The Sayings Gospel Q and
the Quest of the Historical Jesus

Is it possible to work back from Matthew and Luke to the final redaction of Q, from there to the earliest composition of Q, and thus ultimately to the historical Jesus? John Kloppenborg's article skillfully presents the difficulties and perils of such a procedure. I shall comment only on the second part of his paper; there is little to dispute with respect to the first part, which is an illuminating review of the role of Q (and other sources) in the search for the historical Jesus during the last two centuries. At the end, I shall offer some suggestions that may help to solve the conundrum of the historical Jesus.

John Kloppenborg's first important contribution is his categorical statement that "modern Q studies have taken seriously the act of inscription and have rejected the facile identification of the interests and social location of those responsible for the composition of Q with Jesus and his immediate followers ... the point is that the act of literary composition presupposes a social context that is simply not identical with the various oral performances of Jesus." [2] This raises questions with respect to the work of even those scholars who have taken recent Q scholarship seriously in their attempts to discover relevant materials for historical Jesus research. [3]

John Kloppenborg also rightly emphasizes the continuity of the several stages of the composition and redaction of Q in spite of some evident discontinuities. I agree that the sayings about the coming of the Son of Man and the judgment introduce a new element into this document and are secondary. As Kloppenborg notes, however, the introduction of these sayings into Q does not indicate "a massive change from a noneschatological to an apocalyptic document." [4] Rather, "one must presume a basic continuity in eschatological outlook between [Q.sub.1] and [Q.sub.2], in spite of the changes in idiom." [5] In addition, the sayings of [Q.sub.1], "announce or look for the `reign of God,'... invoking a symbol of decisive cosmic transformation." [6] This assessment of the relationship of [Q.sub.1] to [Q.sub.2] allows the placement of Q along a trajectory that reaches, as James Robinson has demanded, from John the Baptist via Jesus and Q to the Gospel of Matthew. [7] I shall only note here in passing that such view of the relationship of [Q.sub.1] and [Q.sub.2] may also permit a reconsideration of the placement into [Q.sub.1] of some eschatological materials, which John Kloppenborg has excluded from Q's formative stage: for example, sayings about the reign of God that have parallels in the Gospel of Thomas. [8]

I shall offer four observations that may help methodologically with respect to both Q and the question of the historical Jesus as it relates to Q as well as to other sources that are used in the so-called quest.

First, what John Kloppenborg says about the "inscription" of materials in Q is generally valid. There are no materials about Jesus whatsoever that have not been "inscribed," either by the usage of such materials in a purposeful literary composition such as Q or in any earlier oral tradition. In oral tradition, the very forms in which Jesus materials were transmitted are conditioned by their usage and social location in the Christian communities. In no instance do such materials owe their formulation to the life situation of Jesus' ministry. There are no original Jesus materials in the tradition preserved verbatim as they were formulated by Jesus himself, and it will never be possible to state exactly "what Jesus actually said." Form criticism did not aspire to recover the forms of materials as they were shaped by their situation in Jesus' life; rather, it sought to describe the forms of a tradition that owed its existence to its Sitz im Leben ("life situation") in the early Christian communities.

Second, I agree with John Kloppenborg that, insofar as Q is concerned, the historical Jesus quest cannot disregard what has been learned about the stratification of Q. If scholars use any materials from either the formative stage or the later strata of Q, they must consider both the way the materials have been inscribed by the author or editor as well as the form that has been imposed upon such materials by their oral transmission in early Christian communities for such purposes as instruction, preaching, and liturgy.

Third, the quest for the historical Jesus cannot be limited to the investigation of Q. As John Kloppenborg has argued in his article, the absence of any materials in Q does not necessarily imply that they did not exist or were not known. Only in specific instances can one suggest that the absence of certain materials in Q raises critical concerns. John Kloppenborg has demonstrated this, for example, with respect to the Sabbath controversies. [9] I propose that a similar argument applies to the sayings about the Son of Man coming for judgment, if, as Egon Brandenburger [10] has shown, these sayings are prophetic announcements that originate in the time just before and during the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE. It is possible, however, that Son of Man sayings like Q 12:8-9, in which the Son of Man is seen as the defense counsel in the divine court, have an earlier origin. This figure in the divine court is neither the coming judge nor is he identified with Jesus.

Fourth, the term "eschatological" must be clarified. Rudolf Bultmann's existentialist and individualistic understanding of the eschatological moment is misleading. [11] The term must be understood in the context of the history of the religions, society, and politics of the Hellenistic and Roman eras, including the history of Israel during these periods. From the utopian vision of Iamboulos' "Islands of the Sun" to Pergamon's Heliopolis, the slave insurrections of Ennius and Spartacus, the community of the Essenes, [12] and the new age proclaimed by Augustus and his poets - the prophets Virgil and Horace [13] - "eschatological" designates the religiously-based expectation of a new social and political order that can at least be partially realized, that is, made present in the new organization of the community on the basis of prophecy and religious vision. Of course, eschatology could also respond to the failure of such realization, resulting, for example, in the application of the chaos myth to the understanding of the present time as in Revelation 12 where Satan has been thrown out of heaven. While Satan's ejection from heaven restores order in the divine world, however, Satan is now ruling on earth.

On the basis of Q alone, the construction of the trajectory from John the Baptist to Matthew (and, note well, to Paul) may not be able to state exactly what Jesus said or did. If John the Baptist, however, saw the coming of God for the final judgment as the only solution of the darkness of his time, then the memory of Jesus' preaching and especially his parables seem to indicate that he proclaimed the possible realization of God's reign in the present, however problematic.

How did Jesus' followers preserve the memory of this proclamation? It is useful to return to the insights of Johann Gottfried Herder, [14] which have been so deplorably neglected in two centuries of life-of-Jesus scholarship. The most immediate memory of history, Herder claimed, has nothing to do with accurately recording what happened; rather, memory is immediately recast (or "inscribed," or transformed) into hymn, song, story, myth, legend, and celebration. The oldest and most immediate memory of Jesus' ministry may be the hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians 2. The next step is the formulation of the ethics of the community. Paul presents the fundamental features of these ethics in Romans 12 in sentences that closely resemble materials in the inaugural sermon of Q. Did Jesus actually say these things? If so, Paul does not bother to tell. Whatever Jesus said has already been transformed into communal ethics, perhaps even before it was explicitly formulated as a speech of Jesus in the inaugural sermon of the Sayings Gospel Q.

In the community of Q, the attempt to come to terms with the vision of the breaking-in of a new age, which the community had inherited from Jesus, appears first in the ethics of the turn of the ages, as Q presented them in the inaugural sermon, and second in the celebration of a meal that anticipated the messianic banquet in the reign of God. The community of Q did not directly contemplate the significance of the death of Jesus, and certainly not in terms of a sacrifice of expiation for sins. Bread, however, and the feeding of all who are hungry, and the close connection between the petition "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" with "our daily bread give us today" (Q 11:2-4) are undeniably emphasized in Q. The eucharistic prayers of the Didache, which also do not imply an interpretation of Jesus' death, could well be assigned to the heirs of the community of Q. With the Pauline words of institution they share the eschatological outlook into the future, the bread as a symbol of the gathering of the community into one, and the reference to the renewed covenant ("the holy vine of David" -- "the cup of the new covenant"). [15]

Q, or even [Q.sub.1], will never tell us what Jesus actually said or did. Q stands, however, as a witness to the attempt to come to terms with a memory of Jesus' preaching that challenged the disciples to understand their own situation as an instance of eschatological realization. If this appears in Q as a message in the form of radicalized wisdom, this is not necessarily a direct reflection of the voice of Jesus but rather a poetic reformulation of Jesus' vision, just as the visions of Ceasar and Augustus were most appropriately and fully formed in the prophetic poetry and epic writings of Virgil and in the Carmen seculare of Horace.

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[1] This response was read at the annual New England regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, at Harvard Divinity School, 29 March 1996.

[2] John S. Kloppenborg, "The Sayings Gospel Q and the Quest of the Historical Jesus," HTR 89 (1996) 322.

[3] For example, John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991); idem, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1994); and Burton L. Mack, "Lord of the Logia: Savior or Sage," in James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, and Jack T. Sanders, eds., Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings: In Honor of James M. Robinson (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1989) 3-18; idem, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993); see also idem, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress: 1988).

[4] Kloppenborg, "The Sayings Gospel Q," 336.

[5] Ibid., 337.

[6] Ibid.

[7] James M. Robinson, "The Q Trajectory: Between John and Matthew via Jesus," in Birger A. Pearson, ed., The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 178-89.

[8] On this question, see my article, "Q and Its Relatives," in Goehring, Hedrick, and Sanders, Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings, 49-63; also see my article, "Eschatology, the Sayings of Q and Their Image of Jesus," forthcoming in the Festschrift for Tjietze Baarda.

[9] Kloppenborg, "The Sayings Gospel Q," 332-34.

[10] Markus 13 und die Apokalyptik (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984).

[11] See Dieter Georgi's critique in his "Rudolf Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament Revisited." in Edward C. Hobbs, ed., Bultmann, Retrospect, and Prospect: The Centenary Symposium at Wellesley (HTS 35; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). Georgi's arguments are characterized in John Kloppenborg's article above ("The Sayings Gospel Q," 340).

[12] Doron Mendels, "Hellenistic Utopia and the Essenes," HTR 72 (1979) 207-22.

[13] Dieter Georgi, "Who is the True Prophet?" in George W. MacRae, et al., eds., Christians among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) 100-26.

[14] Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 19: Christliche Schriften (ed. Bernard Suphan; Berlin: Weidmann, 1880).

[15] Did. 9.2; 1 Cor 11:24-26; see also 1 Cor 10:17.