The Lost Gospel “Q” (Part 1)
“For many who are familiar with the language of the Gospels, it could be an eye-opening revelation to read the sayings of Jesus without the usual contextualization of his words. A reader might discover wisdom instead of moralizing, beauty and poetry rather than opinion, and unfathomable mystery instead of plain persuasion. Q offers us a glimpse of the Gospel’s soul and not merely its message”
Thus begins the story of The Lost Gospel Q (The Original Sayings of Jesus) by Marcus Borg, Mark Powelson, Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore, a text that I will rely upon heavily for this discussion. But what exactly is this “Q Gospel”?Q is an older and simpler Gospel than the Gospels that are found in the New Testament (NT)…and more.
This “Q Gospel” is known to us only indirectly, as no copy of the “original” Q Gospel has ever been recovered. But the Q story is “still with us, nevertheless” preserved within the canonical (NT) Gospels themselves. Q was not only believed to be the the First Christian Gospel, but the earliest written form of the Jesus tradition.
The claim that there was a lost Q Gospel is not a recent innovation. The scholarly case for the existence of Q was first made more than 150 years ago. By the early 1900s, Q had been widely accepted by scholars involved in the study of Christian origins. The basis for the “Q Hypothesis” as it came to be known, is the large amount of material (over 200 verses) found in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. Most scholars do not think that the author of Matthew or the author of Luke knew of the existence of the other’s Gospel. If this assumption is correct, the non-Marcan material that they share in common cannot be the result of one borrowing from the other, but must come from an earlier written source to which both authors had access. That common source was the Lost Gospel Q.
Since no actual copy of Q has ever been found, it is therefore possible to deny that it existed, and some scholars do not accept the Q Hypothesis. But more than 90% of contemporary Gospel scholars do. It seems to them a necessary hypothesis. Accepting the highly probable hypothesis that Q once existed, what was it like? Q was a “sayings Gospel”. It consisted primarily of the recollection of “things that Jesus said” that had been intentionally preserved by the collective memory of early Christianity, and eventually gathered together and “written down” so as to never be forgotten. Unlike the NT Gospels (but very much like the Gospel of Thomas), Q is not a narrative Gospel. There are no birth stories, no death and resurrection stories. There are almost no miracle stories. The one exception, the healing of the centurion’s servant, has as its climax, a saying of Jesus. Thus even the “exception” fits the basic pattern of Q as a sayings Gospel.
(To Be Continued)