Embellishments in the Gospel of Mark.

[Jehanne]

It is, like Q, one of the earliest historical sources on the historical Jesus, with, of course, Matthew & Luke copying from Mark, adding their own source material (along with that of Q), and with the Gospel of John being a largely unhistorical narrative of Jesus (such as the Thursday crucifixion); but, if Mark himself embellished his source material, how can historians hope to reconstruct the historical Jesus?

[The Grand Nudger]

Q, a historical source?  Q is a hypothetical document proposed 100 years ago but never found.  The only point to hypothesizing it's existence was to rehabilitate the gospels relative inclusions and omissions, to strip the narrative of the supernatural, and present a character closer to our modern liberal sensibilities. 

There is no q manuscript, there is no reference to a q manuscript in antiquity, and if there ever were a q manuscript it's more than a little bit perplexing that no one kept it, considering the giant mound of trash that was kept and endlessly recopied.  

Here's an interesting tidbit.  If there ever were a q, and if the hypothesis about the construction of the other gospels relied on it as envisioned, the authors of that document didn't view jesus as the messiah, they didn't think he had redeemed their sins, they didn't claim that he had risen from the dead.  More a raving wanderer in rags.  The teacher of righteousness, lol. Even the crucifixion of Some Guy™ is thought to be independent of this hypothetical q.

Any "historical jesus" derived from the q hypothesis will have nothing whatsoever to do with the character of jesus or christ in the new testament. Instead, it would stand as a rejection of either of those characters being historical in any way. The nt jesus would not be derived from q, but wholly re-imagined and independently constructed - a few sayings lifted here and there, with the jesus of q having been forgotten in process. Even the name being a part of that re-imagining. On top of all of that, the character in q, whomever that was, and if there was a q, wouldn't be on solid ground as a historical figure either.

[Fake Messiah]

They can't, it's all wishful thinking and cultural bias - just like historians in India consider Krishna to be based on historical person.

[onlinebiker]

I thought Q was that goofy bitch on Star Trek Next Gen.......

And ya know?

I can just see some weak minded dribblers startiing a religion with Q as their god.. 


Wonder how John Delancy would feel about that?

[Brian37]

Embellishments in one book?

My late friend Bob used to put it like this,

"In the beginning, then it all went downhill from there."

[Jehanne]

Q, a historical source?  Q is a hypothetical document proposed 100 years ago but never found.

I think that there is little doubt that Q, as a historical document, was written in the 1st century, as Matthew & Luke wrote independently of one another.  Likely Q, a "sayings Gospel", was similar to the Gospel of Thomas.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's interesting that you think that.  Why would matthew or luke need a shared source document?  All they'd need were narratives in an oral tradition.  A collection of wisdom sayings.  

That collection didn;t need to be monolithic or from a singular source, itself, or have any historical character at it;s heart....and, again, there is no q, there is no mention of q, and if there ever were a q it would have been very important and valued to the nascent jesus movement.  As envisioned it is very literally the gospel of jesus, the smart things he said.

In reality, q is a secularization of jesus popularized by liberal theology.

-and all of this, all of it, relies on a very amusing set of assumed initial conditions to excuse and explain away. There's a simpler explanation that gels with everything we know about the development of myths, legends, and social movements.

[Jehanne]

It's interesting that you think that.  Why would matthew or luke need a shared source document?  All they'd need were narratives in an oral tradition.  A collection of wisdom sayings.  

That collection didn;t need to be monolithic or from a singular source, itself, or have any historical character at it;s heart....and, again, there is no q, there is no mention of q, and if there ever were a q it would have been very important and valued to the nascent jesus movement.  As envisioned it is very literally the gospel of jesus, the smart things he said.

In reality, q is a secularization of jesus popularized by liberal theology.

-and all of this, all of it, relies on a very amusing set of assumed initial conditions to excuse and explain away.  There's a simpler explanation that gels with everything we know about the development of myths, legends, and social movements.

Matthew & Luke were not eyewitnesses, and so, they copied their source materials and embellished as they needed and wanted to.

[The Grand Nudger]

The Q hypothesis strongly argues against there ever having been any eyewitnesses to copy from. I think that you have in mind an idea that there were two guys sitting around with a stack of books and that's how this stuff was made.

If you see two posts with "life is like a box of chocolates" in them..that won't actually certify that either person ever saw forrest gump (or that there was a forrest gump, or that the forrest gump of the movie had much to do with a real forrest gump if there were, lol). The same would have been true then.

This is how stories work.

(his name was Sammy Davis, btw)

---

-just more to chew on, using the same example above.  If you do watch forrest gump, you'll see a scene with lyndon johnson in it.  How they did that, was to put tom hanks head on top of sammy davis' body.  It remains a fact, however, that forrest gump isn't really based on the historical sammy davis or the historical tom hanks.  Importantly, hanks has said that one of the defining aspects of the charcter, the way he talked, was actually based on a little boy named micheal humphreys, who played the younger gump and had trouble sounding like hanks, so hanks took it upon himself to sound like him.  

This is one of the many ways in which the character you see in the new testament could have been constructed. No q, no eyewitnesses, no person from which the stories were built in a historic sense, but many stories and many people grafted onto a larger and independently existent narrative. It wouldn't have been the first or last time this happened.

Or, I suppose, people can twist themselves into knots trying to make all of this stuff cogent with respect to a fatally misconceived assumption derived from the articles of someone else's faith.

[Succubus]

Embellishments in one book?

My late friend Bob used to put it like this,

"In the beginning, then it all went downhill from there."

It was a dark and stormy night...