The "Messianic" Implications of the Q Material.

In the past twenty-five years scholars devoted to the study of Q have abandoned the concept of a single homogeneous Q source in favor of a developing multistaged compositional theory. Q has become an archaeological dig promising to reveal successive layers of primitive Q community thought about Jesus and his teaching. Technical terms such as Q 1, Q 2, Q 3, QMt, QLk, the wisdom stratum of Q, the prophetic stratum, the apocalyptic stratum, and so forth have thus now become common among those who write on the subject. Correlating with this idea of a growing, developing Q composition is the concept that developmental or redactional stages may also be detected in the christological understanding of the editors of Q and the churches or communities they represent. (1) Thus, most recent reconstructions of Q attribute the presence of the name "Son" in Luke 10:21-22//Matt 11:25-27 and the name "Son of God" in the temptation narratives to a middle or late stage of Q redaction. (2) Similarly, scholars commonly attribute Son of Man sayings, wisdom sayings, and prophetic sayings to different, often mutually exclusive, stages of Q's christological maturation in a sequence ordered according to the judgments of the individual scholars themselves. (3) These related hypotheses have converged to create the contemporary paradigm that Q evolved from one stage of development to the next, so that the final composition of Q differed significantly from the first, both in its purpose and in its understanding of Jesus. This evolving sophistication of Q has given rise to a developing consensus that Q, in all of its supposed stages, essentially was not interested in the question of Jesus' messiahship. The following comments by Marcus Borg, Burton Mack, and Christopher Tuckett are representative: Such nonmessianic assessments correctly draw attention to the fact that in Q Jesus is not the object of explicit christological proclamation. The technical term "Messiah/Christ" does not exist in Q, nor do organizing faith statements like Rom 1:1-7 or John 1:1-18. Nevertheless, granting Q's silence, few deny that Q has an important contribution to make to the study of Christology, or, perhaps more properly, the forces that generated Christology. For Q not only attributes to Jesus the names "Son of Man," "Son of God," and "the coming one," but also maintains a clear and consistent witness to Jesus' unparalleled authority as judge, healer, exorcist, commissioner of disciples, determiner of people's fate in or out of the kingdom of God, and performer of acts that signal the promised arrival of God's saving work among humankind. Thus, the question of how to appraise Q'S Christology in light of its apparent silence on the matter of Jesus' "messianic" identity. Is Q'S omission of the term "Messiah/ Christ" forceful evidence of its transmitters' ignorance, disinterest, or perhaps even rejection of Jesus' "messianic" identity, as the above authors seem to intimate? In what follows, I shall argue that this is not the case. I shall contend that Jesus' "messianic" identity does indeed figure into the christological equation of Q. I shall describe what I believe to be the messianic profile of the Q material and develop an argument for the coherence of various independent sayings of Jesus in Q that have "messianic" implications. Moreover, I shall attempt to justify the historical judgment that these "messianic" sayings go as far back in the Synoptic tradition as objective historical inquiry can take us.