Finding the Shards #12
But the two-document hypothesis answered more questions about textual relations among the three gospels than did the theory of Matthean priority and thus, as in any scientific field of research, it had to be taken seriously by critical scholars. And it was taken seriously, although progress in demonstrating its superiority was slow. One has to follow the twists and turns of biblical scholarship for about one hundred years to see the eventual shift in paradigm that allowed Q to be read as a text in its own right. The list of those who made lasting contributions to the testing and refinement of the hypothesis is long and illustrious. H. J. Holtzmann put the Q idea to the test in an exhaustive investigation in 1863 and concluded that it was essentially correct. Bernard Weiss, a careful and conservative New Testament scholar, demonstrated Luke's dependence on Q in 1907. In the same year Adolf von Harnack, the well-known historian of early Christianity, actually published a little book called The Sayings of Jesus (English translation 1908) in which, for the first time, a collection of sayings approximate to Q was published apart from its gospel context. Harnack wanted to see how the teachings of Jesus sounded when divorced from a setting of miracle and myth.