Overview: New Testament scholars often act as if all the really important historical data about Jesus survived somewhere, somehow, and that we can piece together a good general picture of his life. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Jesus’s words and actions are lost forever. This talk is all about those missing pieces, and why it is important to reflect on them.

Prof. Mark Goodacre’s presentation is about what we can’t know and should be skeptical about the historical Jesus.  We basically know nothing about Jesus until his 30s.  Goodacre argues the gospels are propaganda to persuade people that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of God as the gospel of John says (John 20-21).  Paul is selective about what Jesus taught and what Paul taught, and Mark’s gospel says Jesus taught much more than what Mark passed on. 

We can’t know who Jesus’ major influences were, because the most prominent ones could have been lost to history.  John the Baptist being in the gospels need not be because he was connected to Jesus (Josephus knows no such connection), but because John was really famous.  We see similar things when people do work on Stalin and try to impose Lenin as a major influence, which he probably wasn’t. 

ANALYSIS:

I have noted elsewhere we seem to have a literary pair with the humiliating death of John (again, not in Josephus) with the even more humiliating and tortuous death of Jesus.  We see a similar technique with the forgiving death of Jesus in Luke which early Christian scribes have edited out because they couldn’t see the Jews being forgiven, and the forgiving death of Stephen in Acts. If Livesey is right that the figure of Paul is invented in Acts, we may have the conversion of the soldier at the cross in Luke as a literary pair with the converted Saul/Paul in Acts.   

Goodacre also notes that around the 1970s the incarnation was being seen as myth. This actually makes sense of there being a Q source (which Goodacre rejects).  Q is interesting in that it does not have a salvific death and resurrection and seems at its earliest stratum to reflect a collection of Jewish/Cynic aphorisms from a school (Q1) that were later attributed to a failed messianic claimant figure Jesus (like Cynic sayings were fictively attributed to Diogenes), and like sayings passed between Jewish sages as Neusner notes.  This would be the incarnation of the Word becoming Flesh in John (who Goodacre argues knew the synoptics), and the Philippian Christ Hymn (which Livesey suggests is late).  I tend to think Matthew and Luke used the Q source, but also Luke knew Matthew, and so for example the genealogies are too unexpected to suddenly appear in both Matthew and Luke by accident, yet too different to reflect being in a shared source like Q. Luke seems to have a more primitive use of Q than Matthew, more reflective of the primitive Q source.

According to the scholarly consensus in the two-source hypothesis (which posits the existence of Q as a shared sayings source for Matthew and Luke), Luke’s use of Q is generally considered more reflective of the original than Matthew’s. This view is based on several key observations. Luke is thought to maintain Q’s original sequence more faithfully, while Matthew often rearranges the material to create thematic groupings or discourses. For instance, sayings like the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20–23) and the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4) appear in separate contexts in Luke but are combined into the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) in Matthew.

This pattern aligns with how Matthew reorganizes stories from Mark (e.g., gathering scattered miracle accounts from Mark 1, 2, 4, and 5 into a unified collection in Matthew 8–9), suggesting he applied similar editorial freedom to Q.

Matthew appears to modify Q material more extensively to align with his theological emphases, such as the importance of Jewish Law, whereas Luke’s changes are typically less pronounced. This is inferred from how both evangelists handle their other shared source (Mark): Matthew alters Markan stories more often than Luke does, implying a similar approach to Q. Influential scholars like B. H. Streeter have argued that Luke’s arrangement better reflects Q’s original order, a position that remains foundational in modern Gospel studies. Goodacre of course is the primary advocate against the existence of Q.