Chapther 5 The Gospel

Chapter 5

THE LOST GOSPEL

THE Q QUESTION

cholars have always felt that with Q they were especially close to the historical Jesus. In the heyday of the two-document hypothesis that Matthew and Luke had both separately incorporated both Mark's gospel and Q into their own, Mark shared the honors with Q. Scholars tended to grant Mark priority as being more likely historical than Matthew or Luke. And one can at least show that at several points Mark's theological conceptions are earlier and less sophisticated (or less extravagant) than those of Matthew and Luke, because the changes the two later gospels made to their source, Mark, are easily seen. But then William Wrede (Schweitzer's "thoroughgoing skeptic")' showed how Mark was far from being a cut-and-paste compiler, much less a reporter. Wrede discerned a complex pattern of theological rewriting already evident in Mark. In fact, compared with Mark, the later writers who used him seem less sophisticated on some points, such as Mark's elaborate "messianic secret" theme which they appear not to have picked up on.

This left Q as the best candidate for a pregospel look at the historical Jesus. Burton Mack certainly thinks so. Indeed, he believes that the historical Jesus revealed by the Q gospel is so different from the Jesus of Christian dogma as to necessitate the root-and-branch rejection of the latter as debunked by the former.' Of course, that is nothing new; it was pretty much the same way the original liberal Protestant questers viewed the matter. What is new, however, is the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the careful work of Mack, John Klop- penborg, Leif E. Vaage, and others on the "stratigraphy" of Q.3 For it turns out that Q is not simply a pristine, untracked snowfield either. Like Mark, the Q source seems to have undergone theological retooling. But Mack and his fellow Q-questers are reasonably confident they can peel back the subsequent layers and reach back to the original sayings collection they call Q1.

Along with F. Gerald Downing, Leif E. Vaage, and others, Mack sees Q as essentially a collection of sayings and anecdotes reflecting the ancient popular philosophy of Cynicism, founded by Antisthenes of Athens and Diogenes of Sinope in the generation after Socrates. Cynics were irreverent radicals who moved from place to place without family, home, or possessions, preaching, often with sarcastic invective, their message of the excellence of living in accordance with nature's plan. One need fear no thief if one has no property. One need not bother with jealousy or with domestic drudgery if one has no marriage. Government, private property, clothing, and especially money, are all artificial conventions concocted by people too clever for their own good. God's will for the creation is revealed clearly enough for all to see in the freedom of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field who have no jobs or kings or worries. Nothing unnatural can be good, and nothing natural can be bad. Cynics blessed those who cursed them and loved their persecutors. Some were ascetics, others were libertines, heedless of the condemnations of the bourgeois. They preached the government of Zeus (the Kingdom of God), living in accord with nature by simple common sense. They urged their hearers to let goods and kindred go, and wander through the wide world. They lived by begging and of course encouraged generosity.

Mack and his colleagues have shown that beneath the present text of the reconstructed Q can be discerned an original collection divided into seven thematic sections, none of which includes anything about the authority of Jesus or threats of eschatological judgment to come. Subsequent layers of Q include predictions of the coming of the apocalyptic Son of Man, but no Q sayings refer to the earthly Jesus as the Son of Man or Messiah. No Q saying from any stratum ever mentions Jesus' death, much less his resurrection. So Q would seem to have been only subsequently Christianized, and never nearly so thoroughly as Mark.

Mack reasonably asks why the compilers of Q would have left out all mention of the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had they believed in these things. And we must assume they recorded what they believed to be of importance about Jesus. We have no evidence of the Q community believing anything they did not record, obviously. We have no right simply to assume that the Q compilers also believed the same doctrines as we find, for example, in the Epistle to the Romans, if they do not say so. There is simply no ground to assume that all early Jesus followers believed the same things. Just the opposite: The minimally christological Q counts as strong evidence that at least this quarter of early Christianity (if that is even the proper word for the Q community) had no particular doctrine about Jesus or Christ at all. Q (especially Q1) implies a radically multiform early Christianity.

The power of Burton Mack's case is such that he has managed to convince the great proponent of the Christ-Myth theory in our day, George A. Wells, to abandon the ground he defended for so long. Wells now significantly qualifies his own argument to the effect that, while there was a Cynic-style sage named Jesus underlying Q1, this shadowy figure did not give rise to the full-blown mythic Christ of the gospels, and that we must look elsewhere for the antecedents of the latter.' And Mack would agree. We will be asking in what follows whether Mack's thesis, as plausible as it is, is necessarily strong enough to prevail over Wells's original viewpoint. But it will take a while to get there.

Mack's estimate of the (non)theological proclivities of Q might be said to receive a kind of corroboration from a neglected source: the Islamic Agrapha, or Sufi Sayings of Jesus. There are scores of aphorisms and apophthegms attributed to Jesus among the writings of the Sufi ascetics. Here is a community of wandering ascetics, much like that loose alliance of itinerant charismatics posited by Gerd Theissen, taking Jesus as their example and attributing their sayings to him. In this Q-like material, Jesus is frequently addressed "0 Spirit of God," which denotes not the divine nature of Jesus (impossible in Islam), but rather his unworldliness and itinerant asceticism, as Mary Douglas's anthropological-sociological analysis of "spirit" language would also confirm. She notes,' on the basis of her characteristically exhaustive crosscultural research, that religious groups who devote a great deal of attention to things of the body, namely, dietary restrictions and sexual rules- especially celibacy, distinctive dress, and so on-are thereby reflecting their openness, or lack of it, toward the outside world. Invariably, kosher laws exactly mirror intermarriage rules. The wider the options in the one case, the wider they will be in the other. The amount of control over the openness of the literal bodily orifices is an indicator of the social openness of the group to interaction with outsiders. The one fits hand in glove with the other, so that, for instance, if you cannot eat many foods, or foods prepared a certain way, your dining with those who do not observe these strictures will be accordingly limited. (This was the issue of controversy over Peter's preaching to Cornelius in Acts 10-11: It necessitated his eating and staying with Gentiles, threatening his hitherto-strict observation of the kosher laws.) A group with tight strictures on such behavior has erected high walls against outsiders, "the world." The alienation from those without matches the solidarity with those within. In Douglas's terms, such a group (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls sect, Hasidic Jews, and the Amish) has a "strong group" identity because of its "high grid" of rules governing belief and behavior. In such a group, then, attention to the body signifies both the regulation of the physical bodies of the individual sect members and the defensive perimeter of the social "body" of the sect itself. Everything will be different when "spirit" language predominates. The body suffers in contrast, literally and physically by ascetical self-mortification, and socially by the increased preoccupation with individual spirituality and asceticism on the part of the individuals in the group. The classic example would be those monasteries, as in Late Antique Egypt, where Christian ascetics banded together in the loosest of "communities" but really constituted a league of hermits. Such fellowships would count as "weak group" but "high grid." A strong sense of self-definition serves in such a case to alienate members both from the outside world and from fellow members of the group. The Q itinerants would fit such a sketch, as would the ancient Cynic preachers and the Sufis of Islam. Thus their Jesus is the "Spirit of God," and his sayings, like those in Q and the Gospel of Thomas, presuppose and inculcate such a radical lifestyle.

SUFI Q

I propose to make a few observations about the Sufi-preserved sayings of Jesus and their relevance to the Q question. I have drawn on various secondary sources for them, primarily reproducing them from the collection and the translation of D. S. Margoliouth, professor of Arabic at Oxford, as they appeared in The Expository Times, 1893-1894. As it turned out, Margoliouth had inadvertently omitted several sayings from his main source, Al-Ghazali's Revival of the Religious Sciences; I have filled them in from other secondary sources, including Javad Nurbakhsh's Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis and T. J. Winter's translation of Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, book 40 of AlGhazali's larger work.6 I have retained Margoliouth's numbering, adding the sayings drawn from Nurbakhsh and Winter with lowercase letters attached at their proper place in the sequence from Al-Ghazali. I believe these sayings will prove more relevant to the consideration of the Q question than has generally been realized. One thing to keep in mind will be the controversial Criterion of Dissimilarity, so christened by Norman Perrin, but a staple of form criticism before and after him.' The idea is that a saying attributed to Jesus is more likely to be authentically his if it contrasts with the beliefs or practices of both contemporary Judaism and the early Church. Though one need not suppose Jesus to have held nothing in common with either the religious community into which he was born or that to which he gave rise, the goal of the Criterion of Dissimilarity is to weed out sayings that may have been borrowed from Judaism (on the assumption that "if it sounds good, Jesus must have said it") or that may have been ascribed to Jesus by inventive Christians eager to authorize their own viewpoints (on the assumption that "if it's true, Jesus would have said it"). Though you might lose some genuine sayings this way, you would be left with a core of material you could with some confidence attribute to Jesus that ought to represent his most distinctive message. The results of applying this criterion to the tradition have been surprisingly ambiguous, Perrin himself applying more than a bit of wishful thinking. But I think it will be a worthwhile exercise to invoke the dissimilarity principle here on the assumption that, given the Muslim identity of the Sufi transmitters of the sayings, any apparent non-Islamic element might mark the saying as pre-Islamic and thus at least possibly to be traced back to the historical Jesus.

1. Jesus asked Gabriel when the Hour was to come. Gabriel answered: He whom thou askest knows no better than he who asks. (Castalani, Commentary on Bukhari, i. 163.)

We at once think of Mark 13:32, "But of that day and that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the Father." But there is a significant difference: In Mark, Jesus himself is the revealer and yet qualifies his revelation; there is one vital piece of data to which even he is not privy. In the Sufi version Jesus is no longer the revealer, Gabriel is, and it is his divine knowledge that is qualified. Note that in Mark 13:32 "the angels" in general are mentioned, but in the Sufi version Gabriel is specified, he who brought revelation to Daniel (Dan. 9:21-22), to Mary (Luke 1:26 ff), and later to the Prophet Muhammad. What we have to ask is whether this saying represents an Islamicization of Jesus, to make him more human, less divine, analogous to the Prophet Muhammad as a "mere" recipient of revelation rather than a supernatural revealer in his own right. It might be so, but on the other hand, we must wonder if perhaps in this case oral tradition has preserved an earlier version of a saying which was later rewritten as we find it in Mark, where it seems to represent a backtracking from a high Christology: "the Son" might have been expected to have had infallible knowledge of the eschaton, and yet he did not, since "this generation" passed away without seeing the fulfillment of his predictions. Perhaps Mark had resorted to the early saying, now preserved only in the Sufi tradition, to correct the embarrassment in the Markan Apocalypse (chapter 13), but he had to rewrite it in light of the higher Christology of the church in his own day, leaving us the strange spectacle of Jesus the clueless revealer.

2. Jesus said: The world is a place of transition, full of examples; be pilgrims therein, and take warning by the traces of those that have gone before. (Jacut's Geographical Lexicon)

This saying presupposes the wandering lifestyle of the early Christian charismatic itinerants, as do several sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and the Q collection. As the Sufis included many wandering mendicants, the saying might have been coined by them, or simply passed on from their pre-Christian or Christian predecessors.

3. Jesus said, Be in the midst, yet walk on one side. (Baidawi, Commentary on the Koran, p. 71, Constantinople ed.)

The reference to "walking" again recalls the itineracy of ascetics.

4. In the sermons of Jesus, son of Mary, it is written: Beware how ye sit with sinners. (Zamakhshari, Commentary on the Koran, p. 986)

William Morrice quips: "as if Jesus wrote sermons."' But the same might be said of the Sermon on the Mount, a distinct collection of sayings already in Q. Zamakhshari would seem to have drawn the saying from a larger collection. This, as we will see, may be quite significant.

5. Jesus said: I have treated the leprous and the blind, and have cured them; but when I have treated the fool, I have failed to cure him. (El-Mustatraf )

As we see in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus has been identified with the literary personification of Wisdom.9 Jesus speaks here as Lady Wisdom does in Proverbs chapter 8, or as Jesus/ Wisdom does in Thomas, saying 28: "Jesus said: I took my stand in the midst of the world and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, I found none among them athirst. And my soul was afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their heart and do not see that empty they have come into the world; empty they seek to go out of the world again. But now they are drunk. When they have shaken off their wine, then they will repent." The saying, however, does presuppose the gospel tradition of Jesus as a miracle worker and thus is probably not so early as some would make the prechristological Q.

6. God revealed to Jesus: Command the children of Israel that they enter not my house save with pure hearts, and humble eyes, and clean hands; for I will not answer any one of them against whom any has a complaint. (El-Hadaic El- Wardiyyah, i. p. 27.)

Though the sentiment recalls Matt. 5:23-24, it is even closer to Isa. 1:10-17. We might even suspect that this Sufi saying and Matt. 5:23-24 are independent examples of the tendency of early Christians to misattribute, or to reattribute, familiar scriptural material to Jesus in a slightly different form.

7. Jesus said: Whoso knows and does and teaches shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Al-Ghazali, Revival of the Religious Sciences i. 8)

Here is an abridged version of Matt. 5:19 ("Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven"), already itself a redactional creation aimed at Paulinist anti-Torah libertines. But the Sufi version has dropped the specific reference to Torah commandments, no longer the issue in a later set of circumstances, with the result that the point of the saying is made more general, along the lines of James 1:22 ("But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves"). Again, we are later than the conjectured date for a prechristological Q.

The marked words in this saying provide "catchwords," mnemonic pegs on which the next saying depends for its sequence, a pattern we will observe throughout the rest of the Sufi sayings considered here.

7a. Jesus said: "God has declared that those who observe the canonical devotion will be saved, while those who perform supererogatory worship, will be drawn close to him." (Ibid., 78, Nurbakhsh)

Let no one dismiss this saying as late, since the language of canonicalthat is, traditionally prescribed-religious duties need imply no more than the Jewish Torah commandments, while the "works of supererogation" may refer to acts such as that assigned the rich young ruler by Jesus: The man had already done what the Torah commanded, hence already had assurance of the salvation he sought (cf. Luke 10:28, "Do this and you will live"), yet he felt the need for devotion above the strict stipulation of the commandments (Matt. 19:16-20). This Jesus fulfilled by telling him to renounce all worldly attachments and join him (Matt. 19:21).

8. Jesus said: Trees are many, yet not all of them bear fruit; and fruits are many, yet not all of them are fit for food; and sciences for kinds of knowledge, or things known} are many, but not all of them are profitable. (Ibid., i. 26)

The marked words match the motif marked in saying 7 dealing with teaching and knowledge. It was this general relation of theme that led to the juxtaposition of the two sayings in the collection used, and followed in its original sequence, by Al-Ghazali, the source of all the rest of the Sufi sayings to follow.

This saying may have been intended as a warning against "vain philosophy" a la Col. 2:8, and thus it is easy to propose an Islamic Sitz-im-Leben for it: We need only think of the influx of alien philosophical ideas in the days of the Abassid Caliphate headquartered in Damascus. It was in large measure against this new tide of "orientalization" and sophistication that the Sufis reacted in their return to the primitive simplicity of the early days in Mecca. But then again the same reservations would have been held by the Christian monks of Syria who were a great influence upon Sufism.

We might trace the saying back even further, though, since it may easily be read as inculcating encratite asceticism. This early Christian movement, especially strong in Asia Minor in the second century C.E., regarded the sexual encounter between Adam and Eve as the primordial sin through which death entered the world. Salvation required not only Christian faith and baptism but also celibacy. They were quite similar to the American sect of the Shakers. In such a framework, it would be the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (i.e., sex) which proved unprofitable. This was the one fruit tree of Eden forbidden to the first couple.

9. Jesus said: Commit not wisdom to those who are not meet for it, lest ye harm it; and withhold it not from them that are meet for it, lest ye harm them. Be like a gentle physician, who puts the remedy on the diseased spot.

According to another version:

Whoso commits wisdom to them that are not meet for it, is a fool; and whoso withholds it from them that are meet for it, is an evil-doer. Wisdom has rights, and rightful owners; and give each his due. (Ibid., i. 30)

The theme of "committing wisdom" to others links this saying with numbers 7 and 8 above.

The subject of saying 9 is esoteric spiritual wisdom or doctrine. It is always a risk sharing it: One must keep mum around the impenetrably orthodox lest they put one to death for heresy. On the other hand, one bears heavy responsibility for withholding the truth from those ripe to hear it. One has no right to deprive them of spiritual nourishment for fear of one's own safety. This concern led many Middle Eastern sects, like the Druze, to embrace what is called the doctrine of dissimulation. One may deny one's faith in times of persecution so as not to tempt persecutors to the sin of murder. Since they cannot be expected to understand the higher knowledge, it will be the Gnostic's own fault if he gets himself into trouble. The Sufis certainly had reason to fear: One of their greatest, the mystic al-Hallaj, was crucified for proclaiming "I am the Real [i.e., God}," something the pantheistic Sufis understood but your average Muslim in the street did not.

And yet the saying may easily be pre-Sufi. Claims of esoteric knowledge are much older than Sufism. Thomas saying 13 knows the danger: "Now when Thomas came to his companions, they asked him, What did Jesus say to thee? Thomas said to them: If I tell you one of the words he said to me, you will take up stones and throw at me; and fire will come from the stones and burn you up." I suspect the same concern lies behind Matt. 7:6, "Do not give sacred things to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

9a. Jesus said: Do not hang jewels around the necks of swine. Wisdom is finer than gems, and those who do not value it, are worse than swine. (Ibid., 172., Nurbakhsh)

If this saying were found in the gospels, no doubt it would read: "They do not hang jewels upon the necks of swine, and yet he who values not wisdom is worse than a swine." The point would be that even a worldly man values gems enough not to waste them on swine, whose appearance cannot be enhanced by them, and yet the worldling is himself a swine since he fails to realize the superior value of wisdom to jewelry!

The saying owes its place in the sequence to the fact that someone recognized a kinship between it and the gospel aphorism "Do not cast your pearls before swine," which is a good summation of the point of the preceding saying immediately above.

10. Jesus said: Evil scholars are like a rock that has fallen at the mouth of a brook; it does not drink the water, neither does it let the water flow to the field. And they are like the conduit of a latrine which is plastered outside, and foul inside; or like graves, the outside of which is decorated, while within are dead men's bones. (Ibid., i. 49)

This saying has been joined to number 9 above based on the common occurrence of "scholars" here and the communication of wisdom, or miscommunication of it, anticipated in saying 9. The variant version of saying 9 contains an explicit reference to "evildoers," anticipating "evil scholars" here.

The saying is obviously another version of a pair of Q sayings against the Pharisees and/or Jewish scribes. Matthew and Luke have used them both, each in his own words, and in a different order. Matt. 23:13, 27: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in." "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Luke 11:52, 44: "Woe to you lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering." "Woe to you! for you are like graves which are not seen, and men walk over them without knowing it." It is hard to know which version is closer to the Q original, since Luke has the redactional tendency to flatten poetry into prose, while Matthew tends to make the prosaic more poetic. Has Luke added the "key of knowledge" metaphor? Thomas also has it (saying 39: "The Pharisees and the scribes have received the keys of knowledge, they have hidden them. They did not enter, and they did not let those enter who wished"). Thomas has added another to the same saying: "Woe to them, the Pharisees, for they are like a dog sleeping in the manger: neither does he eat nor does he allow the oxen to eat" (saying 102). In the same way, the Sufi version adds the image of the boulder blocking the flow of water.

11. Jesus said: How can he be a scholar who, when his journey is unto the next world, makes for the things of this world? How can he be a scholar who seeks for words in order to communicate by them, and not to act according to them? (Ibid., i. 50)

This saying's reference to the "scholar who ... makes for the things of this world" follows up "evil scholars" in the preceding saying.

11a. Jesus said: One who teaches higher knowledge and does not practice its wisdom, is like a clandestine adulteress whose swelling condition betrays her to shame. Such a person who does not act on the precepts he knows, will be shamed by the Lord before all creation on the Day of Judgment. (Ibid., 188, Nurbakhsh)

One must locate the arising of this logion among the ranks of teachers, and aimed at their own fraternity, whether originally Syrian Christian monks or Sufis. The simile of the adulteress includes both the elements of one's life speaking louder than one's words and of public exposure. (Given the great number of adulterers liable to be exposed on judgment Day, one may at least hope to be relatively anonymous, lost in the shuffle.)

12. God said unto Jesus: Exhort thyself, and if Thou hart profited by the exhortation, then exhort others; otherwise be ashamed before me. (Ibid., i. 52)

The notion of a sage entrusted with words of wisdom but possibly not taking them seriously in his own case provides the link between this saying and number 11 above. Beyond this, we might observe how this saying reflects the idiom of the Koran in which revelations are ascribed not to Muhammad himself, but to his Lord. Allah addresses the Prophet, "0 Muhammad, say, ..." In the gospel tradition, Jesus is not shown telling people what God told him.

13. Jesus said: If a man send away a beggar empty from his house, the angels will not visit that house for seven nights. (Ibid., i. 77)

We can readily recognize here the interests of the wandering mendicants whose missionary vicissitudes also form the subject matter of the Q Mission Charge (Matt. 10:5 ff; Luke 9:3 ff). The point of saying 13 is pretty much the same as Matt. 10:12-13: "As you enter the house salute it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you." The visiting angels are the protectors, keepers of peace over the house.

13a. It is recounted that Jesus once went into the desert to pray for rain. When people gathered round, he said to them: Whoever has sinned, must go back. Everyone went away, except one man. Jesus turned to this man and asked him: Have you never sinned? The man replied: By God's Name, I know nothing of sin. Indeed, one day I was saying my prayers, when a woman passed by. My eye happened to fall upon her, so I plucked it out and cast it behind her. Jesus then told him to pray. As soon as he began, clouds proceeded to gather. Rain began to fall-and a goodly downpour it was! (Ibid., ii., p. 437)

The anecdote is connected to the next saying by the simple fact that this one involves prayer, and that one is a prayer.

Strikingly, Jesus is not himself the hands-on miracle worker in this story, but rather more the broker of the miracle, seeming to know, as his question to the crowd implies, how the miracle is to be wrought: through the agency of a righteous saint whom he will ferret out. (Cf. James 5:16b-18, "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit.") And yet Jesus is "in charge," and thus the story fills a gap: E. A. Harvey,10 seeking to highlight Jesus' supposed uniqueness among legendary thaumaturges, contends, "The most common miracle attributed to holy men of his time and culture was that of procuring rainfall.... But this is something never credited to Jesus." Never say never.

14. The Prayer of Jesus: 0 God, I am this morning unable to ward off what I would not, or to obtain what I would. The power is in another's hands. I am bound by my works, and there is none so poor that is poorer than I.0 God, make not mine enemy to rejoice over me, nor my friend to grieve over me; make not my trouble to be in the matter of my faith; make not the world my chief care; and give not the power over me to him who will not pity me. (Ibid., i 247)

Many of the same words occur practically unaltered below in saying 19, marking off sayings 14 through 19 as a special unit.

The resignedness of Jesus before the winds of providence is certainly characteristic of Sufism specifically, Islam in general, and of pretty much any and all piety. Thus it does not much help us determine the origin of the saying.

15. God revealed to Jesus: Though thou shouldst worship with the devotion of the inhabitants of the heaven and the earth, but hadst not love in God and hate in God, it would avail thee nothing. (Ibid., ii. 119)

Minus the unpleasant note about hating, this saying must be understood as derivative from 1 Cor. 13:1-3, the idea of "worshipping with the devotion of the inhabitants of heaven" echoing "speaking with the tongues of angels" from 1 Cor. 13:1. "Hating in God" may have crept in by assimilation to the next saying, which would in any case be connected by the catchwords "love in God" (saying 15) and "beloved of God" (saying 16). The origin of the saying in a Pauline Epistle rather than the Jesus tradition is attested by the fact that even in its present form it is, again, made a revelation to Jesus, not from him.

16. Jesus said: make yourselves beloved of God by hating the evil-doers. Bring yourselves nearer to God by removing far from them; and seek God's favour by their displeasure. They said: 0 Spirit of God, then with whom shall we converse? Then he said: Converse with those whose presence will remind you of God, whose words will increase your works, and whose works will make you desire the next world. (Ibid., ii. 119)

Gone is the "friend of sinners" we are used to from the canonical gospels. This saying originated among monastics, hermits, and ascetics, whether originally Syrian Christians or Muslim Sufis. The difference in attitude between this saying and the gospels mirrors that between the gospels and Christian devotional literature like Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ, and for the same reason. A la Mary Douglas, again, we should recognize that for Jesus to be addressed as "Spirit of God" in this context is no coincidence. The expression denotes just the sort of unearthliness we would expect from ascetics.

"Works" links this saying with the first and last of this subsection, 14 and 19.

17. Jesus said to the apostles: What would you do if you saw your brother sleeping, and the wind had lifted up his garment? They said: We should cover him up. He said: Nay, ye would uncover him. They said: God forbid! Who would do this? He said: One of you who hears a word concerning his brother, and adds to it, and relates it with additions. (Ibid., ii. 134)

This striking saying, incidentally, deals with the issue of exaggeration in the process of oral tradition! It has the ring of many of the similes attributed to Jesus in the gospels, where he puts forth a laughably absurd course of mundane action which no one would follow, and then directs the hearer to analogous behavior on a spiritual plane in which we habitually engage.

This saying owes its position in the sequence to its use of "a word," reflecting "whose words" in the preceding saying.

18. They say that there was no form of address Jesus loved better to hear than "Poor man." (Ibid., ii. 154)

What is said here of Jesus is characteristic, formulaic, of the Sufis and originated with them, or among their Syrian monastic predecessors. The secondary character of the saying is again evidenced by the reluctance of the tradition to make this saying into a saying of, rather than only about, Jesus. Another version makes Jesus himself the speaker, as usual: "Jesus said: I prefer deprivation and despise wealth. When asked which epithet he liked best he replied: Call me, Pauper!" (Makki, Qut al-qolub, vol. II, p. 402, Nurbakhsh)

"Poor man" links the saying with the following, number 19, as well as with the first in this linked set of sayings, number 14.

19. When Jesus was asked, How art thou this morning? He would answer: Unable to forestall what I hope, or to put off what I fear, bound by my works, with all my good in another's hand. There is no poor man poorer than I. (Al-Ghazali, Revival of the Religious Sciences, ii. 169)

The repetition from saying number 14 rounds off the special unit. Jesus is made to speak as the ideal of the pious person. He has his own karma to worry about, something unthinkable to Christian Christology (at least postMark, since Mark apparently had no problem with Jesus appearing to wash away his sins in the waters of John's baptism-Mark 1:4-9).

20. Satan, the accursed, appeared to Jesus and said unto him: Say, there is no God but God. He said: It is a true saying, but I will not say it at thy invitation. (Ibid., iii. 25)

Q specialists suggest that the Q narrative of Jesus' three temptations by Satan in the desert may belong to the secondary, Christianized layer of Q. This is because of Satan's opening gambit, "If you are the son of God...... And yet the present sequence of sayings, numbers 20 through 22, also depicts Satan tempting Jesus (or discussing temptation, Screwtape style, with his infernal subordinates, in the wake of Jesus' advent). Here the point is not precisely Christology but rather the use of Jesus as the ideal ascetic. The hearer/reader ought to take Jesus' example. And then we must look back at the threefold Q temptation story. Is it not apparent that the point there, too, is asceticism? The "Son of God" designation in the story may be sapiential in origin and connotation, as in Wisd. of Sol. 2:13, 18, where the persecuted righteous man is God's son. The point is reinforced when we remember that the three quotations Jesus invokes are from Deuteronomy and all deal with how the Israelites should have reacted to trials in the desert. The implication is that of exemplary behavior for the pious, not an exclusive statement about Jesus as the Christ.

In this saying, we have the idea, present in the Q temptation narrative, too, that "even the devil can quote scripture to suit his purpose." We think of James 2:19: "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe-and tremble." "God is one" is a quote from the Shema ("Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God is one ...").

21. When Jesus was born, the demons came to Satan, and said: The idols have been overturned. He said: This is a mere accident that has occurred; keep still. Then he flew till he had gone over both hemispheres, and found nothing. After that he found the son of Mary already born, with the angels surrounding him. He returned to the demons and said: A prophet was born yesterday; no woman ever conceived or bare a child without my presence save this one. Hope not, therefore, that the idols will be worshipped after this night, so attack mankind through haste and thoughtlessness. (Ibid., iii. 28)

As elsewhere in Islamic tradition, including the Koran, the Jesus tradi tion includes material from extracanonical sources. The reference of this saying is to the toppling of the idols of Egypt during the sojourn of the Holy Family there (Infancy Gospel of Matthew XXII-XXIII)." The notion that Jesus alone was born immaculate, without the presence of Satan, is characteristic of both Islam and Catholic Christianity.

22. Jesus lay down one day with his head upon a stone. Satan, passing by, said: O Jesus, thou art fond of this world. So he took the stone and cast it from his head, saying: This be thine together with the world. ( Al-Ghazali, Revival of the Religious Sciences, ii. 169)

Here we find echoes of diverse ancient traditions. Jesus is like the patriarch Jacob, seeking whatever rest is available upon a stony pillow; only he is not so fortunate as his predecessor in chancing to meet God (Gen. 28:12). This time it is Satan who appears. He challenges Jesus' use of the stone, as Mara the Tempter challenged the right of Gotama the Bodhisattva to sit upon the earth as he sought enlightenment beneath the boughs of the Bodhi Tree. Gotama placed his hand upon the earth and called her to witness, which she did, vindicating his right. But the most relevant parallel is that of Diogenes, when he who had believed himself divested of all but bare necessities, felt shame at seeing a dog lapping the water and cast his wooden drinking bowl away. The version in saying 65 is even closer. Here is a striking Cynic parallel such as Downing, Mack, and others have compiled for Q. As such, it may have arisen anywhere and more than once, along the course of the evolution of Cynic, Christian, and Sufi asceticism.

23. Jesus was asked, Who taught thee? He answered: No one taught me. I saw that the ignorance of the fool was a shame, and I avoided it. (Ibid., iii. 52)

Frequently, "revealed" religions represent their founders as unlettered and therefore humanly incapable of authoring their ostensible revelations. The claim has been made for Jesus, Peter and John, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith. But that seems not to be the point this time. The contrast is not Christological (Jesus as divine revealer versus human erudition, as in Matt. 11:25-27), but rather Cynic in nature: One hardly needs the sophistical training of philosophers to recognize fundamental wisdom, that foolish behavior brings shame.

24. Jesus said: Blessed is he who abandons a present pleasure for the sake of a promised [one) which is absent and unseen. (Ibid.)

Again, Jesus is made to speak the maxims of popular philosophy, this time not Cynic but Epicurean (and remember, Epicureanism was itself a kind of asceticism, the "pleasure" it sought being that of mental tranquillity and physical self-control).

Saying 24 follows number 23 because of the parallel between "avoiding ignorance" in the one and "abandoning pleasure" on the other.

25. Jesus said: 0 company of apostles! Make hungry your livers, and bare your bodies; perhaps then your hearts may see God. (Ibid., iii. 65).

This sounds like a paraphrase of Thomas, saying 27: "Unless you fast from the world you shall not find the kingdom; unless you keep the Sabbath as Sabbath, you shall not see the Father." If, as Stephen J. Patterson 12 has argued, Thomas stems from the same sort of proto-Christian itinerant charismatics as Q does, we may make the same suggestion of this sort of material in the Sufi source used by al-Ghazali.

26. It is related how Jesus remained sixty days addressing his Lord, without eating. Then the thought of bread came into his mind, and his communion was interrupted, and he saw a loaf set before him. Then he sat down and wept over the loss of his communion, when he beheld an old man close to him. Jesus said unto him: God bless thee, thou saint of God! Pray to God for me, for I was in an ecstasy when the thought of bread entered my mind, and the ecstasy was interrupted. The old man said: 0 God, if thou knowest that the thought of bread came into my mind since I knew thee, then forgive me not. Nay, when it was before me, I would eat it without thought or reflection. (Ibid., iii. 67)

The catchword phrase "without eating" obviously connects this saying with the one before it, with its "make hungry your livers."

The issue of meditative absorption in God, undisturbed by even a single thought, is vintage Sufism. Thus the saying is probably Sufi in origin. The point of it seems to be much the same as Martin Luther's commonsense advice to those who worried unduly about thoughts of temptation. Luther said, roughly, you may not be able to stop a bird from lighting on your head, but you sure can stop it from building a nest in your hair!

But notice that the old man outdoes Jesus himself: Even when eating his concentration on God is not interrupted.

27. Jesus said: Beware of glances; for they plant passion in the heart, and that is a sufficient temptation. (Ibid., iii. 81)

The planting of passion in the heart in this saying is the link to the previous saying with its lament of hunger's power to distract the ascetic from God. There it was the sudden appearance of the passion of hunger that was bemoaned. Otherwise we may simply note that saying 27 appears to be a paraphrase of Matt. 5:28, "Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart," though it might be an independent saying to the same effect.

28. Jesus was asked by some men to guide them to some course by which they might enter Paradise. He said: Speak not at all. They said: We cannot do this. He said: Then only say what is good. (Ibid., iii. 87)

Like Mark 10:17-22, this saying is a classic aphophthegm, common to ancient wisdom literature. Like the Markan saying, but especially in its slightly modified Matthean form (Matt. 19:23-30), it seems to offer a counsel of perfection, implying that a lesser standard is nonetheless acceptable. It is best to divest oneself of all wealth, but it will do to keep the commandments. Likewise, one is on safest grounds forswearing all speech (cf. James 3:2, "If anyone makes no mistakes in what he says, he is a perfect man"), but speaking only the good will do.

29. Jesus said: Devotion is of ten parts. Nine of them consist in silence, and one in solitude. (Ibid.)

The catchword "silence" links this saying to the one before. The enumeration of the elements of piety is a common Sufi device, though hardly unique to Sufism. Again, the piety commended here is more in tune with The Imitation of Christ than with that in the gospels.

30. Jesus said: Whosoever lies much, loses his beauty; and whosoever wrangles with others, loses his honour; and whosoever is much troubled, sickens in his body; and whosoever is evilly disposed, tortures himself. (Ibid., iii. 92)

Though if this saying had been included among canonical scripture we can be sure some would appeal to it as a prophetic anticipation of the discovery of psychogenic illness (e.g., worrying yourself into a case of cancer), in fact the saying is a fine illustration of how wise sayings embody homespun observational wisdom. Popular wisdom has always been able to observe the physical effects of a contentious personality, just as people knew to call cigarettes "coffin nails" long before the surgeon general caught up with them.

Incidentally, it is worth asking if, in light of this saying, we ought to recognize a similar point in the Q saying Matt. 6:22-23/Luke 11:34-35, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light which is in you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!" The soundness of the eye may refer to generosity as opposed to the "evil eye" of stinginess (Matt. 20:15, "Is your eye evil because I am good?"). We might expect that the eye, being the window of the soul, would be spoken of as symptomatic of one's soul or heart or life. But instead we read of the eye indicating the state of the body. Is the point the same as in the Sufi saying, that the attitude determines the body's health? (And if the Q material stems from wandering preachers, we can well imagine them warning how their audiences' stinginess might backfire!)

30a. John the Baptist asked Jesus what was the most difficult thing to bear. The latter replied: The wrath of God. Then, asked John, what serves most to bring down God's wrath? Your own anger, answered Jesus. And what brings on one's own anger? asked John. Jesus said: Pride, conceit, vainglory and arrogance. (Ibid., p. 183)

Again, as in the preceding saying, the irony is that you have only yourself to blame for your torment, whether in this world or in the next, since "God's wrath" toward you is only a magnification of some attitude of your own.

Note how this saying presupposes but surpasses the canonical gospel tradition: Here John is no rival of Jesus, nor even merely his forerunner, but actually Jesus' disciple. Here we even see the ostensible origin of the theme of John's preaching, the coming of the wrath of God (Matt. 3:7) and how it may be averted in the same way one first attracted it to oneself, by one's moral behavior, then sinning, now repenting (Matt. 3:8).

31. Jesus, passing by a swine, said to it: Go in peace. They said. 0 Spirit of God, sayest thou so to a swine? He answered: I would not accustom my tongue to evil. (Ibid., iii. 94)

As in number 28, the point is "if you can't find anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." So why does not Jesus simply keep silence in the presence of the unclean pig? If he had, we would have no aphophthegm! Of course, the evil-speaking rejected here is of a piece with the wrangling and lying of the previous saying, accounting for their juxtaposition.

Does the abhorrence of swine mark the saying as stemming from a Jewish context, and hence possibly from the Sitz-im-Leben Jesu? Not necessarily: Remember, Muslims abjure pork as well.

32. Jesus said: One of the greatest of sins in God's eyes is that a man should say God knows what He knows not. (Ibid., iii. 107)

Here is more evil-speaking, or at least the condemnation of the same. Those who take God's name in vain by swearing a false oath, "God knows I didn't steal your donkey!" (which in fact he doesn't know, since you did steal it) are "accustoming their tongues to evil."

33. Malik, son of Dinar, said: Jesus one day walked with his apostles, and they passed by the carcass of a dog. The apostles said.• How foul is the smell of this dog! But Jesus said: How white are its teeth! (Ibid., iii. 108)

This saying shares with number 31 before it and number 34 following it the setting in which Jesus' remark is prompted by a "passing sight" (as Buddhism calls them). In all three he might have been expected to make a negative remark but makes a positive one instead. In saying 31, the sight is that of an unclean hog; in 33 it is that of a reeking dog carcass. This story works a bit better in that Jesus' remark, superfluous in itself, is motivated by the previous remark of the apostles. Jesus would have kept silent if they had, but as long as they are going to say something bad, he must counter it with something good.

Why is the saying preceded by an attribution, like the hadith, traditional anecdotes of the Prophet Muhammad? Perhaps because of the tinge of silliness, which might strike some as irreverent unless vouched for by a person of well-known piety.

34. Christ passed by certain of the Jews, who spake evil of him; but he spake good to them in return. It was said to him: Verily these speak ill of thee, and dost thou speak good? He said: Each gives out of his store. (Ibid., iii. 134)

This third version of the tradition seen also in sayings 31 and 33 is the most sober as well as the most enlightening. It seems to connect two gospel ideas in such a way as to make one explain the other. The advice of Luke 6:28 is to "bless those who curse you." The Q saying Luke 6:45/Matt. 12:34b observes: "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil." What is the connection? The good-hearted person does not have to reign himself in when insulted, choking back a stinging rejoinder. No, it is simply not in him to unleash invectives, even when deserved. He will no more respond with harsh words than he will initiate them.

35. Jesus said: Take not the world for your lord, lest it take you for its slaves. Lay up your treasure with him who will not waste it, etc. (Ibid., iii. 151)

"Your treasure" in this saying accounts for its appending after the previous one with its mention of the treasure of the heart. Saying 35 recalls Matt. 6:19-21, 24: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust corrupt, and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust corrupts and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." "No one can be slave to two masters; for either he will hate the first and love the second, or he will love the first and hate the second. You cannot serve both God and Mammon." (Mammon means money as a god, the Almighty Dollar). As if this Q saying (see also Luke 12:33-34) were not already ascetic enough in its thrust, forbidding the amassing of wealth on earth, the Sufi version accentuates the asceticism: If you make worldly success your ultimate concern, money will cease being a convenience, no longer making things easier. Soon it will bind you and limit your freedom. It is the wealthy who lie awake at night fearing the thief. The poor man is free of such fretting. Note also, the Sufi version has replaced the perils of moth, rust, and burglars with that of profligate stewards, as in Luke 16:1-8. 1 would guess we have here either an abridging of the parallel gospel texts through memory quotation or an independent saying based on the same traditional motifs.

36. Jesus said: Ye company of apostles, verily have I overthrown the world upon her face for you; raise her not up after me. It is a mark of the foulness of this world that God is disobeyed therein, and that the future world cannot be attained save by abandonment of this; pass then through this world, and linger not there; and know that the root of every sin is love of the world. Often does the pleasure of an hour bestow on him that enjoys it long pain. (Ibid.)

Here someone is remembering the gist of John chapter 16, part of John's Farewell Discourse of Jesus to his disciples, where Jesus warns of the enmity of the world after his imminent departure from it (here: "after me"). But they are not to be intimidated: "In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). But, in accord with its ascetical bent, we are not surprised to read in the Sufi saying a warning, not against persecution, but against worldliness, being at ease in Zion.

The mendicant wandering motif appears again here, as does a reflection of the Cynic saying "The love of money is the mother city of all evils." (Cf. 1 Tim. 6:10, "The love of money is the root of all evils.") The theme of momentary pleasure costing too much in the long term is an Epicurean truism.

37. He said again: I have laid the world low for you, and ye are seated upon its back. Let not kings and women dispute with you the possession of it. Dispute not the world with kings, for they will not offer you what you have abandoned and their world; but guard against women by fasting and prayer. (Ibid.)

We have no trouble recognizing here another version of the saying just discussed, and the recurring features supply the catchwords leading to the present arrangement. Added to the Johannine basis of the saying, however, seems to be the same sentiment we find in the Gospel of Thomas, saying 21: "Mary said to Jesus: Who are thy disciples like? He said: They are like little children who have installed themselves in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say: Release to us our field. They will take off their clothes before them to release it to them and to give back their field to them. Therefore I say: If the lord of the house knows that the thief is coming, he will stay awake before he comes and will not let him dig through into his house of his kingdom to carry away his goods. You then must watch for the world, gird up your loins with great strength, lest the brigands find a way to come to you, because they will find the advantage you expect."

This passage in Thomas is in turn derived from a vague memory quotation of two canonical gospel texts. The first is the parable of the wicked tenants in Mark 12:1-9 ("A man planted a vineyard ... and let it out to tenants, and went away into another country. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard ..."). The second is the parable of the unfaithful steward toward the end of the Markan Apocalypse, 13:34-37, which ends with the exhortation, "Watch therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house will come .... lest he come suddenly and find you asleep." Thomas' version makes the tenants into the disciples rather than the enemies of Jesus and bids them acknowledge the claim of the field's/vineyard's true owner (perhaps Satan or the Gnostic Demiurge). Likewise, the owner of the house has become, not the one whose coming is awaited, but rather the one who awaits the coming of another-a thief. Again, the allegorical counterparts have shifted roles. One awaits not God but the devil (cf. Mark 4:15). The Sufi version garbles things further, adding to the general ascetic horror of the alluring world a specific warning against the delights of women.

38. He said again: The world seeks and is sought. If a man seeks the next world, this world seeks him till he obtain therein his full sustenance; but if a man seeks this world, the next world seeks him till death comes and takes him by the throat. (Ibid.)

This is an alternative version of Matt. 6:31-33/Luke 12:29-31. Luke's version, closer to the common Q original, reads, "Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be of anxious mind. For all the nations of the world seek these things; and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well." The Father's kingdom is, of course, the "next world" of the Sufi version. Precisely in abstaining from the pursuit of worldly necessities, the pious man becomes a magnet for these very provisions, thanks to the providence of God. This is the faith not of the conventionally religious householder, but of the wandering brethren of the Son of Man who have no guaranteed place to lay their heads (Matt. 8:20/Luke 9:58), who are thus dependent upon strangers to provide for them (Luke 10:7). The second part of the saying, the corollary, recalls the Lukan parable of the Rich Fool (12:16-20), in which we read of a man caught up in pursuit of worldly security, until the Grim Reaper stops him short on the eve of retirement.

39. Jesus said: The love of this world and of the next cannot agree in a believer's heart, even as fire and water cannot agree in a single vessel. (Ibid., iii. 152)

Again, indentured service to two competing masters simultaneously just will not work, as in Matt. 6:19-21, and in saying 35. This saying owes its position after number 38 to the recurrence here of the phrase "the next (world)."

40. Jesus being asked, Why dost thou not take a house to shelter thee? said: The rags of those that were before us are good enough for us. (Ibid. iii. 153)

Again, the Son of Man (and those who appeal to him as their exemplar) has no sure place to rest his head. It is good enough not to have to go naked. Actually, some Cynics and Digambara ("sky-clad") Jainist ascetics did go around naked, weather permitting. And the reference to wearing the rags of our forbears in the faith would ideally fit the early Buddhist practice of appropriating the shrouds of the disintegrated dead for clothing. But the reference is most likely to the hand-me-down patched robes of the Sufis, and the saying will then have arisen among their ranks.

41. It is recorded that one day Jesus was sore troubled by the rain and thunder and lightning, and began to seek a shelter. His eye fell upon a tent hard by; but when he came there, finding a woman inside, he turned away from it. Then he noticed a cave in a mountain; but when he came thither, there was a lion there. Laying his hand upon the lion, he said: My God, thou hast given each thing a resting place, but to me thou hast given none! Then God revealed to him: Thy resting-place is in the abode of my mercy; that I may wed thee on the day of judgment ... and make thy bridal feast four thousand years, of which each day is like a life-time in this present world; and that I may command a herald to proclaim: Where are they that fast in this world? Come to the bridal feast of Jesus, who fasted in this world! (Ibid.)

The first part of this saying, connected to the previous one by the shelter motif, may be regarded as a narrative padding out of the previous saying, as well as of Matt. 8:20/Luke 9:58. Note that, as a good ascetic, Jesus is less afraid of physical danger, the lion, than of moral, the woman.

The second part, the promise of Jesus' millennial recompense by God, may come from Rev. 19:1-9 ("Blessed are those [celibate ascetics-14:1-5} who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb!") combined with the parable of the Great Supper (Matt. 22:1-10/Luke 14:16-24), especially Matthew's version, in which the banquet is a wedding reception for a king's son.

41a. 'Ammar ebn Sa'd relates that Jesus arrived at a village where the inhabitants were all lying dead in the pathways and around the houses. 0 company of disciples, he declared, this community has been destroyed by the wrath of God; otherwise, they would have been properly buried. 0 Spirit of God, they urged, let us have news of what has happened to them! So Jesus invoked God's name, and a revelation came, whereby God told him to call out to the villagers after nightfall to obtain the answer. When night came, Jesus went up on a hill and hailed the dead populace, and one of the villagers answered up: At your service, 0 Spirit of God! Jesus asked what had happened to them. The reply came: we spent a peaceful night and woke up in the morning to find ourselves in the pit of Hell. Jesus asked why. Because we loved the world, came the answer, and obeyed the behest of sinful people. In what way did you love the world?, queried Jesus. The way a child loves its mother, was the reply. Whenever it came to, we were happy, and whenever it went away, we became sad and wept. Then Jesus asked, Why do your comrades not speak up? Harsh and brutal angels have clamped red hot bits on their mouths, the voice answered. Then how is it you are able to speak? countered Jesus. I was not of them, said the other, even though I was with them. When the torment descended, I remained amongst them. At present, I am at the edge of Hell, not knowing whether I shall be saved or cast down into the infernal depths. At this point Jesus turned to his disciples and told them: Eating barley bread with rock salt and wearing sackcloth and sleeping on dunghills in squalor is more than enough to assure one's well-being in this world and the next. (Ibid., iv. p. 562)

The theme of "this world" continues unabated. This saying and the following have been bracketed together by their common use of the motif of the revelation of the doom to come to sinners. In the present saying, it is the disciples of Jesus who are shown the postmortem fate of the worldly, potentially including themselves unless they watch their step. In the next saying, their fate is revealed to those sinners at death.

This saying is a kind of miniature apocalypse on the order of the Apocalypse of Paul or the Apocalypse of Peter, where the disciples are vouchsafed a terrifying vision of sinners finally getting their just rewards.

42. Jesus said: Woe unto him who hath this world, seeing that he must die and leave it, and all that is in it! It deceives him, yet he trusts in it; he relies upon it, and it betrays him. Woe unto them that are deceived! When they shall be shown what they loathe, and shall be abandoned by what they love; and shall be overtaken by that wherewith they are threatened! Woe unto him whose care is the world, and whose work is sin; seeing that one day he shall be disgraced by his sin. (Ibid.)

This threat of hellfire and worldly vanity follows the previous saying because of their common use of the phrase "this world."

43. Jesus said: Who is it that builds upon the waves of the sea? Such is the world; take it not for your resting-place. (Ibid.)

The image is adapted from that in Matt. 7:24-27/Luke 6:47-49. That it is not rather an alternative, parallel, and independent saying is evident from the more far-fetched character of the metaphor. While no one could ever imagine building on the sea, it is barely possible that someone might be stupid enough to build upon sandy ground, as envisioned in the Matthean version. Whence the sea waves of the Sufi version? The inrushing waves of the Q version which destroy the poorly grounded house have become themselves the poor foundation of the house in the Sufi version. It is a case of garbled memory quotation.

This saying has been joined to the previous one by their common use of "the world."

44. Some said to Jesus: Teach us some doctrine for which God will love us. Jesus said: Hate the world, and God will love you. (Ibid.)

A third saying featuring "the world" has been appended here. The saying sets up a straw man, the erroneous assumption that God's favorites are those who happen to believe a certain creed. With this false assumption is swept away the depiction of Jesus as primarily a revealer of doctrines. Do we read in too much if we see here the relegation of theological niceties as a part of that worldliness which God and his loved ones alike despise?

It is tempting to make the saying late because of the possible reflection of that Sufi ecumenism that saw all positive religions as mere cocoons for the spirituality concealed within, an ascetic spirituality, of course. But on the other hand, the world-negation motif is quite old, as witness 1 John 2:15: "Love not the world, nor the things in the world, for if any man love the world the love of the Father is not in him."

45. Jesus said: Ye company of apostles, be satisfied with a humble portion in this world, so your faith be whole; even as the people of this world are satisfied with a humble portion in faith, so this world be secured to them. (Ibid., iii. 154)

This is a parallel with the independent ascetical saying Luke 16:8b, "For the sons of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their generation than the sons of light." Likewise, if one's attention is preoccupied with seeking the next world, one simply will not be competent to deal with worldly affairs, and vice versa.

46. Jesus said: 0 thou that seekest this world to do charity, to abandon it were more charitable. (Ibid.)

This saying, like the last one, refers to "this world"; hence their linking here.

What is the intention Jesus rebukes? Apparently, the person in view does not want just to give charity in this world, but to gain the wealth of the world so as to have something to give to charity. And why is utter abandonment of the world (of possessions and society) a superior course? One might answer that the self-mortification of the ascetic wins the ascetic himself more merit than almsgiving would. But that is not the point. Rather, abandonment of the world is said to be better for the world, not for the ascetic. He is doing the world more of a favor than the worldly philanthropist. Why? Perhaps because to give alms contributes to the delusory optimism that the ills of the world are susceptible to remedy within the world. The ascetic knows that is tantamount to rearranging the furniture aboard the Titanic. It is the living lesson of the one who has renounced the world that alone will awaken worldly sufferers to their true plight, just as it was the sight of a wandering monk that galvanized Prince Siddhartha to renounce hearth, family, and throne to seek the true Dharma. Could he not have stayed in power and used his wealth to ameliorate the sufferings of those like the old man and the sick man he had seen, which so tormented him? Yes, but this would have been false hope, since the human malady goes much deeper. He wound up doing the world a greater service by discovering the radical surgery necessary to deal with the problem.

46a. Jesus said: The world and the hereafter are like two women which a man is trying to please at the same time; when one is pleased, the other is annoyed. (Ibid., Nurbakhsh)

This saying is a better version of Matt. 6:24: "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the first and love the second, or he will be devoted to the first and despise the second. You cannot serve God and Mammon." Loving and hating two slave masters seem somehow beside the point. And if the point is not to try to serve two objects of potential devotion, why say the slave must love the one and despise the other? If you hate the one, your mind's made up: your affections are not divided. The Sufi version is clearer: The lover of two women sees no more conflict in loving both than the rich religious person sees in loving both God and money. It is not that he loves either object less, but rather that his two-timing annoys both of them. Even so, we must imagine that it is God and Mammon (the Buddhist Mara) who despise the would-be slave of both, not the slave who despises one of them while loving the other. If he did the latter, whence the conflict in the first place?

This saying has been placed after the preceding because the compiler shrewdly recognized the notion of gaining wealth in order to give (part of) it to charity (see Nurbakhsh's translation: "0 you who seek after worldly goods, in order to do good works....") as a self-deceptive excuse to become or remain wealthy while claiming piety. The strategy is thus an attempt to court both God and Mammon, foolishly imagining that neither will mind.

46b. Jesus said: This world is a bridge. Pass over it. Do not linger upon it. (Ibid., Nurbakhsh)

Famously, this saying cannot go back to Jesus, nor even to the early Palestinian community, since there were no bridges in ancient Palestine!

The catchwords connecting this saying to the previous three are "this world."

47. Jesus used to say: My condition is hunger, my inner garment is fear, and my outer garment wool. I warm myself in winter in the sun; my candle is the moon; my mounts are my feet; my food and dainties are the fruits of the earth; neither at eventide nor in the morning have I aught in my possession, yet no one on earth is richer than I. (Ibid., iii. 159)

Here is a progammatic statement of Cynic/Christian monastic/Sufi selfsufficiency. There is a hidden and ironic truth in the apparently extravagant promise that God will provide all necessities: The truth is that the ascetic learns to do without whatever is not provided him. What others deem necessities, he has learned to dismiss as luxuries. And thus God has taken care of him by teaching him to do without. The promise is not one of miraculous providence but rather of lowered expectations.

The Sufis take their name from the Arabic word for wool, referring to the humble garments they wear, a practice going all the way back to the first followers of Muhammad in Mecca, who included both the voluntarily and involuntarily poor. There is no reason to think that Muslim ascetics were innovators in this regard, so this saying, which depicts Jesus as a good wool-wearing ascetic, may stem from pre-Islamic Christian monasticism, but there is no particular reason to press further back into religious history.

48. The world was revealed unto Jesus in the form of an old woman with broken teeth, with all sorts of ornaments upon her: How many husbands hast thou had? She said: I cannot count them. He said: Hast thou survived them all, or did they all divorce thee? She said: Nay, I have slain them all. Jesus said: Woe unto thy remaining husbands! Why do they not take warning by thy former husbands? Thou hast destroyed them one after the other, and yet they are not on their guard against thee. (Ibid. iii. 161)

This wonderful allegory trades on Old and New Testament images like that of Tob. 2:7-8 (the demon Asmodeus kills Rachel's husbands, seven of them one after the other, before she can consummate marriage with them), Mark 12:20-23 (one woman marries seven brothers, one after the other, because each dies before he can beget children for her), and John 4:16-18 (the Samaritan woman has had five husbands and now lives with a sixth man without the pretense of wedlock). We are also reminded of the conservative Dean Inge's quip that "He who marries the spirit of the age will often find himself a widower"-to which one might answer: It is better than the alternative of necrophilia.

Why has this saying been arranged to follow the one before it? The link is between "my outer garment" in number 47 and the woman's gaudy "ornaments" here in number 48.

49. Jesus said: Of a truth I say unto you, even as the sick man looks at the food, and does not enjoy it, owing to the violence of his pain; even so the man of this world takes no pleasure in worship, neither tastes its sweetness for the love of this world which he feels. And of a truth I say unto you, that even as a beast, if he be not ridden and exercised, becomes intractable and changes his character; even so, if the heart be not softened by the thought of death, and the fatigue of devotion, it becomes hard and rough. And of a truth I say unto you, that even as a bottle, so long as it is not rent nor dry, is fit to hold honey; even so the heart, as it is not torn by passion, nor befouled by desire, nor hardened by comfort, shall become a vessel for wisdom. (Ibid., iii. 161.)

This set of three similitudes is linked with the preceding saying by the presence in both of the "world." Beyond this, the saying is perhaps remarkable for its unusual anticipation of Schleiermacher's aesthetic approach to religion, "a sense and taste for the Infinite."

The (to us morbid) meditation upon death, urged here, is shown practiced by Jesus himself in sayings 75 and 76.

50. Jesus said: He that seeks after this world is like one that drinks sea-water: the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes, until it slay him. (Ibid.)

This excellent similitude is linked to the previous sayings by the mention in number 48 of "vessel" and "bottle," while number 49 mentions drinking. The ascetic counsel here, as often in Sufism, sounds almost Buddhist: It is, with tragic irony, the very thing one desperately seeks for sustenance that will poison one.

51. The apostles said to Jesus: How is it that thou canst walk upon the water, whereas we cannot? He said unto them: What think ye of the dinar and the dirham? They said: They are precious. He said: But to me they are equal with the dirt. (Ibid., iii. 175)

Walking upon the water is a favorite Sufi theme, and some Sufi mystics have claimed to be able to do it. This saying presupposes the same link we find in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles between docetic Christology and ascetical practice. How has Jesus managed to defy gravity, or in other words to take on the insubstantiality of a ghost (cf. the address "0 Spirit of God") so that mere water holds him up? He has parted company once and for all with both the denarius and the drachma. These, in the pockets of others, would act as heavy anchors dragging them down beneath the waves.

52. Jesus said: There are three dangers in wealth: First, it may be taken from an unlawful source. And what if it be taken from a lawful source? they asked. He answered: It may be given to an unworthy person. They asked: And what if it be given to a worthy person? He answered: The handling of it may divert its owner from God. (Ibid., iii. 178)

Saying 52 is joined to 51 above because "wealth" here reflects the dinar and the dirham" (Roman coins) there.

53. Jesus said: Store up for yourselves something which the fire will not devour. They said: What is that? He answered: Mercy. (Ibid., iii. 184)

In view here is an eschatological scene like that in 1 Cor. 3:13: "Each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done." Paul warns that wood, hay, and straw cannot survive such temperatures, while gold, silver, and gems will prove lasting investments. What heavenly treasures might correspond to these goods? Here Jesus answers: mercy. And how will one have been able to stockpile that commodity? By showing mercy to others: "Judge not that ye be not judged, for with that judgment that ye judge, ye shall be judged" (Matt. 7:1-2). This treasure, which one is advised to "store up," serves to connect the saying with the two preceding ones.

54. We are told that Jesus said: Ye evil scholars, ye fast and pray and give alms, and do not what ye are commanded, and teach what ye do not perform. Evil is your judgment! Ye repent in words and fancy, but act according to your lust. It avails you not to cleanse your skins, when your hearts are foul. Verily I say unto you, be not like the sieve, whence the good corn goes out and the husks remain. Even so with you: ye cause the judgment to issue from your mouths, while the mischief remains in your hearts. Ye slaves of this world, how shall he win the next world who still lusts after this world, and yearns after it? Verily I say unto you, that your hearts shall weep for your actions. Ye have set the world under your tongues, and good works under your feet. Verily I say unto you, ye have spoiled your future, and the prosperity of this world is dearer unto you than the prosperity of the next. Who among mankind is more unfortunate than you, if you only knew it? Woe unto you! How long will ye describe the path to them that are in earnest, yourselves standing still in one place like those that are bewildered; as though ye summoned the inhabitants of the world to leave it to you? Stay, stay! Woe unto you! What does it profit a dark house that a lamp be set on the roof thereof, when all is dark within? Even so it profits you not that the light of the world should be upon your mouths when your hearts are destitute thereof. Ye slaves of this world, who are neither faithful slaves nor honorable freemen!, soon will the world pull you out by the root, and cast you on your faces; and then your sins shall take hold of your forelocks, and push you from behind, till they hand you over naked and destitute to the Royal judge; then He shall show you your wickedness, and make you ashamed of your evil deeds. (Ibid., iii 198)

Has someone recollected there being a long denunciation by Jesus of the scribes and Pharisees such as we find in Matt. 23 and John 5, but couldn't remember it? This sounds like a kind of pastiche, drawing on some New Testament materials, to be sure. "Your judgment" serves to link the saying with the preceding one's reference to the refining fire of judgment Day, just as the repeated references to the "heart" link this one with the second saying following this one.

54a. Jesus told his disciples: Whenever one of you should fast, he should smear grease on his hair and face and lips, so that no one is aware of his fasting; and when he gives with his right hand, his left hand should not know what his right hand is doing; and when he prays, he should draw a curtain across the doorway; for God metes out his blessings as he apportions his provender. (Ibid., p. 811)

That there is some relation between this saying and the complex in Matt. 6:1-18 is clear enough, but is the Sufi version to be judged merely a loose memory quotation of Matthew's, or is it rather possibly an independent version? I would guess the latter. As often in the Gospel of Thomas, we find here marks of a more primitive version. Note the lack of a "Matthean antithesis" between the "hypocrites" or Pharisees and the disciples, as well as the lack of the characteristically Matthean refrain, "Your Father who sees in secret will reward you." We also miss the Matthean digression lampooning Gentile Christian glossolalia (Matt. 6:7-8, literally, "Do not say `Bata.' "), which interrupts the triptych of secret pieties, as does Matthew's insertion of the Q Lord's Prayer at this point. The Sufi-preserved version, then, gives us evidence that Matthew did not make up his version out of whole cloth, as we would otherwise be tempted to conclude. He had a traditional basis for it, whatever its ultimate origin.

The theme of secret piety connects nicely with the preceding saying, especially if the compiler had Matt. 6:1-18 in mind, since then he must have taken this parallel as applying to the same "evil scholars." The element of modesty in the display of religion connects the saying with the next one, too, with its warning against pride.

55. Christ said: Blessed is he whom God teaches His book, and who does not die proud. (Ibid., iii. 256)

Here is a mercifully shorter complaint against evil scholars, those who are learned in the teaching of scripture but are puffed up with conceit over their learning.

The note about pride, added to the references to "the heart" in the preceding saying, serves to link both sayings 54 and 55 with numbers 56 and 57, in which both terms appear.

Nurbakhsh's translation, "Blessed is he who surrenders as God's book guides, for he will not die as an oppressor," gives a very different sense, one parallel to Col. 4:1.

55a. God revealed to Jesus: "When I bestow upon you a blessing, receive it with humble gratitude, that I may lavish upon you my entire bounty." (Ibid., 14, p. 945, Nurbakhsh)

The sentiment is an old one, going back at least as far as Deut. 8:17-18, "Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' You shall remember Yahve your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth."

Note the occurrence of the adjective humble in this saying, as of proud in the one before it, since both will reappear in the following saying.

56. Christ said: The reed grows in the plain, but does not grow on the rock. Even so, wisdom works upon the heart of the humble, but does not work upon the heart of the proud. See ye not, that if a man lifts his head to the roof it wounds him, whereas if he bow down his head the roof shelters him? (Ibid. iii. 261)

Again, note the catchword theme of pride in the heart.

57. Jesus said: Beautiful raiment is pride of heart. (Ibid. iii. 269)

This sentiment, though reasonable enough, seems contradictory to the Matthean theme of hidden piety whereby one ought not to allow inward piety to be reflected in outward demeanor. For Matthew's Jesus, a public display of piety is a greater temptation for pride than a public display of wealth and beauty (Matt. 6:16-18).

58. Jesus said: Why come ye unto me with the garments of monks upon you, while your hearts are the hearts of ravening wolves? Put on the robes of kings, and mortify your hearts with fear. (Ibid.)

In view are the wool garments of the Sufis (or Syrian Christian monks) and withal the traditional warning against wolves in sheep's clothing. Also, the catchword connection with "heart" is carried still further. Now we do hear something like Matthew's hidden piety, in that pretenders to piety are rather to don impious garb until their self-mortification entitles them to the woolen habit of the true penitent.

59. It is narrated that there was a robber among the children of Israel who had infested the highway forty years, when Jesus passed by him with a pious Israelite, who was an apostle. The robber said in his heart: Here is the Prophet of God passing with his apostle by his side; what if I come out and make a third? Coming forth, he tried to approach the apostle, all the while despising himself and magnifying the apostle, and thinking that such as he was not worthy to walk by the side of that righteous man. The apostle perceived him, and said to himself: Shall such a man walk by my side? and gathering his skirts together, he went and walked by the side of Jesus, so that the robber remained behind. Then God revealed unto Jesus: Say unto them, they must begin their work from the beginning, for I have canceled their previous deeds; I have canceled the good deeds of the apostle for his self-conceit, and the evil deeds of the other for his self-abasement. Then Jesus told them of this, and took the robber for his companion in his pilgrimage, and made him one of his apostles. (Ibid. iv. 120)

This tale essentially recasts the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:9-14), Christianizing it. Note that the theme of the apostle's selfconceit matches that of the hypocritical monks in the previous saying.

60. It is recorded that Jesus said: Ye company of the apostles fear transgression, but we the Prophets fear unbelief. (Ibid. iv. 135)

The address to "the company of apostles" here links the saying with the reference to apostles in the previous one, as well as with the next saying.

61. Christ said: Ye company of apostles, the fear of God and love of Paradise give patience in tribulation and alienate men from the world. Verily I say unto you, that the eating of barley-bread and sleeping with dogs upon a dunghill in the search for Paradise are a little thing. (Ibid. iv. 143)

We are far from the Son of Man who came eating and drinking, who could be plausibly accused of being a drunk and a glutton (Matt. 11:19)! The neurotic voice of monastic extremism meets us here.

62. Christ passed in his wanderings by a man asleep, wrapped in a robe. He woke him, and said: 0 thou that sleepest, rise and make mention of God. He said: What wilt thou of me? Verily I have left the world to them that are of the world. He said unto him: Then sleep on, my beloved. (Ibid. iv. 152)

What seemed to be indolence turned out to be the sleep of the just. A somewhat similar anecdote occurs in Codex D, in place of Luke 6:5: "On the same day he saw a man performing a work on the Sabbath. Then he said unto him: Man! If thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed. But if thou knowest not, thou art cursed and a transgressor of the law." Appearances are insufficient; motives are what matters, something the sometime libertine Sufis urged their contemporaries to keep in mind.

The mention of "sleep" here matches that in the preceding saying, where ascetics are advised not to think twice about sleeping with the dogs.

63. Christ said: Look not unto the wealth of the people of this world; for the glitter of their wealth takes away the light of their faith. (Ibid. iv. 157)

The mention "of this world" here answers to the phrase "of the world" in the previous saying.

64. Christ said: Four things can be attained only with toil-silence, which is the beginning of devotion; humility; constant prayer; and poverty. (Ibid. iv. 173)

Here is the customary Sufi enumeration of the aspects of piety. The element of "poverty" accounts for the placement of the saying directly after number 63, with its admonition "Look not unto ... wealth."

65. Jesus used to take with him nothing but a comb and a pitcher. One day, seeing a man comb his beard with his fingers, He cast away the comb; another day, seeing a man drink out of the river with his hands, He threw away the pitcher. (Ibid. iv. 182)

The poverty of the ascetic is absolute, demanding the renunciation of everything that pretends to improve on nature (as the Cynics put it) or on providence (as the Sufis put it), which are in the final analysis deemed to be the same thing. This story follows up the note of "poverty" in the preceding saying with concrete examples of it. The story is an exact parallel to the famous anecdote of Diogenes, considered below.

66. Jesus was asked, Why dolt Thou not buy an ass to ride? He answered: I am too precious with God for Him to let an ass interrupt my thoughts of Him. (Ibid. iv. 256)

Is property a convenience, as most of us think? Or rather perhaps an inconvenience? If even the most rudimentary possession of a donkey distracts one from contemplation, it has become an inconvenience rather than a convenience. This saying has been grouped with number 65 as yet another example of basic possessions renounced.

67. Jesus passed by a man who was blind, leprous, crippled, paralyzed on both sides, and with his flesh scarred from elephantiasis, but was saying: Praise be to God, who has kept me free from that wherewith he hash afflicted many of his creatures. Jesus said unto him: Sir, what form of affliction is that which has been kept away from thee? He answered: 0 Spirit of God, I am better off than those into whose hearts God has not put that knowledge of himself which he has put into mine. Jesus said: Thou hast spoken truly; give me thy hand. He gave his hand, and straightway became the fairest and best-looking of men, for God had healed him of his afflictions. So he accompanied Jesus, and shared his devotions. (Ibid., iv. 272)

The point is obvious enough. Suffice it to note that here, conspicuously in a story which underlines the irrelevance of the outward man, Jesus is addressed again as "Spirit of God."

68. Jesus asked the children of Israel: Where does the seed grow? They answered: In the mold. He said: Of a truth I say unto you, wisdom grows not save in a heart like the mold. (Ibid., iv. 279)

The catchword here is "in a heart," matching "into whose hearts" in number 67.

69. Ibn El Jala said: God revealed unto Jesus: When I examine a man's heart, and find not therein any love for this world or for the next, I fill it with love of me and sedulously guard it. (Ibid., iv. 281)

We must suppose that Jesus is imagined to have passed along the revelation vouchsafed to him here, but since the maxim is a direct revelation from God, like the Koran, instead of a saying of Jesus himself, the accredited transmitter, Ibn El-Jala almost takes the place of Jesus as the speaker of the saying.

The phrase "a man's heart" provides the catchword connection with the previous two sayings.

70. Jesus was asked: What is the best of works? He answered: Resignation to God, and love of him. (Ibid.)

Asked about good deeds, Jesus responds instead with a pair of dispositions, which are therefore more important. A similar contrast appears in John 6:28-29: "What must we do to be doing the works of God? Jesus answered them, This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent." Only here the virtue is not the Christian one of believing in Jesus but rather the Islamic one of submission to the will of Allah.

"Love of him" in this saying points back to "love of me [God]" in the previous saying.

71. Jesus said: Blessed is the eye that sleeps and thinks no evil, and wakes unto sinlessness. (Ibid., iv. 284)

One wonders if perhaps this saying originally followed immediately after number 62, in which case it would have perpetuated the catchword "sleep." It may have been omitted from the sayings collection by a copyist error, since the catchword principle itself invites accidental omission: A scribe's eye may return to the last word he remembers, but the wrong instance of it. Thus he skips a saying. Perhaps a proofreader noticed the omission and copied it into the margin, from whence the next scribe returned it to the body of the text, only he was perhaps oblivious of the catchword sequence and put the marginalized saying back in the wrong place. Or perhaps al-Ghazali himself departed in this instance from the order of sayings in the source.

72. The apostles asked Jesus: What action is just? He answered: That of him who works for God without desiring that any one should praise him for it. (Ibid., iv. 298)

This saying shares with number 69 the element of disinterested love of God with neither hope nor expectation of heavenly reward.

73. Jesus said: Actions are of three sorts-those which are evidently right, which ye should ensue; those which are evidently wrong, which ye should eschew; and those which are doubtful, which are to be referred to those who know. (Ibid., iv. 313)

"Actions" here follow up the previous saying's scholastic positing of the best pious "action" (cf. Mark 12:28-34).

74. On the authority of Ta'us: The apostles asked Jesus, Is there anyone on earth today like Thee? He answered: Yea; whosoever has for his speech prayer, and for his silence meditation, and for his vision tears, he is like me. (Ibid., iv. 332)

Is the attestation of the anecdote by Ta'us needed because it is not Jesus who initiates the saying? No such need was felt in other similar cases. At any rate, the saying appears after number 73 because that saying spoke of three sorts of action, and so does this one: prayer, meditation, and penitence.

74a. It is said that Jesus once sat down by an old man who was digging the earth with a spade. Said Jesus: 0 Lord God, take away his hope, and the old man put down his spade and lay down. After an hour had passed, Jesus said: O Lord God, restore hope to him, and he arose, and set about his task. And when Jesus asked him concerning what had transpired he said: While I was at work my soul said to me, How much longer shall you labor, now that you are an old man? so I cast aside my spade and lay down. Then it said to me, By God, you must live out that which is left to you. So, I arose and took up my spade once more. (Ibid., Winter trans.)

The reference to "digging the earth" provides the link with the previous saying and its use of the phrase "on earth." The contemplation by the old man of his allotted lifetime links the saying to the next one.

74b. Said Jesus: Pay no attention to your provisions for tomorrow, for if tomorrow is to be part of your lifetime then your provisions will come with it, whereas if it is not to be, then you should pay no attention to the lifetimes of others." (Ibid., Winter trans.)

Whereas this saying advises us not to worry about possible future perils, the next one inculcates, by example, the contemplation of death. If the two sentiments seem contradictory, the fact only underlines the nature of the catchword connection principle: The same theme is enough to link two sayings, whether the treatment of that theme is consistent between the sayings or not.

75. When Jesus thought on death, His skin dripped blood. (Ibid., iv. 354) The last three items raise the same question that the presence of Matt.

10:38/Luke 14:27 ("Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple") does in Q: Is there an implicit reference to the death of Jesus? Does the Q saying presuppose the famous death of Jesus on the cross and call the faithful to emulate him if necessary? Or are we reading into it a reference to the crucifixion of Jesus because it is so overwhelmingly familiar to us? The issue is quite important since Q contains no other reference to the death of Jesus, implicit or explicit, which implies the death of Jesus formed no part of the faith of whoever, whatever movement, compiled Q. Strikingly, the same ambiguity meets us in this "Sufi Q."

First, does the relegation of the three "death" sayings to the end of the sequence imply that everyone knew a "gospel," even a nonnarrative sayings gospel like Q (or Thomas) or the Sufi sayings source used by Al-Ghazali, ought to end with a Passion narrative, or at least the nonnarrative equivalent to one? Maybe, but then again it is obvious that material dealing with "the last things" should be placed last! The presence of the three "death" sayings does not need to be a reference to the fact of Jesus' (redemptive) death.

Second, we must remember that morbid introspection about one's own eventual death was a common spiritual exercise for Sufis (and others), as witness saying 49. There need be no reference to the Passion of Jesus, though the sweating of blood has crept into some manuscripts of Luke (Luke 22:44) from some apocryphal tradition-like this one! It made perfect sense to Sufis to read this anecdote as describing Jesus' proper pious anxiety about death with no reference to his own crucifixion-since, as Muslims, they believed Jesus had not been crucified!

76. Jesus said: Ye company of apostles, pray unto God that this cup may be easy for me; for I fear death with a terror which is like the pains of death. (Ibid., iv. 362)

The parallels to the Gethsemane story are obvious: "Father ... remove this cup from me..." (Mark 14:36). "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death" (Mark 14:34). But, again, no reference is actually made to Jesus' dying, though it is assumed that, like all mortals, one day he will. Is it possible that such a saying as is preserved here first formed the basis for the Gethsemane passages just quoted? It would not be the only instance of the gospel tradition taking a saying that originally pertained to the common human lot in a proverbial fashion being subsequently worked up into a narrative about Jesus in particular.

77. Jesus, passing by a skull, kicked it with His foot, and bade it speak by the will of God. It said: 0 Spirit of God, I was a king in past time. One day, when I was seated in my kingdom on my throne of state, with my crown on my head and my armies and my courtiers around me, the Angel of Death appeared to me. Then each of my members fell apart, and my spirit went forth to him. Would that all those armies had been but one troop! Would that all that dense company had been solitude! (Ibid., iv. 363)

The fact that it is not even Jesus' own death in view in this final saying rules out the possibility that the three "death" sayings were intended as the equivalent of a Passion story.

The skull already bore mute witness to the futility of worldly striving. Jesus just makes that silent testimony explicit. Indeed, the point is exactly that of Shelley's great poem "Ozymandias." The king should have done what Prince Siddhartha did: renounce the transitory glory of the kingdom in favor of a life of mendicant meditation, but for him, alas, it was too late.

I wonder: Is it possible to catch here an echo of the famous scene in the Theravada Buddhist text The Questions of King Milinda, in which a Buddhist monk explains to the Hellenistic King Menander the anatta (no soul) doctrine by disassembling a chariot piece by piece, asking which particular piece is the "chairot"? Even so, the "soul" is nothing but a superfluous, hypostatizing word better dispensed with. Does Jesus here converse, as the Buddhist once did, with King Menander? Is it the dharma of Buddhism the dead king wishes he had heeded? And was it the "members" of his royal chariot which "fell apart," teaching him a truth ignored at eternal peril?

77a. Said Jesus: How many a healthful body, a graceful face, and a skillful tongue, shall tomorrow be woeful among the tiers of Hell! (Ibid., Winter trans.)

We are not told that the possessors of these various excellences are using them for sinful ends. The point seems rather to be that one ought not to be blinded by today's sunlight to tomorrow's possible darkness. One must not put off contemplation of death and thus of repentance.

The fact that the focus is definitely not on Jesus' own death implies that the earlier anticipations of it were aimed at spurring the reader/hearer to contemplating his own.

In retrospect, the thing that jumps out at the reader of Margoliouth's set of sayings of Jesus from Sufi sources is how, once we get into the Jesus traditions from Al-Ghazali's Revival of the Religious Sciences, we find a virtually uninterrupted sequence of catchword connections denoting an originally orally transmitted collection of Jesus materials. As I studied Margoliouth's list, I wondered if the catchword sequence might prove an illusion dispelled once I restored the sayings skipped by Margoliouth, but in fact their restoration only served to continue and strengthen the pattern. On the other hand, the first six sayings in Margoliouth's list display no sign of catchword connection, as indeed we should expect, since Margoliouth chose them from disparate written sources. If Al-Ghazali had similarly drawn on disparate sources available to him, we should likewise expect no particular connecting thread. But that is just what we do in fact find. This leads me to the conclusion that Al-Ghazali had before him a written document, a collection of Jesus tradi tions exactly analogous to Q and to the Gospel of Thomas. Like Q, and as many believe, like Thomas, this document must have been a compilation of orally transmitted sayings and anecdotes. Of course, I infer that Al-Ghazali used the sayings in their original order, thus to some extent structuring his massive work Revival of the Religious Sciences around this document, much as the wide-ranging treatise of Shankara on nondualism is structured around the cryptic aphorisms of the Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana, or Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine around the terse texts of the Stanzas of Dzyan. Though this hypothesis must past muster before the tribunal of scholars of Islam, I offer it here at least as a provisional suggestion which, if valid, is quite significant.

This reconstructed Sufi Q would function as the Gospel of Thomas has ever since its discovery in 1945, as a kind of corroboration of the Q hypothesis. Thomas is an actual example of the kind of document Q was hypothesized to be, as is the Sufi sayings document. Can we suggest a date? No, not really. Very little of it could be construed as specifically Islamic or Sufistic. The developed signature doctrines and practices of Sufism occur in the Sufi Q as little as Gnostic distinctives occur in Thomas. Most scholars who have examined the sayings have deemed it likely that many of them may be hundreds of years older than the twelfth century, when Al-Ghazali wrote, and that many may be pre-Islamic, drawn from Syrian monastic tradition. And then we are talking about Christian agrapha or Apocrypha, something very much like Thomas.

And as I have anticipated, this Sufi Q would tend to increase the plausibility of Burton Mack's profile of the proto- or pre-Christians behind Q. For the compilers of Q, Thomas, and Sufi Q, Jesus was a Cynic-like teacher of wisdom. His death was not apparently part of their faith. They may not even have known what happened to Jesus. Sufi Q strengthens Mack's argument that if the Q community believed the death of Jesus was important, they had a funny way of showing it. Yes, they might have cherished beliefs they did not include in what appears to be a charter document, but what evidence could we point to that they believed what is unattested? But the Sufi Q has been transmitted to us by a community whose beliefs we know. As Muslims, they certainly lacked any and all belief in Jesus' death or resurrection.

THE BIG BANG VERSUS THE BIG MACK

Burton Mack bids us dare to part with the traditional model of Christian origins, shared by Bultmann and other supposed radicals, which has it that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that three days later the disciples experienced visions of the Risen Christ. Perhaps the resurrection was a hallucination; no matter. It was the "Big Bang" from which all the diverse forms of Christianity (Gnostic, Catholic, Ebionite-Jewish, and so on) emerged by hook or by crook. All forms of Christianity would have represented various ways of interpreting this "Christ event." So say most scholars, whether conservative or liberal. But not Mack. He suggests instead that what we have all been doing is gullibly adopting the foundation myth of one of the many kinds of early Christianity. Since there is no reason to believe the Q community (or that which produced the similar Gospel of Thomas) had the slightest interest in or knowledge of a Passion, why should we assume that the Q document or the Q community stems from such an ostensible death and resurrection? No, Mack says, it is time to recognize that the resurrection was one of many origin myths cherished by but one of a wide diversity of Jesus movements and Christ cults all over Palestine and Syria.

As discussed in earlier chapters, Mack sets forth a typology of the various Jesus movements and Christ cults to which we owe various segments and strata of the New Testament writings. He ultimately seems to leave open the question whether these very different Christianities stem from a common origin point in the historical Jesus. If they did, we might call this common genesis a "Little Bang," since it would be the man Jesus himself, not the theological supernova of the resurrection, that would be the primordial singularity. But it seems hard to imagine that Mack would be willing, in effect, just to push the traditional single-origin concept back a few steps. Though he hesitates to say so, he seems to be implying a multiple-origin theory. Christianity grew from several roots, not one. A la Koester and Robinson, if we plot the trajectories of Christian evolution through the New Testament documents as Mack does, we will come up with multiple Christianities all the way back, the gradual federation and assimilation of disparate Christ mystery cults and Jesus movements which at first had nothing to do with each other.

We would, in other words, have a situation exactly analogous to that of the ancient Israelite tribal league (or amphictyony). It has been clear for some time that Israel initially formed as a confederation of separate tribes, many of them named for their traditional totems or gods (e.g., Zebulon, Asher, and Gad), others for their homeland (Ephraim for the people on Mt. Ephrath; Benjamin for sons of the south, as in Yemen) or occupation (Issachar for burden bearers). Like six- or twelve-tribe leagues all over the ancient Mediterranean, these tribes adopted a common god (Yahve) in addition to "state and local" deities, and each tribe took its turn taking care of the central shrine (Gilgal, Shechem, and Shiloh at different times) for one (or two) months a year. Once the twelve tribes of Israel had come together, they sealed their bond by positing a mythical eponymous ancestor, Israel/Jacob, whose twelve sons were imagined as the progenitors of each tribe. Each tribal patriarch was accorded the name of one of the tribes, even though some were not even personal names.

Implicit in Mack's alternative to the Big Bang model of Christian origins would seem to be what we must call the Big Mack model: an assembling of various ingredients to make one big, oozing melange of Christianity. And Jesus would be the analogue, in the Big Mack model, to the eponymous mythical patriarch Israel/Jacob. And such a Jesus figurehead would fit perfectly with the composite figure of the gospels who seems to be an amalgam of ill-fitting pieces from Old Testament proof texts and borrowings from contemporary messiahs and prophets. His patchwork character derives from the confla- tionary nature of the movement for which he serves as eponymous figurehead.

WHO IS THIS BROKEN MAN?

Let me hasten to point out that a multiple-root origin theory for Christianity would not automatically mean there had been no original historical Jesus. Indeed, Mack certainly holds for, so to speak, at least one historical Jesus, the sage whose sayings have been collected for our edification in Q1. But I wonder if Mack's work does not set loose implications that he himself does not yet appreciate. Let me outline three factors that would imply that Q1, far from allowing us access for the first time to the historical Jesus, is instead inconsistent with a historical Jesus.

First, do we receive from the Q1 sayings and anecdotes a striking and consistent picture of a historical individual? Mack thinks we do. There is a sly sense of humor coupled with common sense and prophetic anger. There is a definite outlook on life. And thus, one might think, a definite personality, a real character! But no. The problem is that once we discern the pronounced Cynic character of the sayings, we have an alternate explanation for the salty, striking, and controversial "personality" of the material. It conveys not the personality of an individual but that of a movement, the sharp and humorous Cynic outlook on life. What we detect so strongly in the texts is their Cynicism. The fact that so many Q1 sayings so strongly parallel so many Cynic maxims and anecdotes proves the point for the simple reason that the Cynic materials used for comparison stem from many different Cynic philosophers over several centuries! If they do not need to have come from a single person, neither do those now attributed to Jesus which parallel them. Let me illustrate my point by supplying here the text of the hypothetical Q1 (minus a couple of sayings Mack and others feel entitled to add from Luke, unparalleled by Matthew, but which I regard as Lukan redaction), with parallels from contemporary CynicStoic popular philosophy (gleaned from F. Gerald Downing's exhaustive compendium Christ and the Cynics.'3

Q1

Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Only the person who has despised wealth is worthy of God. (Seneca)

We should not get rid of poverty, but only our opinion of it. Then we shall have plenty. (Epictetus)

Blessed are those who hunger, for they shall be filled.

People used to see Diogenes shivering out in the open, often going thirsty. (Dio)

Herakles cared nothing about heat or cold, and had no use for a mattress or a woolly cape or a rug. Dressed in a dirty animal skin, living hungry, he helped the good and punished the wicked. (Dio)

Blessed are those who weep, for they shall laugh.

"Don't you want to know why I never laugh? Its not because I hate people, but because I detest their wickedness.... You are astonished because I don't laugh, but I'm astonished at those who do, happy in their wrong-doing when they ought to be dejected at failing to do what's right. (Pseudo-Heraclitus)

I say to you, love your enemies.

Bless those who curse you.

Pray for those who mistreat you.

A rather nice part of being a Cynic comes when you have to be beaten like an ass, and throughout the beating you have to love those who are beating you as though you were father or brother to them. (Epictetus)

How shall 1 defend myself against my enemy? By being good and kind towards him, replied Diogenes. (Gnomologium Vaticanum)

Someone gets angry with you. Challenge him with kindness in return. Enmity immediately tumbles away when one side lets it fall. (Seneca)

If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer him the other also.

If someone seizes your cloak, offer him your tunic as well.

Musonius said he would never indict anyone who'd injured him, nor would he advise anyone else to, not anyone who wanted to be a proper philosopher.... Well, if a philosopher cannot despise a slap or abuse, what use is he? ... People sin against you. You take it without going wild, without harming the offenders. Instead you give them cause for hope of better things. (Musonius Rufus)

If you're inclined to be quick-tempered, practice putting up with being abused, refusing to get cross at insults. You'll be able to go on from that to taking a slap and saying to yourself, I seem to have got entangled with a statue. (Epictetus)

Give to anyone who asks of you, and if someone seizes your belongings, do not seek them back.

If there is a requisition and a soldier seizes {your donkey}, let it go. Do not resist or complain; otherwise you will be first beaten, and lose the donkey after all. (Epictetus)

Don't get cross when wise people ask you for a tribol, for it's not yours, it's theirs, and you're giving it back to them.... For everything belongs to God, friends have everything in common, and the wise are the friends of God. (Pseudo-Crates)

Diogenes used to say we should hold out our hands to our friends palm open, not tight-fisted. (Diogenes Laertius)

What we have now is enough for us, but you take whatever you want of it. (Dio)

Treat others as you would have them treat you.

Take care not to harm others, so others won't harm you. (Seneca)

Let each one here reflect how he feels towards those who try to do him down. That way he'll have a fair idea of how others must feel about him, if that's how he behaves. (Dio)

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Do not even taxcollectors love those who love them? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Does not everyone do likewise? If you lend only to those you expect to pay you back, what credit is that to you? Even evil-doers lend to their fellows expecting to be repaid.

I never did a kindness to win a testimonial or to gain gratitude or any favor in return. (Dio)

... as though it were the done thing to be stingy and tight-fisted with impoverished strangers, but to be generously welcoming with hospitable gifts only to the wealthy, from whom you clearly expected much the same in return. (Dio)

No, love your enemies, do good, and lend without expecting repayment. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of God. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and the good; he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.

By and large only humankind among living creatures is an image of God... . As God is ... high-minded, beneficent and humane (that's how we conceive him to be), so we must think of human beings as his image, so long as they live according to nature, and are eager to.... (Musonius)

Diogenes said good men were images of the gods. (Diogenes Laertius)

The whole human race is held in high regard-and equally high regard-by God who gave it birth. (Dio)

Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

Judge not, lest you, too, be judged.

For you will be judged by the same standard you apply.

Someone asked how he could master himself. Diogenes replied, "By rigorously reproaching yourself with what you reproach others with." (Stobaeus)

Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?

Some people prefer to be provided with a blind guide rather than a sighted one. They're bound to take a tumble. (Philo)

You can no more have a fool as king than a blind man to lead you along the road. (Dio)

A student is not better than his teacher. It is sufficient that he should be like his teacher.

When Diogenes saw a boy eating a savory snack, he rightly slapped the slave looking after him; for the fault lay with the one who'd failed to teach rather than with the one who hadn't learned. (Plutarch)

How can you look for the splinter in your brother's eye while there is a twoby-four in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, "Let me remove the splinter from your eye," when you are not aware of the two-by-four in your own eye? Hypocrite! First take the two-by-four out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see to remove the splinter in your brother's eye.

And you, are you at liberty to examine others' wickednesses, and pass judgment on anyone ... ? You take note of others' pimples when you yourself are a mass of sores.... It's like someone covered in foul scabs laughing at the odd mole or wart on someone of real beauty. (Seneca)

When the Athenians do philosophy in your way they are like people promising to heal others of ills they've not managed to cure in themselves. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

A good tree does not bear bad fruit. A bad tree does not bear good fruit. Do they gather figs from thistles, or thistles from figs? Every kind of tree is recognized by its fruit.

Who would think to be surprised at finding no apples on the brambles in the wood? or be astonished because thorns and briars are not covered in useful fruits? (Seneca)

The good man brings forth good things from his treasury; the evil man evil things. For the mouth speaks from what fills the heart.

Evil no more gives birth to good than an olive tree produces figs. (Seneca)

Why do you call me, "Lord, lord," and not do what I say? Everyone who hears my words and does them is like a man who built his house on a rock. The rain fell, the flood broke against the house, and it did not fall, for it had a solid foundation. But everyone who hears my words and does not do them is like a man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the flood broke against it, and it fell, and it was a total ruin.

Diogenes described himself as a hound of the kind much praised, but which none of its admirers dared to take out hunting. (Diogenes Laertius)

It was mostly people from a distance away who came to talk with Diogenes ... the common motive was just to have heard him speak for a short while, so as to have something to tell other people about ... rather than look for some improvement for themselves. (Dio)

If you are in good health and think yourself at last fit to be your own man, I am pleased. The distinction will be mine if 1 can pull you away from where you are floundering in the waves. But, my dear Lucilius, I'm begging you as well as exhorting you to put down philosophical foundations deep in your heart. Then test your progress! But not by words that you speak or write. To see what strength of mind you have gained, and what unruly desires you've shed, you must test your words by your deeds. (Seneca)

A man said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the sons of men have no place to lay their heads [for the night}."

According to Theophrastus Diogenes had watched a mouse running around, not bothering to find anywhere for its nest, not worrying about the dark, showing no particular desire for things one might suppose particularly enjoyable. It was through watching this mouse that he discovered the way to cope with circumstances. (Diogenes Laertius)

No city, no house, no fatherland, a wandering beggar, living a day at a time. (Diogenes Laertius)

The whole earth is my bed. (Pseudo-Anarcharsis)

I've no property, no house, no wife nor children, not even a straw mattress, or a shirt, or a cooking pot. (Epictetus)

I have traveled around for so long, not only without hearth or home, but without even a single attendant to take round with me. (Dio)

Another man said to him, "First let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their dead."

Though the mass of people want the same results as the Cynics, once they see how difficult the way is, they steer well clear of those who propose it. (Pseudo-Crates)

Someone wanted to do philosophy with Diogenes. Diogenes gave him a tunnyfish to carry around and told him to follow him. For shame the would-be disciple threw it down and left. Some time later Diogenes met him. "Our friendship was broken up by a tunny fish," he said with a laugh. (Diogenes Laertius)

Someone said to Diogenes, "I'm yours to command. " He took him along and gave him a half-obol's worth of cheese to carry. He refused. "Our friendships been shattered, " said Diogenes, "by a piece of cheese costing all of a half-obol. " (Diogenes Laertius)

It's not how you think it is.... You say, "I wear an old cloak already-I'll go on doing that. I sleep on a hard bed now, and I shall still. I'll get myself a satchel and staff, and I'll wander around, begging from the people I meet...." If you think that's how it is, stay well clear of the whole business; there's nothing in it for you. (Epictetus)

If you die without a servant to wait on you, who will take you away to bury you? Whoever wants the house, said Diogenes (Diogenes Laertius)

Diogenes was harsher.... In Cynic style he spoke more crudely, giving orders that he was to be thrown out without burial. His friends asked, "For the birds and wild animals?" "Certainly not. You're to put a staff near me to drive them off with. " "How could you?" they asked. "You'll be past all feeling." "Well, what harm is there in being torn to pieces by wild beasts if I'm past all feeling?" (Cicero)

A little while before Demonax died someone asked, "What instructions have you given about your burial?" "No need to fuss," he said. "The stink will get me buried." (Lucian)

There's no need to thank your parents, either for your birth, or for being the sort of person you are. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

Obeying your father, you're obeying the will of a fellow human being. Doing philosophy, you're obeying Zeus. (Musonius)

If you're not accomplishing anything, there was not much point your coming in the first place. Go back and look after things at home ... you'll have a bit more pocket money, and you'll look after your father in his old age. (Epictetus)

He said, the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few; therefore, beg the master of the harvest to send out more laborers into the harvest.

The problem may well lie with the so-called philosophers. Some of them refuse point-blank to face crowds, just won't make the effort. Perhaps they've given up hope of improving the masses. (Dio)

A true Cynic will not rest satisfied with having been well-trained himself. He must realize he's been sent as God's messenger to his fellow humans to show them where they are going astray over what is right and what is wrong ... (Epictetus)

See, I send you out as lambs amid wolves.

Crates said that people living with flatterers were in as bad a way as calves among wolves. (Diogenes Laertius)

Do not carry money, or a pouch, or sandals, or a staff.

And according to Diodes Antisthenes was the first to double his cloak, and use just that, and carry a staff and a satchel. (Diogenes Laertius)

According to some, Diogenes was the first person to double his threadbare cloak, because he had to use it to sleep in, and he carried a satchel for his bread... but he took to carrying a staff for support only when he became infirm. (Diogenes Laertius)

When I'd chosen in favor of this Cynic way, Antisthenes took off the shirt and the cloak I was wearing, put a doubled threadbare cloak on me instead, slung a satchel on my shoulder, with some bread and other scraps of food, and put in a cup and a bowl. On the outside of the satchel he hung an oil flask and a scraper, and then, finally, he gave me a staff, too. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

Wearing only ever one shirt is better than needing two, and wearing just a cloak with no shirt at all is better still. Going bare foot, if you can, is better than wearing sandals (Musonius )

By now Peregrinus had taken to long hair and a dirty threadbare cloak and a satchel, with a staff in his hand. (Lucian)

And do not greet anyone on the road.

Seek out the most crowded places, and when you're there, keep to yourself, quite unsociable, exchanging greetings with no one, neither friend nor stranger. (Lucian)

Whatever house you enter, say, "Peace be to this house!" And if a man of peace is there, your protection will rest upon him. But if not, let your blessing return to you.

"A good daimon (spirit} has come to stay in my house," (Diogenes' host speaking of his arrival} (Diogenes Laertius)

"Is it really necessary to have something written over your doorway?" "Yes, it is." "Then how about this? `Poverty lives here, evil is debarred.' " (Pseudo-Diogenes)

Don't beg your necessities from everyone, and don't accept unsolicited gifts from just anyone, either. It's not right for moral virtue to be fed by wickedness. Ask and accept only from people who've accepted an invitation into philosophy themselves. (Pseudo-Crates)

And remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer is worthy of his wages.

You're not asking for a free gift, still less for some worse bargain, but for a contribution to the well-being of everyone ... you are able to give back something very much better than what you got. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

A good soldier is never without someone to reward his efforts, nor is a laborer or a cobbler. Do you think it's any different for a good human being? Do you think God cares so little for the servants and witnesses he's had so much success with? (Epictetus)

Do not go from house to house.

It looks to me as though what you really want is to go into someone's house and stuff yourself with food. (Epictetus)

If you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick and say to them, "The Kingdom of God has come near you."

A Cynic's friend must share the Cynic's scepter and his royal rule and be a worthy servant. (Epictetus)

Let me enjoy the wealth that is really mine. I have experienced the great and invincible kingdom of wisdom. (Demetrius, quoted by Seneca)

It is Zeus who first and foremost knows how to rule-and shares his knowledge with whom he will. (Dio)

But if you enter a town and they do not receive you, as you leave, shake the very dust from your feet and pronounce against them, "Nevertheless, know this: the Kingdom of God has come near you!"

Diogenes the Cynic Dog to you so-called Hellenes, Be damned to you ... you lay claim to everything, but you actually know nothing. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

To some Diogenes seemed quite mad; lots despised him as a powerless good-fornothing, Some abused him and tried insulting him by throwing bones at his feet as you do to dogs. Others, again, would come up and pull at his cloak.... Yet Diogenes was really like a reigning monarch walking in beggars' rags among his slaves and servants. (Dio)

When you pray, say:

Father, May your name be kept in reverence. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Cancel our debts, for we cancel the debts owed us. And do not bring us to the test.

For everyone and for ever and always there is the father who cares for them. Why, to Odysseus, it was no hearsay matter, that Zeus is the Father of humankind, for he always thought of him as Father, and addressed him as Father, and did everything he did with him in mind. (Epictetus)

Some people do not hesitate to address {Zeus} as Father in their prayers. (Dio)

God... who gives us what we need to live, and life itself, and everything good, the common Father and savior and guardian of human kind... is addressed as King because he rules in power, and as Father, I take it, because of his care and gentleness. (Dio)

Another takes care to provide us with food. (Epictetus)

With peace proclaimed by God through reason ... now no evil can befall me. (Epictetus)

Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the door is opened to the one who knocks.

Seek and you will find. (Epictetus)

Which of you fathers, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for fish, will give him a snake? Therefore, if you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

And our parent has put close to hand whatever is going to be to our good. (Seneca)

People blame the gods because they don't make them rich with lots of nice things-but they don't blame their own disposition to stupidity. They must be blind to refuse the really good gifts the daimon gives. (Pseudo-Heraclitus)

Nothing is hidden that will not one day be made known, or secret that will not eventually come to light.

The Cynic ... ought to have nothing of his own that he wants to hide. Otherwise ... he's started to be afraid about externals, he's begun to feel the need for concealment. And he couldn't possibly keep anything concealed even if he wanted to. Where or how could he possibly hide himself? (Epictetus)

What I tell you in the dark, speak in the light. And what you hear whispered in your ear, shout it from the housetops.

I shall remain for as long as there are cities and inhabited countries, my learning assuring that I never fall silent. (Pseudo-Heraclitus)

Diogenes lit a lamp in broad daylight and went around with it, saying, "I'm looking for an honest man." (Diogenes Laertius)

Do not fear those who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.

Free under Father Zeus and afraid of none of the great lords. (Pseudo-Diogenes) What tyrant or thief or court can frighten anyone who does not care about his body or its possessions? (Epictetus)

Are not five sparrows sold at market for two cents? Yet not a single one of them falling to the ground escapes God's watchful eye. The very hairs of your head each has its number. Therefore, do not fear. You are worth more than many sparrows.

Isn't God such that he oversees everything, and is present there with everything, and is able to be in touch, in some way, with everything? (Epictetus)

Therefore I tell you, have no anxiety over your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Consider the ravens. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and God feeds them. Are you not worth more than the birds? Which of you can add a single hour to your life by worrying about it? And why worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin: yet I tell you even Solomon in all his finery was not arrayed as one of these! If God clothes the grass of the field in this manner, though it is in the field today, only to be thrown into a furnace tomorrow, will he not clothe you, you of little faith?

Hunger, cold, contempt? Poverty doesn't necessitate any of these. Not hunger, for lots of things grow from the earth and can satisfy hunger; for the dumb beasts go without clothes and don't feel it. (Pseudo-Diogenes)

"Good God, that's all very well, but I'm a poor man without property. Suppose I have lots of children, where am I going to get food for them all?" "Well, where do the little birds go to get food from to feed their young, though they're much worse off than you are-the swallows and nightingales and larks and blackbirds ... ? Do they store away food in safe-keeping?" (Musonius)

Why not consider the beasts and the birds, and see how much more painlessly they live than humans do, how much more pleasantly and healthily. They are stronger, each lives the longest possible span for their kind-despite lacking hands or human intelligence.... They have one enormous advantage to counter-balance any ills they may suffer-they are free of property. (Dio)

Therefore I tell you, do not worry, saying to yourselves, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the nations do that, and your Father knows you need these things. Instead, seek his kingdom, and all these things will be provided as a matter of course.

Since I keep my time clear of the things others busy themselves with, come to me, if you need anything I have to offer. I'll refund you generously for all the gifts you currently take so much pleasure in. (Pseudo-Anarcharsis)

"What's going to become of me? Is it impossible to find a traveling companion {through life} who's strong and totally reliable?" Then you think to yourself, "If I commit myself to God, I'll make the journey in safety. " (Epictetus)

We make a fuss about our little bodies, about our piffling property, about what Caesar thinks of us. And about what's going on inside us? Not a thought! (Epictetus)

The philosophic wise man ... without being concerned or anxious about more than the bare necessities, will give his stomach and back what's due to them. Carefree and happy, he'll laugh at people busy with their riches, and at others scurrying around trying to get rich, and he'll say, "Why postpone being yourself into the distant future?" (Seneca)

Sell your possessions and give [the proceeds] to the poor.

Crates sold up all his property-he was from a prominent family-and realized about two hundred talents. This he shared among his fellow citizens. (Diogenes Laertius)

I gather that you brought all your wealth to the civic assembly and handed it over to your native city. Then, standing in the middle, you shouted out, "Crates, son of Crates, sets Crates free!" (Pseudo-Diogenes)

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where moths and rust do not corrupt and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, your heart will be there also.

Our soul knows, I tell you, that wealth does not lie where it can be heaped together. It is the soul itself that we ought to fill, not our money-chest. It is the soul that we may set above all other things, and put, god-like, in possession of the universe ... when it has taken itself off to the great heights of heaven. (Seneca)

Someone who is eager for riches is also fearful for them. But no one stops to enjoy such a worrying gain; they're always at pains to add something more. (Seneca)

Where the "I" and the "mine" are, that's the direction in which the living being is bound to incline. If they're in the flesh, that's going to dominate; if they're in one's moral choice, that's dominant. (Epictetus)

He said, What is the kingdom of God like? To what can one compare it?

(Pheidias the sculptor claims he has tried to represent something of the accepted character of God} to the extent that a mortal man can understand and represent the inconceivable nature of God. (Dio)

It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.

These words should be scattered like seeds. However small a seed is, once it's sown in suitable ground, its potential unfolds, and from something tiny it spreads out to its maximum size ... I'd say brief precepts and seeds have much in common. Great results come from small beginnings. (Seneca)

Once a man gave a great banquet and invited many. When time came for the banquet he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, "Come, for everything is now ready." But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, "I have bought a farm, and I must go and look it over. Please have me excused." Another said, "I have bought five pair of oxen, and I need to inspect them. Please have me excused." Another said, "I have just married a wife, and I cannot come." The slave came and reported this to his master. Then the owner said in anger, "Go out quickly into the streets of the town and bring in as many people as you find." And the slave went out into the streets and brought in everyone he could find, till the house was filled with guests.

We've no end of excuses ready for our base behavior-it's our children, our mother, our brothers. (Epictetus)

He who does not hate his father and mother cannot be my disciple. He who does not hate his son and daughter cannot be my disciple.

If you'd seized his property, Diogenes would have let it go rather than follow you for it. If you'd seized hold of his leg, he'd have let that go-and his ... body, his family, his friends, his native land.... (Epictetus)

He who does not carry his cross and follow me can not be my disciple.

If you want to be crucified, just wait. The cross will come. If it seems reasonable to comply, and the circumstances are right, then it's to be carried through, and your integrity maintained. (Epictetus)

He who tries to preserve his life will lose it;

but whoever loses his life on account of me will preserve it.

Socrates cannot be preserved by an act that is shameful.... It is dying that preserves him, not fleeing. (Epictetus)

Salt is good but if the salt loses its savor, how can it be salted again? It is good neither for the land nor for the manure heap, and they throw it out.

Why have you made yourself so useless and worthless? ... When some household article has been thrown out intact and serviceable, anyone who finds it will pick it up and prize it. But no one will do that with you. Everyone will think you a dead loss. (Epictetus)

THE AUTHOR AS TITLE

Additionally, I would suggest that the very nature of Q1 (or Q period, for that matter) as a sayings collection would imply that the name to which the maxims are attributed is a fictive figurehead, like King Solomon in the Book of Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes (to say nothing of the Odes of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon, the Song of Solomon, the Testament of Solomon, or the Key of Solomon!). The Wisdom of Jesus ben-Sira is only an apparent exception since, while the whole collection may well come from the pen of Jesus son of Sirach, we must imagine him as a collector of traditional wisdom, that is, of the venerable sayings of other, anonymous sages before him.

Indeed, the attribution of a collection of maxims to an authoritative name betrays a long subsequent stage of "canonical" anxiety when scribes or theologians have forgotten just what a maxim, a proverb, is. To ascribe the saying to a "big name" implicitly assumes that the credibility of the saying depends upon the authority from whom it stems. You are to take Jesus' or Solomon's or Abe Lincoln's word for it. This mode of thinking I call "canonical," because it presupposes a mindset characteristic of theologians working with a sacred canon of writings which have been theologically homogenized at the expense of finer genre distinctions. "Big name" attributions originated with prophecies and revelations, assertions that could not be empirically verified and so rested upon the prior credibility of the revealer. This is, of course, why the apocalyptic writers all wrote under the names of ancient authorities like Enoch or Moses. But such attributions are in the nature of the case foreign and irrelevant to the maxim genre. Proverbs enshrine wisdom, not revelation. They crystallize insights about life that immediately ring true to experience once we hear them, though chances are we ourselves would never have thought of them. If their truth resonates deep inside us, they have, as it were, their own empirical verification and do not rely upon the authority of a great name. It is only later, once scribes seek extraneous theological legitimation for a collection of sayings, in a theological context, that the sayings collection comes to be judged and legitimated by analogy to revelations and prophecies. It might take the authority of Jesus to make one believe that one's own generation would live to see the Last judgment, but it would not require anyone's say-so to convince one that "he who hesitates is lost." Thus, again, the Ql material originally must not have had the name "Jesus," or any other name, on it.

Think of the rabbis whose sayings are preserved in the Pirke Aboth. Most of these great figures are credited with one or two memorable sayings apiece. (We will be considering a number of them, paralleling the gospel sayings attributed to Jesus, in chapter 8.) The blithe complacence with which Christian scholars have credited Jesus with such a huge store of wise sayings only reveals anew the implicit theological bias of supposedly critical scholars. They have just assumed that Jesus was Wisdom incarnate, and that therefore an infinite number of wise and pithy sayings might be attributed to him, while only one or two came from mere mortals like the rabbis or the Greek philosophers.

As for the sheer number of miracle healings attributed to Jesus, the only serious competitor would be Asclepius, son of Apollo and patron of numerous healing spas around the Mediterranean. The great number of Asclepius stories stems from the great number of Asclepius franchises, each of them generating advertising propaganda in the form of testimonials of satisfied customers. By analogy, the great volume of healing and other miracle stories about Jesus stems not from recollections of an historical individual but rather from multiple centers of evangelistic and healing propaganda in the name of the healing god Jesus. In other words, churches.

The same goes for the remarkable volume of wise sayings attributed to Jesus: The name denotes the figurehead for the particular wisdom tradition (as in Poor Richard's Almanac), not that of a historical individual. Another analogy would be all the six hundred thirteen laws "of Moses" in the Hebrew Scripture. Does any historian think Moses wrote all or even most of them? It is a good question whether he wrote a single one.

CRUCIFIED SOPHIST

Those who contend that Jesus himself was the Cynic-like fountainhead of the Q1 material presuppose that Cynicism would have been readily available to Jesus given the cosmopolitan Hellenism of Galilee in the first century C.E. But the point has occasioned much debate. There seems to be no decisive evidence either way. Downing is content to argue, not unreasonably, that since we do know Cynicism was widespread in the general time period and in the general area (e.g., Meleager the Cynic, active in nearby but thoroughly Gentile Gadara, died in 50 B.C.E.) the burden of proof is on the one who would exempt Galilee from being afloat on the winds of doctrine sweeping the Hellenistic world. And besides, reasons Downing, the sayings themselves constitute the strongest possible evidence that Cynicism had penetrated Palestine, since there is just no minimizing the Cynic character of them.

But E. P. Sanders and Richard A. Horsley" are pretty confident they can shoulder the burden of proof Downing assigns them. Sanders makes a good case that in the first half of the first century C.E., Palestine, including Galilee, was thoroughly resistant to Hellenization, outside of the several new cities Herod the Great had built and settled with Gentiles. One might sum up the gist of Sanders's argument by pointing out that if Meleager's presence in Gadara is normative for Galilee in Jesus' day, then pig herding might as well have been, too (Mark 5:11 ff.). But it wasn't. It is a difficult issue, one not to be resolved here. But suppose Sanders is right, that Galilee in Jesus' day was not where one might run into Cynics and Cynic philosophy. What does one do with Downing's evidence of the Cynic coloring of the gospel sayings? Well, they do not suddenly start sounding less Cynic, more apocalyptic or rabbinical. Have we reached an impasse?

Not at all. The answer is clear, though some will not like the sound of it: The sayings of Q1 are Cynic all right; they just don't come from Jesus. If we must locate Cynicism elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, and if Q1 bears ample marks of Cynic origin, then Q1 must come from somewhere else in the Mediterranean world. Why not view it as a collection of originally anonymous Cynic sayings only later attributed to Jesus, just as the Cynic Epistles contain numerous Cynic teachings only subsequently given the names of famous Cynics including Crates, Socrates, and Diogenes?

As Abraham J. Malherbe has demonstrated," the Pauline Epistles give ample evidence of Christian interaction with Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean competitors. Thus why not assume that Ql comes from the same areas as the Epistles? All we need to suppose is what we know from other sources anyway, that some Cynics were attracted, for reasons of their own, to the Christian movement. In his ruthless lampoon of Proteus Peregrinus, Lucian of Samosata (ca. 150 C.E.) tells us that Proteus, a Cynic, had also joined the Christian community in Palestine and at length rose to such prominence in it that he became revered almost as a second founder of the Christian movement, held in reverence only below "the crucified sophist" himself. Lucian goes on to say that Proteus had written books that became accepted as Christian scripture (The Passing of Peregrinus 11). The only scholarly attempt to make sense of this last note that I know of was the theory of Daniel Volter that Proteus was the pseudonymous author of the Ignatian Epistles. At any rate, Lucian's report attests the plausibility of supposing that Cynics could become Christians and contribute to Christian literature writings still manifestly Cynic in content.

Someone might object, pointing to the Jewish terms and concerns presupposed in various Q sayings. But all we need to assume is that Cynicism came into Hellenistic Christianity by way of the God fearers attached to the margin of Hellenistic Jewish synagogues. Philo was, after all, deeply influenced by Platonism and Stoicism. Jewish elements in Q1 hardly demand that the sayings in question originated with Jesus.

I have already suggested in chapter 2 that Q is a late deposit of the teachings of the Q itinerants. This would hold even for the prechristological Q1. Now I would go further and propose that at first Q consisted solely of aphorisms and proverbs with no narrative introductions, in other words, no apophthegms, no pronouncement stories, no chreias. All these sayings, then, would have been unattributed, or else (perhaps subsequently) ascribed to the Wisdom of God, the speaker we can still glimpse behind the saying Matt. 23:34-39/Luke 13:34-35; 11:49-51. Remember Noth's redundancy principle: Since, as we now read the saying, Jesus is the star of the show, what is the Wisdom of God doing there (Luke 11:49, omitted by Matthew's redaction) at all-unless she had first been at center stage and was only subsequently shoved aside? In the Gospel of Thomas the refashioning of Wisdom into Jesus has been much smoother, though also more overt.

On what basis can I suggest that an earlier version of Q lacked any of the narrative setups for the sayings? Simply that, as Bultmann" showed long ago, the story portions of the pronouncement stories often do not quite fit the punch lines they ostensibly lead up to, and thus must have originated as exegetical guesses at the meaning of the sayings. (That there was in some quarters an urgency to get them right can be discerned in the first saying of the Gospel of Thomas: "Whoever finds their meaning shall not taste death.") For instance, in Mark 2:15-18, we read that the Pharisee scribes carped at Jesus' practice of dining with sinners. Yet one may ask how they knew this without committing the same sin, being present on the scene themselves? Likewise, Mark 2:23 if has the scribes objecting that Jesus allowed his disciples to glean grain on the Sabbath. What were they doing, hiding behind the hedgerows, spying? The worst is the cumbersome scene in Luke 7:36-50. In it Jesus forgives a sinful woman who nonetheless showed great love and justifies his leniency with a parable that shows instead that great love is the result, not the occasion, for great forgiveness." The fit of question to answer seems forced in these and other cases, implying somebody has got the cart before the horse.

Picture the early church exegete pondering, "What's the point here? What issue is this saying supposed to be a comment on? Well, suppose the saying was a comment on A, a response to B. Then it would have meant C." It would be like the television game show Jeopardy, where the contestant is given an answer, and he must supply a relevant question to which the answer would correspond. In exactly the same fashion did the original aphorisms become pronouncement stories. To illustrate the point, I will take one gospel aphorism that somehow never attracted a narrative setup, Matt. 7:6: "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you." I will supply a few lead-in stories, each of which would cast a significantly different light on the saying. I will be recapitulating the role of the ancient gospel tradents.

1. The chief priests and the scribes came to him, seeking to dispute with him, but he would not. And when he was alone with his disciples, they asked him about it. He said, "Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

2. And as they were eating, he took bread, and blessed and broke it, and he gave it to them, saying, "Take: this is my body." And he took a cup, and he gave it to them, saying, "Drink ye of it: this is my blood." Peter said to him, "Lord, is this remembrance for us, or for all?" Jesus answered him, "Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

3. All this Jesus said to the crowds in parables. And when he had dispersed the crowds, those who were about him with the disciples asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, "To you it has been given to know the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside all is in parables. Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

4. Jesus sent out the Twelve, charging them, "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

5. At this time many of his disciples withdrew and no longer went about with him. Peter said to him, "Lord, it has happened to them according to the proverb, The dog turns back to its own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mire." And he had compassion upon them. But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

6. And from that time on, many sought to kill them. And the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked, and they asked him, "Shall we bear witness even to the death?" And Jesus answered, saying, "Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you."

The first version would make the saying warn against getting involved in contentious debate with those who do not appreciate one's beliefs, much in the spirit of Titus 3:9-11: "Avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels over the law, for they are unprofitable and futile. As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned."

The second would apply the saying to the practice of secrecy surrounding the eucharist. The nonbaptized were not to be admitted.

The third applies the saying to the guarding of elite gnosis so that the unenlightened will not hear it, be alarmed, and persecute the illuminati. The point is the same as in saying 13 of the Gospel of Thomas: "When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, 'What did Jesus say to you?' Thomas said to them, 'If I tell you one of the things he said to me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me."'

The fourth version would reinforce the early Jewish-Christian reluctance to share their gospel among non Jews: "Now the apostles and the brethren in Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, saying, 'Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?"' (Acts 11:1-3).

The fifth setup makes the saying advocate the Donatist-style intolerance many Christians felt toward those of their number who had denied their faith under threat of persecution. To hell with them!

The sixth lead-in makes the saying advocate the prudent dissimulation certain sects have always practiced during persecution: Why admit your belief when the persecutor cannot possibly be expected to understand you? You know he will jail or kill you, and you could have prevented it! It will be your fault. So keep mum.

Mack points out that it was common in Hellenistic secondary education for students to illustrate their grasp of the characteristic style and thought of a famous sage by fabricating a pronouncement story starring that sage. He ventures that various gospel apophthegms originated this way. Probably so. I have just engaged in a similar exercise, one which Bultmann imagined early Christian exegetes practicing. He was probably right, too.

The brief narrative introductions would have entered the Q tradition only once the Q collection had come to replace the Q itinerants/sages themselves, just as the Koran came to replace the living voice of the Prophet Muhammad. Had the Q sages themselves been on hand, they could have, as once they no doubt had, explained their enigmatic sayings in person. Thus the inclusion of the lead-in stories must be later additions. And it was only once the sayings expanded into pronouncement stories that Jesus seemed to become a historical figure in the situations described in the pronouncement stories. Just as the situations are "ideal" situations, imaginary, "hypotheticals," as in a law class, so the sage Jesus is an ideal figure.

NOTES

1. William Wrede, The Messianic Secret, trans. J. C. G. Greig (Altrincham: James Clarke, 1971). Schweitzer saw the alternatives for life-of-Jesus studies as posed between his own "thoroughgoing eschatology" and Wrede's "thoroughgoing skepticism." In our day, Burton Mack comes close to being a skeptic in Wrede's mold, while there are certainly many scholars who still accept Schweitzer's sketch of the apocalyptic Jesus, including A. J. Mattill Jr., who is pretty much an unreconstructed Schweitzerian. Evangelical apologist N. T. Wright claims to follow in Schweitzer's train, but this is merely strategic pretense. Like those Schweitzer criticized, Wright refuses to take Jesus' apocalyptic sayings with any sort of literalness. Wright, like a whole generation of post-Schweitzer, postliberal retrenchers, has merely used Schweitzer's Jesus as a cloak to sneak reformed theology back into the mouth of the "historical Jesus" ventriloquist dummy.

2. Charlotte Allen, "The Search for a No-Frills Jesus," Atlantic Monthly (December 1996): 67.

3. Leif E. Vaage, "The Son of Man Sayings in Q: Stratigraphical Location and Significance," in Semeia 55, Early Christianity, Q and Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 103-30; John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987); Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), pp. 105-10 if.

4. George A. Wells, The Jesus Myth (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), p. 102-103.

5. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 162.

6. D. S. Margoliouth, "Christ in Islam: Sayings Attributed to Christ by Mohammedan Writers," The Expository Times, vol. 5, 1983-1894, pp. 59, 107, 177-78, 503-504, 561; Javad Nurbakhsh, Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis (London: Khaniqahi- Nimatullahi Publications, 1983); Al-Ghazali, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, book 40 of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, trans. T. J. Winter (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1989).

7. Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching ofJesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 39-43.

8. William Morrice, Hidden Sayings ofJesus: Words Attributed to Jesus Outside the Four Gospels (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997), p. 192.

9. Stevan L. Davies, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), pp. 81-99.

10. Jesus and the Constraints of History (London: Duckworth, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), p. 100, quoted in Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1987), p. 91.

11. Usually called "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew," as if we had any reason to believe the writer of the canonical gospel was actually Matthew, or that the writer of this infancy gospel was trying to impersonate the canonical author.

12. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma: Polebridge Press, 1993).

13. F. Gerald Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First-Century Tradition. JSOT Manuals 4 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988).

14. E. P. Sanders, "Jesus in Historical Context," Theology Today 50, no. 3, (October 1993): 429-48; Richard A. Horsley, Archaeology, History and Society in Galilee: The Social Context ofJesus and the Rabbis (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996).

15. Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

16. Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, 2d ed., trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 39-40.

17. See Robert M. Price, The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny. SBL Dissertation Series 155 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 101-103.