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Re: Q and Papias
Thanks, Larry, I think I understand your position much more clearly
now.
> Q is a logia collection which Matt and Lk both use. It was
> probably much larger, but all we are able to reconstruct with any
> certainty is the material Matt and Lk share.
I am curious why you think it was _probably_ much larger. It would
seem to me that since we can only reconstruct the material that Matt
and Luke share then we can not say one way or the other whether it was
larger or not. I would say that it probably is not much larger,
because Luke and Matthew both incorporated nearly all of Mark, and so
I would expect that they incorporated nearly all of Q. However, I
realize that this argument is based on accepting the priority of Mark,
and I do not expect it to be convincing to you.
>> On the third hand, I know of no scholar who holds Mark and Q as the
>> ultimate sources for Matthew and Luke, if by ultimate you mean the
>> only sources.
> Please, I may be demonstrating my ignorance in these posts, I am not
> quite that ignorant, however.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply by that comment that you were ignorant.
Please just take it as an indication that I do try to entertain
seriously all possible readings of a text or, for that matter,
hypothetical solutions to explan a set of phenomena. :-)
>>Nor do I know of
>> scholars who hold that Q and Mark are ultimate in the sense that they
>> have no sources behind them.
> MMM, nor do I on the one hand. On the other I have not anyone who
> attempts to deal with the sources behind them either, other than in very
> sketchy fashion-as if to say, they are there, but we don't know what they
> are or how to recover them.
True, but aren't you in the same boat? Above you said that Q was
probably much larger that what we have in Mt and Lk, but that it was
unreconstructable.
> My basic objections is that there are simply too many problems with
> either of the major theories currently on the boards. Most of the hole
> plugging is just that-plugging up holes. I don't think that the 2 SOUrce
> theory takes into account the diversity, the cross breeding, the
> complexity of early CHristianity in the Hellenisitic world-it is too
> simplistic to be taken seriously.
I agree that the 2 source theory is a simplified model of what
actually took place. However, I am not convinced that it is too
simplistic. Considering how long it has taken for the Q hypothesis to
approach something like widespread acceptance, I doubt that a more
complex hypothesis will have a chance, since it will have to rely on
much more ambiguous evidence.
On the other hand, if I remember correctly, the generation of
physicists before Einstein, Planck, and Bohr thought that all that was
left for the next generation was to measure the next decimal place.
Perhaps it is time for the 2 source hypothesis to be superseded, but
if that does happen, I doubt if it is by any of the alternatives that
I have seen suggested so far.
Stan Anderson
The Claremont Graduate School
Institute for Antiquity and Christianity
ANDERSOS@CGS.EDU
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