American author and scholar of early Christian history and the New Testament. This stems from his development of a theory of religion as “social interests. Jesus Movements” followed a similar model. The mack within pdf download develops the thesis that this was the earliest writing about Jesus, developed over decades by a community which he describes with unwavering confidence.
The layers are significantly structured – the earliest material is spaced out and bracketed by later material, the later material showing awareness of the earlier sayings, but not vice versa. The earliest layer, called Q1, is composed of sayings attributed to Jesus and addressing the audience directly. These are mostly instructions on how to behave. The main teachings are to live in poverty, to lend without expecting anything in return, to love your enemies, not to judge, and not to worry, since God will provide what you need. Mack posits that Q1 itself can be broken into two historical stages, the first being simple maxims containing the core of the teachings, and the later stage being developments by the community giving illustrations and arguments for these maxims. The next major development, Q2, comprises the major portion of the Q document as reconstructed by Mack.
Pharisees and scribes are criticised. Mack sees in this layer an increased anxiety on the part of the community, a need to define itself against others, and also intimation that the community itself was causing tension: there is reference to father turning against son, brother turning against brother etc. The final layer, Q3, is very scant and thought by Mack to have been written after the Roman-Jewish war from 66-73AD. Passages added at this time include the temptations of Jesus, and a lament for Jerusalem. The severity of the language and the paucity of material compared with the earlier stages is thought to reflect the losses suffered by the community during the war. Mack’s hypothesis presenting Jesus and the earliest Christians within the frame of Greco-Roman cynicism is controversial. While most scholars have recognised finding Jesus within the context of first century Judaism, Mack and other proponents go against the majority and argue that Jesus be understood in a Hellenistic context.
The Cynic hypothesis will in time assuredly be consigned to the dustbin of ill-conceived hypotheses, but it will be useful nonetheless to appeal to it as our point of departure. Mack follows the lead of Kloppenborg in reconstructing Q in layers, focusing on Q communities. On Jesus as a Cynic, Casey states that “When all the evidence is taken into account, supposed parallels of this kind show that Jesus was quite different from a Cynic philosopher, not that he was like one. Who Wrote the New Testament?
The gospels as narratives created by various communities. The Continuum International Publishing Group 2001. This page was last edited on 20 November 2017, at 01:07. Her greater success as an actress was as a leading lady in the 1930s. Later in life, Mack billed herself as a professional writer, writing for Broadway, stage, and television. Golden Age of Radio, and the rise of television.