Thursday, September 14, 2006

Clarifying the Q survey

I must clarify that what the question is I wish to ask teachers introducing the Q hypothesis: What are you telling students the Q hypothesis is? because I suspect that not many teachers are persuaded in a single written Q source even if they hold to a two-source (Mk-Q) hypothesis. And I wonder are teachers are still telling students that the Q hypothesis is a hypothetical document even though they themselves may assume a modified 2SH with written and oral fragments comprising "Q". I recall my lecturers being quite confident of Markan priority but rather hesitant in what exactly Q was. I want to know if that was (ab)normal to teach "Q" is a "label" or umbrella term covering shared sources rather than a single document? Hence my quotes taken from Guthrie and from Barrett (and my allusion to Petrie's 1959 Novum Testamentum article). For example, how much of the double-tradition is considered oral traditions? Do oral traditions feature at all in what students are being taught about the double-tradition?

I have a suspicion that the survival of the notion of a Q document hypothesis is not unrelated to:

(1) What teachers teach about what is the consensus Q hypothesis,
(2) What teachers actually believe about the double-tradition,
(3) How teachers teach the Q hypothesis,
(4) What graduate students eventually take with them.

Are most students being taught that the standard Q hypothesis posits a single document?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't think a single document Q source is very plausible just based on what we know from the times. Textual criticism finds the use and importation of already existing creeds in the NT. Are these written or oral? I would think both - perhaps this is the first writing of them? Are they written/oral in multiple communities? I would think so based on the travels of disciples previously to the areas to establish converts.