Matthew and Q: The Matthean Deployment of Q and Mark in the Apocalyptic Discourse

From the publisher\u27s website: In their recent work on Matthew’s compositional use of the Sayings Gospel Q, Ulrich Luz and James M. Robinson differ considerably as to the compositional procedures of the author in his use of Q, although both propose that the Matthean community was, sociohistorically as well as theologically, the direct descendent of the Q community. This paper evaluates the approaches of Luz and Robinson in light of Matthew’s use of the latter parts of Q in the composition of the Apocalyptic Discourse (Matthew 24–25). In the first half of this discourse, Matthew inserted a brief excerpt from Q into his redacted text of Mark 13,1-32; but having exhausted his Markan source, and still having relevant Q material at his disposal, Matthew used the eschatological tropes of the Q material as the template for his arrangement of both Q and Sondergut. However, Q could never function on the same level as Mark as a “structuring hypotext” for the whole gospel. The paper also examines how Matthew’s reinterpretation of the sayings of the latter part of Q is largely dependent on his new (post-70 and post-Markan) eschatological framework. Matthew still sees the usefulness of Q’s eschatological sayings (and of Mark 13) although he no longer can agree with the frameworks in which they were originally deployed. The paper thus argues that Q as a document in its own right – and not just its dominical contents – was of continuing importance to Matthew, and that this evidence can also support the conclusion on other grounds of some kind of sociohistorical connection between the Q and Matthean communities