Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel:The Book of Q and Christian Origins, Harper,
San Francisco. Mack is Presbyterian minister, Professor of NT Studies at
Claremont School of Theology, Claremont CA
Mack says that Q is wisdom sayings, a collection of aphorisms ascribed to a
teacher of sage. These pithy sayings were the earliest strata of Christian
tradition, which later got put together into things like the sermon on the
Mount. He says that Q is a hypothesis that answers most questions, and so a
scholarly consensus is building that assumes the veracity of Q. He thinks
Jesus was a Cynic type philosopher. He did not emerge from Jewish
tradition.
Q has no mention of virgin birth, nor is Jesus a martyr figure. It is
possible Jesus was crucified, but that is not in the context of Q as we
know it. Perhaps Jesus died as part of an antiRoman protest along with
other Galileans. Mack says he is not very interested in the historical
Jesus, but in the early Christians. Jesus is the creation of the Q
community. By 70 there was a shift from wisdom to narrative. The focus came
to be on who Jesus was, rather than on what he taught. The Q community was
interested in what they called the Kingdom of God, an egalitarian social
order. Present concern about the historicity of the Jesus story are a sort
of cop-out. Mack told National Catholic Register, for issue of May 9, 1993
(interview with Gabriel Meyer) that,"Christianity is no less 'mythological
' than any other religion. Joseph Campbell put it well when he wrote that
the central problem of Christianity is that it historicized its myth... .
If we didn't have to believe in the Gospels as creedal narrative, we could
allow our missionary triumphalism to fall away and join the rest of the
human race. We could use our stories more playfully. We could experiment
with them. We might actually be able to rise to the challenge of our time
and understand what we and the Christian heritage genuinely have to
contribute to the human enterprise."
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