Rollens’ essay builds on the last one I talked about from Kloppenborg that examines the notion of the scribe in constructing the Jesus tradition.  She notes this argument only really pertains to the Q document, as the Gospels and Acts reflect a more sophisticated production. She writes:

Regardless of where one falls on the question of the historical Jesus proper, the topic of “scribal Galilee” and the early Jesus movement is, to my mind, only relevant to Q, because when we turn to the later gospels, we are dealing with cultural expressions of a translocal movement that have lost much of their regional specificity and that have begun to show marks of more elite forms of literature. What this means, then, is that Q provides us with some of the most relevant data for understanding scribal Galilee close to the time and place of the historical Jesus and the bureaucratic perpetuation of ideas in his name.

She argues what we see in Q reflects mid-level urban administrative/bureaucratic scribal activity in both content and form:

Not only does Jesus spout numerous ethical teachings in Q, but in general his wise sayings valorize “clarity of perception,” “guidance,” “good speech,” and “moral examples,” which reflect, as one Q expert notes, “the self-consciously ‘public’ nature of the scribal pursuit [in these sorts of texts].” In other words, the content of Q reflects precisely the scribal, intellectual values that other sapiential, instructional literature does. There are other details in Q’s content that suggest a distinct kind of administrative scribal competency. In particular, many of the examples that Q uses throughout Jesus’s sayings are topoi drawn from the world of urban administration.… It is not impossible that people from a different social location would be familiar with such phenomena, but to use them so consistently and with so little reflection on their appropriateness seems to suggest we are dealing with authors who saw these sorts of situations on a day-to-day basis and who considered these scenarios the most appropriate ones with which to argue…[T]his discussion has focused on examples that reveal the unstated assumptions of the authors or the experiences that they (apparently) assume to be self-evidently persuasive. Many of these happen to be scenarios with which village scribes would have been intimately familiar… [In terms of form], Q’s authors decided to write this down, they drew on their repertoire of knowledge for what official documents and records looked like… [Bazzana] has shown that specific lexical items in Q reflect the “highly formulaic documents” that administrative officials regularly penned…The compositional techniques of the document, as we have noted, betray habits associated with mundane administrative writing: drafting petitions, creating contracts, recording inventories of storage caches, and the like.

Given the early dating of Q, we have an interesting window here into how the Jesus movement developed:

Gousopoulos finds the latter option compelling, which thus provides us with an instance of administrative figures, connected translocally to their counterparts in other towns and villages, sharing aspirations to own and (presumably) to read elite literature. Against the idealized picture of how the Jesus movement spread in the Four Gospels, Acts, and Eusebius’s idealized narrative, the collaboration, communication, and spread of ideas through preexisting scribal networks simply make more sense than any other romanticized idea of apostles transporting texts around as part of their “mission” in first-century Roman Palestine… As I have shown, Q uses a cache of imagery and literary techniques that makes sense originating among middling administrative figures. We should thus abandon the idea that illiterate peasants kept the Jesus traditions alive simply by telling stories for decades until the gospels were written. Rather, we can agree with Douglas Oakman that “Jesus of Nazareth entered the pages of history due to the work of sympathetic scribes.” …In short, village administrators truly might have been some of the most well-connected people in the social landscape of the Roman Empire—akin to the axial figures and mediating intellectuals that we often find facilitating the spread of social and political movements throughout history. The movement of ideas and people through these sorts of networks makes much more sense than simply taking over the gospel myths themselves and concluding that we are dealing with radical itinerant preachers or a cadre of charismatic wonder-workers. Yes, that is what the texts are about, but we are not obliged to accept this as a viable historical explanation for the development of the tradition.

I wonder if Jesus’ original followers were really fisherman, or if this vocation was invented for them to embody the imperative to be “fishers of men.” Rollens provides us a window into the reception history about who traditionally wanted to preserve ideas about Jesus. Recall, Q is a hypothetical lost document preserved as the material common to Matthew and Luke that does not come from Mark. Though the existence of Q is the majority position, a few like Carrier and Goodacre argue Q is really just Luke copying Matthew, although this minority position doesn’t seem to account for the administrative scribe form and content of the Q material which distinguishes it from Matthew.

Bibliography

Rollens, Sarah.  Scribal Galilee in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp 392-415). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).