The Q Documents and Their Impact

First off I would like to state that, if found, this would be either the single greatest historical find or the single greatest let down. For those who don't know, the Q Documents are the supposed documents written by Jesus himself.

Why would this be so important?
1. It would essentially prove he existed.
2. It would let all of us know his true nature: Human or Diety
3. It would give us a better guide line to live our lives most likely, as it would be coming straight from the horses mouth
4. It would probably reveal any relations Jesus had with Mary Magdelene, and whether or not they had kids and what not.
5. It would most likely give us an inside to his brain and thoughts.

It would be incredible. OR it could just be an outline of what to put in the gospels, which would be the let down, and would actually cause a lot of controversy. Imagine, if you will, if it did lay claim that Jesus was the Son Of God, and the gospels were correct. If Jesus himself said he was the Son Of God in these documents, you would have, probably, a MAD RUSH of Islamic people converting to christianity. You may also see a few Jews become Christians and so on and so forth. However, the reverese of that is it reveals him as a prophet, and many a people start converting to Islam, or Christianity is changed. Either way, this would be a significantly huge discovery. Which, I am sure you all already know.

Now, to my point.
Is it rumored that they still exist or have been destroyed? If destroyed why were they, was it for the church or was it for someone else's church (IE Judaism or Islam). If they are still around, where is it rumored they are, or is this whole thing one big mystery? And finally, what do you think they would entale, and will they ever be discovered or released? Also, how would it change your life and current outlook in terms of religion, if at all?

[edit on 9-4-2005 by Ryanp5555]

Can you give us some background on the documents? Like which books they're mentioned in and what their history is?

"Documents + Q" is going to give an awful lot of search engine hits for people to wade through.

The Q documents, which there is no proof of, suggest that the authors of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, no mention of John, used a document as sort of a template. Some believe that Jesus wrote these documents himself, and they used his writtings to sort of lead their way, as opposed to them copying off of Matthew, or the Holy Spirit interfering. I prefer to think that Jesus himself wrote these Documents, thus making it so much more significant to both History and everyone's life. This post is based on the premise that Jesus himself did write these documents. I am not really sure if it is said to be Jesus' handwork that wrote the Q Documents, but I do remember hearing speculation, so correct me if I am wrong. If it is, like i said before, the impact would be MONUMENTAL!

This site is long and provides information on the Q Documents:
www.tektonics.org...

A Shorter, clearer, summary of what they are:
www.biblehistory.com...

This makes me think of the truckloads of other books, gospels and scripts that have been lost or destroyed. I wonder what sort of knowledge we've lost over the centuries. Everytime I see things like this however i'm reminded of the James Ossuary and the Soloman tablet.

``

If there were. anything. like the 'Q Documents'

i think one's imagination would be spurred on more-so
if the 'Q' had a relationship to Qumran
rather than a less inspiring word, as in the German word 'Quelle'

being that Qumran was a community of religious zealots
which practiced living the life in a dynamic battle against Darkness

Jesus or Iseus or whomever was supposted to been baptized by
John the Baptist, who was also one of those Essenes (of Qumran?)
so it follows that he (Jesus et al) was an Essene and likely a Nazorean
Sect follower, and was that eras' , sects, "Messiah"...a role acted out
by the faithful 'players' of the ongoing religious, real-life, Drama

chances are, the Jesus person, did not write things or publish letters or documents or that sort of thing....that was for the scribes & copiers, as they were an important cog in their communities spiritual world-view...
my guess is that he (Jesus etc) would only tell stories, allegories, parabels,
it was up to the 'secretary' in his group of followers to do the 'shorthand & stenographer' duties, and then a committee to 'refine' 'augment' his mutterings into "Words-To-Live-By" status

It was later on, distanced in time & the faded memories of those who 'knew' him....that the Organized Religions joined-in with the Peace & Resurrection model, then with their
'Truth found in expediency', those same OrganizedReligions themselves became the 'Pharasees & Saduccees' of the times.

If there were Q Documents, found, Ironically at this 'End-of-Age' era...
i too would view them with that skeptical eye...like the Ossuary & Tablet phenomena mentioned earlier in the Linux' post.

Vatican Catacombs? hidden Libraries?
Eastern Orthodox Mysticisms? Slovak or Ukranian Caches 2B discovered?
More Qumran Caves 2B revealed?
the Knights Templar long-lost stash? Holy Grail?

~~~~~~~~~~~
Holmes' said to Dr Watson...'There is a game afoot!'
hey, enjoy your journey

Is it established tho that the Baptist and Jesus were actual Essenes? I know that the qumran cult is generally looked upon as being a possible part of the jesus movement, but there's nothing 'definitive' no?

The 'Q' Document, from what I understand, is based on the idea that lots of gospels seem to have 'cut-n-pastes' in them from other gospels. I don't recall having heard about the source documents being something that jesus wrote for himself tho.

Regardless, I can't imagine that there were copies of stuff written by jesus himself and the early christian community just trashed it, prefering the works of his apostles. Or even that they'd just throw out a more 'basic' text upon which the other gospels were written. Keep in mind, the early christian community was self organized, and didn't have the big hierarchy that say the RCC or even Orthodox church has.

Yeah, it is the idea that they were just cut and paste documents. But, I have heard one or two people make claims that they were written by Jesus, and that is what i wanted to discuss. How incredibly interesting would that be!

Truly, that'd be astounding.

I had to wonder tho. Whats the average educational level of a jewish rabbi of the early first century ad?

I suspect that they can't read too well actually. Relgiious texts are quote often memorized (think about the odes and epic poems like the Iliad and Odyssey, recited from memory, even over the course of days amoung the greeks). So with the jews, I'd bet that they can 'read' the torah easily, but don't write original texts very often and don't read anything outside the torah, perhaps the talmud. But I don't know how 'popular' the talmud was at that time.

So i think if jesus had a gospel, it'd've been written by a scribe. I also suspect that he was too busy to have his saying recorded bya proper scribe and do everything else, especially since it would be sort of redundant, what with those 12 other dudes following him around! He he.

haha, yeah i suppose it would be quite redundant. Very good point. Still, I will continue to imagine this document, that probably doesn't exist, and wet myself in the process. A good portion of the world would change in some way or another.

[edit: excluded general quote, included header - nygdan]

[edit on 10-4-2005 by Nygdan]

The Jesus seminar believes that they have reconstructed a close facsimilie
of the Q document. It is included in one of their published works, The 5
Gospels i think but am not possitive.

The Bible was written. The Talmud is a long running commentary composed of Rabbi's opinions on a text called the "Mishna". The Mishna was also known as the "Oral Tradition" and as it name suggests, was not written down initially. Not everyone knew how to read back then and many religious "texts" were actually passed down teacher to student by memory.

Groupies:

Scholars call the 216 or so specific "sayings" placed into the mouth of Iesous which overlap in Matt and Luke (but these sayings are NOT found anywhere in Mark's or John's gospel) "Quelle" (German for "source") or "Q" for short.

"Q" is a HYPOTHETICAL document which has never been discovered (yet !).

It may have been oral or written or a combinatgion of both. Q comes in two basic Greek forms: about 1/3 of the sayings of Q as they are found in the Greek of Matthew and Luke are very very closely worded (almost exact word order, syntax, vocabulary, style etc) and look like almost verbatim copies ---suggesting there was some kind of Q-written source that both of these writers shared:

The other 2/3rds of the socalled Q-sayings (about 140 of them) are made up of Greek Jesus-sayings of variable closeness to each other as they are related by Matthew and Luke, suggesting an oral source or different sources from which the writers might havee selected whatever version of the saying they preferred.

There is no actual physical "Q document" in existence per se: the closest sayings collection (or sayings gospel) that we now possess today is the so-called Gospel of Judas Didymus Thomas (a copy wasa found in 4th century Coptic in Nag Hammadi in 1945--badly translated out of a Greek version of the book tgo judge from the gramattical errors in it) which lists 113 sayings each starting with "Jesus said...".

Some of these "113" sayings are actually groups of separate smaller sayings listed under a single number, so the total number of separate sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is really about 200---roughly the same length as the hypothetical Q document.

However only 30% of the sayings placed into the mouth of Iesous in the gospel of Thomas have any parallel with the Q sayings in Matthew and Luke; another 25% of them can be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke in one form or another, but there are significant differences.

Here are some "new sayings" that are placed into the mouth of Iesous in the Gospel of Thomas:

"Iesous said: The Fountainhead of prophecy was severed with the head of Yohanon the Baptist: from henceforth the Good News of the Kingdom of God shall be preached amidst violent men..."

or "Iesous said: He who enters the Kingdom of God laughing will exit the Kingdom crying ere long"

or "Iesous said: To what shall I liken the Kingdom of God? It is like a woman carrying a jar full of meal with a small hole in the bottom: when she got home she was shocked to find the jar completely empty..."

Like the hypothetical Q document, the 113 "sayings" in the Gospel of Thomas contain very little narrative (unlike the 4 canonical gospels) and are concerned mainly with moral "wise" teaching (i.e. philosophical sayings on how to live in the world at large) and interestingly, there is very little reference to the crucifixion or resurrection in either Q or Thomas-----they are more concerned with the "living presence" of Iesous among the fledgling Chrsitian community, or as the opening of Thomas suggests "These are the Secret words which the Living Iesous spake unto his disciple Judas Didymos Thomas: whoever obtains an understanding of these words will never taste death...."

It is possible that there were many of these so-called SAYINGS GOSPELS in circulation BEFORE the time of the more familiar written gospels found in the New Testament were written and circulated in the early 2nd century--which means the (Sayings) Gospel of Thomas (and the so-called Q collection of sayings) may be some of the earliest material in the Christian tradition--possibly dating from around AD 60 or so.

Other gospels in the New Testament may contain kernels of other gospels in them (in John's gospel there seems to be a collection of SIGNS "this was the first sign which Iesous performed..." from a kind of Signs Gospel; Matthew seems to have had a prophecy-fulfillment-midrash gospel buried inside it somewhere e.g. "these things were done to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet so and so").

Mark's gospel (in his discussion of "cleansing the lepers, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf," etc.) seems to have a collection of "Messianic proofs" in a kind of collection inside his own gospel to draw from to "prove" that Iesous was the Chrstos (or Messiah) e.g. "behold, this man hath peformed all things according to the letter (i.e. of prophecy) i.e. from Isaiah: "the blind receive their sight, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the dead are raised..." etc.

So it is very likely that the earliest Christians gathered random sayings (and "deeds") of "Iesous" into similarly smaller primitive collections or booklets BEFORE the present gospels took their final shape (probablyy for use in their teaching as the living disciples began to die off).

Just some random thoughts to help you understand the Q-phenomenon !

What if they were hiding the documens in the vatican archives

Why would the vatican hide documents that the other gospels lifted their information from?

The Q documents are the hypothesised source for these other gospels.

So its not going to say something like 'the pope is the antichrist' or anything like that.

How would the vatican get them anyway? The documents were lost before the vatican existed or there was a 'catholic' type of christianity.

Why wouldn't the Vatican archives have such information? For all we know they do have what is refered to as the "Q" documents.

Supposidly some of their books and documents in the Vatican go back as far as 200 years after the crucifixion, maybe even longer and the church most definitely has a security system in place to rival that of the secret service.

Reguarding the idea that whole documents of what may have been recorded of Jesus' words not being allowed to see daylight...believe it, because it's true.

Once the canon was established by the early holy roman church...anything else was herisey...Christ could have said it, but to the church, that didn't matter...they ruled by "divine right"...and anyone that disagreed was a heritic.

~oracle

The initial observation to be made is this: the popular forms of christianity we now have do not require indeed do not even permit Jesus to indorse them. Creedialism is a religion that supersedes Jesus, replaces him,or perhaps displaces him with a mythology that depends on nothing he said or did with the possible exception of his death.

observation of the Research team @ The Jesus Seminar.

The Q document has been hiding in plain sight for millenia.

Here it is:

www.sacred-texts.com...

For some reason, people always seem to forget that the Bible states that the most formative years of Jesus' life, the years where he was most likely to experience spiritual growth and formulate ideas, were spent in Egypt - the land which the early Hebrews had been exiled to and from where many of Judaism's ideas and theories evolved.

www.sacred-texts.com...

In order for it to be the Q documents I think it'd have to have actual blocks of text that are the same, lifted and what not, and turns of phrase that are taken from it and incorporated into other documents. THere's certainly lots of texts out there that talk about a dying and resurected saviour, and also lots of 'god-on-a-stick' myths out there too. But I at least think that the idea behind the 'Q' document is that there is evidence that the different gospels are copying, cut and pasting, stuff from different texts and what not.

Apparently there is also this phenomenon where a number of different "gospels" will be condensed into one, sometimes without any sort of rewriting, except to clear up some logical errors and contradictions too.

In response to the first post about how i would feel about religion if Jesus actually stated he was the son of god or what not... well id probably laugh. Why? well people make a lot of statements that are exagerated or ever 100% false and thousands if not millions of people have said they are a god or the offspring of a god.

I already dont believe in a higher deity or a god so if an ancient writing supposedly written by Jesus stated that he was godly then it would probably reinforce my disbelief in a god. But if he reappeared then maybe just maybe i would change my mine

Originally posted by alawler
In response to the first post about how i would feel about religion if Jesus actually stated he was the son of god or what not... well id probably laugh. Why? well people make a lot of statements that are exagerated or ever 100% false and thousands if not millions of people have said they are a god or the offspring of a god.

I already dont believe in a higher deity or a god so if an ancient writing supposedly written by Jesus stated that he was godly then it would probably reinforce my disbelief in a god. But if he reappeared then maybe just maybe i would change my mine

Don't really understand how you can not believe in a God when life is incredibly complex. It is like saying you believe that erosion created hieroglyphs in Egypt. But it is your opinion and I shall respect you for having one.