Theology in Particular: The Four Gospels with Jeffrey Riddle

 

JTR

Hilarion Alfeyev on Q: It simply never existed

I returned this week to my reading of Hilarion Alfeyev’s Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching (SVS Press, 2018) and was struck by his evaluation of the so-called Q hypothesis:

“What happened to Q? Why did it disappear?”…. We must answer directly: nothing happened to it; it has not disappeared—it simply never existed. There never was a “discovery” of Q. There have only been more or less clumsy attempts to invent it on the basis of the fragments remaining after the deconstruction of the Gospel text. It is plausible that the evangelists used some sources; it cannot be excluded that the collections of the sayings of Jesus existed not only in an oral, but also in written tradition; but in the form in which the Q source has been “reconstructed,” “discovered,” and “excavated” throughout the twentieth century, it is a typical scholarly myth raised to the status of dogma (80-81).

He later adds:

The pressing task of contemporary biblical studies is to be librerated from these types of myths and dogmas (81).

Such skepticism of “the assured results of modern scholarship” should not perhaps come as a surprise from one who comes from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, as does Alfeyev, given that the Enlightenment did not affect the East to the degree it did the West. Oddly enough, many evangelicals happily embrace modern Gospel source criticism, with its theories for resolving the Synoptic Problem, Markan Priority, and Q, without seeming to recognize the inherent dangers to the integrity and authority of the Gospels or drawing the clear minded conclusions taken by Alfeyev.

JTR

Ned B. Stonehouse on the Authorship and Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels

Image: Ned B. Stonehouse (1902-1962).

An interesting point is made by Ned B. Stonehouse in the opening of chapter two (“The Self-Witness of Matthew”) in his Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Tyndale Press, 1963) relating to the self-disclosure of the canonical Gospel authors (19 ff).

He notes that the canonical Gospels are technically “anonymous writings” in that the authors never directly self-identify. In this regard he makes a distinction between Matthew and Mark, on one hand, and Luke and John on the other, with the latter at least including some “features of self-disclosure” (cf. Luke’s historical prologue, Luke 1:1-4, the “we passages” in Acts, and passages in John like John 13:23 ff; 19:26 ff, 35; 20:2 ff).

He contrasts this with the apocryphal Gospel of Peter which includes this statement, “But I, Simon Peter, and Andrew my brother, took our nets and went out into the sea….” One does not find Matthew or the other Gospel writers speaking in the first person about themselves quite like this. The sense is that the canonical Gospel authors did not feel compelled to “prove” or “show” that they were eyewitnesses (at least in the case of Matthew and John), in the way that the pseudonymous author of the Gospel of Peter did, and this, in fact, subtly supports the traditional view of their authorship.

JTR