[after Luke 10:1-17]
When Jesus sent us, who were seventy,
out to bring His Good News to every place
and region to which He Himself would go,
He asked our brother, Matthew, to compile
and organize a set of preaching notes;
that on the details, none should disagree.
Matthew has quite a polished writing style
(as those who browse the document will know).
Speaking in fields and homes, on hills and boats,
Jesus proclaimed an age of joyful Grace
in terms nobody could misunderstand.
This message we proclaimed throughout the land
and even demons fled at our command
in Jesus Christ's name, spoken faithfully.
Starward
[jlc]
Author's Notes/Comments:
Q is a scholarly construct, a document no one has ever seen, and presumably the first collection of Jesus' Words that are common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not the Gospel of Mark. I once engaged in an email debate with an emininent Q scholar who asserted these assumptions: that Q was compiled and used by a community of Christians who are not represented in Scripture; that these Christians had no interest in Jesus' message of Salvation, but only in the social and eschatological preaching; that these Christians were primarily local to the Holy Land; and that their theology was suppressed intentionally by a majority of Christians, presumably those in the Pauline churches. Occam's Razor, which was dominant in the History department where I studied, states that the hypothesis with the least amount of assumptions is most likely the corret one. So, in the email debate, I suggested to the eminent Q scholar that Q was simply preaching notes provided to the Seventy to create a uniform presentation of the Gospel . . . a single assumption, deriving its foundation from Scripture. The eminent scholar refused to reply, and subsequently blocked my e-mail.
I have written a couple of other poems about Q. I wrote this one while reading A. T. Robertson's commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew; during which reading I became convinced that Matthew had been the organizer of Q for the use of the Seventy.
