The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections

In this groundbreaking study, Kloppenborg uses genre criticism and redaction criticism to examine the composition and development of the sayings source Q. He argues that Q is composed of three compositional layers, or strata, each of which reflects certain stages of development in the Q community. The first, and formative, layer reflects the influence of collections of ancient sapiential sayings and contains six wisdom speeches. The second layer reflects the influence of the prophetic literature of judgment and contains prophetic oracles and many Son-of-Man sayings. A third layer adds a temptation story, which moves the document from a chriae collection in the direction of a biography. James Robinson at Claremont University notes: €œJohn Kloppenborg€™s impressively wide-ranging survey of the various genres of collection sayings in antiquity and his placing of Q within that context have elevated this dimension of the study of Q to a new niveau of sophistication. With its publica