Explorations in Q:
The Groundwork for Analysing the Putative Sayings-Material of Jesus
'Common' to Matthew and Luke.

In this introductory entry, I wish to begin a series on "Q"-- from the German word Quelle ["source"]-- utterances of Jesus which in a very rough way may be said to be found in common in Matthew and Luke. This first statement is to function as an overview, highlighting two contrasting perspectives on Q scholarship that prevail today in the field, concluding with my own predilections for approaching Q.

In the next entry, I shall divulge all the hypothetical inclusions that are said to make up Q; this listing will promise to be length and-- for some-- tedious. My present design in this entry is to assay to outline Q and to describe some of the scholarship leading up to the present dominant views as to its composition, etc.

German scholarship inspired the great inaugural work in New Testament studies. Early among these scholars was Friedrich Schleiermacher, who hypothesized that the sayings of Jesus were perpetuated by an Aramaic original which was subsequently translated into the Koine Greek Gospels that we know. Later, Christian Hermann Weisse in 1838 published a masterwork Die Evangelische Geschichte Kritisch und Philosophisch Bearbeitet, which argued for the first time that Matthew and Luke worked from a basic text of Mark, yet also employed additional sayings material of Jesus.

In the year 1863, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, another German scholar, published a modifed version of Weisse's hypothesis in a work entitled Die synoptischen Evangelien: Ihr Uhrsprung und geschichter Character, in which he argued that there had been a primitive version of Mark which he labelled Urmarkus; this is the gist of the so-called Two-Document Hypothesis.

Bernard Weiss (1827-1918) was the first person to call the common source of sayings-material of Jesus-logia "Q." This he did in a great work entitled Die Quellen des Lukasevangeliums, which appeared in Berlin in 1907. Weiss should be noted for having included several passages in Q from the Gospel of Mark, and was known as an exegetic conservative.

Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930) was an illustrious New Testament scholar in many areas; his contribution to Q scholarship includes Sprueche und Reden Jesu, published in Leipzig in 1907. This last-mentioned work was the first true construction with analysis of Q.

Rudolf Bultmann needs to be mentioned in passing for his History of the Synoptic Tradition and other clear writings about Q, yet it is fair to say that Bultmann did not systematize any more about Q than was already assumed at the time; his gift seems to be mostly by way of analysis and commentary on Q.

Burnet Hillman Streeter and Thomas Walter Manson are names that should be mentioned honorably in discussion of Q scholarship. Streeter proposed a "Four-Document Hypothesis," Mark, Q, M, and L-- to account for the synoptic Gospels. Manson made a full-length reconstruction of Q into English.

John Kloppenborg of the University of Toronto has published widely on Q, and after some time of reticence on the subject, in 1987 published a work The Formation of Q, whose thesis was that Q is a Greek document which needs to be studied without reference to a putative Aramaic orignal source. In subsequent correspondance at my attention, I have proof that Kloppenborg essentially believes that Jesus spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, or some combination thereunto as his first/mother-tongue(s), which perforce leaves us with the conclusion that some written textual sociolinguistic factors must be implicated in the shift between the language of Jesus and the very first members of the Jesus Movement and that of the Evangelists, who may exhibit Semiticisms in their writing but express themselves in perfectly understandable 'fishmongers' and 'homeopaths'' Koine Greek.

The dialectical balance to counter Kloppenborg's position-- now the prevailing position among Q scholars-- we find in the work of Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham. I refer the reader to Casey's An Aramaic Approach to Q (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2002), which vigorously defends the older, traditional notion that Q had an Aramaic substrate.
Casey thoughtfully analyses all dimensions of the problem at-hand, and just as carefully attempts linguistic reconstruction of select passages in Q. Casey's comments thus constitute a worthwhile ballast to the press of Greek-only scholarship in Q research, whose chief characteristic -- as Casey is quick to point-up-- is on text-based redaction and not on source-criticism.

Here is where I begin to chime in with my editorial opinion. Something about Q research goes incredibly awry when it restricts itself to a Greek-only text for the simple reason that we have no extant Palestinian Jewish Aramaic texts of Q, especially when the prevailing view abides that the utterer of 'The Source' of Q spoke Aramaic, and this is altogether a complicating factor when we consider that Aramaic imposes an entirely different Weltanschauung [German: "world-view"] in its logical assumptions given the sociolinguistics of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir than (Koine) Greek. Do read the Whorf-Sapir Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis to which I just alluded into the contrast between Semitic languages (including Aramaic) in Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 1970, 1960), whose gist is that Hebrew [and Aramaic] are 'psychological' and 'dynamic' languages whereas Greek is 'logical' and 'placid.' Semitic languages have only two tenses, basically, the perfect and the imperfect, and both are more or less a past tense; meanings are tacked upon verbs pronomially and adverbially in a way that does not compute at all in Indo-European languages like Koine Greek.

Only with the greatest circumspection can one make a shift from a Semitic tongue to an Indo-European tongue, and I ultimately lack confidence in the prevailing notion of confidence in the extant set of Greek texts of Q-- as long as the same prevailing wisdom still holds that Jesus uttered the thoughts behind Q in either Aramaic or Hebrew, with perhaps a word of Latin or Greek thrown in as loan-expressions gathered from the agora.

Still, precise linguistic reconstruction seems a task that will elude pat acomplishment. I greatly admire the formidable work Dr. Maurice Casey has done in An Aramaic Approach to Q, but for my rude part as amateur I think I shall try a broad-spectrum approach in my final product, semantically listing the concepts in Q, then listing the sundry expressions possible for defining such terms. Here the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio and Marcus Jastrow's Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerusalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (1903) and Michael Sokoloff's Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (1992, 1990) should prove to be of immense benefit.

My product will not resemble Dr. Casey's product, who has given us a precise 'retro-translation' of Q. Instead, my effort will be a word-list of germane Palestinian Jewish Aramaic words and variants (as known) having bearing on the text evidenced in Q-- it would for energic-expenditure purposes be too grandiose to stretch myself beyond those academic limits. Even within these restrictions-- which are conservative-- this piece of work will be a 'tall order' and may take the rest of my life-- I am 58 years of age and 'have several irons in the fire' besides Aramaic/Hebrew scholarship. But simply because the task is daunting I should not forgive myself of the opportunity to work at it!