The title of Robinson’s essay indicates the Gattung, or genre, which he found for Q: LOGOI SOPHON , which he translates as ‘sayings of the sages’, or ‘words of the wise’. Robinson sought
to establish the existence of this genre by referring to a wide variety of sayings collections.
(...) Accordingly, the existence of such documents as m. Abot and the Gospel of Thomas showed that a collection of sayings of Jesus was a possible document: scholars who had maintained that a document in the form of the proposed Q was impossible had been shown to be wrong. That should have been an important gain, and it is regrettable that problems with this genre have prevented it from being such.
The major problem is the nature of this genre itself. If we chop a sonnet in half, we get two halves of a sonnet. A sayings collection is like a worm: if we chop it in two, we get two sayings collections, perhaps a little damaged at the ends. Similarly, if we have an epode and we add
another epode, we get two epodes. A sayings collection is like a glass of Trockenbeerenauslese: pour it into a bigger glass with another glassful, and we still have one glass of Trockenbeerenauslese, and some of us like it better for being bigger; add a sayings collection to another sayings collection and we get one bigger sayings collection.
In practice, this meant that all kinds of tricks could be played with Q. It could be thought to have grown in stages, or to have had different versions, merely because of differences in its supposed parts, but these might have belonged to different documents altogether.
(Maurice Casey, An Aramaic Approach to Q, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 24)
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