The reason Jesus warned about Sodom is given in Ezekiel 16:49-50. Unfortunately for Evangelicals and other conservative Christians, sexual behavior had nothing to do with it.
Renato Lings, in Love Lost in Translation, goes in depth about the mistranslation of the story of Lot in Sodom. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell the whole story. TL;DR: the mob wanted to interrogate the visitors, likely by torture.
The story begins with the king of Sodom (and 4 other city-state kings) failing to pay tribute to their Sumerian overlord. Said overlord sends an army to collect, and Lot gets collected along with a good part of the population and goods of Sodom. Then Abram shows up with his cavalry and saves everyone. The king of Sodom wants to reward Abram, but Abram refuses to take any reward, since doing so would make him a vassel of the king of Sodom.
So now the king of Sodom has to worry about Abram, and when Abram's nephew Lot gets two visitors, the king is worried that something is up. That's the punchline; the king is worried about losing his throne, just as he is about to lose his city.
So Ezekiel was commenting on Sodom, a wealthy society that refused to take care of widows and orphans. You can understand why the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose societies were dominated by oligarchs, decided to misdirect the translation of the story of Sodom towards sexual behavior.
What fascinates me is that none of this is really “secret.” It’s sitting in seminaries and scholarly introductions in plain sight. The scandal isn’t that Christianity has complicated textual history. It’s that so many churches seem terrified their people might discover faith can survive knowing how the sausage was made.
The seminary bookstore stocks the same books the pulpit won’t mention, and that’s the whole gap. Most pastors sat through a semester on the synoptic problem and then spent thirty years preaching around it, because the people funding the building showed up for the Jesus in the pew Bible and nobody wants to test how many would stay through the explanation. Whether faith survives knowing how it was assembled is a testable question, and a lot of people have run the test on themselves.
It is the ultimate form of audience capture, the same dynamic that trapped Fox News. Once an institution trains its audience to demand a specific illusion, delivering the truth becomes an existential threat. The moment reality conflicts with the brand, the audience punishes the network for reporting it, forcing the leadership to choose between telling the truth or keeping the lights on.
This is a very persuasive argument for the existence of Q. One bit I am unable to find any information on is the origin of the parable of the sheep and the goats, my favorite New Testament passage. It is not in Q, nor is it in the hypothetical M document.
Ehrman has an interesting take that it is based on an actual teaching of Jesus that somehow made it into Matthew, even though it tends to contradict Matthew's Pauline Christology
The Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46) really is an odd duck. It's exclusive to Matthew, so by the usual logic it should be M material, but its theology doesn't fit the profile of the rest of Matthew's special source, which is what makes Ehrman's reading interesting. Rather than forcing it into a source category, he treats the tension itself as evidence.
Matthew elsewhere leans toward a works-plus-law framework wrapped in fairly high Christology (the Son of Man judging the nations, but tied to confessing Jesus). The sheep and goats scene judges people purely on how they treated "the least of these," with no mention of belief, confession, or law at all. That's closer to what a lot of scholars think the historical Jesus actually preached: an ethic of mercy toward the vulnerable, judged on its own terms.
If Ehrman's right, the passage survived precisely because it was too well-known or too forceful to leave out, even though it sits awkwardly next to Matthew's own theological program. It'd be a rare case of an evangelist including something that undercuts his own argument because the tradition behind it was too strong to drop.
I heard an interesting comment the other day, and it applies here. Many evangelicals and other such fellow travelers "use" Jesus. They don't "follow" Jesus.
Wonderful post; thank you. You mention in several passages that the central work of Jesus was the imminent judgement of God, yet you don’t truly explain why you say it is so.
Is it implied that the “church” centered around the salvation theme because the imminent judgement did not come? There is so much more to explore here.
Thank you for such a thoughtful question and for engaging with the material!
You’ve hit on a core insight shared by many historians such as Albert Schweitzer and Bart Ehrman. Early Jesus traditions, including source, heavily feature apocalyptic expectation, where Jesus warns that God's Kingdom and judgment were arriving imminently within his generation.
When that expected end-of-days judgment didn't materialize on that immediate timeline, the early Christian movement faced a major theological transition (often called the "delay of the Parousia"). As the movement expanded into the wider Greco-Roman world, the focus naturally pivoted from an urgent, imminent cosmic upheaval to a timeless message of personal salvation, eternal hope, and institutional faith that could sustain believers across generations.
Thank you! During the process of freeing myself from religion, I read many books to try to grasp the historical Jesus and religion in general, and yet, I have never heard of Q. This article felt like finding a missing link.
People have defied Jesus because they don't want to hold themselves up to the standards of behavior that he preached. They invented original sin to account for their own behavior.
How about this? Just accept that all religious figures are myths. Use the wisdom contained in holy books as moral guidance and don't get hung up on the supernatural elements that are obviously fictional.
There are many gospels that are not officially accepted. The Gospel of Philip suggests quite strongly an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who may have been his wife. The famous wedding at Canaan may have been his own - for a man of his age in a traditional Jewish society, not being married would have been unthinkable. Even the accepted Gospels leave a lot of the story out.
How does this work compare to A Course in Miracles? I’m finding it a hard read but enjoyed The Disappearance of the Universe which led me there. It talks about Jesus (Jesua) not starting a new religion but instead teaching tolerance and empathy. It mentions that Christianity leans heavily on the crucifiction, that Jesus died for our sins when in fact we are not sinners. 🧐
A Course in Miracles originated with Helen Schucman, a research psychologist at Columbia University, who scribed the text between 1965 and 1972 as an inner dictation. As a modern devotional work, it reflects a 20th-century spiritual perspective rather than historical data about the first century. Where its insights align with historical study, it reaches those points through a very different avenue.
Historical reconstruction works by comparing early Greek manuscripts line by line. The Jesus reflected in the earliest reconstructed sources, such as Q, was working within a first-century Jewish context, with no apparent aim to establish a separate religion. This picture emerges through textual analysis rather than personal revelation.
The main point of divergence comes around the interpretation of the crucifixion. Many historians note that the earliest recoverable layers of the tradition focus on Jesus's life and teachings without framing his death as a sacrificial atonement. The idea of a death that pays for human sin appears slightly later in the written record, notably in Paul's letters to early Christian communities.
What amazes me is how scholars can place so much emphasis and define with such specificity the contents of a document that has never left a material trace and then elevate it above any of the documents which are supported by physical documents and quoted by early church leaders.
Q never had to be a document. A better explanation would be that over time as early Christians discussing Jesus among themselves developed stereotypical language when they preferred some phrasing over another.
This has the advantage that nothing had to be made up as well as the disadvantage that the actual gospel couldn't be ignored while rewriting history to suit your own prejudices.
Scholars describe Q with so much detail because it is reconstructed directly from Matthew and Luke rather than being invented out of thin air. When you align those two Gospels and subtract the material found in Mark, the remaining text shares striking verbal agreement, down to minor Greek sentence connectors and sequence.
That level of exact agreement suggests written reliance rather than oral memory. When ancient authors relied on oral tradition, they typically retold the same story in different words, which is what we see in how Matthew and Luke handle the birth and resurrection accounts.
As for physical evidence, no original New Testament manuscripts survive for any book. The earliest fragments date to the second century, complete Bibles emerge in the fourth, and modern editions are reconstructed from later copies.
In that sense, a missing original places Q in a similar position to Mark or Paul's letters, with the key difference that Q's content is preserved through extensive direct quotation rather than standalone manuscript copies.
Could it be said that we have placed particular emphasis on the books in the NT because a group of appointed scholars back in the 4-5C thought that they were appropriate? Without concrete knowledge of their authors, context or circumstances we celebrate these over all others
Of course anything could be said about anything. How closely anything that is said comports with the likely transmission of texts and formation of the Canon requires more careful consideration.
Yours is a very cursory and misleading commentary. There are many manuscripts that biblical authors relied upon, some actually named. Nothing new. And since we do not have the document, despite attempts to ‘reverse engineer’ it from what we do have (gospels), we do not know what problem it was addressing or other intent its author had. If there was such a document, it could have been assuming most of the things you mention. Why speak to the virgin birth, or Jesus’s atonemen and resurrection, if the readers were already convinced? Keep working on it.
On a related note, I stumbled across the CentrePlace on YouTube several years ago, and was intrigued enough to watch several of their Bible study sessions. What surprised & impressed me, quite frankly, was the honesty with which biblical scholarship including Q, Nicea, and other apocrypha was represented to the congregation by pastor John Hamer.
It’s also a bit of the “yada yada yada love one another” routine, but it’s an *honest* one & imo that’s worthy of note as an exceptional case. (I also find it surprising that the origins of this particular faith tradition led to this place: I’d have expected something far MORE dogmatic tbh)
The whole Q discussion is quite old, but fails on a fundamental fallacy of logic. The most obvious and easiest explanation for similarities between Matthew and Luke is that one of them used texts from the other. Many scholers do indeed deduce that Luke used Matthew to write a "proper" Gospel (followed by the Acts), rearranging and reordering and adding new material as he saw fit to match his own Christology as wall as esthetic principles.
It is only if you assume that these guys were trying to tell the "truth" that illogial solutions such as "Q" become necessary. But since they were obviously writing about a century after the putative events, about a person which most likely never existed, then the whole thing becomse much easier to deal with.
Q is not the interesting part of the Synoptic Problem. It is a hypothetical document invented to explain similarities while leaving the differences largely without theological purpose.
There is a simpler and more fruitful explanation.
Mark preserves the earliest collected apostolic proclamation associated with Peter. It begins with John the Baptist because that is where the apostles’ public witness initially began: “from the baptism of John” to the Resurrection.
Matthew builds upon Mark. But something has changed. The apostles have continued doing what Jesus taught them on the Emmaus road: finding Him in the Scriptures. Matthew now begins with Abraham because he has recognized that Israel’s history is also the history of Christ. Jesus is the true Israel: called out of Egypt, passing through the water, tested in the wilderness, and ascending the mountain to teach.
Matthew is therefore not merely Mark copied and embellished. It is Mark 2.0—the earlier proclamation preserved and expanded by further Christological discovery.
Luke builds again. He does not stop with Abraham. His genealogy passes through Abraham and continues to Adam. Luke has recognized that the men before Israel also speak of Christ. The Emmaus reading has extended backward through the whole human story.
Luke is Mark 3.0.
Then John begins before Adam, Abraham, and John the Baptist: “In the beginning was the Word.” The movement is progressively backward because the apostles are discovering that Christ did not suddenly appear at Bethlehem. He had been the subject of God’s revelation from the beginning.
That explains both the similarities and the differences. The similarities preserve the common apostolic proclamation. The differences preserve the Church’s growing recognition of Christ throughout the Old Testament. Each Gospel may retain, arrange, clarify, omit, and expand earlier material according to the new aspect of Christ being disclosed.
The development is therefore hermeneutical before it is literary.
The Q hypothesis sees shared sayings and imagines a lost document belonging to a community whose Jesus had no Cross. It then treats the supposed absence of a Passion narrative as evidence for an earlier, merely moral teacher.
The Emmaus solution sees something the Q theory cannot: before the Cross, the disciples possessed Jesus’ words without fully understanding them. After the Resurrection, Christ opened the Scriptures and taught them what His words had always meant. The sayings did not precede the theology of the Cross. Their meaning was revealed by the Cross.
What scholars call layers of Christian invention may instead be layers of apostolic discovery.
We do not need a lost “Q Gospel” to explain how Matthew and Luke came to share Jesus’ sayings. We need to notice what the canonical Gospels themselves are doing:
Mark begins with John. Matthew reaches back to Abraham. Luke reaches back to Adam. John reaches back before the beginning.
The Gospels are not slowly replacing a Jewish teacher with a divine Christ.
They are progressively discovering that all Scripture had been speaking of Him.
The reason Jesus warned about Sodom is given in Ezekiel 16:49-50. Unfortunately for Evangelicals and other conservative Christians, sexual behavior had nothing to do with it.
You're making a great point about how often Ezekiel’s explicit social and economic critique gets conveniently overlooked in popular discussions!
If you believe Ezekial, that is.
Renato Lings, in Love Lost in Translation, goes in depth about the mistranslation of the story of Lot in Sodom. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell the whole story. TL;DR: the mob wanted to interrogate the visitors, likely by torture.
The story begins with the king of Sodom (and 4 other city-state kings) failing to pay tribute to their Sumerian overlord. Said overlord sends an army to collect, and Lot gets collected along with a good part of the population and goods of Sodom. Then Abram shows up with his cavalry and saves everyone. The king of Sodom wants to reward Abram, but Abram refuses to take any reward, since doing so would make him a vassel of the king of Sodom.
So now the king of Sodom has to worry about Abram, and when Abram's nephew Lot gets two visitors, the king is worried that something is up. That's the punchline; the king is worried about losing his throne, just as he is about to lose his city.
So Ezekiel was commenting on Sodom, a wealthy society that refused to take care of widows and orphans. You can understand why the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose societies were dominated by oligarchs, decided to misdirect the translation of the story of Sodom towards sexual behavior.
The biblical story of Lot, Sodom and Abram has always bothered me at a visceral level. I have read that section of Genesis over and over.
Your explanation finally made it click! It finally makes sense! Thank you so much for sharing this.
What fascinates me is that none of this is really “secret.” It’s sitting in seminaries and scholarly introductions in plain sight. The scandal isn’t that Christianity has complicated textual history. It’s that so many churches seem terrified their people might discover faith can survive knowing how the sausage was made.
The seminary bookstore stocks the same books the pulpit won’t mention, and that’s the whole gap. Most pastors sat through a semester on the synoptic problem and then spent thirty years preaching around it, because the people funding the building showed up for the Jesus in the pew Bible and nobody wants to test how many would stay through the explanation. Whether faith survives knowing how it was assembled is a testable question, and a lot of people have run the test on themselves.
It is the ultimate form of audience capture, the same dynamic that trapped Fox News. Once an institution trains its audience to demand a specific illusion, delivering the truth becomes an existential threat. The moment reality conflicts with the brand, the audience punishes the network for reporting it, forcing the leadership to choose between telling the truth or keeping the lights on.
🔥🔥🔥
This is a very persuasive argument for the existence of Q. One bit I am unable to find any information on is the origin of the parable of the sheep and the goats, my favorite New Testament passage. It is not in Q, nor is it in the hypothetical M document.
Ehrman has an interesting take that it is based on an actual teaching of Jesus that somehow made it into Matthew, even though it tends to contradict Matthew's Pauline Christology
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-sheep-and-the-goats/
The Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46) really is an odd duck. It's exclusive to Matthew, so by the usual logic it should be M material, but its theology doesn't fit the profile of the rest of Matthew's special source, which is what makes Ehrman's reading interesting. Rather than forcing it into a source category, he treats the tension itself as evidence.
Matthew elsewhere leans toward a works-plus-law framework wrapped in fairly high Christology (the Son of Man judging the nations, but tied to confessing Jesus). The sheep and goats scene judges people purely on how they treated "the least of these," with no mention of belief, confession, or law at all. That's closer to what a lot of scholars think the historical Jesus actually preached: an ethic of mercy toward the vulnerable, judged on its own terms.
If Ehrman's right, the passage survived precisely because it was too well-known or too forceful to leave out, even though it sits awkwardly next to Matthew's own theological program. It'd be a rare case of an evangelist including something that undercuts his own argument because the tradition behind it was too strong to drop.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense to me
I heard an interesting comment the other day, and it applies here. Many evangelicals and other such fellow travelers "use" Jesus. They don't "follow" Jesus.
The Jesus reconstructed in Q is close to useless for politics, which is why you'll rarely hear him quoted in one.
He’s the antithesis of Supply Side Jesus, that’s for sure!
Wonderful post; thank you. You mention in several passages that the central work of Jesus was the imminent judgement of God, yet you don’t truly explain why you say it is so.
Is it implied that the “church” centered around the salvation theme because the imminent judgement did not come? There is so much more to explore here.
Thank you for such a thoughtful question and for engaging with the material!
You’ve hit on a core insight shared by many historians such as Albert Schweitzer and Bart Ehrman. Early Jesus traditions, including source, heavily feature apocalyptic expectation, where Jesus warns that God's Kingdom and judgment were arriving imminently within his generation.
When that expected end-of-days judgment didn't materialize on that immediate timeline, the early Christian movement faced a major theological transition (often called the "delay of the Parousia"). As the movement expanded into the wider Greco-Roman world, the focus naturally pivoted from an urgent, imminent cosmic upheaval to a timeless message of personal salvation, eternal hope, and institutional faith that could sustain believers across generations.
Thank you! During the process of freeing myself from religion, I read many books to try to grasp the historical Jesus and religion in general, and yet, I have never heard of Q. This article felt like finding a missing link.
People have defied Jesus because they don't want to hold themselves up to the standards of behavior that he preached. They invented original sin to account for their own behavior.
deified is the word I wanted. My spell checker may have changed it when I wasn’t looking.
How about this? Just accept that all religious figures are myths. Use the wisdom contained in holy books as moral guidance and don't get hung up on the supernatural elements that are obviously fictional.
If only Xians (and Muslims, Jews, Hindu, etc) were as distant as Olympian devotees …
“Imagine” even 😹
There are many gospels that are not officially accepted. The Gospel of Philip suggests quite strongly an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who may have been his wife. The famous wedding at Canaan may have been his own - for a man of his age in a traditional Jewish society, not being married would have been unthinkable. Even the accepted Gospels leave a lot of the story out.
How does this work compare to A Course in Miracles? I’m finding it a hard read but enjoyed The Disappearance of the Universe which led me there. It talks about Jesus (Jesua) not starting a new religion but instead teaching tolerance and empathy. It mentions that Christianity leans heavily on the crucifiction, that Jesus died for our sins when in fact we are not sinners. 🧐
A Course in Miracles originated with Helen Schucman, a research psychologist at Columbia University, who scribed the text between 1965 and 1972 as an inner dictation. As a modern devotional work, it reflects a 20th-century spiritual perspective rather than historical data about the first century. Where its insights align with historical study, it reaches those points through a very different avenue.
Historical reconstruction works by comparing early Greek manuscripts line by line. The Jesus reflected in the earliest reconstructed sources, such as Q, was working within a first-century Jewish context, with no apparent aim to establish a separate religion. This picture emerges through textual analysis rather than personal revelation.
The main point of divergence comes around the interpretation of the crucifixion. Many historians note that the earliest recoverable layers of the tradition focus on Jesus's life and teachings without framing his death as a sacrificial atonement. The idea of a death that pays for human sin appears slightly later in the written record, notably in Paul's letters to early Christian communities.
What amazes me is how scholars can place so much emphasis and define with such specificity the contents of a document that has never left a material trace and then elevate it above any of the documents which are supported by physical documents and quoted by early church leaders.
Q never had to be a document. A better explanation would be that over time as early Christians discussing Jesus among themselves developed stereotypical language when they preferred some phrasing over another.
This has the advantage that nothing had to be made up as well as the disadvantage that the actual gospel couldn't be ignored while rewriting history to suit your own prejudices.
Thanks for reading, Ken!
Scholars describe Q with so much detail because it is reconstructed directly from Matthew and Luke rather than being invented out of thin air. When you align those two Gospels and subtract the material found in Mark, the remaining text shares striking verbal agreement, down to minor Greek sentence connectors and sequence.
That level of exact agreement suggests written reliance rather than oral memory. When ancient authors relied on oral tradition, they typically retold the same story in different words, which is what we see in how Matthew and Luke handle the birth and resurrection accounts.
As for physical evidence, no original New Testament manuscripts survive for any book. The earliest fragments date to the second century, complete Bibles emerge in the fourth, and modern editions are reconstructed from later copies.
In that sense, a missing original places Q in a similar position to Mark or Paul's letters, with the key difference that Q's content is preserved through extensive direct quotation rather than standalone manuscript copies.
Of course the autographs have never been recovered.
They were written for specific groups to encourage and instruct. There is no reason for the writersto expect their projects were for the ages.
But fragments of copies, enough to reconstruct the autographs, have been sufficient to provide their contents with reasonable accuracy.
No one found it necessary to interpolate their own speculations as equivalent to that for which physical evidence actually exists.
Could it be said that we have placed particular emphasis on the books in the NT because a group of appointed scholars back in the 4-5C thought that they were appropriate? Without concrete knowledge of their authors, context or circumstances we celebrate these over all others
Of course anything could be said about anything. How closely anything that is said comports with the likely transmission of texts and formation of the Canon requires more careful consideration.
Yours is a very cursory and misleading commentary. There are many manuscripts that biblical authors relied upon, some actually named. Nothing new. And since we do not have the document, despite attempts to ‘reverse engineer’ it from what we do have (gospels), we do not know what problem it was addressing or other intent its author had. If there was such a document, it could have been assuming most of the things you mention. Why speak to the virgin birth, or Jesus’s atonemen and resurrection, if the readers were already convinced? Keep working on it.
Thanks for this!
On a related note, I stumbled across the CentrePlace on YouTube several years ago, and was intrigued enough to watch several of their Bible study sessions. What surprised & impressed me, quite frankly, was the honesty with which biblical scholarship including Q, Nicea, and other apocrypha was represented to the congregation by pastor John Hamer.
It’s also a bit of the “yada yada yada love one another” routine, but it’s an *honest* one & imo that’s worthy of note as an exceptional case. (I also find it surprising that the origins of this particular faith tradition led to this place: I’d have expected something far MORE dogmatic tbh)
https://youtube.com/@centre-place
The whole Q discussion is quite old, but fails on a fundamental fallacy of logic. The most obvious and easiest explanation for similarities between Matthew and Luke is that one of them used texts from the other. Many scholers do indeed deduce that Luke used Matthew to write a "proper" Gospel (followed by the Acts), rearranging and reordering and adding new material as he saw fit to match his own Christology as wall as esthetic principles.
It is only if you assume that these guys were trying to tell the "truth" that illogial solutions such as "Q" become necessary. But since they were obviously writing about a century after the putative events, about a person which most likely never existed, then the whole thing becomse much easier to deal with.
Q is not the interesting part of the Synoptic Problem. It is a hypothetical document invented to explain similarities while leaving the differences largely without theological purpose.
There is a simpler and more fruitful explanation.
Mark preserves the earliest collected apostolic proclamation associated with Peter. It begins with John the Baptist because that is where the apostles’ public witness initially began: “from the baptism of John” to the Resurrection.
Matthew builds upon Mark. But something has changed. The apostles have continued doing what Jesus taught them on the Emmaus road: finding Him in the Scriptures. Matthew now begins with Abraham because he has recognized that Israel’s history is also the history of Christ. Jesus is the true Israel: called out of Egypt, passing through the water, tested in the wilderness, and ascending the mountain to teach.
Matthew is therefore not merely Mark copied and embellished. It is Mark 2.0—the earlier proclamation preserved and expanded by further Christological discovery.
Luke builds again. He does not stop with Abraham. His genealogy passes through Abraham and continues to Adam. Luke has recognized that the men before Israel also speak of Christ. The Emmaus reading has extended backward through the whole human story.
Luke is Mark 3.0.
Then John begins before Adam, Abraham, and John the Baptist: “In the beginning was the Word.” The movement is progressively backward because the apostles are discovering that Christ did not suddenly appear at Bethlehem. He had been the subject of God’s revelation from the beginning.
That explains both the similarities and the differences. The similarities preserve the common apostolic proclamation. The differences preserve the Church’s growing recognition of Christ throughout the Old Testament. Each Gospel may retain, arrange, clarify, omit, and expand earlier material according to the new aspect of Christ being disclosed.
The development is therefore hermeneutical before it is literary.
The Q hypothesis sees shared sayings and imagines a lost document belonging to a community whose Jesus had no Cross. It then treats the supposed absence of a Passion narrative as evidence for an earlier, merely moral teacher.
The Emmaus solution sees something the Q theory cannot: before the Cross, the disciples possessed Jesus’ words without fully understanding them. After the Resurrection, Christ opened the Scriptures and taught them what His words had always meant. The sayings did not precede the theology of the Cross. Their meaning was revealed by the Cross.
What scholars call layers of Christian invention may instead be layers of apostolic discovery.
We do not need a lost “Q Gospel” to explain how Matthew and Luke came to share Jesus’ sayings. We need to notice what the canonical Gospels themselves are doing:
Mark begins with John. Matthew reaches back to Abraham. Luke reaches back to Adam. John reaches back before the beginning.
The Gospels are not slowly replacing a Jewish teacher with a divine Christ.
They are progressively discovering that all Scripture had been speaking of Him.
Hypothetical documents that help you get more oxygen: 🥱