What is ‘Q’?
(Jesus) spoke out: ‘I am indeed a servant of God. He has given to me the Book and made me a Prophet. Wherever I go, His blessings follow me.’ (QUR’AN 19:30)
THERE IS, IN TERMS OF LITERAL CONTENT, little for a mainstream Christian to object to in the passage from the Qur’an you just read. Virtually all Christian theologies accept Jesus’ role as Prophet, or Messenger of God. If ‘Book’ means an authentic Divine Revelation, surely no Christian would dispute that Jesus received this.
But that is the content. The context is a different matter. The very fact that the words in question appear in the Qur’an, rather than in the Gospels, is enough to give many people pause.
Ó Ó Ó
Most contemporary Christians simply do not believe that Jesus was a practitioner of the same religion practiced by Muslims. To be more specific: Most Christians do not believe that Jesus’ actual mission and teachings, by whatever name we may choose to call them, would be recognizable to a contemporary Christian, or even to a fair-minded neutral observer, as those of the Prophet Muhammad.
If you were to switch on a time machine and set out to test the matter, ninety-nine out of a hundred Christians would probably predict that your journey back through time would prove definitively that Jesus was not, in fact, a Muslim.
The problem is that most of those ninety-nine people would have a hard time describing, in even the vaguest terms, what a Muslim actually believes.
Ó Ó Ó
We don’t have a time machine, of course, and perhaps it would be better for us not to wish for one. How many of us would actually risk making such a trip for the first time, risking the possibility that we might never return to the certainties of our present lives?
It might be safer and more practical to plan a different kind of journey. It might be better—at least for those of us who are not particularly brave about journeys—if Jesus could gain access to the time machine and approach us.
Ó Ó Ó
Fortunately, we are in a position to ask Jesus to make just that kind of journey through time for us.
We can appeal to a kind of ‘hard evidence’—evidence, at any rate, that should be of interest to thoughtful Christians. The evidence to which we can appeal, the journey Jesus makes on our behalf, resides in the Gospels, in words attributed to Jesus himself. We can evaluate these words on their own merits. Then we can compare these words to the core principles of Islam.
You will be reading, in this book, a number of New Testament scriptures. When a passage like this comes up, it will appear in this kind of bold type, and indented. Quotes of prominent Christians are in bold type, italics and indented, while passages from the Qur’an are in italics style and indented.
Ó Ó Ó
Now, it is a common, and probably a fair, complaint from Christians that Muslims sometimes ‘pick and choose’ their way through the New Testament in discussions about Jesus. Some Muslims cite the Gospel of John one moment to prove some prophecy or other, and then, the next moment, dismiss the sixteenth verse of the third chapter in that same Gospel, which describes Jesus as the only begotten Son of God. Similarly, some Muslims appeal with great enthusiasm to St. Paul’s advice to women to cover their heads in public, but ignore the portions of his epistles that emphasize Jesus’ role as the sacrificial Savior of humanity.
This kind of flip-flopping exasperates the Christians and embarrasses Muslims, or ought to. Selective criticisms like these ignore the question ‘How did you come to prefer that passage over this one?’ They are demeaning to people of any faith or tradition, because they suggest that religion is little more than a rhetorical game in which an opponent’s fundamental beliefs can be uprooted easily—if only one knows what to ignore. No one, I think, is convinced by these kinds of arguments.
Of course, this book relies to a certain extent on my own Biblical interpretation and arguments. But you should understand that, for the purposes of consistency, historical authenticity, and clarity, this book is different from other Islamic assessments of the Gospels. This book relies primarily on a very narrowly defined group of verses, verses that are not to be found in the Gospel of John or in any of the Epistles. So when a thoughtful Christian asks, ‘Why do you prefer verse X over verse Y?’ the answer can be a clear one: ‘Because responsible scholars believe verse X to be older in derivation, and therefore more likely to be authentic.’
Ó Ó Ó
The verses in question, known as Q verses, are the passages many of today’s scholars believe to be the earliest surviving expression of the oral tradition of sayings attributed to Jesus.
Make no mistake: This is your father’s (and grand-father’
Ó Ó Ó
The remnants of a lost, but identifiable, ‘sayings gospel’ called Q (from the German Quelle, or ‘source’) do appear in Matthew and Luke.
What, you may ask, was a ‘sayings gospel’? This was, scholars believe, an ancient document consisting of instructions attributed to Jesus, ‘sayings’ that generally lack narrative material.
A sayings gospel would have carried material that eventually found its way into the Gospels we are familiar with—but a sayings gospel would have made no attempt to tell the life story of Jesus.
Ó Ó Ó
A little background is in order. The Gospel of Mark, most scholars believe, is the oldest extant Gospel. Intriguingly, Matthew and Luke depend on Mark for much, but not all, of their material. (The Gospel of John does not depend on any other Gospel in a textual sense; it is independent in a way that the other three Gospels are not. It is also compiled later.)
When we remove the influence of Mark and look at what Matthew and Luke still have in common, we find dozens of obviously parallel verses in Matthew and Luke—verses that often give us nearly verbatim expressions of the same saying.
Many scholars feel these parallel verses constitute clear evidence of a sayings gospel that supplies Matthew and Luke with a substantial amount of their content. These parallel verses, known as the Q verses, appear to reflect a lost manuscript that is almost certainly older than even Mark’s Gospel.
Ó Ó Ó
This all sounds, perhaps, more complex than it actually is. The simplest explanation for the situation we are examining is known as the Two Source Theory. This theory holds that the authors of Matthew and Luke made use of two important written sources—Mark and the lost gospel we now call Q—in developing their own accounts of the life of Jesus.
Here is a simple visual summary of the Two Source Theory on the next page, which is not my creation; this theory is familiar to virtually all responsible contemporary Gospel textual scholars, and has been a topic of scholarly discussion for many years.
Now, even this brief summary of Q is enough to stir up any number of intricate scholarly debates, and this book is not meant to be about scholarly debates. You should know, however, that the analysis of the development of the Gospels you have just read reflects the findings of some of the most accomplished researchers and scholars working in the field of New Testament textual studies. See The Complete Gospels, edited by Robert J. Miller, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
= influence
Luke
Matthew
Mark
Q
