Self-Contradiction in the Iqp (Critical Notes‪)‬

The publication of the first four volumes of Documenta Q (1) cannot fail to impress the reader with the enormous industry that has gone into the International Q Project. More than forty scholars have worked to amass the opinions of the learned over a century, to set out their reasons, and to provide an evaluation on every point at issue. The intention is within a limited period to publish a justified reconstruction of Q from start to finish; to judge from the present rate of progress, in about thirty volumes. A student of Q myself, I have been anxious about so ambitious a scheme because there seems to be a concealed self-contradiction at its heart. I have tried to give warning of this problem for fifteen years: first in an essay, "A House Built on Sand," (2) then in a full-length book, Luke: A New Paradigm, (3) and most recently in an article in JBL, "Is Q a Juggenaaut?" (4) There have been two main papers on Q at recent meetings of the SNTS, and at both of them I have raised the difficulty; but neither Prof. Howard Kee at Prague nor Prof. Paul Hoffmann at Birmingham had apparently heard of it, nor did either attempt to answer it. I have felt like the clown in Kierkegaard who comes to warn the audience that the theater is on fire, and the more earnestly he speaks the louder they laugh. Perhaps a catalogue of specific instances will be less comical.