A bit of thread drift, but what the heck:

The Essenes expected that at the Parousia they would march out and join the Armies of the Lord to destroy the Romans. Jesus and his followers espoused a form of quietism and pacifism.

I don’t understand why people are so confident that Jesus and his followers were pacifists during his life. What historically reliable evidence do we have to make this determination?

Paul doesn’t tell us anything useful on this point (as far as I can remember). The Gospels are not generally reliable and they seem to have reworked Jesus in many respects (making him conform to various OT prophecies, making Christianity seem less dangerous to the Romans, etc.) but even still the pacifism lies lightly on the page: Even the Gospels that want a pacifist Jesus have him processing into Jerusalem as a king and getting violent in the temple.

But the Q source is purely conjectural, we know nothing about its transmission, and–crucially–along with whatever evidently primitive material it contains, it also contains material of dubious authenticity (Mt. 10:38 Lk 14:27–interestingly this passage is both likely interpolated and generally pacifist in tenor, which is directly relevant to my contention that the pacifist passages in Q might well be later interpolations).

So it seems to me pretty tenuous to judged the tenor of Jesus’s apocalypticism on a handful of Q verses about loving your enemies and not resisting evil-doers, given that the Q material was likely reworked at some point, even if it preserves a germ of historical material.

As to Paul, I mean that he doesn’t give any witness to Jesus’ historical teaching on these points. Paul might take a position, but he doesn’t attribute the teaching to Jesus. Paul teaches a whole lot of things that we aren’t justified in attributing to the historical Jesus during his natural life.

It seems to me that the strongest case of Jesus being a pacifist is simply that early Christianity is pacifist. But the problem with that line of reasoning is that any militaristic ambitions of Jesus would have been the first things that would be dropped if Christianity was to survive the crucifixion. If you are convinced Jesus was the messiah, and you know that Jesus was crucified, you sort of have to leave behind any plans for earthly military success to continue believing he was messiah. You would naturally have to recast him as a messiah modeled on the suffering servant or Ps. 22 to continue to hold that he was the messiah. And that fits perfectly with what we see in the gospels: His own disciples consistently fail to understand him as a suffering servant even though he consistently prophecies his own passion; they expect him to usher in an actual earthly kingdom of God. It is only after the crucifixion that they start to “understand” (or perhaps, reenvision) what it means to be a messiah and usher in the kingdom of God.

By itself, the provenance of the Q material is entirely beside the point, but the force of your argument was (as I understand it) that we can be reasonably confident that Jesus was a pacifist because a pacifist Jesus is what we find in Q, and Q is antique and therefore most likely reflects the actual preaching of the historical Jesus.

But if it is possible or even likely that the Q material has been redacted–with militaristic material excised and pacifist material added–then the argument falls flat. The argument needs to be able to identify specific pacifist passages as antique and therefore likely reflective of the original kerygma of the historical Jesus to go through. What is inadequate is saying *some* of the Q material is evidently old and likely authentic, therefore *all* the Q material can be used to establish, at least in broad outlines, what the historical Jesus likely taught.

I don’t think there is much question that the Jesus of the Gospels evolved significantly from the Jesus of history, at least in some key respects. The question then is whether pacifism might be one of the respect in which the character evolved between his historical activity and his immortalization in the gospels?

John the Baptist, a firebrand apocalypticist if there ever was one, counsels not war, but repentance in expectation of the Kingdom. God will do the winnowing.

True John is not going to bring God’s wrath, but it’s *not* God who he says will do the winnowing; Even in Q, it is “he who is coming after me” (presumably Jesus) who will do the windowing, clean the threshing floor, and burn the chaff–Lk. 3:16-17, Mt. 3:11-12. Even in Q we find the implication that Jesus is to be the executor of God’s wrath.

The comparison with the Dead Sea Scrolls is imperfect because they didn’t undergo continuous revision: they were ossified when they were hidden away; if their predictions failed there was no one to revise them and massage the message to the new reality, unlike the preaching of Jesus which evolved for several more decades until after the fall of Jerusalem. Again, if Jesus had originally had some ambition of worldly success, that element of his preaching would necessarily have been left behind *very* early in order to make sense of a crucified messiah. You have to re-envision what it means to be the messiah if you are going to accept a crucified man as your messiah.

The viewpoint that was suppressed was not apocalyptic militarism but the apocalyptic expectation of an imminent Parousia.

I don’t see why the suppression of these is mutually exclusive; indeed I think that if we think the earliest Christians suppressed one part of Jesus’s historical preaching, it only makes it more plausible that they suppressed other parts of his preaching. First, apocalyptic militarism is suppressed because it obviously didn’t pan out (as of the crucifixion), and the role of messiah is reinterpreted and finessed–the Messiah is reinterpreted as a suffering servant. Then, the immanent parousia is suppressed when it never arrives. The latter of these developments took place while the NT canon was being written so that we can see both poles in the development, but the former necessarily would have happened very early in the history of Christianity, prior even to Paul’s authentic letters. If you acknowledge that the Christians first held a literal immanent parousia and then adjusted their views when it turned out not to be so imminent, why balk at the suggestion that far earlier they had adjusted their militarism when their conquering Messiah was crucified?

Based only on my initial perusal, the book is insanely facile in its argument.

He doesn’t defend but simply asserts (with some footnotes to other authors) that Q is our best source for the teaching of the historical Jesus. He considers the Farrer Hypothesis, but dispenses with it in a handful of sentences.

He then argues that it doesn’t actually matter whether Q is a source used independently by Matthew and Luke, or whether Luke copied the Q material from Matthew, in any event, he insists, the material had to come from somewhere: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Except of course that if Luke got the Q material from Matthew (or vice versa, though Joseph never countenances the possibility that Matthew wrote last), we not longer can take Matthew and Luke as independent witnesses of a more primitive source, which naturally diminishes the material’s value: If one of them copied the material from the other then, even if there is a germ of primitive Q material, everything we have of that material has been filtered through either Matthew (in the case of the Farrer Hypothesis) or Luke (in the Matthean Posteriority Hypothesis) so we are hamstrung in determining what it said prior to that evangelist’s revisions (as opposed to if we have two independent witnesses to some common source, in which case, by comparing their independent reports of what that source said, we have a reasonable chance of reconstructing the original source at least in some sections).

When faced with the problem that Q has Jesus say he comes not to bring peace but the sword, and that most scholars agree on the passage’s authenticity, he waves it away: “On the other hand, this saying could easily represent the social strain on early Christian families throughout the first-century. Jesus may have alluded to Micah; the allusion could also be a Christian proof-text.The fact that good arguments can be raised both to affirm and deny the saying’s authenticity symbolizes our interpretive challenge: the early Jesus tradition contains both eschatological judgment and salvation sayings. The time of salvation and judgment has arrived.”

So Q material is our best insight into what the historical Jesus taught (even though we don’t know where it came from), unless it suggest violence, in which case, despite the consensus of scholars that it is an authentic passage, we can’t actually be sure that the passage is authentic and can safely ignore it and move on with our book unperturbed by the fact that his Q passage, which is generally viewed as authentic by scholars, militates against our thesis.