In this study, Llewellyn Howes analyses the formative stratum of the Sayings Gospel Q, arguing for the inclusion of traditionally excluded texts. Novel interpretations of certain Q texts enable the author to reconsider the overarching message of Q's earliest redactional layer. This results in interesting and important consequences for our understanding of Jesus as a historical figure.

Judging Q and saving Jesus is characterised by careful textual analysis, showing a piercing critical eye in its impressive engagement with the secondary literature and sharp, insightful critique. This book takes the stance that the hypothetical document Q can be reconstructed with sufficient precision and that this enables biblical scholars to study with confidence its genre and its thematic and ideological profile. The genre issue is central to the book’s overall structure, and the alternative proposals are discussed at length and with sophistication. The author’s inference is that Q’s macrogenre is sapiential with occasional insertions of apocalyptic microstructures and motifs. This finding embodies progress in Historical Jesus studies. An opposing trend has been to label Jesus an apocalypticist, so that the great ‘either-or’ of contemporary Jesus scholarship has been ‘either eschatological or not’, an alternative that dates back to Albert Schweitzer. The author finds that generally, and even when used apocalyptically, the term Son of Man tends to support arguments best understood as sapiential in outlook. This is consistent with the sapiential genre of the document as a whole. This finding is supported by the close and careful exegesis of Q 6:37?38 (on not judging). He reconstructs the original wording of this saying ‘on not judging’ and explores the idea of ‘weighing’ in judgment (psychostasia), determining in the end that the saying is entirely sapiential.

Papers presented at the 49th Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense held at the Faculty of Theology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 25-27 july, 2000.

The Gospel Behind the Gospels portrays all the major areas of current discussion and debate regarding the early source of Jesus' sayings known as Q. Sixteen gospel scholars have advanced the debate about this source's nature, history and significance. Contributors discuss Q's existence, its relationship to Mark's gospel and to the Gospel of Thomas, its genre, its redactional history with special reference to the Son of Man and to wisdom and prophetic traditions, its social history with respect to family structures and the Cynics, a feminist analysis of Q, its significance for the historical Jesus and for Jesus' parables. The volume sheds important light on Jesus and Christian origins as well as upon Q itself, and it is significant for the diversity of major North American, European and Japanese scholarship which is represented.

The study analyses the current state of research on the synoptic problem and proves that the Synoptic Gospels were written in the Mark, Luke, Matthew order of direct literary dependence. Moreover, the work demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospels are results of systematic, sequential, hypertextual reworking of the contents of the Pauline letters. Accordingly, the so-called 'Q source' turns out to be an invention of nineteenth-century scholars with their Romantic hermeneutic presuppositions. Demonstration of the fact that the Gospels are not records of the activity of the historical Jesus but that they narratively illustrate the identity of Christ as it has been revealed in the person and life of Paul the Apostle will certainly have major consequences for the whole Christian theology.

A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyses the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus. A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the beginnings of Christianity.