Finding the Shards #23
A new array of critical approaches to these texts then created a twentieth-century excitement of its own. New Testament scholars learned about discourse, rhetoric, narrative imagination, and the relation of authorship to authority. They explored patterns of social formation, the structures of human societies, the creation of symbolic worlds, and the ways in which myths and rituals worked to forge a group's identity. When used to read the literature produced by early Christians, this new learning brought groups and movements into view that had no place on the older map of Christian beginnings.
Q suddenly seemed important for reasons that had nothing to do with solving the synoptic problem. It caught scholarly attention along with a host of extracanonical writings from the early periods of Christian history, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Didache, the Apostolic Fathers, the Coptic-Gnostic writings, the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, and the Gospel of Peter. Q was now on its own, a document from the time before the narrative gospels were written. Many scholars sensed Q's importance and were eager to take it up for study. Unfortunately, basic work still had to be done. The text had to be established, the literary form of the composition was yet to be determined, and the early history of transmission and composition still needed thorough investigation. Studies that contributed to these endeavors began to appear early in the 1970s, then flourished during the 1980s and show no signs of stopping.