Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §7.4
has quite properly reinforced the earlier insight of form criticism that tradition
can hardly be thought of as other than community tradition. 44 Though the question
should not be ignored, whether such a document was simply a deposit of a
community's tradition or may have been addressed to a community (in exhortation
or rebuke) by a particular author. 45 There is some tension here, not always
perceived or clarified, between Q as simply a collection of community tradition
and Q as a carefully constructed composition.
More serious, however, is the assumption that Q somehow defines its community:
it is a 'Q community' or 'Q-group' in the sense that the Q material is its
only Jesus tradition; it holds to this material in distinction from (defiance of?)
other communities who presumably are similarly defined by their document. 46
There are several flaws in the logic here.
First is what we might call the 'one document per community'fallacy. It
simply will not do to identify the character of a community with the character of
a document associated with it. 47 Such a document will no doubt indicate concerns
and emphases in the community's teaching. But only if we can be confident
that the single document was the community's sole document (or traditional
material) could we legitimately infer that the concerns and beliefs of the
community did not extend beyond those of the document. And we cannot have
such confidence. On the same logic we could speak of 'wisdom villages' in the
land of Israel which knew no prophetic books, or prophetic communities at odds
with Torah communities. The Dead Sea Scrolls should surely have banished
forever the idea that communities possessed and treasured only one document
or only one genre of tradition. Where documents have different purposes, the
lack of cross-reference between them tells us nothing as to whether both docu-
Easter situation' (58; Formation 26). See also Kloppenborg, 'Literary Convention, Self-Evidence
and the Social History of the Q People', Semeia 55 (1992) 77-102; Vaage, Galilean Upstarts.
Hoffmann prefers to speak of a 'Q-group' rather than a 'Q community' (Studien 10), but so long as
the developed ecclesiastical overtones of 'church' are kept under control, the issues are not significantly
different (cf. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q 170-71).
44. See below, §8.la and further §8.6a, d.
45. Tuckett, Q 82.
46. In Excavating Q, Kloppenborg Verbin makes the point more subtly by pressing the
distinction between 'diversity' and 'difference' (354-63): 'Q's "differentness" is substantial and
that difference has the potential of undermining some of the tidy models for imagining theological
continuity' (363).
47. Kloppenborg, Formation 25; 'Q represents a theologically autonomous sphere of
Christian theology' (27), 'a discrete group in which Q functioned as the central theological expression'
(39). Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: 'Both documents [the Gospel of Thomas
and Q] presuppose that Jesus' significance lay in his words, and in his words alone' (86, my
emphasis). See also B. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993) 213-14, 245-47.
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