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The Lost Gospel. The very concept provokes a flood of questions. If it is lost, how do we know it ever existed? How do we know what was in it? Who lost it? And how was it lost? Perhaps most intriguing of all: Will it ever be found?

A new book by Burton Mack, entitled The Lost Gospel^a provides some answers that will startle many Christians. Mack is a highly respected professor of New Testament at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. The book jacket contains glowing endorsements from a variety of major figures in the study of Christian origins. Mack is not to be dismissed as some kind of offbeat quack. His major conclusions are widely 035shared by New Testament scholars. Yet his analysis calls into question the very presence of a Christological element in earliest Christianity.

The Lost Gospel is not a discovery of Mack’s. It has long been known to scholars, if not to the lay public. It is called simply Q, because we don’t know its original name if, indeed, it had one.

It was “discovered,” if that is the right word, in the early 19th century by scholars working on one of the most vexing problems in New Testament scholarship, the so-called synoptic problem. The synoptic problem is this: When three of the four New Testament Gospels are laid side by side, it is apparent they share much in common. These are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Because of their commonalities they are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek meaning “to see together.” They see things very much alike.

How much alike? First, they share a common basic outline of the life of Jesus. Second, when individual episodes are compared from Gospel to Gospel, there is often a great deal of agreement, even verbatim agreement, among the three.

But there is more. In comparing the sequence of episodes in these Gospels, Matthew and Luke agree in their ordering of events only when they also agree with Mark. Early in the study of these phenomena, many thought we could account for this by giving chronological primacy to Matthew, positing that Luke then used Matthew as a model and, finally, supposing that Mark used them both, including only things on which both Matthew and Luke agreed. This is known as the Griesbach hypothesis (for Johannes Griesbach, the 18th-century German scholar who first proposed it), and it is still defended by a few scholars today (see see the first sidebar to this article).

But Mark’s glaring omissions (such as the Sermon on the Mount) and his manifestly rustic Greek (by comparison to the more elegant prose of Matthew and Luke) eventually undermined scholarly support for Griesbach’s solution. By the early 19th century, another solution was beginning to catch on: Marcan priority.

The hypothesis of Marcan priority holds that Mark, not Matthew, was the earliest of the canonical Gospels (see the first sidebar to this article). Matthew and Luke both used it as a source, but independently of one another. That is how Mark came to mediate the agreements between Matthew and Luke. Marcan priority also explains Mark’s rustic quality when compared to Matthew and Luke. They each took ample advantages of the opportunity to improve upon Mark’s rough-hewn style.

But Marcan priority alone could not account for all the agreements between Matthew and Luke. And so at last, we come to the Q hypothesis.

Matthew and Luke also share a good deal of material that is not found in Mark. Unlike the agreements in the order of the episodes explained by their use of Mark, this material does not consist of episodes in the life of Jesus. Instead it consists of sayings attributed to Jesus. These sayings—common to Matthew and Luke—exhibit a remarkable verbatim agreement. They also show signs of sharing a common order of sorts. Though Matthew and Luke tend to place them differently into the Marcan outline, when extracted and placed side by side, they turn out in many cases to have been used in the same order. It is as though Matthew and Luke both had a collection of sayings from which they, independently of one another, drew sayings to insert into their basic Marcan outline (see the last sidebar to this article).

That is exactly what a majority of Gospel scholars believe today. Matthew and Luke shared two sources which they used independently of one another. The first was Mark, which they used as a basic outline. The second was a collection of (primarily) sayings, which they shuffled into the Marcan outline as they deemed appropriate (see the first sidebar to this article). This is known as the two-source hypothesis; it is the basis of most modern Gospel scholarship.

This second source, a hypothetical collection of sayings used by Matthew and Luke, is called Q. Unfortunately, Q did not survive the vicissitudes of time. It, therefore, is the Lost Gospel. Its loss is especially regrettable because it may well have been the first gospel, antedating Mark by a decade or more. Since it did not survive, we do not know what it was called. The German scholars who first identified it in the 19th century referred to it simply as Quelle, German for “source.” Later that was abbreviated to Q.

Scholars took a long time deciding just what Q was. The sheer fact of its nonexistence was no small problem—and an obvious opening for Q skeptics. In recent years, however, resistance to the idea of Q has largely disappeared as a result of another amazing discovery: a nearly complete copy of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas.^b This copy of the Gospel of Thomas was found at a site near the town of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt.

Scholars had long known about a Gospel According to Thomas. Snippets were even quoted by the third-century church father Hippolytus. Other 036small fragments were known from a hoard of papyri found around the turn of this century at Oxyrynchus, another famous Egyptian site. In 1946 two Egyptian peasants discovered in some cliffs along the Nile a cache of documents now known as the Nag Hammadi Codices. The Nag Hammadi Codices are the single most important archaeological find of the 20th century for the study of the New Testament. One of the documents in this corpus is the Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings of Jesus, each introduced by the phrase, ‘Jesus said”—in short, a collection of sayings rather like Q. Though Thomas is most definitely not Q, its discovery proved that such documents existed in early Christianity.

Unlike the Gospel of Thomas, no copy of Q has ever been found. Q can nevertheless be reconstructed, however imperfectly, from the passages in Matthew and Luke thought to have come from it. When this is done, the mystery deepens. So far as anyone can tell, Q appears not to include any reference to events once thought to be absolutely crucial to earliest Christianity: the death and resurrection of Jesus!

Early in the discussion of Q, this omission prompted many to suppose that Q could not have been a gospel. It must have been a teacher’s supplement to the gospel or an ethical handbook to guide neophytes in the faith. Others were not satisfied with this explanation: Bothered by the absence of material relating to Jesus’ passion, they argued that Q must have included a passion narrative like other gospels, but since Matthew and Luke preferred Mark’s passion account to Q’s, all but a few traces of it vanished when they failed to use it. Few scholars today would accept this position. For one thing, the Gospel of Thomas shows that a gospel without a passion narrative is quite possible.

Moreover, in recent years scholars of Christian origins are more apt to see a great deal of variety in Christian beginnings. A theology grounded in Jesus’ words, without any particular interest in his death, is no longer unthinkable. Early Christians could well have used theological categories borrowed from Jewish Wisdom tradition to interpret the significance of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas, which also has little interest in Jesus’ death and resurrection, in effect forced this reevaluation.

It turns out that early Christian theology was not monolithic. Q could now be seen as a gospel in its own right, with its own structure and theology distinct from the four gospels that have come down to us in the canonical New Testament.

Despite these advances in the study of Christian origins, many New Testament scholars ignored the problem of Q, preferring to focus on other aspects of the gospels. As recently as ten years ago, one could hardly find a word about such matters even in the scholarly literature. You had to look carefully in the footnotes of an essay on a synoptic passage to find any reference to Q at all. The Q hypothesis was commonly dismissed as “only a hypothesis.” This was not because new information had surfaced calling Q into question. There was simply no interest in such matters. Since the 1960s, most New Testament scholarship had been devoted to redaction criticism and its successor, literary criticism, which are concerned with the composition and structure of texts. Naturally, the craft of an author can best be studied with an actual text in hand. This was not possible with Q, and reconstructing the text of Q from Matthew and Luke was a painstaking and imprecise process. Who would want to mess with a complicated thing like Q when you can simply look at the surface structure of a text and offer literary observations? No one complained when scholars tacitly decided not to discuss Q anymore.

But in the early 1980s all that changed. After a long hiatus in Q research, the prominent New Testament scholar James M. Robinson, who was responsible for the publication of the Nag Hammadi Codices, turned his attention to Q. In addition to pursuing his own work on Q, Robinson also inspired a generation of graduate students to join in this work. Robinson’s Q team began the arduous task of reconstructing the text of Q, verse by verse, word by word, case ending by case ending. They also began to produce a sizable corpus of new scholarship on Q. A Q seminar was soon begun in the Society of Biblical Literature. The SBL also 037sponsored an international team of scholars to pursue the work of reconstruction more vigorously. Within a few years, Q was once again a vital issue in New Testament scholarship.

The most recent discussion of Q has focused on its literary history. The most significant work in this effort to trace Q’s literary history is a 1987 book by John Kloppenborg. The Formation of Q (Fortress Press). Kloppenborg asks what gives Q its literary structure and cohesiveness. How was it composed?

Kloppenborg found that the structure of Q, its skeleton so to speak, is supplied by a series of speeches. These speeches consist of Wisdom sayings—proverbs, aphorisms, parables and the like—the stuff of Jewish Wisdom tradition. Jesus delivers them as Wisdom’s prophet,^c nothing more.

But clustered around these speeches, affixed to them like barnacles on the hull of a ship, is another sort of saying, a kind of saying whose focus is judgment, aimed usually against the recalcitrant “generation,” that is, those Jews who would not listen to the words of Q’s prophet, Jesus. In this material Jesus appears for the first time as the Son of Man, who is to return on clouds of glory to judge humanity.

Kloppenborg proposes that these two groups of sayings—the Wisdom sayings and the judgment sayings—represent two distinct moments in Q’s literary history. The Wisdom speeches, since they give Q its basic structure, must represent the earlier of the two (Kloppenborg calls this Q¹). The judgment sayings, since they affix themselves to this underlying skeleton, must represent a secondary editorial stage in Q’s history (Kloppenborg calls this Q²). The shift from Q¹ to Q² came, according to Kloppenborg, at a moment of frustration in the Q community’s experience, at a time when they realized that most people were choosing to disregard the words of their prophet, Jesus. They responded to this rejection by introducing the strands of judgment found in Q².

Kloppenborg proposes one last stage in Q’s development, a Q³ if you will. Like many others who have studied Q, Kloppenborg noticed that the temptation story—in which Jesus spends 40 days in the desert tempted by the devil (Matthew 4:1–11//Luke 4:1–13)–shows signs of being a late addition to the document: The temptation story is a narrative, in contrast to the rest of Q, which is predominantly sayings. This narrative contains several direct quotations from the Bible (from the Jewish Scriptures in Greek, the Septuagint)—for example, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ ” (Q 4:4^d, quoting Deuteronomy 8.3). Quotations from Scripture are rare in Q. In the temptation narrative, we also find a reference to Jesus as the 038Son of God, a title that occurs nowhere else in Q. Kloppenborg argues that the temptation story was added to move Q more in the direction of a biographical narrative.

Placing Jesus’ sayings in a particular historical context was one way of taming the tradition of Jesus’ sayings. Eventually most sayings of Jesus were incorporated into some such narrative (for example in Luke and Matthew) as sayings gospels like Q faded from use. The addition of the temptation narrative to Q (= Q³) reveals the first inclination in that direction.

Kloppenborg’s study is more than a lengthy footnote in the study of Q. Together with other studies, his work has become a critical step in reimagining Christian origins and even the character of Jesus’ original message.

Since the turn of the century, scholars had assumed that at the heart of Jesus’ preaching was a message of imminent divine judgment. Q originally played a critical role in this contention, for, taken as a whole, Q shares in this perspective that the end of days, when God will judge the entire world, is nearly upon us. The words of judgment scattered throughout Q, and especially the Q apocalypse, give Jesus the appearance of an apocalyptic zealot—“For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day; but first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Q 17:24–25). By pairing Q with Mark’s apocalyptic Jesus (especially Mark 13:3–37), one could say that the earliest gospels (Q and Mark) were in fundamental agreement on the character of Jesus’ preaching as apocalyptic—“[A]fter the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory…. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:24–26, 30). When one adds to this Paul’s apocalyptic understanding of the gospel, the picture is complete—see, for example, 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17—“ The Lord himself will descend from heaven… and the dead in Christ will rise; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” Early Christianity appears to have emerged as an apocalyptic sect grounded in the apocalyptic preaching of its founder figure, Jesus.

Kloppenborg’s work, however, removes Q from this equation. If Kloppenborg is right, the Q community did not originally understand Jesus apocalyptically. Furthermore, by identifying a point in the history of the Q group when its sentiments took a more apocalyptic turn, away from its original Wisdom orientation, Kloppenborg opens the way to seeing the advent of apocalypticism in early Christianity apart from the preaching of Jesus himself. Mark, after all, wrote somewhat later than Q, and may well be me result of a similar theological shift. Paul’s letters are more or less contemporaneous with Q, but Paul himself seems to have shared the fate Kloppenborg suggests for the Q community. Paul wandered for years in the regions of Arabia, Syria and Cilicia (Galatians 1:17, 21) with little or no success (notice that no Pauline communities survived in these regions). His apocalyptic orientation may be the result of a similar disillusionment with this-worldly ambitions for the radical Wisdom of Jesus.

So Christianity may not have begun as an apocalyptic sect after all. Rather, Q¹’s orientation in Jewish Wisdom tradition suggests that the earliest 039followers of Jesus used Wisdom categories, not apocalypticism, to lend significance to their teacher and founder.

This conclusion leads to one final twist—a reassessment of the Fourth Gospel (the Gospel of John) and of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of John has long been odd-gospel-out among New Testament gospels. Its theology is a mix of nascent gnosticism and speculative Wisdom of the variety one finds, for example, in Philo, a Jewish Hellenistic philosopher from Alexandria, who also lived in the first century. John’s theology stands in sharp contrast to the apocalyptic theology of the Synoptic Gospels. But with the new understanding of the development of Christian thinking beginning with Q—which like Paul and the Synoptic Gospels then took an apocalyptic turn—John too can now be seen as the result simply of taking the early Christian Wisdom tradition—the core of Q or Q¹—on an alternative route: that of speculative Wisdom.

Much the same can be said of the Gospel of Thomas. That Thomas shares so many sayings and parables with the synoptic tradition shows that both Thomas and the synoptics derive from a common early Christian Wisdom tradition. The synoptics took an apocalyptic turn, but Thomas parlayed that tradition into a simple form of Gnosticism, in which Jesus’ sayings are no longer presented as the words of Wisdom’s prophet, but as the divine redeemer sent from God to reveal to God’s chosen ones the knowledge (gnosis) of their origin and destiny as “children of the Living Father” (Gospel of Thomas 49–50).

Thus, positing a Wisdom layer at the base of the Q tradition has wide-ranging implications, and may even suggest the rudiments of a unified theory of Christian origins in Jewish Wisdom tradition, followed by later bifurcated development. Kloppenborg usually demurs from drawing such broad historical implications from his work. But his literary analysis of Q may inevitably lead to this conclusion. In short, his excavation of the layers of Q may well have, to change the metaphor, pulled the ace out of a historical house of cards, a house of cards that had as its foundation an apocalyptic Jesus. If we have seen an erosion in the century-long scholarly consensus that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, Kloppenborg’s work on Q has made a major contribution to its collapse. And this consensus has indeed collapsed.

In a recent poll, two-thirds of the members of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Historical Jesus Section replied no to the question: Do you think Jesus expected the end of the world in his generation? In a similar poll of the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, the no’s outnumbered yes’s three to one.

True, the debate is not yet over. But it is clear that the study of Q has unleashed a fire-storm in the quest for Christian origins. What is at stake is nothing less than the character of Jesus’ own preaching.

Before returning to Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel, we must acknowledge the contribution to Q studies of a book published in 1992, The First Gospel by Arland Jacobson (Polebridge Press).

Although Jacobson’s book was published five years after Kloppenborg’s Formation of Q, Jacobson’s ideas actually precede those of Kloppenborg in the history of Q scholarship. Jacobson worked out the basic thesis of his book 15 years earlier in his Ph.D. dissertation. He submitted this work for publication in the SBL Dissertation Series, but was politely turned down. Despite remaining unpublished, however, Jacobson’s work became a signal point in Q scholarship. This embarrassment to the judgment of the editors of the SBL Dissertation Series is perhaps testimony to the flagging interest in Q that persisted into the early 1980s. The First Gospel, finally published in 1992, at last brings Jacobson’s ideas to a broader readership. In the intervening years, Jacobson added three excellent introductory chapters, making this book the best available introduction to current Q studies for the serious and casual student alike.

Like Kloppenborg, Jacobson asks how Q was composed. But rather than focusing on Q’s first, or formative, layer, like Kloppenborg, Jacobson looks at how Q reached its final form. He lights upon the material Kloppenborg would later assign to Q², that second layer in which one finds the theme of apocalyptic judgment against “this generation.” Jacobson notices how this material tends to frame large sections of Q, giving the entire document its overall flavor. Jacobson identifies this flavor as deuteronomistic, placing Q in the very old Jewish tradition of lamenting Israel’s unfaithfulness, but celebrating the fidelity of a faithful remnant.

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In his investigation Jacobson asks only about the final form of Q. He does not ask whether this final form is built upon an intermediate document. He therefore did not see, as Kloppenborg later would, that his final form of Q is actually a second redaction (Q²) of an earlier document (Q¹). However, his results are remarkably consistent with Kloppenborg’s.

First, the material Jacobson sees as giving final shape to Q turns out consistently to correspond to that material Kloppenborg assigns to Q². This confirms at least half of Kloppenborg’s theory: The theme of judgment belongs to Q’s final edition.

Secondly, even though Jacobson does not identify an earlier Wisdom layer in Q, he does notice that Q’s theme of judgment is sometimes played out making use of the myth of Lady Wisdom. In the intertestamental period Jewish writers frequently expressed their frustration with society’s decline by declaring that Lady Wisdom had descended to earth, but found no hearing. Thus she returned, rejected, to the heavens. In the final form of Q, Jesus is sometimes cast in this mythic role of Wisdom. This theme in the final form of Q is explainable if one assumes what Kloppenborg later showed: that Q’s roots are in the Wisdom tradition.

If Jacobson’s book, though published later, is the proper precursor to Kloppenborg’s study, Burton Mack’s new book, The Lost Gospel, is its enthusiastic successor. Mack takes Kloppenborg’s thesis and runs with both its basic features and its broader implications. The ambitions of Mack’s book are enormous. At times one feels that he is writing nothing less than a post-Christian (or pre-Christian) manifesto:

“The remarkable thing about the people of Q is that they were not Christians. They did not think of Jesus as a messiah or the Christ. They did not take his teaching as an indictment of Judaism. They did not regard his death as a divine, tragic, or saving event. And they did not imagine that he had been raised from the dead to rule over a transformed world. Instead, they thought of him as a teacher whose teachings made it possible to live with verve in troubled times. Thus they did not gather to worship in his name, honor him as a god, or cultivate his memory through hymns, prayers, and rituals. They did not form a cult of the Christ such as the one that emerged among the Christian communities familiar to readers of the letters of Paul. The people of Q were Jesus people, not Christians” (pp. 4–5).

Like Kloppenborg, Mack notes a shift in the Q community’s understanding of Jesus’ significance—from a teacher of Wisdom sayings to the apocalyptic figure commonly known from the Synoptic Gospel portraits of Jesus. In Mack’s words:

“This shift from interest in Jesus’ teachings to questions about Jesus’ person, authority, and social role eventually produced a host of different mythologies.

“The mythology that is most familiar to Christians of today developed in groups that formed in northern Syria and Asia Minor. There Jesus’ death was first interpreted as a martyrdom and then embellished as a miraculous event of crucifixion and resurrection. This myth drew on hellenistic mythologies that told about the destiny of a divine being (or son of God). Thus these congregations quickly turned into a cult of the resurrected or transformed Jesus whom they now referred to as the Christ, or the Lord, as well as the Son of God. The congregations of the Christ, documented most clearly in the letters of Paul from the 50s, experienced a striking shift in orientation, away from the teachings of Jesus and toward the spirit of the Christ who had died and was raised from the dead. It was this myth that eventually made the narrative gospels possible” (p. 2).

Mack goes on to use Q to state in a most provocative way an assumption that most scholars of the New Testament share:

“Q demonstrates that factors other than the belief that Jesus was divine played a role in the generation of early Jesus and Christ movements…. [As a result] the narrative [canonical] gospels can no longer be viewed as the trustworthy accounts of unique and stupendous historical events at the foundation of the Christian faith. The gospels must now be seen as the result of early Christian mythmaking. Q forces the issue, for it documents an earlier history that does not agree with the narrative gospel accounts” (p. 8, 10).

For Mack, the source of the early Christian mythmaking is to be found in the Hellenistic 041mystery cults:

“[E]arly Christianity bore a distinct resemblance to the hellenistic mystery cults, particularly where it mattered most, namely in their myths of dying and rising gods and in their rituals of baptism and sacred meals” (p. 22).

Thus, in Mack’s view, Q calls into question the idea that Jesus appeared as a Jewish messianic figure who wanted to reform Judaism, who preached the arrival of God’s rule, and who was killed when he came into conflict with the Jews, a conflict of cosmic proportions. It calls into question the conventional view that Christianity began when Jesus appeared to the disciples in Jerusalem after the resurrection, the one great miracle to signify that Jesus had been right after all. In place of this, Mack offers Q as evidence for a gradual and complex process of social experimentation and group formation—in other words, a nonmiraculous account of how Christianity came to be.

Mack sets the stage with a description of the social world in which the early Jesus movement emerged. His focus is Galilee. Drawing on recent archaeological and historical research on Galilee, Mack describes a multicultural environment full of independent thinkers and saucy Galileans. Galilee, according to Mack, was a crossroad in the very diverse cultural world of Hellenism, that mixture of Greek, Roman and indigenous cultures that resulted from the unifying forces of first Greek and then Roman conquest. He underscores the difference between Galilee and Judea in this respect. Judea was the cradle of Jewish culture and the source of Jewish ethnic resistance to Roman rule. Galilee was less committed. Galilee had been linked to Judea by force under the Hasmoneans in 100 B.C.E. and remained under Judean rule only until 63 B.C.E., when Pompey conquered all of Palestine and turned it into a Roman province. That is not a very long time to develop loyalties. It is little wonder that when the Jewish war for independence broke out in the 60s C.E., Josephus, the head of the Jewish forces in Galilee and first-century Jewish historian, was unable to rouse a force for the defense of Jerusalem. The Galilean Jews were too “peaceful,” explained Josephus. Mack’s point in all of this is simply that Galilee was a diverse place with mixed loyalties, a place where Jewish and Hellenistic culture rubbed shoulders constantly. With this multicultural world of Galilee as the backdrop, Mack extracts from Q an account of Christian origins in which the Jesus movement emerges as a Jewish from of ancient Cynicism.

Cynicism—not to be confused with the modern use of this term to refer to the aloof attitude of a curmudgeon—was a popular philosophy that flourished during the period of Christian origins. Its practitioners, according to Mack, exhorted the world to develop a “sense of personal worth and integrity.” They wanted people to be independent in a world that defined one’s value in terms of social position. They counseled escape from that society. Cynics typically challenged social convention. They lived mendicant lives of self-reliance. Their goal, according to Mack, was to live life undeterred by “social currents that threatened to overwhelm and silence a person’s sense of verve.’ All this is reflected, says Mack, in the sayings Kloppenborg attributes to Q¹, among which we find blessings on the poor (Matthew 5:3//Luke 6:20), admonitions to regard life as more than food and clothing (Matthew 6:25–34//Luke 12:22–31), a lament about homelessness (Matthew 8:20//Luke 9:58), a warning that one who seeks to secure his or her life will lose it (Matthew 10:39//Luke 17:33). Yet Mack does not rely on all the sayings in Q¹. Instead, he distills it to its “aphoristic core,” in effect proposing another, yet deeper layer in Q, a kind of proto-Q¹.

With Q¹ itself, Mack notices that some of the social radicalism of that original core has already begun to give way to other concerns. Here for the first time a program of social formation emerges centered around the concept of the kingdom of God. Signs of this new phase include a shift from aphoristic sayings to the greater use of maxims and imperative injunctions. Mack also detects in Q¹ a heightened interest in an egalitarian view of social roles and (presumably) how such a view would translate into particular social arrangements.

In Q¹’s discourse in which Jesus sends out the disciples (Matthew 9:37, 10:7–16//Luke 10:2–12), Mack sees a departure from Q’s original core message. Here Jesus tells his disciples what to do when 061they are rejected (Matthew 10:14–15//Luke 10:10–12). Here they are explicitly instructed not to adopt the traditional garb of the Cynic philosopher—take no bag, no sandals, no staff (Matthew 10:9–10a/ /Luke 10:4). This, according to Mack, is a modulation away from Cynic-style mendicancy and toward an interest in developing a network of house groups of like-thinking Jesus people. The Q folk are already beginning to settle down.

Kloppenborg observed a similar shift, but he associated this with the. shift from Q¹ to Q² that is, from Q’s original Wisdom orientation to themes of judgment against “this generation,” typical of Q². Mack proposes something similar to account for the shift from Q¹ to Q². Mack notices in material assigned to Q² an increased concern with issues of belonging and loyalty, of who is in and who is out. The stakes for belonging to the movement are also raised. Jesus is no longer simply 062the founder the first to have practiced its social radicalism. He is now a keeper of accounts, a judge who makes sure that loyalty would be rewarded (Matthew 10:32–33//Luke 12:8–9). To do this, the Q folk begin to draw on traditions from Jewish apocalypticism (e.g., Matthew 24:26–28, 37–42//Luke 17:22–37). At first, however, this did not involve a preoccupation with the end of history. Rather, it simply provided a means to raise the stakes, to assure the loyalty of the members of the group and to call down fire upon their opponents.

This transition did not occur all at once. It happened gradually. One can see its beginnings already in Q¹ (Matthew 7:21//Luke 6:46; Matthew 7:24//Luke 6:47; Matthew 10:16a//Luke 10:3). One can see it more clearly in Q² (Matthew 11:6//Luke 7:23; Matthew 10:40//Luke 10:16; Matthew 13:16//Luke 10:23b–24; Matthew 12:28//Luke 11:20; Matthew 12:30//Luke 11:23; Matthew 10:32–33//Luke 12:8–9).

In pursuit of gradualism, Mack even perceives a layer between Q¹ and Q², a kind of proto-Q², similar to his proto-Q¹. In proto-Q² Jesus appears in a self-authorizing role (Matthew 10:37//Luke 14:26; Matthew 10:38//Luke 14:27), but not yet in the role of the Son of Man, the ultimate figure of judgment in Q²’s apocalyptic scheme.

Mack’s book is a masterful analysis of the entire Q tradition, dissecting it into a sequence of phases of social experimentation. Its scope is large and its argument compelling, if for nothing else than its enormous compass.

Of course it has its weaknesses too. Critics will no doubt notice that Mack’s theory of a Cynic prigin for the Jesus movement rests on the isolation of an aphoristic core of material that lies Prior to Q¹. In Mack’s scheme, by Q¹ a Cynic ethos is already explicitly rejected by the addition of the material in which Jesus tells his followers how to missionize despite rejection and to drop the traditional garb of the Cynic philosopher (Matthew 10:9//Luke 10:4). But Mack offers no methodological grounds for identifying that core. No rationale is given for placing this or that tradition in the core or for omitting others. Mack simply asserts the core’s existence and its content. Similarly, he offers no analysis to substantiate an intermediate stage between Q¹ and Q². Unfortunately, these are not insignificant objections. They go right to the heart of his thesis.

Nevertheless, Mack’s assertion that the Jesus movement began as a Cynic-like movement of a character reflected in his aphoristic core of Q is, though unsupported, quite plausible. If we look at another sayings gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, we find a body of tradition shared with Q that is larger than, but consistent with, Mack’s aphoristic core in its general character. “Cynic” might well be the best way to describe that common tradition. However, it is important not to allow this aspect of the early Jesus movement to overwhelm our understanding of the entire Jesus tradition. Cynicism can help us by providing a general framework within which to understand the early Jesus tradition, but the challenge is to move beyond such generalities to the specifics of the tradition.

Moreover, we must also move beyond the narrow confines of the Q tradition. As important as Q is, it is not the entire picture. There are other pre-Marcan traditions to consider as well, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the letters of Paul and, of course, Johannine traditions reflected in John’s Gospel. Mack too facilely equates the history of Q Christianity with the larger puzzle of Christian origins. Q forms but one piece in that puzzle, albeit a large and important one.

These criticisms aside, the importance of Q for understanding Christian beginnings should not be underestimated. Mack is surely right in asserting that a better understanding of Q will require a major rethinking of how Christianity came to be. Together with the Gospel of Thomas, Q tells us that not all Christians chose Jesus’ death and resurrection as the focal point of their theological reflection. They also, show that not all early Christians thought apocalyptically. Earliest Christianity was not monolithic. The followers of Jesus were very diverse and drew on a plethora of traditions to interpret and explain what they were doing. With the rediscovery of the lost Gospel, perhaps some of that diversity will again thrive, as we rediscover that theological diversity is itself not a weakness, but a strength.

The Lost Gospel. The very concept provokes a flood of questions. If it is lost, how do we know it ever existed? How do we know what was in it? Who lost it? And how was it lost? Perhaps most intriguing of all: Will it ever be found?