Finding the Shards #20
Form criticism dominated New Testament scholarship through the period of the second world war and well into the 1970s. Thus it was not a time for concentrated studies on Q as a document with its own integrity, much less as an important new window onto the social landscape of the early Jesus movement. Just as the Gospel of Mark had fallen into fragments, so was Q still thought of as a collection of small, isolated sayings. These sayings could be analyzed as forms of speech, to be sure. But form-critical analysis also required some social situation or literary context in order to understand the point of an individual saying. Since Q had not been recognized as a literary production with its own social history, the sayings did not have such a setting and thus the study of the sayings in Q could not contribute much to the form-critical project.