The Gospel of Q

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	March 5, 2000

In the Western Christian calendar, we are in the season of Lent, and
so it's an appropriate time to consider a new perspective on who Jesus
was.  For those of you who feel we talk too much about Jesus here,
maybe you can take comfort if I tell you that part of what I have to
say this morning is a demonstration of how the Christian Church got
Jesus wrong for the last two millennia.  Now last Sunday I said that
the best sermons were one that spoke to the heart.  I hope that I will
do that before I finish here, but I am going to have to traverse some
arid intellectual regions before I get to the wells of the spirit.

A powerful tool for the understanding of Jesus was handed to me last
Thanksgiving by my cousin James Robinson, a critical edition of the
Gospel of Q.  No, this has nothing to do with Star Trek.  Q is the
name that New Testament scholars have given for 150 years to a
hypothesized earlier source for some of the material in the gospels of
Matthew and Luke.

You see, we have four Gospels admitted to the canon of scripture:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  If you read them at all closely, you
will see that John is quite different from the other three, and that
the other three have a lot of the same stories and sayings in common.
At some point, someone made a chart of the parallel passages in
Matthew, Mark and Luke and called it a "synopticon," meaning that you
could see all three at the same time.  This is why these three are
called the "synoptic" gospels.

Now, before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, tradition held that
Matthew was the first written of the Gospels, and that it was written
by the Apostle Matthew, in other words, that it was an eyewitness
account of the life of Jesus.  Albert Schweitzer still held this view
at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but by then most scholars,
through careful linguistic analysis, had come around to the view that
Mark was the first to be written, and that it was written sometime
after the fall of the Second Temple, in 70 CE.

I will digress a moment into 1st Century history.  First, a word on
contemporary usage for dates in ancient history:  I grew up with BC
and AD, meaning Before Christ and Anno Domini, the year of our Lord.
Those dates obviously assume a Christian frame of reference and are
not appropriate when dealing with a scholarly or more general
audience, so we use the term C.E.  for "common era" and B.C.E.  for
Before Common Era.  Jesus was born, from what we know now, about 4
B.C.E.  and was crucified in about 30 C.E., after a public ministry of
a year or, by John's account, three years.  St.  Paul's conversion
probably happened about 50 C.E., almost two decades after Jesus'
execution, and his letters were mostly written in the 50's.  Paul's
mission was to the gentiles, but he had to make peace with the older
strain of Jesus' followers, the Jewish followers of Jesus led by
Cephas and James.  This is described in the 18th Chapter of Acts.

In about 68 C.E., the Jews revolted against Roman rule, but the revolt
was decisively put down by the Romans, and they completed the task
with the total destruction of the holiest site in the Jewish religion,
the temple in Jerusalem, which was deemed to be God's actual
residence.  This was the second Temple on the site, the first one
having been built by Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians.  The
destruction of the Second Temple not only broke the rebellion, but
pierced the heart pf Palestinian Judaism.  It was gradually
reorganized by the Pharisees after a meeting at the town of Jamnia in
90 C.E.

Now back to the Gospels.  All of the canonical Gospels, the four in
the Bible, were written after the destruction of the Second Temple.
Mark was first.  Almost all of the material in Mark also appears in
Matthew and Luke.  There is some material in Matthew that is unique to
Matthew, and there is some material to Luke that is unique to Luke.
So far, so good.  We assume that the people who wrote Matthew and Luke
had access to the text of Mark and used it freely, and also added some
stuff of their own.  But that isn't the end of the story.  Because
there are also passages that Matthew and Luke have in common, but
which are not found in Mark.

This fact gives rise to the theory that the writers of both Matthew
and Luke had, in addition to Mark, access to another literary source,
and that unknown source was given the name Q, for quelle, much as the
name Quark was given to an unknown but hypothesized particle in
physics.  The Q hypothesis was first floated in 1838, and effectively
demonstrated in 1863.  But it has only been recently that a definitive
version of the Gospel of Q has been available.

For this I have my cousin James to thank.  James Robinson is a New
Testament scholar who for years has headed the Institute for Antiquity
and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont,
California.  He is a man of singular passions.  In the late Sixties,
through a series of cloak-and-dagger operations, he broke the
scholarly monopoly on a set of ancient Gnostic texts which were
discovered in 1945 in the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, the most
important ancient document find since the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Once
James had a photocopy of the coptic original, he assembled a team of
scholars to provide an English Translation which came out in the early
1970's, the Nag Hammadi Library.  One of the texts was the Gospel of
Thomas, which is a set of sayings of Jesus.  Its discovery was almost
like the experimental verification of the quark, because it contained
about 80% of the material which was predicted to be in Q.

Now after his Nag Hammadi work, James went back to New Testament
studies, and the papers he handed me last Thanksgiving, when he was in
town, are the critical edition of the gospel of Q, and his own
analysis of what that means for the lessons of Jesus.  You may well be
asking, how do scholars arrive at a critical edition of a text of
which no written copy survives?  Here is how James explains on the
website of the International Q Project:

"Over the past decade a team of about forty scholars, with centers at
the Institute, as well as in Toronto, Canada, and Bamberg, Germany,
have worked at reconstituting this lost Gospel, word by word.  For by
observing how Matthew and Luke edited their other main source, the
Gospel of Mark, which has survived, one can establish their editing
policies.  When these are then detected in Matthew or Luke, they can
be discounted in Q sayings, and the text of Q behind Matthew and Luke
can thus be reconstructed."

Clever, huh?

There are three important things I want to say about Q in general, and
then I want to talk about the mission speech that I read from today.
The first is that Q is in form a sayings source, not a narrative of
Jesus' life.  There are a few narrative passages, such as the baptism
of Jesus and his temptation by the devil, but largely Q is the
aphorisms, preachings, prophecies and parables of Jesus.  The Gospel
of Thomas, also, is a sayings source.  In other words, the earliest
writings about Jesus were not biographies, and the story of Jesus'
life was not written down until fifty years after his death.

The second point is a corollary to the first:  there is no account or
even mention in Q of Jesus' birth or death.  This is tremendously
significant when we contrast it not only with the four canonical
Gospels but also with the Epistles of Paul.  Certainly Paul's writing
is grounded on the proposition that Jesus' death and resurrection is
the central fact of the Christian religion, and the Christian church
has basically followed this line.  It has been said that Paul was the
first Christian, and that statement is true if we define Christianity
as a religion premised on Jesus being the Son of God who died to
expiate the sins of humanity.

So it is highly significant that we find nothing of this idea in Q.
There are prophecies hinting darkly at judgment, such as this
(Q13:34-35)

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who
sent her!  How often I have wanted to gather your children together as
a hen gathers her nestlings under her wing, and you were not willing!
Look, your house is forsaken!..  But I tell you, you will not see me
until the time comes when you say:  Blessed is the one who comes in
the name of the Lord!

And there is an exhortation that anyone who would be Jesus' disciple
must "take up his cross and follow after me."  (Q 14:27)

But that is as close as we come to any indication that Jesus would be
executed in Jerusalem.  To appreciate the significance of this
omission, remember that Paul's mission was to the Gentiles outside
Palestine, while the community which produced Q probably consisted of
Palestinian Jews who thought of Jesus as a great rabbi.  The lack of
any reference to Jesus' execution means that to this community which
produced Q, which may have been before the ministry of Paul or at
least among a group of people outside that ministry, the significance
of Jesus' life lay in what he taught, not how he died.

The third significant thing which may give us comfort as UUs is that
there is no mention of the Trinity in this earliest layer of writings
of Jesus followers.  Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit at one point as
something higher than the son of humanity (Q 12:10)

"And whoever says a word against the son of humanity, it will be
forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not
be forgiven him."

If we identify the "son of humanity" with Jesus, the three persons of
the Trinity can be found in Q, but not all assembled in the same
place.  Contrast this with the way they are assembled in the Great
Commission at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, 28th chapter, 19th
verse:

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

This passage is the chief scriptural basis for the doctrine of the
Trinity; the parallel passages in Mark and Luke do not have such a
Trinitarian formulation, and a fair amount of Unitarian ink has been
spilt in trying to show that the Great Commission was a later addition
to the Gospels.  The fact that it doesn't occur in Q is a powerful
support for this Unitarian proposition.

But in the present day, I think we are less interested in the
theological disputes that absorbed our religious ancestors and more
interested in what Q can tell us about what Jesus did and what he
taught.  Many of the people with whom I went to seminary had been
transformed by their experiences in third world countries, and they
came back with a passion for liberation theology.  Liberation theology
looks not at Jesus's sacrifice on the cross but on what is called
praxis, how Jesus and his followers lived their lives and what they
did.  There are communities of faith among the destitute poor in Latin
America and elsewhere that consciously try to model this praxis.

According to James Robinson, probably the most historical information
that Q has to give us is in the mission speech that I read this
morning, for this sets forth the style of the ministry.  Scholars now
think that the earliest Christian itinerant charismatics continued the
preaching and lifestyle of Jesus.

What was that life-style?  Here is what James Robinson says,

"After being baptized by John, Jesus went back to Nazareth apparently
only long enough to break with his past and move to Capernaum, as the
base camp of a circuit that initially may have comprised Capernaum on
the Sea of Galilee, Choraizin in the mountains behind it, and
Bethsaida just across the Jordan to the east, in the safer territory
of Philip.

"What did he do on such a circuit?  He set out without any human
security:  He had no backpack for provisions, no money at all -
penniless, no sandals, no stick - helpless and defenseless.  This
hardly makes sense in terms of the history of religions.  His was
neither the getup of his precursor John the Baptist, nor a Cynic garb.
But it does make sense in terms of his message, as echoed in the other
oldest clusters [of Q]:  one is not anxiety-laden about food and
clothing, any more than the ravens and lilies would seem to be
(Q12:22b-30).  Rather, one trusts God as a benevolent Father to know
one's needs and provide them (Q 11:9-10), while one orients oneself
exclusively to God reigning (Q 12:31).  One prays to God to reign, and
thus provide bread (Q 11:2b-3), trusting that God will not give
instead a stone, but will in fact ...  reign (Q 11:  11-13).

James points out that it is significant that Jesus does not direct his
followers to public synagogues, or marketplaces, and Q does not have
Jesus preaching to multitudes on a Mount, but rather the locus of
action is private houses:

"One walked from farm to farm, from hamlet to hamlet, from house to
house, and there knocked at the door to bring attention to one's
presence and to seek admission.  One called out Shalom!  If admitted,
and thereby accorded the normal hospitality of bed and breakfast, one
conceived of God's peace resting on that house.  Hence the head of
household who admitted Jesus or his disciple was designated 'son of
peace."  If one was turned away at the door, God's peace left along
with Jesus or his disciple.  But what took place in a house that did
not take one in was understood as God reigning.  This was in fact
expressly said to the household while in the home."

God's reign, according to James, involved the hospitality itself, and
the consumption of food and drink by Jesus or his disciples contrasts
with the ascetic philosophy of the followers of John the Baptist.  In
the household Jesus or his disciple may heal the sick and drive out
demons.  In this way they make converts, but for a person to follow
Jesus, he had to cut all family ties, which would not have been easy.

Not only did one have to cut off ones family, one had to love one's
enemies.  James calls this a "supreme value" in Jesus' teaching,

"being what makes one a child of God, God-like since God raises his
sun and showers his rain on the bad as well as on the good (Q
6:35c,d).  The title 'son of God' did not begin as a christological
title [i.e.  as applied to Jesus], but, like the title 'son of peace,'
began as a designation for those involved in the Jesus movement.  But
this is not just a pious sentiment, but means in practice turning the
other cheek, giving the shirt off one's back, going the second mile,
lending without ever asking for it back (Q 6:29-30).  It is living the
Golden Rule even though faced with opposition (Q 6:31).

Being a follower of Jesus, in other words, was not an easy proposition
then, and it is not one now.  Maybe it is a wild leap, but I can't
help thinking, as I read about this picture of Jesus' ministry, of the
similarities to the itinerant Universalist ministers of the early
Nineteenth Century.

I got an insight into that lifestyle last month.  The Wakefield
Historical society just came into possession of the ledger-books of an
early minister who served this church, among others, and when I looked
at it, I saw two books.  One was cash receipts:  each line showed the
date, the town in which the services were performed, and the amount
paid.  Sometimes part of the amount came from the church treasurer and
the president of the congregation made up the difference out of his
own pocket!  The other was a ledger of sermons.  Each line had the
date, the town, and the biblical passage preached on.  I inferred from
that that the point of the ledger was to make sure that the minister
never preached the same sermon in the same town.

While this 19th Century lifestyle might be something of a throwback to
what Jesus practiced, it is still a long way removed, and it points up
how far our own lives are removed from this.  Yes we in America in the
year 2000 sometimes move around, but we generally do it with all the
security we can muster.  Most of us wouldn't think of leaving home
without our cars, our umbrellas, our credit cards and wallets and
proper clothing for protection.  We not only would not knock on a
stranger's door, we will do almost anything to avoid speaking to them
in the street.  Some of us don't even like to talk to people we know
on the telephone.  We live and move within the fortress of our
affluence.

What are we to take from this strange picture?  Maybe this portrait of
Jesus is more repellent than attractive.  Maybe as a picture of what
Jesus was really like comes into sharper focus, we see him less as a
great moral teacher and more as an apocalyptic nut.

Yet contemplating this picture of the ministry of by Jesus and his
followers one is left with the sense that their praxis might be
somehow closer to the holy than our present lives.  That to the extent
we surround ourselves with security, we cut ourselves off from the
holy.

One thing is clear:  Jesus did not do like Emerson and seek the
Kingdom of God in nature.  God might feed the ravens and the lilies on
their own, but Jesus taught his followers to seek food and shelter
with other people.  His ministry and his mission was among people, and
that is the locus of the reign of God.  The radical vulnerability of
Jesus and his disciples reminds us that human need, even
intentionally-created human need, is a sure route to human connection.
And we need reminding of this in America of 2000:  none of us is an
island.  In order to gain the gifts of the spirit, we must open
ourselves to a little more vulnerability.  The spirit enters through
the open heart, and the heart opens in the face of human need.

Amen.