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Book Review: Questioning Q

This collection of essays is primarily devoted to defending the FarrerGoulder hypothesis, according to which the existence of the ‘Q’ material is explained by Matthew’s use of Luke. The major alternative considered is the dominant paradigm, according to which Matthew and Luke made independent use of a single Greek document, ‘Q’. Attention is paid to various forms of this hypothesis. Goodacre launches an effective attack on the International Q Project, and criticizes scholars who refer to ‘Q’ as a gospel. There is also effective criticism of scholars who still hold views which include the priority of Matthew. More chaotic hypotheses are, however, ignored, and there is hardly any mention of the Aramaic dimension of Q. Some essays make good points on the two major fronts. Perrin, ‘The Limits of a Reconstructed Q’, points out flaws in existing attempts to reconstruct a supposedly original text of this hypothetical document. E. Eve, ‘Reconstructing Mark: A Thought Experiment’, shows that if we constructed Mark from Matthew and Luke, the result would be significantly different from real Mark. He infers a significant degree of unreliability in conventional reconstructions of Q as a Greek document. M. A. Matson, ‘Luke’s Rewriting of the Sermon on the Mount’, shows that Luke’s perspective is so different from that of Matthew that he might have altered and scattered Matthew’s Sermon. Goodacre concludes the volume with ‘A World without Q’, a sound general survey of the effect of the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre hypothesis on gospel criticism. Like other essays, however, even Goodacre omits Aramaic and chaos. Barrett’s article, ‘Q: A Re-examination’ (Expository Times 54 (1942–43), pp. 320–3), is never mentioned and does not even make it to the bibliography. Yet this article vigorously stated most of the main reasons for questioning the now dominant paradigm of Q. Barrett pointed out that much of the Q material is not in common order, and that whereas some passages are verbally identical in Greek, others are explicable as resulting from two translations of Aramaic source material. The classic responses by Vincent Taylor, notably ‘The Order of Q’ (Journal of Theological Studies NS 4 (1953), pp. 27–31), are barely mentioned. There is no proper discussion of Taylor’s view that there was a Greek document ‘Q’ which was much less extensive than the ‘Q’ material. Matthew Black does not make it to the bibliography either, let alone to serious discussion. The worst article, that of R. Vinson on the ‘minor agreements’, discusses spurious and misleading attempts to count them, and a strange experiment with contemporary students; it omits the reviewer’s argument that some ‘minor agreements’ occur where any decent editor would alter Mark’s over-literal