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
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