Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

The very latest Jesus scholarship runs as follows: despite the differences discussed above, the striking similarities that remain in Matthew, Mark and Luke stem from the fact that Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark when they were composing their gospels. More, if you take out Mark from Matthew and Luke, you still have a lot of similar material, ‘including vast sections that are nearly word-for-word.’112 Nineteenth-century German scholars called this Q, for Quelle, or ‘source’. Together with the find, in 1945, at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, of the Gospel of Thomas, which scholars knew about but thought had vanished, this put a fresh light on the New Testament. The two most eye-catching and controversial views that have emerged from these discoveries are, first, Burton Mack’s, that Jesus was ‘a historical footnote’, ‘a marginal personality who, through whatever series of accidents, was turned into a god’, and Paula Fredericksen’s, that ‘Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who expected a cataclysmic intervention of God into history…and was devastatingly wrong. Christianity, then, amounts to a series of attempts to deal with this staggering error, most notably the doctrine of the Second Coming.’113 Both of these give Jesus a much-reduced status but still consider him to have been a historical figure.114