The Gospel of Q: the Gospel that doesn’t exist

The gospel of Q doesn’t exist. It was absorbed into the gospels of Matthew and Luke. But the gospel of Q does exist. It can be reconstructed as a separate document, casting Christianity in a new light. Q. stands for Quelle, the German word for source. Scholars figured out that large parts of Matthew and Luke told not just the same story, but used almost the same words. Both are working with an oral tradition, but while oral traditions repeat set scenes, they do not repeat large sections of material almost word for word. So, scholars removed these sections and put them together, and lo Q was born. This is sometimes called the two-source hypothesis, Mark + Q = Matthew or Luke.

Q contains roughly 235 verses found in Matthew and Luke, about an equal number from each. Without Q, Matthew and Luke would have lost much of their content, the Sermon on the Mount aQ nd the Beatitudes becoming no more than passing references. Q. provides the content.

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How much do we know about the historical Jesus?

How much do we know about the historical Jesus? Not much, but before going any further it’s worth asking why bother looking for the historical Jesus in the first place? For almost all Christians, Jesus is a figure of faith and belief, not a subject of historical study. But what about Paul and the gospels, the reader might ask? Aren’t they the source of our knowledge of the historical Jesus? No. Paul and the authors of the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) wrote about Jesus in order to create a man who fit the needs of first-century Christians. They cannot be considered historical sources, even if some of the things they say are historical true.

What can we know historically?

There is widespread (if not always total) consensus that Jesus was baptized by John, that he taught and preached in Galilee, that he drew followers to himself, that he was known as an effective miracle worker and exorcist, and that he made a final journey to Jerusalem for Passover where, in conjunction with an incident in the temple, he was arrested, convicted by Pilate and crucified. (Eddy and Beilby, pp 47-48)

In recent years the Jewishness of Jesus has been unquestioned. In every facet of his life Jesus was a Jew. He was born a Jew, educated as a Jew, and lived as a Jew.

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Christianity and Buddhism don’t belong together

Christianity and Buddhism don’t belong together. Just over fifty years ago, the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, made a pilgrimage to India to meet the Tibetan Buddhist, Chongyam Trungpa, in the hope of fostering an interfaith dialog between Christianity and Buddhism. The dialog has flourished. Buddhist-Christian Studies is an established journal, and interfaith conferences abound. Curiously, a number of believers have chosen to combine their faiths. Paul Knitter’s Without the Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian explains why this combination works for him; evidently it does for many.

This makes no sense to me. Christianity and Buddhism are so fundamentally different that even the question of dialog makes me wonder. Not about the desirability of people of different faiths talking with each other; that’s always a good thing. But about attempts to show similarities: Jesus was like a bodhisattva (a Buddhist holy man), or that the experience of prajna, or enlightenment, corresponds to the Christian experience of God. The only work I know of that even questions their commensurability is in an essay of that title, “Are Buddhism and Christianity Commensurable?” Remember that commensurable means not similar, but alike enough even to be fruitfully compared. The essay in Wikipedia, “Buddhism and Christianity,” is as good as anything I have read on this subject, primarily because it displays their vast differences.

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Parables of Jesus

Parables of Jesus. Parables are stories. Lots of effort has gone into defining parables. Some argue that they are like analogies, in which one thing stands for another. But that definition would assume that every parable can be taken apart, so that this means that. Better to see the parable as a short story whose meaning is set by the context.

Parables are the main way Jesus Christ explains the kingdom of God, to show the character of God, and the expectations that God has for humans (Snodgrass, p 1). Parables make up over 35% of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke).* Most scholars believe that the parables are the bedrock of Christ’s teachings, the closest we can get to what he actually said. Trouble is, the meaning of many parables is ambiguous. Another trouble is that we have only the evangelists’ interpretation of the parables, and they had a theological agenda, set by the resurrection. Generally, this is not a problem, for it is this we want to know. However, there are other ways of trying to get behind Jesus’ intent, and I will share one of them with you.

Parables remind me of the questions Socrates posed as he went about his day, such as “what is justice?” or “what is excellence?” Simple questions with big answers. But the real similarity resides in the way in which Jesus’ parables and Socrates’ questions call for answers. Not just to the question posed, but an answer that requires turning one’s life around. The Hebrew term for riddle, mashal, also means parable. It is up to us to find the answer. My favorite definition is that the parable is intended to “deceive the hearer into the truth.”

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The good atheist: Melvin Konner and Belief

The good atheist: Melvin Konner and Belief. Atheists generally don’t write good books. Not because they are atheists, but because their goal is to convince others that belief in God is bad. Most well-known among them are the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” as they have been called: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. The title of Hitchens’ book is not subtle: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The thing about atheists like this is not that they don’t believe in God; it’s that their disbelief becomes a crusade against religion as the source of most bad things. I don’t like team sports, and classical music doesn’t do much for me. But it would never occur to me that those who like, or even love these things shouldn’t do it, even if I think a lot of money is wasted on big sports. Atheism today has become synonymous with aggressive atheism: belief is bad.

Awe

This is why Melvin Konner’s recent book, Believers: Faith in Human Nature, is so welcome. Raised an orthodox Jew, Konner became an atheist at 17, the result of several factors, including a college course in philosophy. But Konner’s book is not an argument for atheism. It’s an argument for understanding what belief is, where it comes from, and what it does for the believer.

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Bultmann forgets about Christ

Bultmann forgets about Christ. Rudolf Bultmann is probably the twentieth-century’s leading Protestant theologian, though some would give that title to Karl Barth. It hardly matters. The point is that Bultmann has been remarkably influential.

Perhaps his greatest influence has been on how to think about the kerygma (κήρυγμα), the message of the gospels. Bultmann is not subtle.

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modem medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. (New Testament and Myth, loc 107)

Miracle healings, walking on water, lots of bread and fish, heaven as up there—all that is part of the myth. How to distinguish the myth from the message without adopting Thomas Jefferson’s Deism, in which God becomes a distant watchmaker, someone who created the world, and has since stepped away? * How can kerygma still live?

Kerygma: the experience and the message

What remains is faith, and faith begins in wonder. Not in miracles, but in the experience of the sublime, “the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear.” (Rilke) Kerygma is not just, or even primarily, about the message of the gospels. It is an encounter with God. Not with Christ, for Christ is a historical reality (Ladd, p 96). Kerygma is a pre-verbal encounter with the wholly other (Congdon, pp 23-24, 74). It can happen in an encounter with beauty, or in the experience of being alive after a close encounter with death. Boundary or limit experiences they are often called.

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The Resurrection

The Resurrection. Many liberal Protestants seem slightly embarrassed about the resurrection, as if it were part of the magical mystery world of the New Testament. Or at least this is what Wikipedia says. For most Christians, however, resurrection remains the central doctrine of Christianity (Evans, p 29). Believing in the resurrection is tantamount to being a Christian. I suppose I come closer to being a liberal Protestant, but the resurrection is more complicated than reflected by these two categories.

Resurrection in the time of Jesus

Among the elite at the time of Jesus, physical resurrection was abhorrent. The elite, mostly Sadducees, were Hellenistic (Greek) in their attitude toward the body: that it was the prison of the soul. Death meant the liberation of the soul from the body, as Socrates and Plato taught.

Among the less cultured Greeks, as well as the Philistines, belief in the resurrection of the body, today’s official belief among most Christians, was more common (Vermes, loc 612). During the years (forty of them) during which I taught Plato, I thought the Platonists were right. If there is an afterlife, the soul would be free of the burden, demands, and desires of the body. Physical resurrection seemed weird. But the more Christian theology I read, the more sense physical resurrection makes to me. Not as a statement of fact (I don’t know what the facts are), but as a statement about how humans are fundamentally embodied creatures. Life without the body would be less, not more, than it is on earth. Jürgen Moltmann’s argument is particularly persuasive.

Paul states the theological significance of resurrection

It is in Paul that the central theological significance of the resurrection was laid out. Many readers of the New Testament will be familiar with this passage.

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:14-19)

Evidence for the resurrection

The search for historical evidence of the resurrection seems misguided. The historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion is sound. However, it puzzles me that such a brilliant scholar as N. T. Wright could conclude that the evidence for the resurrection provided by two far from certain facts, the empty tomb, and the posthumous appearances of the risen Jesus, make the resurrection as historically certain as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the death of Augustus in 14 AD (p 710).

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Is Paul anti-Semitic? Does God play fair?

Paul’s letter to the Roman’s is difficult. One reason is because Paul seems uncomfortable with a couple of his own conclusions. But one thing is clear. It is the most sustained statement of Paul’s theology (Moo, loc 4011-4019). But what is that?

One theme concerns the relationship between Jews for Jesus and Gentiles for Jesus. The Jews came first, they remain God’s chosen people, but they remain stuck on the law. God is not concerned with the law. He is concerned with faith and justification.

Another theme is God’s wrath, as well as his caprice. How could God hate Esau before he was born (Romans 9:13)? (The Greek term used for hate is misei, and should not be rendered by a weaker verb. See Strongs 3404). What sense does that make?

A related theme is that it’s all up to God. We deserve nothing; whatever we get is due to the loving generosity of God.

What strikes me most is how Paul seems to struggle with the answers he comes up with, not always liking their implications, but with the result that his explanation is even more troubling.

Jews and Gentiles

For Paul, two things are striking about the Jews. They were and remain God’s chosen people. Abraham and the other patriarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures remain sacred to God (11:26). At the same time, Jews have taken a wrong turn. They zealously trust in the law, by which Paul means not only the Ten Commandments, but the purity codes spelled out in Leviticus and elsewhere.

Often times Paul is simply read as an argument for faith over works, but that’s too simple. By works Paul meant (as Luther meant) the works of the law. And faith is only revealed by the works of the spirit. Without the works of the law we would not know sin; but we are redeemed by faith. We need both; they are not exclusive.

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