The Composition of the Sayings Source: Genre, Synchrony, and Wisdom Redaction in Q

This volume analyzes the Q materials in the light of compositional conventions of ancient instructional genres. The author begins by assessing literary-critical approaches to Q which began with Harnack and have culminated in the work of Kloppenborg, Sato, and others. Next he articulates a theory of genre analysis drawn from text-linguistics, literary crticism, and rhetorical criticism. An array of ancient paraenetic texts is used to generate genre-critical models, in turn applied comprehensively to the double tradition materials. The results are used to crtically assess recent redaction-history theories of Q’s formation and to locate Q more securely among ancient paraenetic genres. The book should be of interest to synoptic gospel scholarship, historians of Christian origins, literary critics, and those investigating the production, social function, and performance of texts in early Christianity.