This article presents an interesting question. I found it in the first place because the matter was already on my mind. Could al-Injil have been the Q document? Looking at the footnotes of Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation of The Qur’an I see that the theory is an old one: “[The Qur’an] does not even recognize the Gospels according to Matthew, etc., as the Injil…This view of the Gospel…is now admitted to be the correct one, as all criticism points to some original of the synoptics which is now entirely lost.” (Page 135) For those who don’t know what I’m talking about the “Q document” (short for quelle, the German word for “source”) is a hypothetical original Gospel whose author is unknown. Biblical scholars now generally agree that it existed and posit it along with the book of Mark as one of the sources of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The theory explains how so many lengthy passages in the latter two books can be virtually identical. Q is always depicted as a “sayings Gospel” like The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of proverbs.
I’ve been reading a lot about Q. You’d be surprised just how irritatingly difficult it is to type “Q document” into Google and find anything that isn’t an apologetic tract by biblical conservatives. This discussion topic is addressed to my fellow Muslims, though, and I can only hope that we get at least a little back-and-forth from them before the Christians here hijack the thread. I don’t have much hope, mind you, but a guy can dream, can’t he? Let me also note that this is not supposed to be a debate about whether the Q document exists in the first place.
But as long as we’re on the subject certain scholars do regard the concept of the Q document as nothing more than scotch tape made up for convenience and with only purely circumstantial evidence for it. They ask why no manuscript remains. They point to a few minor coincidences in wording which they allege proves that Luke used Matthew. I see their point but lost manuscripts are a natural part of history. It happens all the time. Furthermore Luke made it sound in the opening like he consulted a number of different sources. On the whole I find these arguments a bit more compelling. In the end history often consists of so much guesswork—but until recently the Higgs-Boson was purely hypothetical too.
Lots of people have tried to reconstruct the Q document over the years but this is just that burning desire human beings have to uncover the past. It’s the very same desire, I suppose, which prompted me to start this thread in the first place so I’m not going to criticize, but I must mention all the same that there is one HUGE gaping hole in these people’s logic, and in the premise of everyone’s conception of Q, and it is so very blatant that it makes me want to bury my face in my hands. No one, you see, can ever explain how it is that the stories of the centurion’s son being healed and the temptation in the desert could have just mysteriously popped up in the midst of a mere “sayings Gospel”. Because those are very much amongst the verbatim contents of both Luke and Matthew. No, it must be out of sheer wishful thinking that anyone could possibly regard this lost source as anything less than a full Gospel, life narrative and all, which the authors of Matthew and Luke selectively drew from according to their own beliefs. (The odds are also nil that they used Q in all the same places.) This skeptical article says, “The possibility must…be allowed that if the Q document had actual existence, perhaps all of it was not used by the Gospel writers and its extent is not known because all of its passages are not preserved.” “Possibility”?! Well good luck getting someone who does believe in Q to admit to that.
There is yet another hugely obvious problem which I haven’t brought up until now: there could always be more than just one quelle involved. In fact I would almost say that it’s altogether implausible to think of a researcher drawing from a mere two texts in his work, both of them guessable to modern scholars, although that does seems to be the general assumption (more wishful thinking I suppose). For all we know the authors of Matthew and Luke used twenty different sources each and five of them were the same. If al-Injil really is one of multiple sources then our chances of knowing much about it decrease all the more. Indeed some scholars have gone so far as to posit an L, and M and a Q, the former two referring to sources for Luke and Matthew. Don’t get me wrong, though: not all of the sources had to be other Gospels.
It’s time to hear what you brothers and sisters think. What do you reckon? Is it possible that al-Injil could be the Q document?
I’ve been reading a lot about Q. You’d be surprised just how irritatingly difficult it is to type “Q document” into Google and find anything that isn’t an apologetic tract by biblical conservatives. This discussion topic is addressed to my fellow Muslims, though, and I can only hope that we get at least a little back-and-forth from them before the Christians here hijack the thread. I don’t have much hope, mind you, but a guy can dream, can’t he? Let me also note that this is not supposed to be a debate about whether the Q document exists in the first place.
But as long as we’re on the subject certain scholars do regard the concept of the Q document as nothing more than scotch tape made up for convenience and with only purely circumstantial evidence for it. They ask why no manuscript remains. They point to a few minor coincidences in wording which they allege proves that Luke used Matthew. I see their point but lost manuscripts are a natural part of history. It happens all the time. Furthermore Luke made it sound in the opening like he consulted a number of different sources. On the whole I find these arguments a bit more compelling. In the end history often consists of so much guesswork—but until recently the Higgs-Boson was purely hypothetical too.
Lots of people have tried to reconstruct the Q document over the years but this is just that burning desire human beings have to uncover the past. It’s the very same desire, I suppose, which prompted me to start this thread in the first place so I’m not going to criticize, but I must mention all the same that there is one HUGE gaping hole in these people’s logic, and in the premise of everyone’s conception of Q, and it is so very blatant that it makes me want to bury my face in my hands. No one, you see, can ever explain how it is that the stories of the centurion’s son being healed and the temptation in the desert could have just mysteriously popped up in the midst of a mere “sayings Gospel”. Because those are very much amongst the verbatim contents of both Luke and Matthew. No, it must be out of sheer wishful thinking that anyone could possibly regard this lost source as anything less than a full Gospel, life narrative and all, which the authors of Matthew and Luke selectively drew from according to their own beliefs. (The odds are also nil that they used Q in all the same places.) This skeptical article says, “The possibility must…be allowed that if the Q document had actual existence, perhaps all of it was not used by the Gospel writers and its extent is not known because all of its passages are not preserved.” “Possibility”?! Well good luck getting someone who does believe in Q to admit to that.
There is yet another hugely obvious problem which I haven’t brought up until now: there could always be more than just one quelle involved. In fact I would almost say that it’s altogether implausible to think of a researcher drawing from a mere two texts in his work, both of them guessable to modern scholars, although that does seems to be the general assumption (more wishful thinking I suppose). For all we know the authors of Matthew and Luke used twenty different sources each and five of them were the same. If al-Injil really is one of multiple sources then our chances of knowing much about it decrease all the more. Indeed some scholars have gone so far as to posit an L, and M and a Q, the former two referring to sources for Luke and Matthew. Don’t get me wrong, though: not all of the sources had to be other Gospels.
It’s time to hear what you brothers and sisters think. What do you reckon? Is it possible that al-Injil could be the Q document?
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