Q - you are making it up now, aren't you?

I've previously commended Larry Hurtado's book - here, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, and rightly so, it is a very good book.

However, when serious scholars start devoting whole chapters to Q I begin to think the world has tilted somewhat.

I don't have a problem with Q, I know what it is, and that's not a soft-porn mag trying to pass itself off as a music mag! Q is the hypothetical 'document' used to explain the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark in solving the Synoptic Problem. (In passing, I don't think Matthew, Mark and Luke had a synoptic problem, it is all our own.)

The problem I have is when you publish a critical edition of Q and start giving chapter and verse numbers to passages in this edition of Q, see e.g. JS Kloppenborg eds. The Critical Edition of Q, pub 2000.
If Q existed as a 'document' the only evidence we have for it is in the text of Matthew and Luke, and it is beyond me how you can reconstruct a 'critical edition' of such a hypothetical document.

Hurtado wrties, 'The christological categories used in Q are somewhat like those of the Synoptic Gospels generally.' P. 250 (emphasis mine)
How can anthing of Q be only 'somewhat like' or 'generally' related to the Synoptics? The only access to Q we have is those same Synoptic Gospels, or more particularly, Matthew and Luke. If Q is not exactly like or specifically the same as the text of Matthew and Luke then we really are making it up!!!

I don't mind anyone using Q to resolve the relations between the Synoptics. I wouldn't mind if Hurtado had commented over 3 or 4 pages that nothing in the hypothetical Q document was distinctive in terms of evidence of Jesus devotion from what is known elsewhere in the first century. But I fear that Q scholarship has circled Pluto and is heading for deep space where any kind of control or restrain is not applied.

Total Church: Gospel and Theology

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church: A radical reshaping around gospel and community. Pub IVP, 2007

This was one of my summer reading books. I can't commend it highly enough, if you've already got the book, read it, if not buy it and read it.

Written from the experience of church in The Crowded House the authors write from a conviction that community is at the heart of the gospel and should be at the heart of church.

In the first section of the book they write of gospel and theology in relation to church.

p. 16 - gospel-centred means two things: word-centred and mission-centred. The gospel is a word to proclaim.

What a challenge to much of our church life in CofS! So often God's word is marginalised by our fighting over it and whatever we mean by mission we can hardly be described as mission-centred. Do we agree that the church is to be gospel-centred, and if so, is this what we mean by gospel-centred?

p. 18 "The theology that matters is not the theology we profess, but the theology we practise."

We are so good, and quick, to argue for our own chosen theological position and to defend the purity of our profession. What would happen, what difference would it make if we promoted our theology by our living? When, for example, we claim to hold to the doctrines of grace, why do we so seldom practise grace? Here's a theological challenge, why not, everytime we state to ourselves or in public a theological position we commit to immediately identifying a practise, a way of life implied by that theological position - and then living this theology in our lives day by day.

p. 36 writing on the difference between full-time and part-time in ministry - we need to model whole-life gospel-centred missional living.

We really have lost the thread of the ministry of the people of God, we diminish all ministry by thinking and speaking about full-time, or paid-ministry. Each disciple of the Lord Jesus should be whole-life engaged in discipleship, whole-life engaged in gospel mission. How do we model this? What does it mean in Scotland in 2009? Is whole-life gospel-centred missional living the age old plan of God to save the world one life at a time?

As you can see, I have been greatly challenged by this book. More to follow.

Some questions on Jesus from N T Wright

I’m still in the introduction to N T Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (ok, I’m reading this excellent book for the second time!).

In his chapter on the ‘Third Quest’ Wright offers five, or six, questions that have emerged from this ‘Third Quest’ and are worthy of being answered.

1. How does Jesus fit into Judaism?
2. What were Jesus’ aims?
3. Why did Jesus die?
4. How and why did the early Church begin?
5. Why are the Gospels the way they are?

Clearly these questions belong together. It is possible to offer an answer to one without addressing the others, but any such answer will necessarily have implications for the other four.
These questions cannot be answered either by theology or by history alone, but require a combination of history and theology to provide any reasonable answer.

The historical fixed points are:
1. Second Temple Judaism
2. About 100 ad the existence of a vibrant and growing Christian Church.
Between these two points we have the life and death of Jesus, the beginnings and expansion of the early Church and the writing of the Gospels. N T Wright is correct to challenge us that any account of Jesus must address all of these points.

The rejection of history as important in the study of Jesus has been made in a number of ways. Amongst others Bultmann rejected the Jesus of history as compromising the Christ of faith. One should encounter Jesus afresh in the existential moment of encounter and there is no need for a Jesus of history. A certain type of piety also rejects the Jesus of history, this is done for faith, or as it is claimed to promote faith, we approach the Gospels, and other New Testament writings with faith and when challenged by history retreat into a form of faith which rejects all need for evidence from history.
Both of these forms of rejecting history are themselves to be rejected.

Our Christian faith rests upon the history of God’s work of Salvation in and through Jesus Christ his Son, who is this Jesus of history. This Jesus must recognisably be located within second Temple Judaism and there must be in his life and death something of such significance as to explain the growth and expansion of the Church within just a few decades of his death.

The possible sixth question is, ‘So what?’ Why after all these years are we still bothering with Jesus? Why is it we can leave him alone and carry on without him? What difference does a historical account of Jesus, his life and death make? Or, what difference would an historical account that disproved the Gospels historical claims make? These are questions that thinking disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot fail to address.