Steven Carr

The old Sherlock-Holmes Jesus....

The character of Sherlock Holmes was based on a real person.

Therefore, Sherlock Holmes existed, as being based on a real person is all that is needed to be a historical character. Ask any Bible historian.

DCHindley

razly,

Wazzup with the Q rebellion? It has even reached Azerbaijan? Honestly, is it the whole concept of a hypothetical document (now lost except in how it was used as a source), or what modern "liberal" scholarship has made of it?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fundie and in many of my social views I am a liberal. Yet I think it is way more than likely that the gospels of Mt & Lk both used Mk & a second source as their primary sources. Yes I am aware that other literary relationships between these three gospels are possible, but I am not really impressed by them.

However, I am not happy with what modern "liberal" scholarship, principally reflected in works by J D Crossan or B Mack and the other members of the Jesus Seminar, have made of Jesus. Westerners have developed so many romantic notions about Christianity and its ethical and moral superiority over any other religion that it has become the unconscious mantra for many modern social liberals. They have developed this idea that Christianity's greatest contribution to Western society is its "social gospel."

Many modern social critics were influenced by the 1960's counter culture as well, and I remember thinking (this was the mid to late 1970's) that modern liberal biblical critics were turning Jesus into a Buddhist or 1960s campus radical. Based on interpretations of the research of J Kloppenborg, who had concluded (probably correctly) that Q was a form of wisdom literature typical to the age and region, Q then became the supreme example of profound counter-cultural wisdom, and of course must have been the core of what any real Jesus taught.

By the 1980s Jesus is a wandering charismatic preacher and by the 90's a kind of in-your-face but essentially harmless Cynic, like pie-thrower Mark Canfora (publicly threw a cream pie in the Ohio governor's face as a protest) or the Revolutionary Three Stooges Brigade (hippie yippie nihilism), not some dangerous claimant to the Jewish national crown like the gospels have to admit he was actually executed for.

I like Kloppenborg, but have come to the less traveled conclusion that Q was indeed derived from the wisdom literature of the time, but was probably not actually Jesus' own teachings but borrowed to make the presentation of Jesus in Mt & Lk seem less rough and less threatening to a Roman administrator. "Jesus was simply a misunderstood wisdom teacher, who was unjustly accused of treason by those untrustworthy Jews." The Gospels are, in effect, "apologies" (a class of literature) for Christianity as it existed in the late 1st or early 2nd centuries CE.

DCH

razlyubleno

Well... it reached New Zealand before I left there, and I will make every effort to preach it in the streets in a language that I still really don't have the hang of yet.

Oh, I'd be quite happy with Q, regardless of what scholarship has made of it. I just don't see strong enough evidence for it, and it makes me depressed to see entire books written about a document that IMHO likely didn't exist, and I grind my teeth just at the suggestion of stratification within a hypothetical document that we can't even reconstruct with any degree of consensus. I'm just feeling pretty speechless watching scholarly castles being built on a foundation of what could very well be... sand. It's driving me nuts.

If Q existed, I'd embrace it with open arms. In fact, I used to be fine with Q. But that was in the beginning, and when you start reading about a subject, you take a lot for granted; you're fairly well enslaved by your sources at that point. But when I got around to reading Goodacre, well... all of a sudden it was okay to be uneasy with Q.

I'm fairly liberal myself. But to be honest, I usually have no idea what it is I believe, couldn't articulate my beliefs if I tried... so I'm agenda-free in that regard.

I haven't definitively decided yet on the issue (I'll first need to read Luke: A New Paradigm, by Goulder, which is out-of-print AFAIK), but Q just seems so damn unnecessary. And I think it's infuriating that scholars look so strained and contorted trying to explain the Minor Agreements, and yet they still maintain that Luke and Matthew were independent. It seems like they need to reevaluate their assumptions, more than anything else.

I think I've quoted this around here before, but it's about the most intelligent thing I've read in a long time... James F. McGrath was talking about the television show LOST, and said,
And that's what I see happening with Q scholarship. They started with a premise that was kind of reasonable given what they knew at the time, but as more information becomes available, as more research turns up more insights, noone seems willing to give up Q... they just keep augmenting the theory, rather than challenging its merit.

Half the reason for holding onto Q seems to be that it provides a separate trajectory to the Historical Jesus, a looking-glass into the very earliest Christian communities... and that, of course, is a very sexy notion, since there is such a lack of independent information. Historians, by their nature, desire answers to their inquiries, they want to know what actually happened, they wanted corroboration between sources, and without Q they get almost none of that. Scholars cling to Q like a child clings to its blanket. To my mind, it has more to do with reassurance and comfort, than with it does with a clear examination of the evidence.

Jesus in one's own image. The eternal problem.

Actually, I think there might be a little societal bias at play. I not sure. I mean, are we actually allowed to hate Jesus? Whatever you happen to end up with once you boil down the gospels to that historical nugget, it has to be fairly romanticized, doesn't it? Or atleast non-offensive. Jesus was a good guy, right? We know that for sure, right?

Sigh.

I tend to think, myself, that very little of the Q material comes from Jesus. But I honestly don't feel too persuaded that the Gospels are apologies, since I can't see who the Christians would be apologizing to. If Mark was written in the last quarter of the 1st-century, which is reasonable, then I don't think Christians would have been distinct enough from Jews to warrant an apology. I think there's a vast exaggeration as to the extent Christians were persecuted (I think the whole Nero thing is just nonsense, for a start).

I really am open to any interpretation of Jesus, or the gospels, or any evaluation of the sources... But I like my arguments to have a ring of truth to them, and I think Q falls flat in that regard, as do all the Jesus the Hippie/Reformer/Pacifist/etc. interpretations. It's not a preexisting prejudice; it's just a matter of wanting stuff to make sense.

Oh, and thank you for your post. It was very interesting.

razly

fatpie42

Why must things make sense? How dogmatic of you! *kidding* :grin: