Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Early History of Easter

4. The Sayings Gospel Q: “You Will Not See Me”

64 Revisiting the Empty Tomb Q, because identifying genre “is of fundamental importance in evaluating what kind of discourse Q represents.”5 Kloppenborg has argued at length that Q shares various rhetorical and generic features with both instructional collections and chreiae collections (a chreia is a short anecdote about a particular speaker, which could be rhetorically elaborated in order to develop its sense).6 Migako Sato, on the other hand, has argued that Q is more like a book of one of the prophets, mainly because some sayings are cast as divine revelation and because Q contains different kinds of prophetic discourse (including oracles, woes, and the like).7 The contents of Q can be rather simplistically divided into either wisdom instruction or apocalyptic/prophetic speech, but taking either as of more fundamental influence in the composition of the text does not necessarily mean that “sapiential” and “apocalyptic” materials do not belong together.8 In any event, in a sayings collection such as Q, the death of the speaker is not necessarily going to be an issue, because the sayings validate themselves for the reader/hearer—they are valuable on their own terms, whether as revelatory speech, wisdom instruction , or what have you. We would not expect Q as a “sayings collection” to include narrative material about the death and resurrection of Jesus. It does not, although some parts of Q are narrative,9 and some of the sayings have a basic narrative framework.10 On the other hand, the canonical Gospels contain sayings, outside of the passion narratives, about opposition to Jesus’ ministry and about his death and resurrection . Three times in Mark (Mark 8:31-33; 9:31-32; 10:32-34) Jesus predicts his rejection, death, and resurrection, and the author of Mark uses these three predictions not only to foreshadow the passion narrative, but also to gather together material about how discipleship and rejection/persecution are related (see, e.g., Mark 8:31-33 and 8:34–9:1; note how prominently “leading” and “following” figure in Mark 10:32-34). The passion predictions, as they are called, are also found in Matthew and Luke, and other sayings in the Synoptics similarly look ahead to the death of Jesus and his resurrection.11 We might expect comparable sayings in Q, since there is material in Q about opposition and faithful discipleship (e.g., Q 6:22-23), but there is no saying that makes the death and resurrection of Jesus explicit. Instead, what we find in Q is material about how faithful prophets and emissaries of God are treated by God’s people, and also about the sort of vindication they might hope for, but none of this is expressed in Q in an individualized way about Jesus, at least not overtly. So nowhere in Q is Jesus’ death even mentioned, much less his resurrection; this has led some scholars to conclude that the people who composed and used Q did not consider these issues important.12 Yet, as we will see, Q does contain material that implies not only a knowledge of Jesus’ death, but even the sense that it formed a paradigmatic case of faithfulness in the face of rejection and persecution. Q also contains several sayings that speak of “the Son of Man,” who in some ways is both a heavenly and an eschatological figure, and whose coming would occasion judgment. “Son of Man” is also the characteristic way Jesus refers to himself, often without any particular emphasis on any extraordinary role or status—so the reader of Q is invited to identify the The Sayings Gospel Q: “You Will Not See Me” 65 Jesus who speaks with the Son of Man who would come. This raises the question of how, in the theology of Q, the Jesus who is rejected and dies is to be identified as the Son of Man, or—in John the Baptist’s terminology—the “Coming One.” Some scholars have proposed that there is a hint of an answer in Q 13:3435 , the Jerusalem Lament, which ends with a very cryptic remark: “You will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’” (v. 35).13 In Luke 13:34-35, Jesus says this on his way to Jerusalem (see Luke 9:51), and this foreshadows for Luke’s readers Jesus riding on the donkey’s...