Dohery part 7 of 7: Final Installment: Jesus, Jewish not Gnostic

Doherty complies the different understandings of the early church in its attempts to come to terms with what the events of Jesus life and death meant, and plugs into them Gnostic interpretations and uses the fact of theology itself to imply that the church didn't have the story of the cross and the tomb when it began.

Between these two poles lie other incongruent conceptions. In the earliest layer of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the mythical Descending-Ascending Redeemer from heaven who saves by being God's Revealer; later he is equated with the Greek Logos. Jesus is the heavenly High Priest of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the non-suffering intermediary servant of the Didache, the mystical Wisdom-Messiah of the Odes of Solomon. Paul hints at divergent groups in places like Corinth who "preach another Jesus." In the diverse strands of Gnosticism Jesus (or Christ) is a mythical part of the heavenly pleroma of Godhead, sometimes a revealer akin to John's, sometimes surfacing under other names like Derdekeas or the Third Illuminator. (The Gnostic Jesus eventually interacted with more orthodox ideas and absorbed the new historical figure into itself.) But all this out of a crucified criminal? Out of any human man?

As we have already seen, the use of Logos is not an just an imported Greek concept, it also functions as a loan word to express a Hebrew concept. it does not link Jesus to Gnostics or mystery cults or to Philo, it links him solidly to Jewish understanding of who the Messiah was in second temple Judaism. The church's understanding of Jesus did grow overtime, it is still growing. That in no way means that Jesus didn't live on earth or that the story of Jesus is fiction invented because the group had a lack luster history. People understand ideas about God in different ways, it only makes sense that the church would have a plethora of understandings about Jesus, some of these were perversions of the truth, some are harmonious with each other. Jesus can be logos and high priest at the same time. Some are derived from the canonical Gospels. The high priest of Hebrews is not a contradiction to the logos of John. The basis for all of these views, Christ, redeemer, high priest, were all present at Qumran and all part of the understanding that developed in heterodox Judaism of their messianic expectations. All of these concepts, in some basic form would have been in place and implied in any association with Messiah. These concepts were already set up and waiting for a candidate when Jesus came along to be baptized by John. They did not need to come from the Gnostics or the Greeks, they were very Jewish.

We find this in material at Qumran

Florentino Garcia Martinez

Florentino Garcia Martinez is professor at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he heads the Qumran Institute. This chapter is reprinted from The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Florentino Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

Section 1:

"In spite of that, the general lines of the text are clear enough to assure us that in Qumran interpretation, Jacob's blessing of Judah was seen as a promise of the restoration of the Davidic monarchy and of the perpetuity of his royal office. And since the future representative of the dynasty is identified not only as the shoot of David, but also explicitly as the "true anointed," there remains no doubt about the "messianic" tone of the text. Unfortunately, the details which the text provides about this "Messiah" are not many."

section 5

"... However, a recently published text enables us to glimpse an independent development of the hope in the coming of the "priestly Messiah" as an agent of salvation at the end of times."

"It is an Aramaic text, one of the copies of the Testament of Levi, recently published by E. Puech,32 which contains interesting parallels to chapter 19 of the Greek Testament of Levi included in the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs. From what can be deduced from the remains preserved, the protagonist of the work (probably the patriarch Levi, although it cannot be completely excluded that it is Jacob speaking to Levi) speaks to his descendants in a series of exhortations. He also relates to them some of the visions which have been revealed to him. In one of them, he tells them of the coming of a mysterious person. Although the text is hopelessly fragmentary it is of special interest since it seems to evoke the figure of a "priestly Messiah." This "Messiah" is described with the features of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, as J. Starcky indicated in his first description of the manuscript.33 The two longest and most important fragments of this new text can be translated as follows:

2.1 4Q541 frag. 9 col. I

1 [. . .] the sons of the generation [. . .] 2 [. . .] his wisdom. And he will atone for all the children of his generation, and he will be sent to all the children of 3 his people. His word is like the word of the heavens, and his teaching, according to the will of God. His eternal sun will shine 4 and his fire will burn in all the ends of the earth; above the darkness his sun will shine. Then, darkness will vanish 5 from the earth, and gloom from the globe. They will utter many words against him, and an abundance of 6 lies; they will fabricate fables against him, and utter every kind of disparagement against him. His generation will change the evil, 7 and [. . .] established in deceit and in violence. The people will go astray in his days and they will be bewildered (DSST, 270).

.... The priestly character of this figure is indicated expressly by his atoning character: "And he will atone for all the children of his generation...."

The agreement of the person thus described with the "Messiah-priest" described in chapter 18 of the Greek Testament of Levi is surprising.34 At least it shows us that the presence of this priestly figure in the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs should not simply be ascribed to interpolations or Christian influence. Rather, it is a development which exists already within Judaism. This text also shows us that the portrayal of this "Messiah-priest" with the features of the "Suffering Servant" of Deutero-Isaiah is not an innovation of purely Christian origin either, but the result of previous developments. Our text stresses that although he would be sent "to all the sons of his people," the opposition to this figure, "light of the nations" (Isaiah 42:6) would be great: "They will utter many words against him, and an abundance of lies; they will fabricate fables against him, and utter every kind of disparagement against him" (compare Isaiah 50:6&endash;8; 53:2&endash;10). What is more, according to the editor, it cannot be excluded that the Aramaic text even contained the idea of the violent death of this "Messiah-priest." In other words, this opposition would reach its ultimate outcome as in Isaiah 53. His argument comes from the other fairly extensive fragment of the work, in which possible allusions to a violent death by crucifixion are found. However, to me this interpretation seems problematic. The fragment in question can be translated as follows:

2.2 4Q541 frag. 24 col. II 2 Do not mourn for him [. . .] and do not [. . .] 3 And God will notice the failings [. . .] the uncovered failings [. . .] 4 Examine, ask and know what the dove has asked; do not punish one weakened because of exhaustion and from being uncertain a [ll . . .] 5 do not bring the nail near him. And you will establish for your father a name of joy, and for your brothers you will make a tested foundation rise. 6 You will see it and rejoice in eternal light. And you will not be of the enemy. Blank 7 Blank (DSST, 270).

... Whatever might be the possible allusion to the death of the expected "Messiah-priest," the identification of this figure with the "Servant" of Isaiah seems confirmed by the parallels indicated in fragment 9. In any case, the idea that the eventual death of the "Messiah-priest" could have an atoning role, as Christian tradition attributes to the death of the "Servant," is excluded from our text since the atonement he achieves (frag. 9 II 2) remains in the perspective of the cult.

As far as I know, this is the only text which in the preserved sections deals with the priestly "Messiah" alone. However, many other texts refer to this figure when speaking of a two-fold messianism. This is the two-headed messianism in which we are presented with the "Davidic or royal Messiah" and the "levitical or priestly Messiah" together. They are called the "Messiahs of Israel and of Aaron" respectively."

Martinez urges scholarly caution as the scrolls are very fragmentary, there is no guarantee they do not contain references to other Messianic figures as well, and the notion of a crucifixion for the priestly Messiah is doubtful for several reasons, pertaining to the nature of the text--but his overall opinion seems to be that the concept of a Priestly Messiah on the order of the suffering servant is vindicated

Qumran text, 4Q521

Hebrew Scholars Michael Wise and James Tabor wrote an article that appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review (Nov./Dec. 1992) analyzing 4Q521:

"Our Qumran text, 4Q521, is, astonishingly, quite close to this Christian concept of the Messiah. Our text speaks not only of a single Messianic figure, but it also describes him in extremely exalted terms, quite like the Christian view of Jesus as a cosmic agent. That there was, in fact, an expectation of a single Messianic figure at Qumran is really not so surprising. A reexamination of the Qumran literature on this subject leads one to question the two Messiah theory. As a matter of fact, only once in any Dead Sea Scroll text is the idea of two Messiahs stated unambiguously.

Ibid.

"There is no doubt that the Qumran community had faith in the ultimate victory of such a Messiah over all evil. However, a closer reading of these texts reveals an additional theme, equally dominant-that of an initial, though temporary, triumph of wicked over righteousness. That is, there was the belief among the Qumran community that the Messiah would suffer initial defeat, but that he would ultimately triumph in the end of days."

Doherty is magnifying obscurities and making more than he should out of matters best left to experts. He commits murder to the text by trying to pretend that the high Priest of Hebrews is not a flesh and blood character or that this in any way means Jesus didn't have a flesh and blood life on earth when the text says explicitly he did. Here he is trying to load his pagan connections into the base of all abstract reasoning about the nature of Christ in connection to Jesus. It is true that early Christianity was diverse, and that proto Gnostic sects were forming as early as the 50's, which addresses are Corinth. None of that proves in the least that Jesus didn't exist in history or that the original Christian position did not embrace the cross, the tomb, and soterological effects of both. Odes of Solomon Doherty cannot prove are about Jesus anyway. So what if there were erroneous ideas forming? He tries to sum up his position:

A more sensible solution would be that all these expressions of the idea of "Jesus" and "Christ" were separate distillations out of the concepts that were flowing in the religious currents of the day (as outlined in Part Two). Scholars now admit that "the beginnings of Christianity were exceptionally diverse, varied dramatically from region to region, and were dominated by individuals and groups whose practice and theology would be denounced as 'heretical'. " (Ron Cameron summarizing Walter Bauer, The Future of Early Christianity, p.381.) It is no longer possible to maintain that such diversity—so much of it uncoordinated and competitive—exploded overnight out of one humble Jewish preacher and a single missionary movement.

The beginnings were diverse alright, that in no way means that there wasn't a Jesus. Doherty's solution is absurd and requires reversing both history and mythology. It makes more sense to understand the developmental history of Christ as the development of the churches understanding and it's story telling ability rather than to see Jesus as a fictional character. The church struggled with the meaning of the events in Jesus' life, his death, his resurrection. It struggled with questions of group identity, and it struggled to find a form in which to reflect Jesus' teachings and his story. None of this in any way implies that the story wasn't based upon real events that center on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Promised Messiah. Doherty is basically ignorant of the second temple Judaism and messianic expectations. He doesn't seem to understand that "Christ" was the Greek term the Jews used to say "Messiah" not a connection to pagan wisdom traditions.

At the center of this controversy is the question about the nature of the early tradition. I have shown the following points which I think demonstrate the futile nature of Doherty's fantasies.

(1) The Gospels are said to have been so unauthoritative that they were not quoted until way after the Apostolic fathers.
Answer: Just not true, I demonstrate hundreds of quotations from Ignatius, 1 Clement, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and Paul.

(2) Paul is said to not quote the Gospels or mention the cross or the tomb

Answer: Just not true; my chart shows that he quotes them many times. Helmutt Koester theorizes that Paul had a saying source, perhaps even Q itself.

(3) three major sources are said to prove an ancient tradition lacking the cross and the tomb; Q, GThom, and E 2.

Answer: Q must lack these elements as part of the definition of itself. Q is the material not shared by all three synoptics and these elements are in all four gospels. Moreover, I show the PMR includes these elements and pushes them back to AD 50, which is just as old as the three non canonical sources mentioned. Thomas is not a single unified source but three different source in Greek and one in Coptic all heavily redacted. There are indications of violence to Jesus in E 2 indicating that perhaps the cross and the tomb were purged from the sources by Gnostic groups.

(4) The development of Q is said to have demonstrated the need to reinvent the history of the group and this is marked by the third state of Q development.

Answer: No real basis in history is shown for such a group. Koester warns of drawing such a conclusion about Galilean Hellenists. The whole point of putting it in Galilee would be just so that would tally with Jesus supposed historical origins. The leadership crisis of the group is as fictional as the group itself. The Q source could easily have been a systemic collection of Jesus ethical teachings, perhaps one that was started before he even died. The narrative action was told in oral tradition and the ethical teachings passed on by remembering his sayings; a historical Jesus would also be a member of a group (presumably John's) or at least "around" the group. John's death would certainly precipitate a leadership crisis it would only be natural to turn to Jesus as the new leader. Of course they would see Jesus as greater because even John said he was greater.

Doherty doesn't seem to understand the nature of theology. He's rife with misconceptions about Christianity that involve understanding the most extreme forms of inerrancy and obscurantism as Orthodoxy. The fact is the early church had the elements of the Jesus story as we know them. They did not know that all that they implies. The Church had to come to terms with the theological significance of the events, and it had to learn how to communicate that in written form and all of this took time. IT is this process of understanding that Doherty tries to pawn off as fictional development, or as invention of the story over time. He cannot square this thesis with either the facts or the authorities he quotes for support.

Doherty part 6: From Group Leader to Cosmic Christ

Finally, Doherty brings up the lack of suffering in Q sayings:

But the most telling feature of the Q Jesus has proven to be the most perplexing, for he seems to bear no relationship to Paul's. Scholars continue to puzzle over the fact that Q contains no concept of a suffering Jesus, a divinity who has undergone death and resurrection as a redeeming act. Q can make the killing of the prophets a central theme (e.g., Luke 11:49-51) and yet never refer to Jesus' own crucifixion! Its parables contain no hint of the murder of the Son of God.

Yet it is not sure that Q doesn't refer to Jesus' suffering or death. Suffering and death are implied all over Q as David Seely ("Jesus Death in Q") tells us (see page 4). Death is frame by cynical view point that reflects the current events through the lives of the prophets of the past. That would be a good reason why the Q saying source does not refer one.

(Doherty goes on) "About the resurrection, Q breathes not a whisper. Jesus makes no prophecies of his own death and rising, as he does in other parts of the Gospels. Note that in a Q passage in Luke 17, the evangelist has to insert into Jesus' mouth a prophecy of his own death (verse 25); it is not in Matthew's use of the same passage" (24:23f).

Of course these scholars make an arbitrary assumption that the saying is placed in Jesus' mouth just Matt didn't use it. The idea that there is no resurrection in Q is not in line with the view of James M. Robinson, who is certainly a much more renown Q scholar than is Doherty:

The Real Jesus of the Sayings "Q" Gospel

by James M. Robinson

James M. Robinson is the Arthur J. Letts Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School and Co-chair of the International Q Project.

Religion online

Although the Sayings Gospel has no passion narrative or resurrection stories, this omission does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the Q people knew nothing of Jesus' fate or had never thought about where it left them. It is hardly probable that his death was not quickly rumored among his followers, even into the most obscure corners of Galilee. But then, after his death, was not the only sensible thing to do, to give up the whole thing as some tragic miscalculation, a terrible failure? Jesus had assured them, "the Father from heaven gives good things to those who ask him," and yet his last word according to Mark was "My God, My God, why have you left me in the lurch?" (Mark 15:34). What was there left to proclaim?

The emergence of the Sayings Gospel was, to put it quite pointedly, itself the miracle at Easter! Rudolf Bultmann formulated a famous, or infamous saying to the effect that Jesus rose into the kerygma. But perhaps we would do better to say: Jesus rose into his own word. The resurrection was attested, in substance at least, in the Q community, in that his word was again to be heard, not as a melancholy recollection of the failed dream of a noble, but terribly naive, person, but rather as the still valid, and constantly renewed, trust in the heavenly Father, who, as in heaven, will rule also on earth.

There are a few sayings in Q that are best understood in terms of such a "resurrection" faith. "What I say to you in the darkness, speak out in the light; and what you hear whispered into your ear, preach from the rooftops" (Q 12:3/Matt. 10:27). This sounds as if Jesus had rather secretively only whispered his message and left the spreading of the good word to his disciples. We would have expected it to be just the reverse. Surely Jesus said it better, louder, and clearer than anyone! But perhaps such a saying reflects the recollection that his message was suppressed by force and thus obscured but then became all the brighter and louder as it was nevertheless revalidated and reproclaimed.

Q is that material which is shared by Matthew and Luke and not by Mark. But the tomb and the cross are in all four Gospels, so ex hypothesis we must regard them as not in Q. The fact is they may well have been part of Q. They are by definition not Q simply because they are shared by all four Gospels. Since we don't have a copy of Q there's no way to know. At this point scholars weed out connections between early Q and Messiahood by arbitrary and circular means. Speaking of that, Doherty has gone a long way on sheer conjecture about the contents of a document the existence of which we can't even begin to verify. Now I'm a liberal and I'm a good sport Q wise. I think there probably was a Q document, in fact I'm inclined to think it was Matthew's "Logia."

Doherty continues:

Most startling of all, the Jesus of Q has no obvious significance for salvation. Apart from the benefits accruing from the teachings themselves, scholars admit that there is no soteriology in Q, certainly nothing about an atoning death for sin. The "Son who knows the Father" (Luke 10:22, a late saying recast from an earlier Wisdom saying) functions as a mediator of God's revelation—simply personifying what the Q community itself does. The Gospel of Thomas is similarly devoid of any reference to Jesus' death and resurrection.

Funny he should mention the Gospel of Thomas. Soteriological implications are all over Q and they are not hard to find. But be that as it may, Thomas is looked to as a backing for Q in many ways, it supposedly implies that the saying source was a prior form of the narrative Gospel, and it uses many Q sayings. But in Thomas there are clear statements of Soteriological value, and of the deity of Christ:

saying no.28: Jesus said, "I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways."

In terms of Q's soeteriology, or alleged lack thereof, Doherty has simplified the issues. It is not true that Q has no Soeteriology, it more the case that the Soteriology of Q is not Pauline and is very Jewish, very law oriented, so says John Kloppenborg, the scholar who first began the emphasis on Q's lack of a cross or a tomb (see Formation of Q 1987). In terms of Soeteriology we know that the early church was confused. Jesus was not a system builder, he was concerned with modeling behavior and with impressing upon people how to live a godly life. God drafted Paul to be the first systematic Christian theologian, that's why he wrote so much of the NT. So it was Paul who sorted out what it all meant and how all the pieces fit and there's nothing wrong with that. As Christians we should just accept that God chose to do it that way. But the issue in terms of Q is how much of Q do we have? Do we have all the pieces in Matt and Luke? Kloppenborg argues that we do because Matt uses all of Mark so why wouldn't he use all of Q. But he can only rest on that answer if we can be sure that Matt always used every source the same way; Mark was a narrative and Q a saying list.

Dennis Ingolfsland

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society,
Jun 2003

Kloppenborg's stratification of Q
and its significance for
historical Jesus studies

The second reason Kloppenborg cites for believing that virtually all of Q can be recovered is Kilpatrick's argument that the disappearance of Q was explicable only on the assumption that it was almost completely absorbed in Matthew and Luke.27 Some have objected, however, that by this logic Mark might have been expected to disappear also, since virtually all of Mark is included in Matthew. In Excavating Q, Kloppenborg responds to this objection by citing Luhrmann who proposed that Mark's survival and Q's disappearance are simply accidents of history in that Mark's Gospel happened to be carried to Egypt where it was copied and Q was not. Moreover, responding to Dunn who argued that Q may have disappeared for theological reasons, Kloppenborg writes, "In fact we do not know why Q disappeared."28

Kloppenborg is right, of course, but he seems unaware that in arguing that Q's disappearance may have been an accident of history and by admitting that we frankly do not know why Q disappeared, he has contradicted one of his own primary reasons for assuming that we know the extent of Q, that is, that the disappearance of Q "was explicable only on the assumption that it was almost completely absorbed in Matthew and Luke."29 Therefore, the main reasons Kloppenborg proposes for assuming that virtually all of Q can be reconstructed have been successfully refuted by his own arguments.

At this stage he returns to his bread and butter, spinning moonbeams about Paul.

How is this radical divergence between Paul and Q explained? It shows, say the scholars, the differing responses by different circles to the man Jesus of Nazareth. But they founder when they try to rationalize how such a strange phenomenon could have been possible. Besides, the documents reveal many more "responses" than just two. We are to believe that early Christianity was wildly schizophrenic. First Paul and other epistle writers abandoned all interest in the earthly life and identity of Jesus, turning him into a cosmic Christ who created the world and redeemed it by his death and resurrection. The Q community, along with that of the Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, decided to ignore that death and resurrection and preserve the earthly teaching Jesus, a preacher of the coming end of the world.

Doherty contradicted by Koester, again

Of course that little fantasy is dispelled by my list, which I take from Helmutt Koester, that shows Paul's deep dependence upon Gospel sayings. It's a total myth to assume that he never quotes a Q saying. Yes Doherty tries to say that Paul never quotes Q, but the man he uses as an authority, Helmutt Koester, says Paul quotes Q quite a bit and that Q was widespread.

Helmut Koester comments on the provenance of Q (Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 164):

"Even the sayings used for the original composition of Q were known and used elsewhere at an early date: they were known to Paul, were used in Corinth by his opponents, employed perhaps in eastern Syria for the composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and quoted by 1 Clement in Rome at the end of the 1st century. The document itself, in its final redacted form, was used for the composition of two gospel writings, Matthew and Luke, which both originated in the Greek-speaking church outside of Palestine."

Koster latter theorizes that Paul had the Q saying source with him and this is what he calls "my Gospel." It's equally foolish to assume that he doesn't mention the cross or resurrection. Of course because he doesn't anticipate Doherty 2000 years latter and say "O by the way, this was in real flesh and blood on earth in history" then he couldn't have believed it? That's where Doherty wins his fan base, by appealing to the Christ haters who want to destroy Christianity and the mythers who care nothing for facts of reality. By appealing to those who love to fill the cracks in knowledge with their dreams.

view this as a nice chart (scroll down)

Just a small part of the list linked to above:
The last supper (1 Cor 11:23ff)
Confessed his Messiahship before Pilate (1 Tim 6:13)
Died for peoples' sins (Rom 4:25, 1 Tim 2:6)
He was killed (1 Cor 15:3, Phil 2:8)
Buried (1 Cor 15:4)
Empty tomb is implied (1 Cor 15:4)
Jesus was raised from the dead (2 Tim 2:8)
Resurrected Jesus appeared to people (1 Cor 15:4ff)
James, a former skeptics, witnessed this (1 Cor 15:7)
as did Paul (1 Cor 15:8-9)
This was reported at an early date (1 Cor 15:4-8)
He ascended to heaven, glorified and exalted (1 Tim 3:16, Phil 2:6f)
Disciples were transformed by this (1 Tim 3:16)
Disciples made the Gospel center of preaching (1 Cor 15:1-4)
Resurrection was chief validation of message

We see that Paul does quote Q and he does refer to crucifixion, resurrection, and even soteriology. He makes all sorts of references which Doherty denies, to Jesus blood line, his life on earth, alludes to the empty tomb, to his crucifixion to his Messiahship. On the next page I will examine more closely Doherty's allegations about the contents of Q and Pauline theology vis, alleged Gnosticism. I will argue that the theology is very Jewish not Gnostic.

Doherty Part 5: Leader of the Pack

Doherty tries to construct a fictional history for his fantasy group, the "Q community," and then invents a crisis in which they needed a leader. Out of that crisis the Jesus myth emerges to offer them the hope of a leader. One wonders how this would work in real Life. Real groups need real leaders. It seems more likely that a fictional or mythological figure would be the object of worship rather than become a group leader who never existed. But all this talk of a group makes us wonder, was Jesus a total loaner before he began his ministry? John seems to indicate in his Gospel that Jesus had friends, he had a social circle. That consisted at least of the little family of Bethany, Lazarus and his two sisters. But did Jesus not belong to a group? He had a human nature (speaking from an Orthodox standpoint), why would he not belong to a group. Jesus may have emerged out of Hellenistic groups and thus had a penchant for Hellenistic sounding ideas, and he may have been quoting some kind litany of group teaching. On the other hand, Doherty can produce no examples of Jesus actual sayings from other sources. It has always been understood by scholars that Jesus probably had some interaction with John the Baptist's group. It is doubtful that when John saw Jesus coming to him for baptism that this was the first time they met. Doherty tries to turn the relationship of Jesus and John into a power struggle within the Q community and the need for a leader.

Especially revealing is the saying now found in Luke 16:16: "Until John (the Baptist) there was the law and the prophets (i.e., scripture); since then, there is the good news of the Kingdom of God." This, like so much of Q, is acknowledged to be a product of the community's own experience and time (i.e., not going back to Jesus), and yet no reference to Jesus himself has been worked into this picture of the change from the old to the new. Luke 11:49 also leaves out the Son of God when speaking of those whom Wisdom promised to send.

Doherty has totally misconstrued the meaning of this passage. Here he takes as an indication that Jesus was absent from the original group because the saying doesn't include a reference to the "son of man." One wonders why it should? Doherty seems to be oblivious to the fact that it is Jesus making the statement. Why should he be talking about himself? But he is not saying that John has replaced the OT, he is not saying that John is the inauguration of the New Covenant. He's merely using John's ministry as indicative for the times, not as a formal replacement for the Old Covenant. He is saying "the laws was preached, until John came and started preaching the kingdom, now everyone wants the kingdom." He is condemning the Pharisees for their adultery. He says the Kingdom of God is manifesting itself on the earth, people are seeking it, John is a sign of the times, an indication that the kingdom has come. The very next passage shows what he is really saying: (Luke 16:17) "And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one title of the law to fail. (Luke 16:18) Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from [her] husband committeth adultery." He's saying that the can't be set aside. The kingdom is here, but the point of it is to manifest the law not to eliminate it. In this context what's the point of expecting a son of man quote? Especially when the son of man is making the statement?

He assumes that the leader was introduced in the third stage of the Q development, the third stage was brought on by the need for re-interpreting the material in light of the need for a leader. "Certain past material would have been reworked and everything attributed to this founder, including healing "miracles" which had been part of the activity of the Q preachers themselves." Of course this would work even better if they had a real leader. One fails to see how projecting a myth into the bogus re-working of group history would solve a leadership crisis, and how it could even be done against the incredulity of the group, short of just making an agreement, "let's have a fake leader." On the other hand, John's death would have left his group leaderless and the leadership crisis could have been avoided if his group merged with Jesus' group and came to see Jesus as the leader. This would work well in real life and seems to be not far from what really happened since we find John cronies such as Aquilla and Priscilla turning up in Christian ranks. Doherty can't provide a reason why the John the Baptist group would suddenly impose upon its fictional past this mythological Jesus figure, but we can understand perfectly why the followers of John would turn to a real earthly Jesus. Jesus was there, he had been baptized by John, he probably had been part of those circles and many of them knew him. Some of Jesus' own 12 had been with John, and Jesus lauded John, they had the same message, and Jesus made sense of John's death to them. If Jesus was Messiah, and John was the heralding voice, then his death is meaningful and serves a purpose in the kingdom. But to manufacture such a meaning with a fictional replacement seems a much dicier proposition.

Doherty's Attempted Answer:

How did such a founder formulate itself in the Q mind if he had no historical antecedent? All sectarian societies tend to read the present back into the past; they personify their own activities in great founding events and heroic progenitors. The very existence of the sayings collection, the product of the evolving community, would have invited attribution to a specific originating and authoritative figure. Such a record set in a glorified past is known as a "foundation document," a universal phenomenon of sectarian expression. (Figures such as Confucius, Lao-Tsu, Lycurgus of Sparta, the medieval Swiss William Tell, as well as other obscure sectarian figures of the ancient world, are examples of founder figures who have come to be regarded as likely non-existent.)

In asking the question Doherty knows its a good point, he knows he needs an answer. He should know his answer is inadequate. All groups put a spin on the past interpreting what came before in light of their need to explain what is happening now. That in no way means that any group could ever invent a leader out of pure fiction and superimpose him/her into the fictional past and then use that to solve a current leadership crisis. One might consider this a pretty crazy idea because why should we ever think that this would contribute to the kinds of things leaders do in the present? The loss of a leader means a current decision maker, not a mouth into which one can stuff an ancient list of sayings. Doherty cannot begin to tell us how this would work. We imagine old Eliaser comes to the meeting:
"I've been in the group 40 years, I've heard of this Jesus guy, who was he?"
"O sure you have, he was our great leader he said all those things, you know, in the sayings list we like."
"I never heard of him, neither has my grandfather."
"sure you have, we all have, and just remember, he didn't die on the cross or raise form the dead."

Moreover, Doherty can't show us the more crucial thing: how would this serve in the current leadership crisis? How do we know the crisis was current? IF the crisis was in the past how did they solve it to begin with? No group works to resolve a leadership crisis that is already 20 years resolved. He points out that groups read the present into the past, but doesn't tell us how reinventing the past would fix the present. In answer to this he postulates the "foundation document" as the answer. In giving the group a heroic past they give the contemporary group something to cling to. He tires to use other figures as proof of this same move. He uses figures such as Lao-tsu and William Tell. But every figure he names is thought to be based upon an historical figure. These have been questioned recently, but mainly by Jesus myth spokesmen. He can not proof that these figures emerged as answers to a crisis need for group leadership.. If they were legendary they each have to be taken on their own terms. They cannot be put over as examples of other figures who were imposed upon a fictional past to save a group. Doherty cannot show any even one of these figures was created to resolve a current leadership crisis.

Then he assumes that the Q community was goaded into replacing John with a superior leader by a rival group. "I also suspect that the existence of a rival sect claiming John the Baptist as its founder may have induced the Q community to develop one of its own, one touted as superior to John." (ibid). Now he's invented a rival group that also followed John. Holy Occam Batman, how many groups were following John anyway? Every time Doherty needs an answer he can just invent a new group. As if he know this is not enough, he invents a third reason:

An additional explanation for the development of this founder is suggested by Q itself. The figure of heavenly Wisdom (Sophia), once seen as working through the community, seems to have evolved into the figure of her envoy, one who had begun the movement and spoken her sayings. Myths about Wisdom coming to the world were longstanding in Jewish thought and would have played a role here. Luke 7:35 (the concluding line of the Dialogue) calls Jesus a child of Wisdom, and Matthew in his use of Q reflects an evolving attitude toward Jesus as the very incarnation of Wisdom herself. Several of Jesus' sayings in Q are recognized as recast Wisdom sayings.

So now he's inventing a goddess worship contingent to the Jewish faith. There is a link between the logos and wisdom. That link is found in proverbs 13 but is made explicit in Wisdom of Solomon. Doherty would have us look to Pagan sources, to Greek Philosophy, to Gnosticism and link to Judaism through Philo to explain the logos of John. But there is a much better, and much more Jewish explanation. Logos was the Greek term that Jews used to express the Hebrew concept of "memra." The concept of "memra" was the Hebrew idea of the Spirit of God revealing itself downward, from heaven to earth. One manifestation of this was wisdom. In fact Logos was just the Greek term which the Jews used to say "memra." Turn to Kaufmann Kolher, Jewish Encyclopedia Online.com.

The Logos. It is difficult to say how far the rabbinical concept of the Memra, which is used now as a parallel to the divine Wisdom and again as a parallel to the Shekinah, had come under the influence of the Greek term "Logos," which denotes both word and reason, and, perhaps owing to Egyptian mythological notions, assumed in the philosophical system of Heraclitos, of Plato, and of the Stoa the metaphysical meaning of world-constructive and world-permeating intelligence (see Reizenstein, "Zwei Religionsgeschichtliche Fragen," 1901, pp. 83-111; comp. Aall, "Der Logos," and the Logos literature given by Schürer, "Gesch." i. 3, 542-544).

Kohlor admits we don't know the extent of Greek influences, but he assumes Philo is bringing them in copiously. Edersheim shows that Philo in use of Logos is really very Jewish. Yes, he has Greek influences, but he is not as divorced from his Jewish roots as some might suggest. I have three full pages on the link between Memra and logos and the use of Memra in the Targimum. They are all linked the page: The Triune God in Hebrew Thought (see also "More Memra" and "Targimum" linked through same page).

So John says "Logos" he's really saying Jesus was the memra, manifested presence of God (see Edersheim Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah see also my Trinity pages). Memra is all over the Syriac translations of the OT used in Synagogues called "Targimum." Edershime gives a chart of uses and where in the OT they are found, it's 16 rows long. But this could never the sort of female goddess figure from paganism that Doherty wants us to accept. He has to assume that the Q community would have been Gnostics. They would have had to be very radical for that period. I'm sure Doherty supporters think the link can be made through Gospel of Thomas, we can discuss that latter. The sort of goddess worship schemata Doherty wants to inflict upon the history is ahistorical and could not have been in Judaism of the day. Wisdom was God. Just because it's personified as a female in a literary device in Proverbs doesn't mean the Jews were into any sort of goddess worship or that this wisdom figure needed a human cohort to express her ideas. For Jews of that day Wisdom was God, God had prophets. In fact the logos prologue is seen as a counter to the Sophia wisdom Goddess of the Gnostics. There is no reason to make these assumptions because "logos" was a very Jewish concept and word when used by Jews.

Here I quote myself, Metacrock, from my Trinity pages, as I quote Helmutt Koster, the authority for Doherty:

As Helmutt Koster says, The Prologue is an anti-Gnostic, anti-Sophia preamble. It is offering an alternative to the mythological Gnostic figure of Wisdom ("Sophia"). This is crucial because Sophia, as the female personification of Wisdom, is linked to God in Proverbs and even more strongly in the Wisdom of Ben Sirach an apocryphal work which dates to about 186 BC. The term "logos" is used interchangeably in that document with the Aramaic term memra. Thus when John says "in the beginning was the word" he is using the term logos in the way that Jewish heterodox sources of the intertestamental period used it, as an expression of God himself, God's presence (see Trinity page 4 "The Triune God in Hebrew Thought?). Koester points out himself that John is writing a biography of the Logos. Wisdom cannot have a biography, she is merely a veggie personified ideal, but the Logos can have a biography because he became a flesh and blood person (as opposed to Gnostic thinking which saw flesh as evil and Jesus' earthly nature as illusory). John tells us in no uncertain terms, "The word became flesh and dwelt among us."

The Meaning of Logos

The word "logos" or "word" in Greek can be used in any sense in which we English speakers would use the term "word" (including as rhama would also be used). In the context of Greek Philosophy it indicated an organizing principle, the concept which constructs the world; for the Hebrews it meant the presence of God, an emanation through various sapheroths, and the self revealing presence, God revealing himself downward to earth. This the two uses (Greek and Hebrew) have in common. As ordering principle of the world, Logos also meant, for the Greeks, revelation, or an idea being revealed. This is the closest sense to its use in John. The Revelation of God to humanity is Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the God's self revealing presence.

Doherty, like so many, tries to link Logos to the Greeks, through Philo, through Jewish Gnosticism, but that does not cover the use of Logos by John and by 1 Peter. 1 Peter? He doesn't use the term "Logos" but he speaks of "the excellent glory" in relation to the revelation of God through Christ. That is a euphemism for memra; that is the concept of memra, he's calling Jesus "memra" which is logos. Doherty needs to adapt Christ to Gnosticism and plugs "Jesus" (the fictional character) into the Wisdom circuit where he can be a manifestation and messenger of the female wisdom goddess thing that Judaism never had. But instead he doesn't realize that he's just running afoul of second temple Messianic expectations. He believes Q is devoid of them because he doesn't know what to look for he doesn't know them when he seems them. The Memra/logos connection doesn't plug Jesus into Gnostic wisdom, it plugs him into God, into the Wisdom of God, into being a messenger of God not of "wisdom-Sophia," it plugs him into Messiahshood.

Then he says something so confusing that it seems to totally contradict everything he's put forth in his theory:

Whether the Q community gave to this perceived founder the name "Jesus" cannot be certain. At a late stage of Q, there may even have been some crossover influences from earliest Gospel circles (of "Mark"). Uncovering such things is a conjectural business, as actual historical developments tend to be more subtle and complex than any academic presentation of them on paper, especially 20 centuries after the fact. It is significant that Q never uses the term Christ, for such a founder would not at this stage have been regarded as the Messiah. That role was introduced by Mark.

So there is a tradition that is older than the canonical Gospels, it is the original tradition that became Christianity, it began with no Jesus, because he didn't exist in history, but somehow an earlier version of Mark existed and had Jesus and they barrowed it and then gospels took it back presumably? That makes no sense. If that's the case than the tradition of Jesus must be actually older than that of Q, not to mention the Gospel of Mark? What is he talking about? If he theorizes that the group that eventually produced Mark sprang up independently of the fictional Q group, then how does he account for their adaptation of Jesus? This is also unbelievable on another level. Because here he is disparaging Messiahood because the term "Christ" isn't used in the Q source, but he can't see that the memra link makes him Messiah without the word Christ. The followers began to identify Jesus as Messiah when they saw him doing all the things that fulfill Messianic expectations and when John said he was "the lamb of God." There's a lamb of God literature at Qumran that is tied to messiah. The link from Memra to Messiah is not direct. The Jews didn't expect Messiah to be an incarnation of the Godhead as in Christian theology, but they had begun to think of Messiah as quasi divine in a sense. They understood Messiah as existing before his life on earth, thus his life on earth was an incarnation. He existed before the world was created and the light of the Messiah was involved in creation. The memra was understood as being involved in creation.




 

Part 4 Refutting Doherty's Evolution of Jesus: Rise of the Q Community

Doherty assumes what we have just disproved, the latter development of Cross and tomb, in order to assert a fictional Q community that lacked knowledge of Jesus and set up the basic Q document:

"If, on the other hand, the "biography" of Jesus of Nazareth was something unusual which went against the grain of current knowledge and belief, one can understand how early versions of the Gospels, written around the turn of the century, would have enjoyed only limited use and isolated reworking for at least a generation."

The Gospels would certainly be limited in acceptance even if the cross and the tomb were early and well known. Doherty wants us to think its because something totally new is being introduced into a tradition that never had it before, and that is true, but that doesn't mean the new element is the cross/tomb part of the story, nor is it an earthly Jesus. What's new is the introduction of written sources as more authoritative than oral sources. Papias complains that he likes to hear the spoken word better than the written word, this indicates that even as late as the early second century some oral tradition was still lingering. The Gospels do not have to have been written by their namesakes to be inspired but even with Apostolic backing they would still take time to spread, and still take time to gain authority. No one thought of these sources as scripture. We have always known scripture, for the early church, meant the Old Testament, not what we call "the New Testament." The gospel authors didn't think of themselves as writing "the Bible." Of course the whole assertion has been disproved anyway because the early Christian writings were full of quotations and allusions to the Gospels.

At this point Doherty makes one of his most crucial moves, grounding the canonicals in the Q tradition. He tries to establish the primacy of Q as an older and more authoritative source, then he will try to separate it form Jesus completely and argue that the Christians took it over form some other group noting to do with Jesus to begin with. We shall examine this on the next page

The core of the historical Jesus precedes the Gospels and was born in the community or circles which produced the document now called "Q" (for the German "Quelle," meaning "source"). No copy of Q has survived, but while a minority disagree, the majority of New Testament scholars today are convinced that Q did exist, and that it can be reconstructed from the common material found in Matthew and Luke which they did not get from Mark.

Of course this is very misleading because there is no Q document. What we have are traces of some tradition, but it could as easily be a version of Matthew or Matthew's "Logia" (of which Papias speaks) or Thomas, or even non existent. A lot of scholarly movement is found back in the direction of anti-Q feeling, and one need not abandon Marcan priority to abandon Q (Mark Goodacre "Fallacies at the Heart of Q" and Alen J. MacNichol "Has Goulder Sunck Q?"). Trying to attach Q to a historical community is especially amazing since we don't even know what Q was.

Doherty rightly points out (according to theory) that Q was not a narrative but a "saying source," and in that sense not a conventional "Gospel" as we think of Gospels. It was filled with ethical sayings and prophetic utterances, but none of the statements about the cross or the tomb fall within the Q range of sayings. Of course that would be true because they are used in all three synoptics. If Q is automatically assumed based upon material shared by Matthew and Luke but not in Mark (of course they do allow for overlaps but that's another issue) then automatically the tomb and cross would be excluded because it's in all three. That in no way proves that it was missing from Q. Its' just a matter of dogmatically excluding such sayings from that which we call "Q." Since don't have a copy of Q it makes it very easy to say "the cross and the tomb were not in Q."

In accessing Q's origin Doherty says: "It was the product of a Jewish (or Jewish imitating) sectarian movement located in Galilee which preached a coming Kingdom of God." Koster warns to be careful of the assertion that it was from Galilee. The assertion is based upon the only place names in Q, but there could be other reasons why those are the only place names used:

Helmutt Koester (remember page 1? Doherty quotes him as an authority) warns us not to do exactly what Doherty is doing, assuming a fictional group based upon the cynical sounding nature of some Q passages!

Helmut Koester:

Q 10:13-15 announces the coming judgment explicitly with the view to two Galilean towns, Chorazin and Bethsaida: even Tyre and Didon will be better off in the coming judgment. And the same saying threatens that Capernaum will be condemned to Hades. Except for the lament over Jerusalem (Q 13:34-35) and the localization of John the Baptist's activity in the area of the Jordan (Q 3:3), these are the only names of places which occur in Q. It is, therefore, tempting to assume that the redaction of Q took place somewhere in Galilee and that the document as a whole reflects the experience of a Galilean community of followers of Jesus. But some caution with respect to such conclusion seems advisable for several reasons. One single saying provides a very narrow base. Polemic against the Pharisees cannot confirm Galilean provenance - Greek-speaking Pharisees could be found elsewhere in the Diaspora, viz., Paul who persecuted the church in Greek-speaking synagogues, probably in Syria or Cilicia. Even the sayings used for the original composition of Q were known and used elsewhere at an early date: they were known to Paul, were used in Corinth by his opponents, employed perhaps in eastern Syria for the composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and quoted by 1 Clement in Rome at the end of the 1st century. The document itself, in its final redacted form, was used for the composition of two gospel writings, Matthew and Luke, which both originated in the Greek-speaking church outside of Palestine. (Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 164).

Doherty links the first layer of Q with counter cultural non Christian movements, (as Koster warns against) hatching out for himself a bogus history for his fictional Galilean cynical non Jesus worshipping Q community:

Scholars have concluded that Q was put together over time and in distinct stages. They have identified the earliest stratum (calling it Q1) as a set of sayings on ethics and discipleship; these contained notably unconventional ideas. Many are found in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount: the Beatitudes, turn the other cheek, love your enemies. A close similarity has been noted (see F. Gerald Downing, "Cynics and Christians," NTS 1984, p.584-93; Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p.67-9, 73-4) between these maxims and those of the Greek philosophical school known as Cynicism, a counterculture movement of the time spread by wandering Cynic preachers. (Mack has declared that Jesus was a Cynic-style sage, whose connection with things Jewish was rather tenuous.) Perhaps the Q sect at its beginnings adopted a Greek source, with some recasting, one they saw as a suitable ethic for the kingdom they were preaching. In any case, there is no need to impute such sayings to a Jesus; they seem more the product of a school or lifestyle, formulated over time and hardly the sudden invention of a single mind.

He's making the assumption that Q is the oldest Christian teaching, because it has an older strata. But that in no way means it's the oldest of Christian teaching. Just because Q goes through a development form cynical sounding ethical sayings to concrete history of Jesus life in no way indicates that the church's understanding went through that evolution. The PMR that embodied the Tomb/cross tradition could be just as old. Here we are comparing narrative action with ethical teaching. If one has only a concept of writing down teachings and sayings, not story lines, how does one include a narrative in a list of sayings? That doesn't prove the narrative didn't exist. All it proves is that Christian literary consciousness expanded. It moved from the static saying source to a dynamic narrative account, but this took several decades. No one had ever written a Gospel before, the communities that invented the Gospels invented the literary form. There is a good reason why the ethical saying would be older than the narrative too, because they originated out of Jesus own teachings while he was alive. That's a very good reason why the group of original disciples would have Jesus ethical says already memorized and already being copied before they got to any narrative action. They probably already had them memorize before Jesus went to the cross. So of course the body of ethical teachings could be set aside as a separate unit and preserved in the memory of the group apart from the story.

Let's consider this argument. We have indications that in the latter part of Jesus ministry he began to attract a lot of people. Women were following the camp and taking care of things (cooking, cleaning). Lots of people were always about. Jesus sends out 72 disciples (Matthew 13) to preach and work miracles. Where did he get them? From the body of followers that had began to surround him. Matthias replaced Judas. The Apostles said "he has been with us from the beginning." So clearly there were other disciples who followed Jesus and who made a camp and regularly around him. wouldn't these people, and new followers as well, want a list of the teachings they were signing up to learn and follow? Jesus was telling them how to live, so they were memorizing sayings about ethics and daily living. The Sermon on the mount was a classic example of Jesus' ethical teaching and thus we find ethical teachings in Q. What if Q represents a list of ethical teachings largely compiled before Jesus had even died? That would be a good reason for it to leave out the cross and the tomb. It may have been used to teach new camp followers about the ethical system Jesus was teaching. After Jesus died they would save the list, they would copy it and pass it on. It is our conditioning to think Jesus = Gospels, that conditioning tells us they had to add a narrative. There is a very good reason why they would not have added the narrative to the sayings list. They were not running a six o'clock news program, they all knew he died. They knew about the empty tomb. They were probably re-telling the women's finding of the tomb every night in their communal meals. There would be no need to add these things to list of teachings, but the sacrosanct nature of the teachings given by the Master before he died and went away would be reason enough to keep the list intact. I'm not saying this is anywhere near proven, but it's alternative that explain the situation without the radial conclusion that the early community did not have knowledge of the cross or the tomb.

Doherty is also assuming from the outset, dogmatically, that they are not Christians in the sense of having a Jesus story. He assumes that Jesus emerges from their ranks and the sect was already going as a cynical group oriented around some body of ethical teaching. He has absolutely no reason to assume this whatsoever, and it seems the Galilee is a major part of his assumption, and of that Koester warns us not to make too much. Of course that's convenient for Doherty because it "explains" why Jesus would come from Galilee. The group put him forward, Doherty will argue because they needed a heroic figure to counter John the Baptist. But we will get to that latter. The fact of the saying having a cynical flavor in no way means they were not Jesus' teachings or that there was any original group to which Jesus belonged. It could just as well be that the cynics were on to something and Jesus' actual teachings coincide with theirs. Of maybe he liked the cynics. That doesn't create Doherty's fictional group. Actually, the sayings are not that close to the cynical mind set. They no more the cynics than any number of ethical view points. At that point Doherty has no reason to assume that these sayings were taken over by a Jewish group with eschatological expectations. He needs this to explain the rise of the Jesus myth form this group (the need for a leader). But there is no reason to assume it. He can't show a reason why a Jewish eschatologically oriented group would be concerned with cynical teachings.

There probably had to be a group that produced the Q document (assuming there was a Q document) but to assert that it was cynical, that it was pre Christian, that it knew nothing of Jesus, is all uncalled for and to assert that it did not know Jesus death is just plain wrong. The Burton Mack assumption that Q lacks a death of Christ is totally wrong, and this opens the door to the notion that the cross was expunged from Q material. But be that as it may, there is good reason not to understand these cynical sounding Q statements as indication of a group producing Q material prior to a Christian group.

David Seely argues that the cynical expression had become so popular among Greek speaking Jews that it could be found everywhere, and that it was used as a means of framing the Jewish understanding of prophetic death. Jesus death was then dealt with by early community in way that the deaths of the OT prophets were dealt with, which means framing it in a cynical outlook:

David Seeley

JESUS' DEATH IN Q

[This article first appeared in New Testament Studies 38 (1992) 222-34; it appears here by permission of Cambridge University Press. The Greek of the original has been transliterated.]

The Sayings Gospel Q is notable for lacking an account of Jesus' death./1/ It is surprising that one early Christian document is apparently so indifferent to an event which plays a profound role in others (e.g., Romans, Mark). Scholars have, to be sure, observed that the issue of persecution and/or death is often referred to in Q, and many have come to believe that these references are casting an implicit glance at the death of Jesus himself. According to this line of thought, early Christians would have used the deaths of the prophets to connect Jesus' death with those of his followers. I do not intend to argue against this. Rather, I will propose that there is also another view according to which Q related Jesus' death and those of his followers. This view involved common, Cynic-Stoic ideas of the time.

The Deuteronomistic-Prophetic Understanding of Jesus' Death in Q In Q, there are six passages which deal with the issue of violent persecution and/or death (Q 6:22-23, 6:27-29, 11:47-51, 12:4, 13:34-35, and 14:27)./2/ Three of these mention the prophets./3/ Q 6:22-23 cautions Jesus' followers not to sorrow over being persecuted, for the prophets received similar treatment. Q 11:47-51 refers to the deaths of the prophets and apostles. Q 13:34-35 refers to the deaths of the prophets alone. These verses imply that Q may have understood Jesus' death in terms of the deaths of the prophets. This implication has grown easier to follow in light of O. H. Steck's work. Steck has argued that, by the first century CE, two important ideas had coalesced: 1) a belief that prophets were habitually killed by the recalcitrant Israelites; 2) the deuteronomistic view of Israel's repeated disobedience against God's laws./4/ Steck has termed this coalescence the deuteronomistic-prophetic view. According to it, the Israelites would sin, God would send his messengers to admonish them, and the people, compounding their sin, would kill those messengers. Nehemiah 9:26 provides important evidence for Steck's argument: "[the Israelites] were disobedient and rebelled against thee [God] and cast thy law behind their back and killed thy prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to thee, and they committed great blasphemies."

In conclusion Seely argues that the framing of Jesus death in this way would have been a very widespread element throughout Jewish culture of the time:

This article has done three things. First, it has pointed out that Q 14:27 does not match the deuteronomistic-prophetic interpretation of Jesus' death, even though the verse seems to address that death more directly than other Q passages. Second, it has proposed that 14:27 does match Cynic-Stoic views on the nature of a teacher's death and its relationship to disciples' deaths. Third, the article has asserted that this kind of influence is plausible from a cultural, chronological, and social standpoint. Though the arguments presented here are obviously not the only ones that can be entertained concerning this verse, they nevertheless deserve serious reflection./50/

Meanwhile, Doherty moves on to the next stage in the development of Q. He's trying to hitchhike his bogus notion of the fictional Jesus story being born out of this evolution of the Q group. He's trying to graft one on to the other.

This formative stage of Q scholars call "sapiential," for it is essentially an instructional collection of the same genre as traditional "wisdom" books like Proverbs, though in this case with a radical, counterculture content. Later indications (as in Luke 11:49) suggest that the words may have been regarded as spoken by the personified Wisdom of God (see Part Two), and that the Q preachers saw themselves as her spokespersons.

Here he is making several major assumptions not in evidence. He's making a connection that shouldn't be made, he wants us to think that because some wisdom traditions embodied a personification of wisdom, that must be the case with all wisdom literature. Solomon's Ecclesiastes is a wisdom tradition and that uses the vehicle of the wise but flesh and blood Solomon as it's author, not some idealized wisdom figure. Doherty wants to splice together these ideas of the idealized personification of wisdom with the eternal Jesus because group needed a wisdom figure. But this way of doing it is so clumsy and so contrived. I want Doherty to show me one example of any group anywhere in the world that ever did things this way. As I have argued before, he has mythology running backwards. No group first exists as an amorphous blob loosely connected to some set of ideas, decides that it needs a mascot to focus it's ideology and then drafts some ethereal being and then shapes it into a concrete historically bound story.

One also wonders what the group was about in the first place. He has a group of cynics, apparently organized around a set of sayings, and those saying are taken over by a Jewish eschatological group, which then has a crisis of leadership and needs to make up a wisdom figure to embody the sayings and give the group a new leader after the loss of the old one (John the B) but wouldn't the first set of sayings require a leader to say them to begin with? How could they just take over this group of sayings from a pagan religion and then work them into the fabric of their group separate and apart form the teachings of their own leader, then cram them into the mouth of their new fictional leader. How would all work for group cohesion in real life?

He pulls this splicing of ethereal Jesus with need or wisdom figure in the coincidence of the prophetic layer of Q.

The next stratum of Q (labeled Q2) has been styled "prophetic," apocalyptic. In these sayings the community is lashing out against the hostility and rejection it has received from the wider establishment. In contrast to the mild, tolerant tone of Q1, Q2 contains vitriolic railings against the Pharisees, a calling of heaven's judgment down on whole towns. The figure of the Son of Man enters, one who will arrive at the End-time to judge the world in fire; he is probably the result of reflection on the figure in Daniel 7. Here we first find John the Baptist, a kind of mentor or forerunner to the Q preachers. Dating the strata of Q is difficult, but I would suggest that this second stage falls a little before the Jewish War.

Here He has the community turning to the prophetic as a means of attack against the rejection they have already encountered. Who would reject and who would identify with this amorphous blob oriented around a few sayings of the Greek cynics? If there was pre Christian Q community that was oriented around the Greek cynics, they would probably have been placid and boring; the cynics were akin to the stoics, they took everything in stride and avoided emotions, if they lived in a Rodenberry universe, they would be Vulcans. Why were they rejected exactly, prior to finding this mascot (Jesus) what drew them together as a group? Just for a few cynical sayings? I think we have to do better than this. Of course its much more likely that Jesus emerged as a real flesh and blood person out of Galilee because that was a political hotbed rife with revolutionaries. It's far more likely that Jesus had this burning concept of the prophetic because real people who actually lived in Galilee thought that way, not like the placid cynics or stoics; It's really much more likely that Jesus was into this prophetic frame of mind because the Jews were into that way of thinking at that time, and because the Galilee was the hotbed of such thinking. The placid nature of a group oriented around cynicism would not fit the revolutionary zeal of the Galilee. Cynicism was popular and could fit into a larger background, but Doherty is assuming the group was oriented around the Q sayings which are cynical in nature, but he can't furnish us with a notion of the nature of the original group. Of course one might argue that if Jesus existed Christians must accept that he really thought those things so he had to more than just a revolutionary, but a thinker deeper than mere politics. That's true, but it works better with a real person. That's the kind of inconsistency one finds in real people. It's harder to see how it would it capture the imagination of a group without a real leader.

The only real clue Doherty can give us about the nature of the group is that it would be Jewish, and thus oriented around some notions of Messianic expectations of the end times. To that extent it seems a contradiction in character that their whole ethical teaching would be based upon the cynics. Now one might argue, "hey but Jesus has the same problem." But Jesus was as a real flesh and blood man could draw criticism and be seen as a challenge to authority and gain the ire of others, but as a fictional mascot who knows? Doherty assumes that the Q group would delve into the end times, understands that the son of Man comes from Daniel but seems oblivious to the fact that this was a standard epithet for the Messiah. So when Jesus speaks of himself as "son of man" in third person he is actually saying "I am the Messiah." This would have been a commonplace for the Jews.

There is good reason to conclude that even at this stage there was no Jesus in the Q community's thinking. That is, the wisdom and prophetic sayings in their original form would have contained no mention of a Jesus as speaker or source. They were pronouncements of the community itself and its traditional teachings, seen as inspired by the Wisdom of God.

one can only wonder why, Out of a hotbed of revolutionary zeal a placid cynic-stoic group (cynicism and stoicism when hand in hand) with a bland message (Love your neighbor) suddenly feels put upon, when in reality they would have been totally ignored in the revolutionary world of the Galilee? One wonders why they would muster prophetic sayings anyway with nothing more than "love your neighbor" and the like as the center of their group identity.

Doherty hitchhikes on the back of Q in seeking to play textual critic. He tries to show a disjunction between the persona of Jesus of Nazareth and the ethical says and the "son of man" statements of Jesus. He's arguing that these statements are being put in Jesus mouth, and this is supposed to prove that the Q group existed without any Jesus in their ranks and separately from any idea of a flesh and blood earthly rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth.

For while Matthew and Luke often show a common wording or idea in a given saying core, when they surround this with set-up lines and contexts involving Jesus, each evangelist offers something very different. (Compare Luke 17:5-6 with Matthew 17:19-20). This indicates that Q had preserved nothing which associated the sayings with a ministry of Jesus, a lack of interest in the source of the teaching which would be unusual and perplexing.

Or it could indicate that the evangelists organized their material in terms of the needs of their contemporary community. That's what scholars think they did, how then can this be evidence for the addition of a fictional Jesus? I think what he's talking about is what scholars call "pericopes" (per-ic-op-pees) which are independent units of story. An example would be Jesus healing the leper. That can be taken out and put in any number of places and not ruin the flow of the overall narrative. We find this happening all the time. For example In John Jesus cleanses the temple at the beginning of this ministry, in the synoptics he does it at the end as part of the Eastern weekend, and high drama leading up to the arrest. For John cleansing the temple serves to kick off Jesus ministry, for the synoptics it serves as a plot device to lead to the arrest. The evangelists weren't too concerned with chronology of each saying or each incident. They had more or less a free flowing narrative. Doherty sees this as proof that there is no history to the Jesus story, most scholars see it as an indication that these guys were not historians but preachers. They did not have a concept of writing history but were writing sermons for the community. Moreover, this device, the pericope was brought out by Bautlmann in his development of form criticism. It probably developed in this manner as indicative of oral testimony. In trying to memorize a long story one works with small independent units. Then in writing it down the redactors realized that they could play with the chronology of the units. Again this is proof, not that the Jesus story evolved over time as though it was fiction, but that the church learned, little by little, how to write.

Let's examine the two passages Doherty mentions:

Luke 17:5 And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

Luke 17:6 And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamore tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.


Mat 17:19 Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?

Mat 17:20 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

These are clearly very similar statements but not identical. For one thing Jesus might actually used these two different illustrations at different times. Of course the structure of the statement is close enough that they are clearly following a pattern. No one talks in such a way as to use the very same syntax over and over again. Still the fact that there is a minor difference (one is dealing with a tree, the other a mountain) might indicate that there is a reason why similar statements are put in two different contexts. To just conclude "O well its' because it's all made up and there' no history to base it on" is absurd. Looking at the context one can see that the notion of fitting the statement to the needs of the community is probably the answer.

Doherty sees the content of Gospel discourse infused with material from a pre-Christian sect devoted to Jewish prophetic expectations in Greek cynical format. He finds that the "son of man" sayings are indicative of this barrowing. The "son of man" is a common euphemism for Messiah, it probably comes from the statement in Daniel that the prophet saw in a vision "one like unto a son of man" (meaning he was extraterrestrial but looked human). Doherty sees the third person usage of this terminology as barrowing because it is as though Jesus is referring to someone else:

Nor are the apocalyptic Son of Man sayings (about his future coming) identified with Jesus, which is why, when they were later placed in his mouth, Jesus sounds as though he is talking about someone else. When one examines John the Baptist's prophecy at the opening of Q (Luke 3:16-17), about one who will come "who is mightier than I," who will baptize with fire and separate the wheat from the chaff, we find no reference to a Jesus or an enlightened teacher or prophet who is contemporary to John. Rather, this sounds like a prophecy of the coming Son of Man, the apocalyptic judge, a prophecy put into John's mouth by the Q community.

What Doherty is unwittingly doing here is stumbling onto Jewish Messianic expectations, since he doesn't know anything about them, he's making assumptions based upon surface appearance. First of all, the statements about the "son of man" as they would be used in Daniel and in inter testamental literature would not be connected to any particular person. Secondly, of course there is a link between John's "one who is coming" and the son of man, of course both do represent the Messiah. John does not detach them from Jesus. They were detached as they appear in other venue, but since John questioning Jesus directly he's connecting them to Jesus. That just leaves the mystery as to why Jesus speaks of the "son of man" In third person. It could be a sort of royal we. I have always felt this is what I call 'signature fulfillment.' Certain things Jesus did that make no sense except as a way of leaving a finger print; he's saying 'I am the Messiah!' One example is before the arrest telling the disciples to guy a sword so they would be numbered among transgressors. What a useless idea, and they didn't even intend to use it. why would he do that? To be numbered among transgressors was a Messianic expectation. Why does he go out of his way to make a self fulfilling prophecy? Because he's signing his name, he's saying "I am the one about whom this was written." So in referring to himself as "son of man" he's saying "I am the son of man." Would we have him speak in an awkward fashion and say "I will come, btw I am the son of man" rather than "when the son of man comes." He doesn't have to add "that's me folks" because we know by the fact that when we read it we think "hey but that's him, why is he speaking of it in third person when it's him?" Doherty's argument about it proves the point, it's efficacy in forcing one to confront the signature. It serves its purpose when it makes us think, but wait, the "son of man" is supposed to be him, so why is he using third person?"

 

Part 3 Refutting Doherty's Evolution of Jesus: The Ancient Tradition of the Cross and the Tomb

Doherty says:

"Only in Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, do we find the first identifiable quotations from some of the Gospels, though he calls them simply "memoirs of the Apostles," with no names." This is already been disproved. I've already pointed out quotations and allusions in all the major Apostolic fathers, in Paul and in pre Mark Redaction. Doherty seems mainly to be carping on the fact that no one sties chapter and verse, as though he doesn't know they didn't write in chapters and verses.

Doherty evokes Koster, but as we see with the myther penchant for quoting Cumont, it's clear he has not read Koster closely enough:

"Scholars such as Helmut Koester have concluded that earlier "allusions" to Gospel-like material are likely floating traditions which themselves found their way into the written Gospels. (See Koester's Ancient Christian Gospels and his earlier Synoptische Uberlieferung bei den apostolischen Vatern.) Is it conceivable that the earliest account of Jesus' life and death could have been committed to writing as early as 70 (or even earlier, as some would like to have it), and yet the broader Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it?"

But what does Koester really say? Here he speaks of how Papyrus Egerton 2 indicates an independent tradition, but that tradition is common with the canonical material and the cross and tomb are part of that tradition.

Koster:

"There are two solutions that are equally improbable. It is unlikely that the pericope in Egerton 2 is an independent older tradition. It is equally hard to imagine that anyone would have deliberately composed this apophthegma by selecting sentences from three different Gospel writings. There are no analogies to this kind of Gospel composition because this pericope is neither a harmony of parallels from different Gospels, nor is it a florogelium. If one wants to uphold the hypothesis of dependence upon written Gospels one would have to assume that the pericope was written form memory....What is decisive is that there is nothing in the pericope that reveals redactional features of any of the Gospels that parallels appear. The author of Papyrus Egerton 2 uses independent building blocks of sayings for the composition of this dialogue none of the blocks have been formed by the literary activity of any previous Gospel writer. If Papyrus Egerton 2 is not dependent upon the Fourth Gospel it is an important witness to an earlier stage of development of the dialogues of the fourth Gospel....(Koester , 3.2 p.215)

But that earlier stage, and therefore the independent tradition is independent in that it is not merely copied form the canonical Gospels, but it does stand behind them as part of the material upon which they draw. But that material included almost word for word what is the canonicals, this table is but two examples presented by Koster:

Egerton 2: "And behold a leper came to him and said "Master Jesus, wandering with lepers and eating with them in the inn, I therefore became a leper. If you will I shall be clean. Accordingly the Lord said to him "I will, be clean" and immediately the leprosy left him.

Mark 1:40: And the leper came to him and beseeching him said '[master?] if you will you can make me clean. And he stretched out his hands and touched him and said "I will be clean" and immediately the leprosy left him.

Egerton 2: "tell us is it permitted to give to Kings what pertains to their rule? Tell us, should we give it? But Jesus knowing their intentions got angry and said "why do you call me teacher with your mouth and do not what I say"?

Mark 12:13-15: Is it permitted to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not? But knowing their hypocrisy he said to them "why do you put me to the test, show me the coin?"

(all of that looks better in the chart on Doxa, in fact this whole pages does--scroll down).

As we can see these are the same stories, they are in a slightly different form, older (according to Koster) than those found in the canonicals, but basically the same stories. If we must assume that the tradition was a whole, why would the Orthodox just barrow from certain stories of a tradition that was totally alien to their view? The tradition as a whole must have included the cross and the tomb, and the textual evidence shows that these elements are part of the PMR and are as old as the writing itself.

Gospel of Peter

Fragments of the Gospel of Peter were found in 1886 /87 in Akhimim, upper Egypt. These fragments were from the 8th or 9th century. No other fragment was found for a long time until one turned up at Oxyrahynchus, which were written in 200 AD. Bishop Serapion of Antioch made the statement prior to 200 that a Gospel had been put forward in the name of Peter. This statement is preserved by Eusebius who places Serapion around 180. But the Akhimim fragment contains three pericopes. The Resurrection, to which the guards at the tomb are witnesses, the empty tomb, or which the women are witnesses, and an epiphany of Jesus appearing to Peter and the 12, which end the book abruptly.

Many features of the Gospel of Peter are clearly from secondary sources, that is reworked versions of the canonical story. These mainly consist of 1) exaggerated miracles; 2) anti-Jewish polemic. The cross follows Jesus out of the tomb, a voice from heaven says "did you preach the gospel to all?" The cross says "Yea." And Pilate is totally exonerated, the Jews are blamed for the crucifixion. (Koester, p.218). However, "there are other traces in the Gospel of Peter which demonstrate an old and independent tradition." The way the suffering of Jesus is described by the use of passages from the old Testament without quotation formulae is, in terms of the tradition, older than the explicit scriptural proof; it represents the oldest form of the passion of Jesus. (Philipp Vielhauer, Geschichte, 646] Jurgen Denker argues that the Gospel of Peter shares this tradition of OT quotation with the Canonicals but is not dependent upon them. (In Koester p.218) Koester writes, "John Dominic Crosson has gone further [than Denker]...he argues that this activity results in the composition of a literary document at a very early date i.e. in the middle of the First century CE" (Ibid). Said another way, the interpretation of Scripture as the formation of the passion narrative became an independent document, a ur-Gospel, as early as the middle of the first century!

Corosson's Cross Gospel is this material in the Gospel of Peter through which, with the canonicals and other non-canonical Gospels Crosson constructs a whole text. According to the theory, the earliest of all written passion narratives is given in this material, is used by Mark, Luke, Matthew, and by John, and also Peter. Peter becomes a very important 5th witness. Koester may not be as famous as Crosson but he is just as expert and just as liberal. He takes issue with Crosson on three counts:

1) no extant text, its all coming form a late copy of Peter,
2) it assumes the literary composition of latter Gospels can be understood to relate to the compositions of earlier ones;
3) Koester believes that the account ends with the empty tomb and has independent sources for the epihanal material.

Koester:

"A third problem regarding Crossan's hypotheses is related specifically to the formation of reports about Jesus' trial, suffering death, burial, and resurrection. The account of the passion of Jesus must have developed quite early because it is one and the same account that was used by Mark (and subsequently Matthew and Luke) and John and as will be argued below by the Gospel of Peter. However except for the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection in the various gospels cannot derive from a single source, they are independent of one another. Each of the authors of the extant gospels and of their secondary endings drew these epiphany stories from their own particular tradition, not form a common source." (Koester, p. 220)

"Studies of the passion narrative have shown that all gospels were dependent upon one and the same basic account of the suffering, crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. But this account ended with the discovery of the empty tomb. With respect to the stories of Jesus' appearances, each of the extant gospels of the canon used different traditions of epiphany stories which they appended to the one canon passion account. This also applies to the Gospel of Peter. There is no reason to assume that any of the epiphany stories at the end of the gospel derive from the same source on which the account of the passion is based." (Ibid)

What this means is that the individual sittings of Jesus at the end of the Gospels came from different sources, were perhaps embellishments, but the basic story, the basic tradition from which all the other sources, canonicals, Peter, Thomas, Q, Egerton 2 all of them derive, included the cross and the tomb.

Raymond Brown, in Death of the Messiah demonstrates brilliantly that the story of the guards on the tomb as reported in Peter is not derived from Matthew, but is an independent tradition, perhaps as old or older. He demonstrates the independence of Peter's Passion narrative and tomb sequences in a huge and brilliantly constructed chart, which cannot be reproduced here, but which is elaborate. He uses the same argument that Koester uses above, not one forged s a document or redacts or copies a document by taking every other word. When one finds this kind of divergence in the working is indicates a separate tradition.

GPet follow the classical flow from trail through crucifixion to burial to tomb presumably with post resurrectional appearances to follow. The GPet sequence of individual episodes, however, is not the same as that of any can canonical Gospel...When one looks at the overall sequence in the 23 items I listed in table 10, it would take very great imagination to picture the author of GPet studying Matthew carefully, deliberately shifting episodes around and copying in episodes form Luke and John to produce the present sequence. [Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1322]

This work Brown did upon the independent tradition of GPet was the work that made his initial reputation as a major scholar.

Gospel of the Hebrews

We do not possess any copies of this work. It exists only in quotations from church fathers, but that's the similar situation with Q as well. GHebrews includes the atonement and the resurrection, and the tradition is independent of the canonicals and is traced to mid fist century. This gives us several sources that show a pre Mark tradition not derived from the canonical Gospels that is at least as old as the hypothetical tradition to which Doherty alludes; it contains Jesus, it contains the cross and the tomb:

Peter Kirby:

Early Christian Writings, Gospel of the Hebrews.

Unlike other Jewish-Christian gospels, the Gospel of the Hebrews shows no dependence upon the Gospel of Matthew. The story of the first resurrection appearance to James the Just suggests that the Jewish-Christian community that produced this document claimed James as their founder. It is reasonable to assume that the remainder of the gospel is synoptic in flavor. The Gospel of the Hebrews seems to be independent of the New Testament in the quoted portions; unfortunately, since the gospel is not extant, it is difficult to know whether unquoted portions of the Gospel of the Hebrews might show signs of dependence.

Cameron makes these observations on dating and provenance: "The earliest possible date of the composition of the Gospel of the Hebrews would be in the middle of the first century, when Jesus traditions were first being produced and collected as part of the wisdom tradition. The latest possible date would be in the middle of the second century, shortly before the first reference to this gospel by Hegesippus and the quotations of it by Clement and Origen. Based on the parallels in the morphology of the tradition, an earlier date of composition is more likely than a later one. Internal evidence and external attestation indicate that Egypt was its place of origin."

Brief note on Gospel of Thomas

Peter Kirby gives a good summary of the ms attestation of Thomas:

The Gospel of Thomas is extant in three Greek fragments and one Coptic manuscript. The Greek fragments are P. Oxy. 654, which corresponds to the prologue and sayings 1-7 of the Gospel of Thomas; P. Oxy. 1, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 26-30, 77.2, 31-33; and P. Oxy. 655, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 24 and 36-39. P. Oxy 1 is dated shortly after 200 CE for paleographical reasons, and the other two Greek fragments are estimated to have been written in the mid third century. The Coptic text was written shortly before the year 350 CE.

Even though scholars date the actual MS to the third or fourth century, a large camp of scholars, including those who discovered Thomas, date the actual writing in middle first century. Does this work indicate a separate tradition growing up along side the canonical Gospels, a tradition that lacked the cross and the empty tomb? It does constitute a MS tradition that is not derived from the canonical Gospels, but that is not proof of "another" Church that lacked the atonement or the resurrection as central pillars of its testimony to Jesus. What it proves is that by the time these sources manifest themselves as second century or later Gnostic "other Gospels" they are minus those elements because the Gnostics would allow them to slip out. First, piece of proof on this point, GThom was heavily redacted. In fact we possess it four separate versions:

Ron Cameron (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 6, p. 535):

Substantial differences do exist between the Greek fragments and the Coptic text. These are best explained as variants resulting from the circulation of more than one Greek edition of Gos. Thom. in antiquity. The existence of three different copies of the Greek text of Gos. Thom. does give evidence of rather frequent copying of this gospel in the 3d century. According to the critical edition of the Greek text by Attridge (in Layton 1989: 99), however, even though these copies do not come from a single ms, the fragmentary state of the papyri does not permit one to determine whether any of the mss "was copied from one another, whether they derive independently from a single archetype, or whether they represent distinct recensions." It is clear, nevertheless, that Gos. Thom. was subject to redaction as it was transmitted. The presence of inner-Coptic errors in the sole surviving translation, moreover, suggests that our present Gos. Thom. is not the first Coptic transcription made from the Greek. The ms tradition indicates that this gospel was appropriated again and again in the generations following its composition. Like many other gospels in the first three centuries, the text of Gos. Thom. must be regarded as unstable.

It would seem that the tradition of the Gospel of Thomas is varied and the text has been through several redactions.

Arguing Thomas' independence from the Synoptics Stephen J. Patterson (quoted by Kirby) compares the wording of each saying in Thomas to its synoptic counterpart with the conclusion that Thomas represents an autonomous stream of tradition (The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, p. 18):

Patterson (quoted by Kirby): If Thomas were dependent upon the synoptic gospels, it would be possible to detect in the case of every Thomas-synoptic parallel the same tradition-historical development behind both the Thomas version of the saying and one or more of the synoptic versions. That is, Thomas' author/editor, in taking up the synoptic version, would have inherited all of the accumulated tradition-historical baggage owned by the synoptic text, and then added to it his or her own redactional twist. In the following texts this is not the case. Rather than reflecting the same tradition-historical development that stands behind their synoptic counterparts, these Thomas sayings seem to be the product of a tradition-history which, though exhibiting the same tendencies operative within the synoptic tradition, is in its own specific details quite unique. This means, of course, that these sayings are not dependent upon their synoptic counterparts, but rather derive from a parallel and separate tradition.

That proves that GThom was independent, that it was not derived by copying the canonicals, but it doesn't prove that saying pertaining to the Cross and the Tomb weren't just left out. Cameron argues that he can prove this:

Cameron (537) quoted by Kirby: Those who argue that Gos. Thom. is dependent on the Synoptics not only must explain the differences in wording and order, but also give a reason for Gos. Thom.'s choice of genre and the absence of the gospels' narrative material in the text. To assert, for example, that Gos. Thom. erased the passion narratives because Gnosticism was concerned solely with a redeeming message contained in words of revelation (Haenchen 1961: 11) is simply not convincing, since the Apocryphon of James (NHC I, 2), the Second treatise of the Great Seth (NHC VII, 2), and the Apocalypse of Peter (NHC VII, 3) all indicate that sayings of and stories about the death and resurrection of Jesus were reinterpreted by various Gnostic groups. For any theory of dependence of Gos. Thom. on the NT to be made plausible, one must show that the variations in form and content of their individual sayings, together with the differences in genre and structure of their entire texts, are intentional modifications of their respective parallels, designed to serve a particular purpose.

This last criterion that Cameron lays down, that "the variations in form and content of their individual sayings, together with differences in genre and structure of their entire texts, are intentional modifications of their respective parallels, designed to serve a particular purpose," why is it necessary to show that? All they had to do was leave out the bits about the cross and the resurrection. If we assume that both canonicals and GThom have a common ancestor, some group or body of sayings that they both draw from, that's pretty obvious, or there would not be such parallels, the Gnostic use of that tradition could very as greatly as just leaving out the key expressions of doctrines hey no longer included in their tradition. There are numerous parallels not only between GThom and canonicals, but E2 and the canonicals. So it's clear that these "other gospels" drew upon the same parent sources, since it is equally clear that they did not just copy the canonicals. This might indicate that the groups producing Q, Thomas and E 2 did not use sayings pertaining to the cross and the resurrection. There is evidence that they had traditions that hinted at them, and the heavy redaction might indicate purging of such sayings. Let us not forget we are dealing with sayings and not narrative. Talk of context is not the same as if we were dealing with the expunging of a part of the plot in a narrative structure. All they have to do is leave out certain sayings. There are hints this may have been done. We can see from the chart above (parallels between E2 and John) that there are passes that deal with arresting Jesus and doing violence to him. That opens the door to the possibility that cross sayings have been expunged from the overall tradition.

Let us just assume for a moment that Doherty's hypothetical case is true and there was a Q community that is also represented in general by other words, such as E2 and GThom. The overall tradition must have at one time included some references to arrest and violence toward Jesus. Thus I am arguing two things:

(1) the door is open through the heavily redacted nature of the ms to have expunged sayings not in harmony with group ideology, at some later point of transmission after the composition of the individual works. if not


(2) good indications exist that some notion of Jesus being arrested and killed existed in the general tradition and were merely not included, either left out of these individual works (Q, E2, GThom) or they fell out before the composition of these works.

As to the argument that other Gnostics deal with the cross and the tomb, so why not these? The reason for that might be because those other works were not part of the early tradition. If these sources under discussion emerged form the mid first century, the other works Cameron mentions (Apocryphon of James, Seth literature from Nag Hammadi) were much latter works. The latter came form after the Orthodox church was more pervasive and the passion and resurrection were undisputed; those events had gained so much ground in the story they could not be ignored. In the early days, the mid firs century, groups that looked down upon the flesh and deemphasized or were embarrassed by those events merely left them out and stopped dealing with them at some point. So they were either expunged from the parent sources that E2 and GThom used, (meaning the source itself was reshaped to exclude them) or they just weren't included in latter copies from which these latter were produced. At that point, only 18 years after the original events, in the groups of the original community, eye witnesses would still be alive to correct error, but in rough groups breaking off or in groups scattered far away (Egypt, Antioch) they would have been able to de-emphasize the cross at that time. Basically we need more information before we really know what the infant church taught.

Now we must turn Doherty's fantasy of a "Q community" because it is the crux of his whole argument. That is where he develops the idea of this "other tradition" that began as the original infant church.

Aside from all that, the Gospel of Thomas does actually contain a reference to the cross of Christ:

GThom:55: Jesus said: He who does not hate his father and his mother cannot be a disciple to me. And (he who does not) hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross like me, will not be worthy of me.