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.
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.
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.
Good question, Kent, because John is the Gospel that Q throws into the starkest relief.
Almost nothing from Q made it into John. It has no Sermon on the Mount, no Lord's Prayer, no parables, and no exorcisms, and "kingdom of God," the centre of Jesus' preaching in the other three, appears in only one conversation (John 3). In their place are long speeches where Jesus talks about himself: "I am the bread of life," "I am the light of the world," "before Abraham was, I am." John also moves the temple incident to the start of the story and puts the crucifixion on a different day.
I read it as the latest of the four, written around 90-100, and the best record of what one Christian community had come to believe about Jesus by then. For what Jesus said in Galilee, Q and Mark are the earlier witnesses. It's on my list for a piece of its own.
I am an old American-Irish Catholic Woman who loves to study the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. I found your discussion of Q fascinating and ‘in line’ with what I have learned about it. As you probably know Our Catholic Preachers are all men but come from different orders of priests and different cultures so we get we get a variety of ‘takes’
on the Gospels and Paul’s influence. Q is mentioned in more scholarly parishes ( Jesuit and Dominican) and in Campus Ministry with the Paulists Fathers. The Franciscans and Maryknollers not so much but with the emphasis on Liberation Theology. Thank you for your insights from the evangelical end of the spectrum. Sadly as an older educated Catholic who worked mainly in Campus and Family and Women’s Ministry I’ve only experienced the Evangelical Scripture’s used as a weapon so this is very refreshing.
Thank you, Rev. Dr. Cynthia! It means a lot to receive such encouraging feedback from someone with your extensive experience in ministry and biblical studies. I’m glad the discussion resonated with you and offered a refreshing perspective on the topic. Thanks again for watching and sharing your thoughts!
"He doesn’t claim divinity. The Jesus who says “before Abraham was, I am” in the Gospel of John has no parallel in Q."
No, he doesn't claim divinity outright, but in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he presents his divinity as being a logical deduction; the only foundation on which his assertions can rest for their justification. The 1st Beatitude alone should elicit the question "who is he to say such a thing?" Unless the kingdom of heaven can be explained away as an abstract state of being or consciousness that one can willfully experience in one's present condition, to make such promises of divine proportion as the Beatitudes presuppose not merely secret knowledge of an indefinite divine, but intimate knowledge of a specific God's will: the God of Israel. No Old Testament prophet made declarations of such dimensional latitude; not even David in the Psalms, the man God praised as being after his heart.
The Lord Jesus follows up the Beatitudes by doubling down in audacity. He doesn't distinguish himself in opposition to the God of the Old Testament's doctrine but declares himself to be its logical outcome:
"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." [Matthew 5:17-19]
Now one might quibble about what he means by what is translated as "fulfill", (πληροόω), but the context of individual righteousness in relation to one's place in God's kingdom set by the Beatitudes, suggests he means that he will satisfy the demands of the law without error. In other words, he will commit no sin, and by implication hasn't in the past. Only God is without sin.
And to top that outrageous pronouncement he sets obedience to the commandments he's about to announce concerning one's motivations as essential to being judged favorably, presumably by God, in the kingdom of heaven. By setting such a standard he himself is pre-emptively judging; he is the means by which entry into God's kingdom is determined. He ends the Sermon with the revelation of himself as judge. Again, divinity is not only a reasonable inference but the only logical one can reach.
The conclusion of the Sermon eliminates the kingdom of heaven as some vague eastern concept; as an intellectually state of mind achievable as an act of will. It is a place, presumably commensurate with that of the resurrection described in Isaiah under Messiah's rule:
"But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." [Isaiah 11:4-9]
Notice also the egocentricity of all of Christ's doctrine in the Sermon. It isn't merely the principles alone that matter but the fact that it is he who is saying them; his commandments and doctrine are mentioned as being equal to God's in determining one's standing before God. It isn't merely following "the way" because he is the way:
"Jesus said unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, but by me. " [John 14:6]
Thanks for working through the text instead of just asserting, I appreciate that. The passage you quote from Matthew 5:17-19 appears only in Matthew, and Luke's version of the sermon (the Sermon on the Plain, which draws on Q) has no line about fulfilling the law. The material you're leaning on comes from Matthew alone, and Q doesn't have it. Isaiah 11 also describes a human king judging the poor with equity, so a Jesus who saw himself in that role was claiming to be the Messiah, which Jews of his day expected to be a man.
Thanks for your reply. If I made assertions regardless of what you'd actually written I'd be like 19th century scholars approaching the Bible with presuppositions such as "There's no possibility of divine incarnation", "no one's ever seen a miracle so miracles don't exist" then culling the sayings of the Lord Jesus in the gospel which fit those presumptions and declare them to represent a "historical Jesus"; one befitting a 19th century scientific materialism. I'd simply be operating on my prejudices.
But I didn't write my comment clearly. It's the outrageous nature of Christ's doctrine which I find the fundamental issue in appreciating his doctrine; the authority it takes for granted. Even if one dismisses the explicit statements of Matt. 5:17-19 and somehow jumps from the Beatitudes to his exposition of the commandments, Christ is still placing his words on a plane of authority equal to that of God. First century Jews didn't view God as a philosophical abstraction (nor judging from his doctrine, did he), but a divine person, to whom daily blood sacrifices were offered in compensation for violations of his written law. The severity of those laws were compounded in its commentaries compiled through the years. While the Lord criticized the commentaries through the religious actions of the Pharisees, it wasn't their zeal which offended him but their presumptive righteousness that was devoid of the holiness bound in God's person as expressed in lovingkindness (Matthew 23:23-24). He didn't deny God's reality but spoke as one who embodied that holy spirit of compassion and care:
"A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth." [Isaiah 42:3]
The popular emphasis on love in the teaching of the Lord Jesus omits the holiness of that love, it being an expression of God's purity.
So the Lord Jesus couldn't have been some Nietzschean Zarathustra, smugly pontificating moral aphorisms simply by assuming a superior intellect and thereby radically rebelling against God and God's law. His doctrine had a base beyond mere intellect; it proceeded from a spiritual motivation not native to human beings. When he condemned the sin imagined in heart and mind as being equal to that committed, (Matthew 5:27-28) he points back to the law against coveting, which isn't an action but a desire. So he didn't reject the law but more clearly established its holiness: its antithesis to human nature. He had to see himself as divine, as possessing such a holy nature incapable even of impure thoughts, to be in a position to proclaim such a premise for his expositions of the commandments: "you have heard but I say". One has to admit his self-evaluation of possessing a heart and mind equivalent to divinity. Otherwise one has to conclude, like Albert Schweitzer (and even some of the Lord's contemporaries), that he was a man beside himself, not quite in his right mind: (Mark 3:21, 31-32).
Nor is his kingdom of heaven an abstract state, a Nirvana, but a literal place where God dwells. Yes, Messiah's rule in Isaiah 11:4-9 represents a material kingdom, but consider the radical change in its materiality. Beasts we know as flesh-eating predators and venomous threats are docile and domesticated by nature. Emmanuel, God-with-us, has filled all with his holy nature "as the waters cover the sea". There is no sin, the selfishness in pride which gives rise to violence and death:
"From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? You lust, and have not: you kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: you fight and war, yet you have not, because you ask not. You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. You adulterers and adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God." [James 4:1-4]
No, Jewish tradition didn't see Messiah as more than a specially anointed king, but that same reading couldn't see the continuity of Isaiah 52:10-15 to 53, balking at the implications of 53, especially 4-12 which clearly indicate a sacrificial death for which the Sacrificed attains a reward, an inheritance, if you will which he can accept. In other words, he doesn't remain dead:
"For you will not leave my soul in hell; neither will you suffer your Holy One to see corruption." [Psalms 16:10]
According to that tradition Isaiah 53 concerns "the suffering servant", not the servant who is Messiah, the Christ.
The crucifixion and resurrection aren't fabrications of the Jewish apostles and Gentile authors of the gospels but essential records in their accounts of the man who is the fulfillment of God's promise to humanity of deliverance through his people Israel.
Q isn’t a gospel. It’s a shared collection of Jesus’ sayings, and it best explains why Matthew and Luke have both many similarities and many differences in material that doesn’t appear in Mark.
Thanks for the comment, Martin. The people who preserved those sayings were likely part of that same early movement, which Acts (9:2, 19:9, 24:14) calls "The Way." This explains the closeness. However, it's impossible to say whether "The Way" was the majority or the minority in the group that kept Q.
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.
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)
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.
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.
What do you think he meant by “I am the Son of God”? In the Hebrew Bible “Son of God” was a title for beings God fathered or adopted, such as angels, and he never claims a unique status as the Son of God.
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 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.
🔥🔥🔥
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.
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!
And what pray tell do you make of the problematic Gospel if John?
Good question, Kent, because John is the Gospel that Q throws into the starkest relief.
Almost nothing from Q made it into John. It has no Sermon on the Mount, no Lord's Prayer, no parables, and no exorcisms, and "kingdom of God," the centre of Jesus' preaching in the other three, appears in only one conversation (John 3). In their place are long speeches where Jesus talks about himself: "I am the bread of life," "I am the light of the world," "before Abraham was, I am." John also moves the temple incident to the start of the story and puts the crucifixion on a different day.
I read it as the latest of the four, written around 90-100, and the best record of what one Christian community had come to believe about Jesus by then. For what Jesus said in Galilee, Q and Mark are the earlier witnesses. It's on my list for a piece of its own.
I am an old American-Irish Catholic Woman who loves to study the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. I found your discussion of Q fascinating and ‘in line’ with what I have learned about it. As you probably know Our Catholic Preachers are all men but come from different orders of priests and different cultures so we get we get a variety of ‘takes’
on the Gospels and Paul’s influence. Q is mentioned in more scholarly parishes ( Jesuit and Dominican) and in Campus Ministry with the Paulists Fathers. The Franciscans and Maryknollers not so much but with the emphasis on Liberation Theology. Thank you for your insights from the evangelical end of the spectrum. Sadly as an older educated Catholic who worked mainly in Campus and Family and Women’s Ministry I’ve only experienced the Evangelical Scripture’s used as a weapon so this is very refreshing.
Thank you
Cynthia
Rev Dr Grandma
Thank you, Rev. Dr. Cynthia! It means a lot to receive such encouraging feedback from someone with your extensive experience in ministry and biblical studies. I’m glad the discussion resonated with you and offered a refreshing perspective on the topic. Thanks again for watching and sharing your thoughts!
"He doesn’t claim divinity. The Jesus who says “before Abraham was, I am” in the Gospel of John has no parallel in Q."
No, he doesn't claim divinity outright, but in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he presents his divinity as being a logical deduction; the only foundation on which his assertions can rest for their justification. The 1st Beatitude alone should elicit the question "who is he to say such a thing?" Unless the kingdom of heaven can be explained away as an abstract state of being or consciousness that one can willfully experience in one's present condition, to make such promises of divine proportion as the Beatitudes presuppose not merely secret knowledge of an indefinite divine, but intimate knowledge of a specific God's will: the God of Israel. No Old Testament prophet made declarations of such dimensional latitude; not even David in the Psalms, the man God praised as being after his heart.
The Lord Jesus follows up the Beatitudes by doubling down in audacity. He doesn't distinguish himself in opposition to the God of the Old Testament's doctrine but declares himself to be its logical outcome:
"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." [Matthew 5:17-19]
Now one might quibble about what he means by what is translated as "fulfill", (πληροόω), but the context of individual righteousness in relation to one's place in God's kingdom set by the Beatitudes, suggests he means that he will satisfy the demands of the law without error. In other words, he will commit no sin, and by implication hasn't in the past. Only God is without sin.
And to top that outrageous pronouncement he sets obedience to the commandments he's about to announce concerning one's motivations as essential to being judged favorably, presumably by God, in the kingdom of heaven. By setting such a standard he himself is pre-emptively judging; he is the means by which entry into God's kingdom is determined. He ends the Sermon with the revelation of himself as judge. Again, divinity is not only a reasonable inference but the only logical one can reach.
The conclusion of the Sermon eliminates the kingdom of heaven as some vague eastern concept; as an intellectually state of mind achievable as an act of will. It is a place, presumably commensurate with that of the resurrection described in Isaiah under Messiah's rule:
"But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." [Isaiah 11:4-9]
Notice also the egocentricity of all of Christ's doctrine in the Sermon. It isn't merely the principles alone that matter but the fact that it is he who is saying them; his commandments and doctrine are mentioned as being equal to God's in determining one's standing before God. It isn't merely following "the way" because he is the way:
"Jesus said unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, but by me. " [John 14:6]
But the last is only John...
Thanks for working through the text instead of just asserting, I appreciate that. The passage you quote from Matthew 5:17-19 appears only in Matthew, and Luke's version of the sermon (the Sermon on the Plain, which draws on Q) has no line about fulfilling the law. The material you're leaning on comes from Matthew alone, and Q doesn't have it. Isaiah 11 also describes a human king judging the poor with equity, so a Jesus who saw himself in that role was claiming to be the Messiah, which Jews of his day expected to be a man.
Thanks for your reply. If I made assertions regardless of what you'd actually written I'd be like 19th century scholars approaching the Bible with presuppositions such as "There's no possibility of divine incarnation", "no one's ever seen a miracle so miracles don't exist" then culling the sayings of the Lord Jesus in the gospel which fit those presumptions and declare them to represent a "historical Jesus"; one befitting a 19th century scientific materialism. I'd simply be operating on my prejudices.
But I didn't write my comment clearly. It's the outrageous nature of Christ's doctrine which I find the fundamental issue in appreciating his doctrine; the authority it takes for granted. Even if one dismisses the explicit statements of Matt. 5:17-19 and somehow jumps from the Beatitudes to his exposition of the commandments, Christ is still placing his words on a plane of authority equal to that of God. First century Jews didn't view God as a philosophical abstraction (nor judging from his doctrine, did he), but a divine person, to whom daily blood sacrifices were offered in compensation for violations of his written law. The severity of those laws were compounded in its commentaries compiled through the years. While the Lord criticized the commentaries through the religious actions of the Pharisees, it wasn't their zeal which offended him but their presumptive righteousness that was devoid of the holiness bound in God's person as expressed in lovingkindness (Matthew 23:23-24). He didn't deny God's reality but spoke as one who embodied that holy spirit of compassion and care:
"A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth." [Isaiah 42:3]
The popular emphasis on love in the teaching of the Lord Jesus omits the holiness of that love, it being an expression of God's purity.
So the Lord Jesus couldn't have been some Nietzschean Zarathustra, smugly pontificating moral aphorisms simply by assuming a superior intellect and thereby radically rebelling against God and God's law. His doctrine had a base beyond mere intellect; it proceeded from a spiritual motivation not native to human beings. When he condemned the sin imagined in heart and mind as being equal to that committed, (Matthew 5:27-28) he points back to the law against coveting, which isn't an action but a desire. So he didn't reject the law but more clearly established its holiness: its antithesis to human nature. He had to see himself as divine, as possessing such a holy nature incapable even of impure thoughts, to be in a position to proclaim such a premise for his expositions of the commandments: "you have heard but I say". One has to admit his self-evaluation of possessing a heart and mind equivalent to divinity. Otherwise one has to conclude, like Albert Schweitzer (and even some of the Lord's contemporaries), that he was a man beside himself, not quite in his right mind: (Mark 3:21, 31-32).
Nor is his kingdom of heaven an abstract state, a Nirvana, but a literal place where God dwells. Yes, Messiah's rule in Isaiah 11:4-9 represents a material kingdom, but consider the radical change in its materiality. Beasts we know as flesh-eating predators and venomous threats are docile and domesticated by nature. Emmanuel, God-with-us, has filled all with his holy nature "as the waters cover the sea". There is no sin, the selfishness in pride which gives rise to violence and death:
"From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? You lust, and have not: you kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: you fight and war, yet you have not, because you ask not. You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. You adulterers and adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God." [James 4:1-4]
No, Jewish tradition didn't see Messiah as more than a specially anointed king, but that same reading couldn't see the continuity of Isaiah 52:10-15 to 53, balking at the implications of 53, especially 4-12 which clearly indicate a sacrificial death for which the Sacrificed attains a reward, an inheritance, if you will which he can accept. In other words, he doesn't remain dead:
"For you will not leave my soul in hell; neither will you suffer your Holy One to see corruption." [Psalms 16:10]
According to that tradition Isaiah 53 concerns "the suffering servant", not the servant who is Messiah, the Christ.
The crucifixion and resurrection aren't fabrications of the Jewish apostles and Gentile authors of the gospels but essential records in their accounts of the man who is the fulfillment of God's promise to humanity of deliverance through his people Israel.
Thank you for such a detailed and well-reasoned response! I really appreciate you sharing your viewpoint and giving everyone more to consider.
Thank you! Positions challenging to faith help hone one's understanding of what one believes.
Which one? I have 38 “lost gospels”
Q isn’t a gospel. It’s a shared collection of Jesus’ sayings, and it best explains why Matthew and Luke have both many similarities and many differences in material that doesn’t appear in Mark.
I’ve read that early Christianity (pre-Nicene) was simply called The Way which sounds similar to Q.
Thanks for the comment, Martin. The people who preserved those sayings were likely part of that same early movement, which Acts (9:2, 19:9, 24:14) calls "The Way." This explains the closeness. However, it's impossible to say whether "The Way" was the majority or the minority in the group that kept Q.
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.
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
Thanks for the tip!
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 😹
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.
Perhaps. Do you think Jesus did everything in his power to make them understand he was the Messiah?
I don't think he thought of himself as the "Messiah" He told them he was the son of man.
What do you think he meant by “I am the Son of God”? In the Hebrew Bible “Son of God” was a title for beings God fathered or adopted, such as angels, and he never claims a unique status as the Son of God.
deified is the word I wanted. My spell checker may have changed it when I wasn’t looking.
Because defy is used more commonly than deify. That’s what the spell check “thought” you were going for. Ick!
right
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.