Q, the Hypothetical Gospel | Early European History And Religion

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Q

Theory of the Gospels origins involving Q

"Q" is the name of hypothetical first century work that consist of 105 aphorisms and parables directly attributed to Jesus. Many scholars believe it was a literary source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. "Q" is short for “Quelle” , the German word for "source." It has mainly been assembled by deductive reasoning (accumulated passages whose sources can not be traced elsewhere and have certain similarities) and is believed to represent Jesus in his rawest and most honest form. Some date the saying in Q to the A.D. 50, around 30 years after the death of Jesus. Many of the sayings found in Q are also in the Gospel of Thomas.

Marilyn Mellowes of PBS wrote: “Q is the designation for a gospel that no longer exists, but many think must have existed at one time. In fact, even though no copy of this gospel has survived independently, some nineteenth-century scholars found fragments of such an early Christian composition embeded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. [Source: Marilyn Mellowes, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“By putting these two gospels beside that of Mark, scholars realized that when Matthew and Luke are telling the story about Jesus, for the most part they both follow the order and often even the wording of Mark. But, into this common narrative outline, Matthew and Luke each insert extra sayings and teachings of Jesus. And although Matthew and Luke do not put these sayings in the same order, nevertheless they each repeat many of the same sayings, sometimes word for word. Since for other reasons it seems unlikely that either Matthew or Luke could have copied from the other, how can this sort of agreement be explained? The answer appears to be that Matthew and Luke each had two sources in common: the Gospel of Mark and another gospel, now lost, a collection of sayings known only as Q.

"Although no actual copy of Q has ever been found, many scholars are convinced that such a document once circulated in early Christian communities. Since it was difficult to get excited about something that did not exist, Q remained a hypothesis that lingered on the edges of scholarly research. But in 1945, a chance discovery in Egypt provided surprisingly new evidence that rekindled interest in the possible existence of Q.

The Nag Hammadi library provided valuable evidence for the existence of the sayings collection known as Q. “In 1989, a team of researchers led by James M. Robinson of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, CA, began a most unlikely task: the "reconstruction" of the Gospel of Q. Robinson and his team are accomplishing this by a highly detailed literary analysis of Matthew, Luke, and Thomas. Their painstaking work goes "verse by verse, word by word, case ending by case ending." After nearly ten years of work, the results of their efforts are soon to be published as the Critical Edition of Q.

Websites and Resources: Early Christianity: PBS Frontline, From Jesus to Christ, The First Christians pbs.org ; Elaine Pagels website elaine-pagels.com ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com ; Gnostic Society Library gnosis.org ; Guide to Early Church Documents iclnet.org; Early Christian Writing earlychristianwritings.com ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Christianity BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Candida Moss at the Daily Beast Daily Beast; Christian Classics Ethereal Library www.ccel.org ; Bible: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks; Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Gospel of Mary
“The "recovery" of the Q gospel has stimulated a debate about the nature early Christian communities, and by extension, the origins of Christianity itself. One scholar, Burton Mack, has advanced a radical thesis: that at least some Christian communities did not see Jesus as a Messiah; they saw him as a teacher of wisdom, a man who tried to teach others how to live. For them, Jesus was not divine, but fully human. These first followers of Jesus differed from other Christians whose ritual and practice was centered on the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Their did not emerge as the "winners" of history; perhaps because the maintaining the faith required the existence of a story that included not only the life of Jesus but also his Passion.”

Professor Elaine H. Pagels told PBS: “Today there are people who talk about Q as though it's a gospel. Q, as I see it, is not a gospel, it's a hypothesis. When scholars first began to study the gospels of the New Testament, literarily, they discovered that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as the core, sort of the basic story line that they tell. Because Mark is completely incorporated - 16 chapters - into both Matthew and Luke. But they both also used other sayings, parables, and stories and so forth. And scholars observed that there's a part of the sayings in Matthew that are exactly identical with sayings in Luke. In fact they're identical in Greek. [Source: Elaine H. Pagels, The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“Now think — Jesus spoke Aramaic. So if you were translating Aramaic, and if I were translating Aramaic, they'd come out different, these translations. So you would only have Jesus speaking identical sayings in Greek if you had a written translation in Greek of his sayings. And so scholars suggested that there must have been, besides Mark, something else written down that would have been a list of the sayings of Jesus, translated into Greek. And they called that "Quelle" which means source in German. And they call it for short, "Q." Nobody ever has found this source written. We can reconstruct it because we guess that there was such a written source, but nobody has seen it, and it certainly in my mind is not a gospel. It's a very good and well-founded hypothesis.”

If it isn't gospel then what is it? “It was a source of the sayings of Jesus, and it's another picture of Jesus. For example, whoever collected the sayings of Q wasn't interested in the death of Jesus, wasn't interested in the resurrection of Jesus. They thought the importance of Jesus was what he said, what he preached. Now other people thought, "it's not enough to have the sayings of Jesus. You have to tell about his death and his crucifixion and his resurrection, that's the important thing." Now somebody put that all together and we call it Matthew, and we call it Mark, and we call it Luke. But originally these are probably rather distinct pictures.”

Assembling Q

Charlotte Allen wrote: the thirty-five-member Q Project has put in fifteen years of painstaking work, assembling the requisite passages from Matthew and Luke, breaking them down into "variation units" in order to assess the tiniest differences of wording and order, and amassing an enormous computer database of 150 years' worth of scholarly opinion as to whether particular variations represent genuine Q material or creative rewriting by either or both evangelists. [Source: Charlotte Allen, The Atlantic, December 1996 ~]

“At the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, located in a handsome whitewashed brick building on the Claremont campus, Jon Asgeirsson shows off printouts from the Q Project's vast database, including a breakdown of the opening verse of the Lord's Prayer into six heavily annotated variation units, and a ninety-one-page single-spaced analysis of a verse from Matthew that the team ultimately decided was not Q. The reconstructed text as a whole follows the sequential order in which Q material appears in Luke (who is thought to have tampered less with Q's structure), although the wording of the reconstructed passages is derived about 50 percent from Luke and 50 percent from Matthew.~

“Both evangelists read like stripped-down versions of themselves in the Q reconstruction, with most Christian overlay deleted. The Peeters publication of those thousands of pages of material began last spring with the Lord's Prayer reconstruction. A volume on the temptation of Jesus was scheduled for this fall. Further volumes will appear at the rate of four a year for the next fifteen years or so, with each roughly 300-page volume taking up perhaps a hundred words of Q. In addition, the project expects to issue in 1998 a one-volume translation of the reconstructed Q, designed for the public, and a one-volume critical edition of the Greek text, for scholars. The detailed reconstruction work is impressive, but nagging questions remain for any observer. Is it truly possible to turn a hypothetical document into a real document? ~

Implications of Q

Charlotte Allen wrote: The roughly 235 parallel verses in Luke and Matthew that scholars have identified as Q material (their techniques and their reasoning will be discussed in greater detail below) do not include the Gospel narratives of Jesus' passion and resurrection, which seem to have come from other sources, written or oral. Therefore Q partisans contend that the authors of Q knew nothing about the way Jesus died or about the stories of an empty tomb — or if they knew, they did not care. Hence there was no atonement doctrine in Q theology. And because belief in Jesus' resurrection is the core belief of Christianity (even very liberal Christians profess faith in the Easter event, if only as a metaphor for renewal), the people who wrote Q must have been adherents of Jesus' in Palestine who were not "Christians" — unless, as Robinson and others observe, one stretches the word to include anyone who admires Jesus. Scholars used to refer to members of the Q community as "Jewish Christians," a term that can sometimes lead to confusion. The preferred designation nowadays for the group of which they were a part is the "Jesus movement." It took decades, Q partisans believe, before the movement was subsumed into a "cult of Christ," largely gentile and centered on the cross and the resurrection — a cult that became known as Christianity. [Source: Charlotte Allen, The Atlantic, December 1996 ~]

Koester theory

“Having carefully broken down the hypothetical Q text — that is, again, the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke — into layers reflecting the stages of its writing and rewriting over several decades during the first century A.D., some scholars think they can reconstruct not only the document in its earliest form but also the community that produced it: a cadre of itinerant Galilean ascetics ("wandering charismatics" or "wandering radicals," in the words of some Q scholars) who actually heard Jesus speak some of the words in Q and who took seriously his command that they not worship Mammon. ~

Because of their interest in this community, a favorite text among Q scholars is the so-called "mission" speech, in which Jesus instructed his disciples not to take food, knapsacks, money, or extra clothes with them on the road but to depend solely on the hospitality of strangers. Why is the Q community deemed to have been Galilean? Because Jesus did most of his preaching in Galilee, and Q mentions certain towns he visited near the Sea of Galilee: Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. Their residents most likely remembered his sayings and tried to live by them. What's more, Jerusalem, where the memory of Jesus' crucifixion would have been too potent to ignore, is some distance south of Galilee — hence the lack of a passion narrative in Q. "The collection of sayings of Jesus would precede accounts of his passion in terms of age," says Jon Asgeirsson, the associate director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, a Claremont Graduate School-affiliated research center headed by Robinson that is the headquarters of the International Q Project. Asgeirsson and other scholars involved in the project surmise that Jesus' followers started collecting his sayings even before he died, giving them an authenticity and immediacy that the Gospels' passion stories lack. ~

“Also, he says, the apparently primitive state of the Q text — mostly sayings of Jesus without a heavy emphasis on narrative — means that its composition in all likelihood preceded that of the four canonical Gospels, all of which take the form of quasi-biographical narratives, and which most scholars believe were written between A.D. 65 and 100. "A narrative implies some sort of elaboration, which would be later," Asgeirsson says. Some scholars believe that the oldest parts of Q may date from as early as the year 50, twenty years after Jesus' death, putting them among the earliest Christian (or Jesus-movement) writings in existence. ~

“By assigning an early composition date to Q, placing the Q community in Galilee, and imputing to its members some firsthand knowledge of what Jesus said, scholars have built into their reconstructed text an apparent window of authenticity that permits a glimpse of who in their view the real Jesus was. Other depictions of Jesus from the decades after his death — Jesus the resurrected redeemer, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the lord of the apocalyptic future — might represent equally valid perceptions of the way the real Jesus conducted himself, but in the eyes of its advocates only the Q text records a sustained living voice. If one accepts this logic and follows it through, one is forced to conclude that this non-Christian Jesus — the Galilee-based wise man who displayed no interest in the end of the world, resurrection, or redemption — is about as "historical" a Jesus as modern scholars are likely to retrieve. It is no wonder that Mack believes that the publication of the reconstructed Q text could undermine Christianity as strictly defined.” ~

Q Text

The following is samples of Q text prepared by the International Q Project: “Q 3:7 He said to the [crowds] who came to hi[s] bapti[sm], Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Q 3:8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our father; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham! Q 3:9 Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore not bearing good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. [Source: Sterling Bjorndahl, International Q Project of the Society of Biblical Literature, as of November 1996, Theological Network, web.archive.org]

Q 3:16b I baptize you with water, but the one coming after me is stronger than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to remove; he will baptize you with holy spirit and fire; Q 3:17 whose winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Q 4:1-2 And Jesus was led [by] the spirit into the wilderness 4:2 to be tempted by the devil. And [he ate nothing] for forty days; .. he was hungry. Q 4:3 And the devil said to him, If you are the son of God, command the[se] stone[s] to become [] loa[ves]. Q 4:4 And Jesus answered, It is written, A person does not live by bread alone.

Q 4:9 [The devil] took him to "Jerusalem" and put him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the son of God, throw yourself down []. Q 4:10 For it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, Q 4:11 and On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. Q 4:12 And Jesus answered him, [] It is written, You shall not test the Lord your God.

Q 4:5-7 And [the devil] took him to a [very high] mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, 4:6 and said to him [], All these I will give you, 4:7 if you worship me. Q 4:8 And Jesus said to him, [] It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and only serve him. Q 4:13 And [] the devil left him.

Q 6:20 And [lift]ing his [eyes to] his disciples he said: Blessed are the poor, for [yours] is the kingdom of God. Q 6:21 Blessed are the hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are the [weep]ing, for you will laugh. Q 6:22 Blessed are you .. when they revile you and they ... and they ... you... evil on account of the son of man. Q 6:23 Rejoice and [be glad], for your pay is great in heaven, for so they did to the prophets [before you]. Q 6:27-28.. [] Love your enemies 6:28 [and] pray for those who [abuse] you.

Bible Code

In the 1997 book “The Bible Code” , former Washington Post journalist Michael Drosnin claimed the Bible predicted certain events such as the Holocaust, Edison's invention of the light bulb and the assassination of Yitzak Rabin.

Drawing on a 1994 article by three Israeli scholars in the mathematics journal Statistical Science, which showed that the names of important rabbis and their birth dates appeared in Genesis, Drosnin found the "predictions" using a high-power computer and "skip code" in which messages are found by examining every 10th, or 44th or 4,772th letter.

Critics claim that the so called "code" is an example of "data mining." They say that if a high number of skip codes are employed they will reveal just about anything. Some scholars have found just as startling prophecies in Tolstoy's “War and Peace” , the Law of the Sea treaty and the Detroit Yellow Pages.

Image Sources: Wikimedia, Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); King James Version of the Bible, gutenberg.org; New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org , Frontline, PBS, Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024