German ''Quelle'', meaning ''source'') was adopted to remain neutrally independent of the collection of sayings and its connection to Papias. In the first two decades of the 20th Century , more than a dozen reconstructions of Q were made. However, these reconstructions differed so much from each other that not a single verse of Matthew was present in all of them. As a result, interest in Q subsided and it was neglected for many decades. This state of affairs changed in the 1960s after translations of a newly discovered and analogous sayings collection, the '' Gospel Of Thomas '', became available. James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester proposed that collections of sayings such as Q and Thomas represented the earliest Christian materials at an early point in a trajectory that eventually resulted in the canonical gospels. This burst of interest led to increasingly more sophisticated literary and redactional reconstructions of Q, notably the work of John S. Kloppenborg . Kloppenborg, by analyzing certain literary phenomena, argued that Q was composed in three stages. The earliest stage was a collection of wisdom sayings involving such issues as poverty and discipleship. Then this collection was expanded by including a layer of judgmental sayings directed against "this generation". The final stage included the Temptation of Jesus. Although Kloppenborg cautioned against assuming that the composition history of Q is the same as the history of the Jesus tradition (i.e. that the oldest layer of Q is necessarily the oldest and pure-layer Jesus tradition), some recent seekers of the Historical Jesus , including the members of the Jesus Seminar , have done just that. Basing their reconstructions primarily on the Gospel of Thomas and the oldest layer of Q, they propose that Jesus functioned as a wisdom sage, rather than a Jewish Rabbi , though not all members affirm the two-source hypothesis. Kloppenborg, it should be noted, is now a fellow of the Jesus Seminar himself. REFERENCES SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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