Language:

New Testament Studies

Table of Contents - July 2011 - Volume 57, Issue 03  

Articles

‘Blessed is Whoever is Not Offended by Me’: The Subversive Appropriation of (Royal) Messianic Ideology in Q 3–7

Simon J. Josepha1

a1 School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, 831 North Dartmouth Ave., Claremont, CA 91711 USA. email: simon.joseph@cgu.edu.

Abstract

Jesus is never explicitly identified as the ‘messiah’ or christos in Q. The conspicuous absence of this particular term—so frequently used in the Pauline letters and the Gospels—is often taken to mean that the Q community was uninterested in, unaware of and/or rejected kerygmatic traditions which understood Jesus as a ‘messianic’ figure. Yet a careful analysis of the literary structure of Q 3–7 demonstrates that the redactor of Q both appropriated and subverted ‘traditional messianic expectations’ of a popular warrior-king by framing Jesus' baptism, temptation and Inaugural Sermon within announcement and confirmation passages that serve to both affirm and qualify Jesus' relationship to ‘messianic’ traditions. Located within a text dominated by the theme of eschatological reversal, the literary structure of Q 3–7 serves as a rhetorical defense in the redactor's construction of a new identity for Jesus.

(Online publication June 08 2011)

Keywords

  • Q;
  • Jesus;
  • kingship;
  • messianism;
  • Christian origins
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