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

Abstract

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