The ‘Galilean Q Community’ and the Orientalist Legacy in 2DH Scholarship

Abstract

Contemporary Q scholarship imagines the existence of a ‘Galilean Q Community’ furnished with a simple religious piety standing over against Judean/Jerusalem-centered Judaism with its narrow ethnic particularism, its cult ritualism, and its scribal legalism. The ‘Galilean Q community’ plays the same role vis-à-vis Judean Judaism in the imaginary of contemporary Q scholarship that Sufi Islam does in past and present western Orientalist discourses on Islam: in G. A. Lipton’s words, as embodying ‘a type of philosophical Protestantism freed from all outward prescriptions of religious law’, as an ‘Oriental version of a Kantian universal faith’ over against Islamic orthodoxy, which is Semitic, legalistic, obsessed with Sharia, dogmatic, ritualistic, intolerant, coercive, and politicized. This essay explores the roots of this Orientalist paradigm in nineteenth-century Synoptic source criticism and its continued influence in circles of 2DH scholarship.