Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project in the Sayings Gospel Q

This dissertation concerns the ideological project of the Sayings Gospel Q, a written source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Although it has become increasingly popular to understand the earliest rural Jesus movement as emerging from a peasant milieu, proponents of this model have not yet taken the time to explore the ramifications for a highly stylized written document being the earliest evidence for this movement, as this project does. The analysis takes as its starting point the problematic category of “peasant” and tries to offer some theoretical clarity into the way the term is deployed. Although the term may still be useful for thinking about the social structure of ancient Palestine, Q does not seem to be a product of that group of people. On the contrary, Q is a sophisticated literary text, which has a number of affinities with other ancient literature, as well as interesting parallels with documentary papyri. Even so, Q does not appear to the product of elites, for the text is rife with tropes of social and economic marginality. In order to access the elusive “middling stratum” from which Q’s authors may stem, this project looks cross-culturally at middling figures, using the same sorts of data that have hitherto been used to characterize the Jesus movement as a peasant movement (anthropological and sociological studies of peasants). Middling figures in similar contexts have a number of things in common, especially if such antecedent conditions as education and literacy skills are present: structural marginality, creativity and innovation, and the capacity to articulate social interests and facilitate reform. These features can be productively mapped onto Q in order to provide insight into the genesis of this text and its ideas. In fact, this comparison better explains Q’s project than the frequent appeal to its “peasant milieu.” Q’s ideological project is admittedly self-interested, but it nevertheless synthesizes a range of social experiences in ways that are fundamentally related to the middling social experience of its authors. It is thus a determined intellectual project, not the vestiges of oral traditions stemming directly from peasant villagers.Ph