Questioning Q…and Mark

Having read Mark Goodacre’s The Case Against Q, I followed up by reading the volume he co-edited with Nicholas Perrin, Questioning Q. It contains a lot of interesting and intriguing studies, but part of the problem with the study of the Synoptic Gospels and their interrelationship is that, as with the historical Jesus, it is hard to make a convincing case about the whole picture by studying individual pieces of the puzzle. And so a book like this, however useful, is unlikely to change the prevailing paradigm, because it has always been known that the Synoptic Gospels contain passages that seem to fit poorly within any of the suggested explanations. That’s presumably why the issue is still a topic considered worthy of scholarly investigation and discussion.

One of the most creative chapters was by Eric Eve, and it demonstrated well the problems we would encounter trying to reconstruct Mark if we only had Matthew, Luke and Q. In some cases we would surely make errors in our reconstruction, we would fail to recover crucial and typically Markan features, and we would inevitably as a result misconstrue the theology of the Gospel of Mark. The warning is perhaps more relevant to those who accept Q than those who question it, that attempts to talk about the precise wording of Q or its theology are highly problematic.

What I’d like to do sometime as a thought experiment is see whether I could explore a similar thought experiment and try to disprove the existence of a hypothetical Gospel “Mark” if we didn’t have it (It could still be called “Mark” because it consists of material which Matthew retained and Luke from this hypothetical source that is no longer extant). The point would be to try arguing, as Mark Goodacre and others do about Q, that there is no need to posit Mark in order to account for the similarities and differences between Matthew and Luke as we now have them.

Until then, I offer this as a sign of ongoing friendship with Mark Goodacre and other Q skeptics:

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