TimBowe

The discovery of Q may create some consternation for Christians because accepting Q’s challenge is not merely a matter of revising a familiar chapter of history. It is a matter of being forced to acknowledge an affair with one’s own mythology. The disclosure of a myth is deemed academic as long as the myth belongs to somebody else. Recognizing one’s own myth is always much more difficult, if not downright dangerous. The reason for this is the way myths work their magic. Myths are guardians of cultural identity and work best when taken for granted. Left undisturbed, a myth makes it possible to assume that others agree in advance on the rules that govern the daily round. Should a myth ever be named and questioned, the collective agreements basic to a society’s well-being come unglued and people feel unsettled. The Christian myth is particularly vulnerable to unsettling questions. Most myths take place once upon a time in an irreal world. Like all stories, they allow the listener to suspend judgment while watching the story unfold. Christian myth claims to be history and asks its adherents to believe that it is true. As long as there is no other data from which to construct a different account of the same chapter of history, the Christian myth can work much the same way as other myths. Christians can simply bracket the story of Jesus from the rest of human history and treat it as an exceptional movement, realizing that the events recorded are fantastic but allowing the story to stand. A remarkable irony can serve as a final observation on the nature of Q’s challenge from within the New Testament. Q was not only essential to the gospels as a source for the teachings of Jesus, or as a precursor mythology upon which the narrative gospels were built. In the course of developing their mythology at the Q2 level, the authors of Q used a clever interextual reference that caught the attention of the authors of the gospels and eventually determined the logic by which not only the gospels but also the New Testament canon were linked to the Hebrew Scriptures to form the Christian Bible. This textual reference was the use of the Malachi citation to predict the appearances of John and Jesus. It has been mentioned that Mark made programmatic use of the John-Jesus story to introduce his gospel and that Matthew and Luke followed Mark and embellished his account. Mark used the Malachi citation (Mal. 3:1) in combination with a forceful prediction from Isaiah about a voice crying in the wilderness (Isa. 40:3) to introduce John at the very beginning of his story. Matthew and Luke undid thus combination, using the Isaianic prediction to introduce John at the appropriate point toward the beginning of their stories, while reserving the Malachi prediction for its proper annunciation by Jesus, just as Q had it (Matt. 11:10; Luke 7:27).


We can now make the observation that these references to Malachi helped determine the structure of the Christian Bible. During the period of canon formation, the early Christian writing were not the only scriptures of importance to the church. The epic literature of Israel was also under constant discussion as a record of the history of divine intention that Jesus and the church “fulfilled.” The Christian claim to novelty could only be forceful if its recent origin could be seen as the perfection of ancient ideas. But, of course, the Hebrew Scriptures belonged to the Jews, not to the Christians. Thus the Christian appropriation of the epic of Israel became an issue of fundamental significance for the church. It had to be read as a story that somehow anticipated the Christ, and it had to be arranged to interlock with the New Testament. In the process of making the Hebrew epic one’s own, Christians rearranged the order in which the Hebrew Scriptures occurred in the Jewish Bible. Q’s challenge strikes to the heart of the traditional understanding of Christian origins. Lying at the bedrock of the earliest traditions about Jesus and his first followers, Q documents a Jesus movement that was not Christian. The Jesus movement that produced Q cannot be shunted aside as a group of people who missed the dramatic events portrayed in the narrative gospels. They cannot be dismissed as those who mistook Jesus, failed to understand his message, or misunderstood their mission to found the church. The reason they cannot be dismissed is because they were there at the beginning. Q reveals what Jesus people thought about Jesus before there was a Christian congregation of the type reflected in the letters of Paul, and before the idea of a narrative gospel was even dared. When that thought did occur, it was Q that the authors of the narrative gospels used as a foundation upon which to build their own novel myths of origin. Q is the best record we have for the first forty years of the Jesus movements. There are other snippets of early tradition about Jesus, but they all generally agree with the evidence from Q. As remembered by the Jesus people, Jesus was much more like a Cynic-teacher than either a Christ-savior or a messiah with a program for the reformation of second-temple Jewish society and religion.

graymouser

Dude, a couple of paragraph breaks would really help the readability of this rather dense text.

Anywho, what makes you think that Q predates Paul? I don't have an opinion either way, but it seems to be a major point in your argument and I don't see a clear case for it.

Toto

This seems to be cribbed from Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: the Book of Q & Christian Origins (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Available on Google Books, p.242-3 (It's easier to read there.)

TimBowe

Burton Mack is a very prominent New Testament Scholar.

Toto

What is it that you want to discuss?

Burton Mack is very prominent, but that doesn't mean that he is right, or that other prominent scholars agree with him.

Some prominent scholars are Q skeptics, who do not believe that Q ever existed. They would disagree with the idea that Q preserves any information from an early church.

TimBowe

Have you read this review from From Publishers Weekly

TimBowe

He is a very important New Testament Scholar.

aa5874

The source for the Gospels may have been the Memoirs of the Apostles as found in the writings of Justin Martyr. It would appear that the Memoirs of the Apostles had no named authors or that no author or authors did admit that they wrote the Memoirs of the Apostles.

The first writing, by Irenaeus, that there were known authors of the Gospels is after the writing of Justin Martyr.

Amaleq13

This forum is for discussing the evidence upon which his and other scholars' work is based.

Discussion isn't advanced much by simple declarations that a given opinion originated with an "important scholar", right? Important scholars get it wrong sometimes. That's where the discussions come in.

TimBowe

Well how is he wrong? O that's right he's not wrong!!!!!