The Book of Q

bare on a piece of parchment nearly two thousand years old. The true marvel, though, lay in the earlier passages- the vast majority of the scroll-those that appeared nowhere in the canonical Gospels, and which gave the words a meaning Pearse had never conceived, something to take it far beyond the narrow scope of scholarship.

It wasn’t simply the new collection of Jesus’ sayings, unseen until now, that made it so remarkable, but the structure itself, the form of the discourse, that placed the scroll in a context he couldn’t quite believe. Or perhaps accept.

Q was half Gospel, half diary, one that traced twenty years in the life of a Cynic teacher named Menippus. Like Diogenes-the father of Cynicism, who had walked about with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for an honest man-Menippus was a wanderer, no purse, no bag, no sandals. His mission, to teach the Cynic ideal: flout convention, scoff at authority, disbelieve in civilization itself, and embrace a poverty that could grant freedom and thus a kind of royalty. To be king within a kingdom unknown by those still mired in the excesses of a material world.

A Cynic through and through.

How like another school of thought.

Driven by a force he couldn’t explain, Menippus had set off on his “Hagia Hodoporia” from his home in Gadara-a Greek city east of the Jordan River, overlooking the Sea of Galilee-traveling to points as far west as Salonika, as far east as Jaipur, in India. Along the way, he had lived in Sepphoris, not far from Nazareth, then spent several years with the Nozrim ha-Brit, the Essene community at Qumran-those who had written the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Keepers of the Covenant. But not alone. Never alone:

I found Him when He was but a boy, but with such power, such thought. I knew why I had been brought to His side.

Menippus had wandered with a companion, at first the boy’s teacher, then his student, ultimately his “Beloved Disciple.” Menippus, the man forever unnamed in the Gospels, now revealed in the rolls of the “Hodoporia.”

Q was nothing less than a history of the lost years of Jesus’ life, his development from ages twelve to thirty, all transcribed by the pen of a Cynic teacher.

Pearse sat amazed.

To read the sayings in that context created an image of Jesus he had never seen before:

Blessed are those who have grown confident and have found faith for themselves!

Do not worry, from morning to evening and from evening to morning, about what you will wear. Consider the ragged cloak to be a lion’s skin.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and will understand that you are children of the living Father. The task lies within you, the journey yours alone. Do not look to another to find a guide to yourself. He will not be there.

When you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female will not be female, then you will enter the kingdom.

And so with all instruction and teaching, men and women share equally in perfection. In me, there is neither male nor female.

Jesus was, in point of fact, a young Jewish radical firmly rooted in the teachings of a still-thriving school of Greek thought. His mission: to unleash a social experiment based on the rejection of traditional constraints in favor of the individual as part of a wider human family. The rituals associated with eating and drinking, the insistence on a voluntary poverty, the loving of one’s enemies, even the choice of dress that Jesus insisted upon all came directly from the Cynic influence:

And how is it possible that a man who has nothing, who is naked, houseless, squalid, without a city, can pass a life in peace? See, God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible. Look at me. And what do I want? Am I not without sorrow? Am I not without fear? Am I not free?

Diogenes himself might have said it.

What was most clear from Q, however, was how strange the message had become in the hands of the writers of the Gospels and beyond. Not only had they inserted certain events-the Last Supper (and thus the Eucharist) was nowhere to be found in Q-but they had eliminated key sentiments that Pearse could only guess had run counter to the needs of the early church. The role of women as preachers (in keeping with the Cynic tradition), the constant emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to maintain his or her own commitment, all disappeared once out of Q’s hands.

Why no women? Why such import to the Last Supper and the Eucharist? No doubt to confirm the crucial role of the male apostles after Jesus’ death.

And yet, the power structure of an elite corps of disciples had had no place in Q. Menippus had gone to great lengths to recount several sermons by Jesus-still in His twenties-that expressly denounced such hierarchy. His was a populist movement, meant for the people as a whole. Everything about it portrayed Jesus not as a harbinger of a mighty structure but as a railer against such monoliths:

And He said to them, “For what would you find through others that you cannot find in me alone? What walls exist that can house my power? And if they should try, I shall throw down this building, and no one will be able to build it.”

For God does not have a house, a stone set up as a temple, dumb and toothless, a bane which brings many woes to men, but one which is not possible to see from earth, nor to measure with mortal eyes, since it was not fashioned by mortal hands.

It was all too clear that Jesus had sensed His own power, and that He had done everything He could to warn against its misappropriations and abuses. His was a brotherhood of believers, not a church of followers. The true authority came from God alone. The individual’s personal and creative experiences of that faith-not the dictates of an institution-were the catalysts of that power:

For those who name themselves bishop, and also deacon, as if they had received their authority from God, are, in truth, waterless canals.

Here it was, thought Pearse. Faith at its most personal, and thus most powerful. There was no denying the clear condemnation of his own calling. “Waterless canals.” And yet, Q also offered the most perfect affirmation of his own brand of faith, one freed of a structure built around detached hierarchy.

The simplicity of Jesus’ sayings had been lost, funneled through Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, and Paul to assure the connection with a Messianic past-the prophecies of Isaiah-and to establish the foundations for an infallible church. But had that been the message?

Not according to Q. Jesus as wisdom teacher, yes. Jesus as apocalyptic Savior, no.

Nothing was more clear on that point than the Beloved Disciple’s retelling of his visit to Jesus’ tomb three days after His death:

And at that time, a great noise went up through Jerusalem, a wailing for the death of this Son of Man. And with it came word of a resurrection, His tomb laid empty, His being risen and returned. “But this will not be so,” He had told me, “though some will come to say otherwise. It is but the folly of men to need such signs, their folly to place their faith in the body and not in the spirit.”

In a single phrase, Menippus had brought down two thousand years of church authority: “But this will not be so,” He had told me, “though some will come to say otherwise.” Not from the distance of the canonical or Gnostic gospels, but from one who had spent his life with Jesus, and had been there at the bitter end, and beyond. No need to interpret. No need to explain. No need for a Luther to divine his priesthood of all believers from an ambiguous text. The message here was clear as day. And while Luther’s ninety-five theses had been more than enough to shake the very core of Christendom, here was the Word of Christ, unambiguous and unassailable. Imagine how much more shattering it could be.

Angeli’s words raced back to him: without Peter standing there saying, “I was the first, I can vouch for His return …” without the doctrine of bodily resurrection, there’s no way to validate the apostolic succession of bishops. No way to lay claim to the papacy.

Pull out the pin, and the entire structure falls.

At first, it seemed strange to Pearse that so monumental a shift could require so little ink. More so that Matthew and Luke had so easily glossed over it. But the more he read, the more it made perfect sense. Q wasn’t the story of Jesus the Destined. That was for the Gospels. It was the story of a life built on faith and wandering, of