Psalm 102:18-22
Write this down for the next generation so people not yet born will praise God: “God looked out from his high holy place; from heaven he surveyed the earth. He listened to the groans of the doomed, he opened the doors of their death cells.” Write it so the story can be told in Zion, so God’s praise will be sung in Jerusalem’s streets and wherever people gather together along with their rulers to worship him.
This is the second in our Summer Series looking at the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written rather than the order in which they appear in most Bibles. We started, if you recall, last week by talking about communal memory and then skimming over the basic information that most people would have had access to prior to any written documents – the things that “everyone knew” before there was ever a written gospel.
Even though seven of Paul’s letters were the first to be written, we’re going to begin our study with the gospels, and then move back to Paul’s letters. We will begin next week with the first of the gospel accounts, which is Mark’s, followed in chronological order by Matthew, John, and Luke – which is considerably different from the order in which we are used to seeing them.
This week’s message is going to be pretty dry, I’m afraid – sorry about that, I can’t make it any more exciting – it’s necessary background information, but I think it’s stuff that is important for us to at least be aware of before we dig much deeper into the readings. It will get better, I promise.
I need to confess here that I am not a New Testament scholar myself -- not even close. It was not my field of passionate interest in seminary so I took the minimum requirements in biblical studies. I was much more interested in story and narrative and how we communicate ideas with each other than in dissecting biblical manuscripts. However, I am clever enough to know where I am lacking and to go straight to sources who do know such things.
So before we get into Mark’s gospel I want to take today to give you a very brief introduction to two other documents – ones you’ve probably never heard of. There are all sorts of non-canonical documents out there from this time period and even those that were never part of the bible have things to teach us about the early church. Chances are, unless you are thinking of going into New Testament studies in a big way, you will never have reason to know much about these particular two “documents.” The Q Source and the Didache were early Christian documents and both, in very different ways, had an effect on the writing of and the studying of the accepted New Testament books.
The first, the Q Source, or “Q” as it’s usually known, takes its name from the German word quelle, which means source. It is not even an actual document – it’s a hypothetical document of Jesus sayings - one that scholars believe must have existed at one time – pre-dating the gospels -- but they can’t prove it because no copies remain in existence today. The primary reason for this belief is the considerable amount of material that is found almost word for word in both Matthew and Luke.
We know that Matthew, especially, pulled from Mark, but there is too much other material in both Luke and Matthew that isn’t in Mark that scholars have been forced to ask “where did they get this?” and to conclude – because they are so identical – that both Matthew and Luke must have copied it from some other existing written source, not just word of mouth.
The existence of “Q” was posited around 1900 so it is a fairly recent theory and while widely accepted it does have it’s disbelievers. Before 1900 the church generally followed St. Augustine’s hypothesis that placed the writing order of the four gospels in the order we are familiar with – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I’m not going to take time to explain this one - just that it used to be the way scholars looked at the gospels. It covered most of the bases but had enough holes in it to prompt deeper digging and eventually to the positing of the Q Source. So Q is a possible pre-gospel document which provided both Matthew and Luke with source material for their gospels. We will go more into this when we read about those two gospels.
The second document, the Didache, does exist – in several forms. Didache is Greek for teaching, and that’s what this document is – a series of teachings about a whole bunch of things. It is not a narrative – it doesn’t tell a story – no life of Jesus. It does contain a version of the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll get into that with Matthew’s gospel. What it mostly does is describe for us much of the life of the earliest Christian communities. It gives us a remarkable picture of how a scattered group of Jewish Jesus-followers morphed into the Christian church.
It was probably written late in the first century. And though it isn’t quoted directly in any of the other writings, since it is accepted as genuine, it had, and still has, power in its use as a check against disputed early documents. Much of what we think we know about baptism and communion – how they changed from casual gatherings in homes or on riverbanks into detailed church rituals – all that comes to us from the Didache.
It will probably not play much role in our summer explorations but I wanted you to know that such a document exists and helped shape our thinking of those earliest years or Christianity.
OK - that’s that’s the dry stuff out of the way. I just wanted to make the point that the New Testament writings did not stand alone as the only written records of the early church. Some of the other documents are important, some don’t seem to offer us much that is useful, many are only fragments – much as been lost to time.
Next week we will start with Mark’s Gospel and take a look at how a gospel account takes shape and grows out of an existing community of believers – forty years after the events it describes.
Even though seven of Paul’s letters were the first to be written, we’re going to begin our study with the gospels, and then move back to Paul’s letters. We will begin next week with the first of the gospel accounts, which is Mark’s, followed in chronological order by Matthew, John, and Luke – which is considerably different from the order in which we are used to seeing them.
This week’s message is going to be pretty dry, I’m afraid – sorry about that, I can’t make it any more exciting – it’s necessary background information, but I think it’s stuff that is important for us to at least be aware of before we dig much deeper into the readings. It will get better, I promise.
I need to confess here that I am not a New Testament scholar myself -- not even close. It was not my field of passionate interest in seminary so I took the minimum requirements in biblical studies. I was much more interested in story and narrative and how we communicate ideas with each other than in dissecting biblical manuscripts. However, I am clever enough to know where I am lacking and to go straight to sources who do know such things.
So before we get into Mark’s gospel I want to take today to give you a very brief introduction to two other documents – ones you’ve probably never heard of. There are all sorts of non-canonical documents out there from this time period and even those that were never part of the bible have things to teach us about the early church. Chances are, unless you are thinking of going into New Testament studies in a big way, you will never have reason to know much about these particular two “documents.” The Q Source and the Didache were early Christian documents and both, in very different ways, had an effect on the writing of and the studying of the accepted New Testament books.
The first, the Q Source, or “Q” as it’s usually known, takes its name from the German word quelle, which means source. It is not even an actual document – it’s a hypothetical document of Jesus sayings - one that scholars believe must have existed at one time – pre-dating the gospels -- but they can’t prove it because no copies remain in existence today. The primary reason for this belief is the considerable amount of material that is found almost word for word in both Matthew and Luke.
We know that Matthew, especially, pulled from Mark, but there is too much other material in both Luke and Matthew that isn’t in Mark that scholars have been forced to ask “where did they get this?” and to conclude – because they are so identical – that both Matthew and Luke must have copied it from some other existing written source, not just word of mouth.
The existence of “Q” was posited around 1900 so it is a fairly recent theory and while widely accepted it does have it’s disbelievers. Before 1900 the church generally followed St. Augustine’s hypothesis that placed the writing order of the four gospels in the order we are familiar with – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I’m not going to take time to explain this one - just that it used to be the way scholars looked at the gospels. It covered most of the bases but had enough holes in it to prompt deeper digging and eventually to the positing of the Q Source. So Q is a possible pre-gospel document which provided both Matthew and Luke with source material for their gospels. We will go more into this when we read about those two gospels.
The second document, the Didache, does exist – in several forms. Didache is Greek for teaching, and that’s what this document is – a series of teachings about a whole bunch of things. It is not a narrative – it doesn’t tell a story – no life of Jesus. It does contain a version of the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll get into that with Matthew’s gospel. What it mostly does is describe for us much of the life of the earliest Christian communities. It gives us a remarkable picture of how a scattered group of Jewish Jesus-followers morphed into the Christian church.
It was probably written late in the first century. And though it isn’t quoted directly in any of the other writings, since it is accepted as genuine, it had, and still has, power in its use as a check against disputed early documents. Much of what we think we know about baptism and communion – how they changed from casual gatherings in homes or on riverbanks into detailed church rituals – all that comes to us from the Didache.
It will probably not play much role in our summer explorations but I wanted you to know that such a document exists and helped shape our thinking of those earliest years or Christianity.
OK - that’s that’s the dry stuff out of the way. I just wanted to make the point that the New Testament writings did not stand alone as the only written records of the early church. Some of the other documents are important, some don’t seem to offer us much that is useful, many are only fragments – much as been lost to time.
Next week we will start with Mark’s Gospel and take a look at how a gospel account takes shape and grows out of an existing community of believers – forty years after the events it describes.
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