MetaCatholic

In a comment on my quick Q addendum, Steve Allison says something I felt needed more interaction than a further response in the comments.

When I first read they were attempting to stratify Q I thought they were crazy. But, something I read in Burton Mack seemed to make sense that it has some validity. The Gospel of Thomas has only sayings from the first two hypothetical levels of Q and not the third. Could that be chance or was it cunningly devised? Other options?

I’d really like someone who knows what they’re talking about, like Mark Goodacre, to give a more detailed answer to this. I’m going to confine myself to some general observations.

• The date, provenance and theological tendencies of Thomas are sufficiently disputed to make it a bit of a wax nose, capable of being pulled and shaped in a number of different directions. Thomas is an important piece of evidence, but whether it provides independence evidence of the Jesus tradition, or of a particular tendency or grouping within the late-first / early second century church, depends entirely on one’s overall reconstruction and hypothesis.
• The earliest datable fragments of Jesus tradition we have come in 1 Corinthians, and include both sayings used in ethical discussion, and a narrative controlling the performance of the Eucharist. Even here there is no “sayings only” tradition, which might make us wary of reconstructions which postulate “sayings-only” as more primitive.
• Q, (granting its existence for a moment) understood as that material common to Matthew and Luke, but not (largely) in Mark, is not a “sayings-only” source, but contains narrative and order, evidenced most strongly in the material around John the Baptist.
• Q, understood as above, is a source of which we cannot know the limits. It is at least possible that some of the material designated Q in fact comes from a second shared source. It is more likely that not everything in Q was used both by Matthew and Luke, as not everything in Mark is used by both Matthew and Luke. Any reconstruction of Q which assumes we have all of it is historically and evidentially improbable. When one begins to attempt the stratification of a reconstruction of part of a hypothetical source into earlier layers, one is counting angels on the head of a pin.
• The argument that Thomas is very primitive depends in significant part on the existence of an early Q as a pure sayings source. The argument that Q was originally a pure sayings source depends in large part on the existence of Thomas as a primitive document. This is the apotheosis of a circular argument, incapable in the light of the evidence as we currently have it of verification, and there are, as noted above, good reasons for doubting the methodology of this deconstruction of Q.
• Finally, one may simply doubt, on the basis of cross-cultural comparisons, whether any oral tradition or history anywhere is entirely without narrative. Whatever the problems of the different views put forward by, say, Dunn in Jesus Remembered, or Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the fundamental point that both before and after the crucifixion, people told stories about Jesus, seems well grounded both in the sources and in normal human experience. It is inherently implausible that Jesus did nothing worth talking about except teach, and that what he did wouldn’t have had an impact worth remembering and recounting. To put it bluntly, and adapting a point that has been made in other contexts, no one could have been bothered to crucify Thomas’ oracular sage.