chapter 6 Slaves to Mammon, , and Urban Development in the Q Source

According to prevailing scholarly reconstructions, Christianity originated as a Judaean movement of reform or resistance in response to new Roman ex- pressions of socioeconomic exploitation and cultural domination in the first century CE . The “Q source” or “Sayings Q,” a putative text recon- structed by scholars on the basis of the “double tradition” shared by the of Matthew and Luke,1 figures prominently in these reconstructions because it is arguably our earliest retrievable witness to the Palestinian traditions. As I showed in chapter 1, Jewish apocalyptic texts have often been used as foils for the early Jesus traditions in Q, which is deemed sapiential, prophetic, and/ or eschatological (where eschatology is defined away from apocalypticism). In

1 An overview and evaluation of recent scholarship on the Synoptic Problem and compre- hensive defense of the Two-Document hypothesis is not possible here. I follow the current majority opinion in studies by positing the existence of Q. Recent criticisms of Q (among others: Goodacre 2002; Goodacre and Perrin 2004; Adamczewski 2010; Poirier and Peterson 2015) have helpfully pushed scholars to be more precise about the limits of our knowledge of Q and the challenges and subjectivity involved in reconstructing the text; however, I am not convinced that they have demonstrated that this source never existed. For recent defenses of Q that constructively respond to these critiques, see Kloppenborg 2008, esp. 1–61; 2014a, 9–154; Burkett 2009; Kirk 2016. One of the key debates in scholarship on the Synoptic Problem involves a reassessment of Marcion’s Gospel. BeDuhn (2013), Vinzent (2014), and Klinghardt (2015) have demonstrated that Marcion’s Gospel, as reconstructed on the basis of patristic citations, is not simply a “Marcionite” redaction of Luke as has tradition- ally been assumed. Instead, Marcion should be considered a witness to an earlier form of Luke than the “final form” that can be reconstructed from the manuscript evidence. On this basis, Klinghardt (2006; 2008; 2015) has proposed a “Markan Priority with Marcion” as an al- tenative to the “Two-Document”/“Two-Source” hypothesis and the “Mark without Q” hypoth- esis. This proposal inadequately accounts for the influence of Marcion’s Gospel on Matthew. It is also too positivistic about our ability to retrieve Marcion’s Gospel from the excerpts of later herisiologists and to separate it from Marcion’s own redactional activity (Roth 2015; 2018; Lieu 2015). In BeDuhn’s (2013, 93–96) estimation, the recognition that Marcion’s Gospel preserves an early form of Luke actually supports the Two-Document hypothesis and Q in particular because this early Luke contains less “minor agreements” with Matthew than the canonical form of Luke. Matthews (2018) has convincingly maintained that Marcion’s Gospel is relevant for understanding the relations of the Synoptics inasmuch as it is a witness to an earlier form of Luke (“core Luke”), but it does not entail the rejection of the Two-Document hypothesis (cf. Hays 2008; Roth 2018).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004383647_008 218 chapter 6 response to oppression, Jesus’s first generation of disciples—so it goes—en- couraged individual spiritual reform rather than heralding God’s impending corporate justice like the Jewish apocalypses. In this chapter, I argue against this scholarly metanarrative by situating Q within the internally diverse matrix of Judaean apocalyptic class rhetoric in Early Roman Palestine. Like the texts treated in previous chapters, Q responds to the shifting struc- tures of inequality as Roman law and culture made an impact on daily life in Palestine. By most accounts, Q was written in Greek in the Galilee between the late 30s and mid 60s CE,2 a period of dramatic geopolitical shifts in which Galilee’s βασιλεία (“kingdom,” “reign”) was at stake: the Galilee was transformed from part of Antipas’s tetrarchy to part of the Roman province of Syria to part of Agrippa I’s client-kingdom to part of the Roman province of Syria again be- fore parts of it were joined to the client-kingdom of Agrippa II.3 In the midst of these fluctuations, elite-driven urban development in the Galilee’s main cities (Sepphoris and Tiberias) and most prominent villages (e.g., Magdala) gradu- ally reconfigured physical landscapes and social relations. This was not a time of increased alienation and oppression for farmers and merchants, but rather of population growth, changing patterns of production and trade, technologi- cal innovation, increased market integration, and institutional development. Although all of this change either maintained or improved the socioeconomic conditions of many Galileans, it remained a cause of resentment for certain ex- tremists like John of Gischala and James, Simon, and Menahem (sons of Judas the Galilean).4 These men and others sought social transformation through revolutionary tactics. The scribes responsible for the production of Q discouraged this revolu- tionary impulse through apocalyptic class rhetoric.5 While criticizing these

2 For expositions of this widespread perspective, see especially Kloppenborg 1987a; 2000b; 2008; Tuckett 2004; Fleddermann 2005. These studies, together with scholarship focused on the Greek composition and structure of Q (Piper 1982; 1989; Kirk 1998) and the use of Greek in the social settings of its authors (Bazzana 2015a; 2015b) show that there is little sense in speaking of an Aramaic stratum of Q (contra Allison 1997, 47–49; Casey 2002). However, there can be little doubt that Q was produced in a context in which Aramaic was the primary spoken language. 3 On the significance of these geopolitical shifts, see White 1991, 228–38. 4 Josephus, B.J. 2:433–449, 585–646; 4:84–120, 538–563; A.J. 20:102. See Rappaport 1982; S. Schwartz 1994, 294–297; White 2004, 35–39; Kloppenborg 2009b. 5 For the purposes of this study, I focus on the “production” of Q rather than its oral and liter- ary formation and redactional stratification (cf. Bazzana 2015b, 4–5). I recognize that the Q material was developed over time, being transformed from a collection of sayings into a more coherent document, but I am skeptical about how confidently any of these strata may be iso- lated. My analysis relies on what is often considered the “final” recension of Q (Q1 + Q2 + Q3,