The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News

by James M. Robinson

We all know the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but what was the gospel of Jesus? That is, what was the original "good news" the first disciples heard from Jesus? What did Jesus really say that started the dramatic movement in Galilee that grew to become the largest religion in the world? Jesus's original gospel has been lost from sight, hidden behind the version preferred by the church. We have put him on a pedestal, rather than walked in his footsteps. In The Gospel of Jesus , James M. Robinson, the preeminent expert on the earliest sources of information about Jesus, provides the primary texts in all their unvarnished honesty to get to the true historical message of Jesus -- what Robinson calls "a brittle, upsetting, comforting, challenging gospel." The Gospel of Jesus draws on a combination of the most ancient and authentic texts to reveal what Jesus really said and to illuminate what he may still have to say to us today. Robinson addresses such provocative questions Drawing on the earliest Gospel, Mark, plus the source for Matthew and Luke, known as "Q," as well as from Jewish sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient extra-biblical Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, Robinson not only reconstructs the good news Jesus preached and practiced two thousand years ago, but shows how relevant his message still is -- and how we can apply it to our lives today. The Gospel of Jesus offers one of the most authentic and stirring accounts ever written of the message preached by the figure whose followers today number more than two billion.

Genres: Religion, History, Theology

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

James McConkey Robinson (born June 30, 1924) is Professor Emeritus of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. He is a member of the Jesus Seminar and arguably the most prominent Q and Nag Hammadi library scholar of the 20th century. He is also a major contributor to The International Q Project, acting as an editor for most of their publications. Particularly, he laid the ground for John S. Kloppenborg's foundational work into the compositional history of Q, by arguing its genre as an ancient wisdom collection.

Reviews

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robinson has done here what I started doing in a half-hearted way based on Julian Baggini’s book “The Godless Gospel”. It was an attempt to find what Jesus actually preached. What did he say as opposed to all the other stuff about what his disciples or parents were doing. And most of us are aware that biographies written 30 or 50 years after the person was around (like the accepted Gospels) usually “gild the lily” or don’t tell the whole story. And we know that in the case of the Gospel of Luke, that it was written by somebody of the Paul faction who had their own take on Jesus message (supposedly given direct to Paul by divine revelation)......and he never even met Jesus. We know also that the earliest versions of the Gospels were different in parts to what we have in out Gospels today. Presumably the earlier versions are more accurate.
Leaving all this aside, I’m really impressed with what Robinson has done here in terms or reconstituting the lost “Sayings of Jesus”....the legendary “Q” document that apparently was foundational to the accepted Gospels and even to some (like the “Gospel of Thomas”) that never made it into the final list. Presumably, this is the closest we are ever likely to get to knowing what Jesus actually said.
The following are extracts from Robinson’s book where I let him speak for himself:
INTRODUCTION THE FOCUS ON JESUS’ GOSPEL
Jesus’ favourite idiom for God in action was the “kingdom of God.” A better translation might be the “reign of God” or “God reigning.” This was not a common idiom of his day, to judge by the Jewish texts of his time that have survived, for the idiom is surprisingly rare. Apparently it was Jesus who first made it the central idiom for his message.
The human dilemma is, in large part, that we are each other’s fate. We become the tool of evil that ruins another person as we look out for ourselves, having long abandoned any youthful idealism we might once have cherished. But if we each would cease and desist from pushing the other down to keep ourselves up, then the vicious cycle would be broken. Society would become mutually supportive rather than self-destructive. This is what Jesus was up to.
Jesus’ message was simple, for he wanted to cut straight through to the point: trust God to look out for you by providing people who will care for you, and listen to him when he calls on you to provide for them. God is somebody you can trust, so give it a try. [I’m not sure that thi actually works in practice].
Jesus found his role models for such godly living in the world of nature around him.....This utopian vision of a caring God was the core of what Jesus had to say and what he himself put into practice.
We should not carry money while bypassing the poor or wear a backpack with extra clothes and food while ignoring the cold and hungry lying in the gutter.....Part of God reigning in Jesus’ day was helping the sick, the invalids of that day, with whatever medical assistance was available in Galilee at the time....Healings took place because God was doing the healing. [I found myself wondering whether any of the early Christians actually practiced any sort of nursing or medicine ...or was it all just faith healing?] God was reigning in this new kind of human society Jesus was calling into being—
John the Baptist grimly predicted the end of the world, an “apocalypse,” but Jesus did not. Rather, he sought to focus attention on trusting God for today’s ration of life, and on hearing God’s call to give now a better life to neighbours, indeed to enemies.
Jesus himself made no claim to lofty titles or even to divinity. Indeed, to him, a devout Jew, claiming to be God would have seemed blasphemous! He claimed “only” that God spoke and acted through him.
People do not [now] do what he said not simply because of the shift in cultural conditions (“ times have changed”), but ultimately because people do not trust God as Jesus did (in spite of claims to having Christian faith).......This is what is most unsettling about finding out what Jesus had to say—you discover that you do not really want to “walk in his footsteps”!
In concentration camps, cells of a few selfless people who could really trust each other, and who were hence willing to give an extra portion of their meager food and other necessities of life to the most needy among them, have turned out to have a better chance of survival than did individuals looking out only for themselves. [Well this is what Robinson claims but I recall reading in “Man’s search for Meaning”, by Viktor Frankl, about his experiences in the German Concentration camps, that the best, most generous people, didn’t survive].
He [Jesus] grappled with the basic issues of human existence, which have not changed and with which each generation, each culture, including ours, has to grapple. [Food, health, clothing, survival]. ....His basic issue, still basic today, is that most people have solved the human dilemma for themselves at the expense of everyone else, putting them down so as to stay afloat themselves.
ONE: THE LOST GOSPEL OF JESUS
The Gospel of Jesus........The title refers to the gospel that was Jesus’ own message in Galilee during a very brief period, probably no more than a year, before his crucifixion.
Jesus’ own gospel has been lost from sight, hidden behind the gospel of the church.
The primary source for knowing Jesus is to be found in the pithy and memorable sayings he used to move his listeners to trust in God enough to go into action.
These oral traditions moved from Aramaic into the more literate Greek and came to be written into Gospels, which were ultimately preserved.
To gain admission to the canon, Gospels were attributed to apostles (Matthew and John) or to those dependent on apostles for their information (Mark and Luke). But today, these persons are not thought to have been the actual authors.
From very early on there were two “denominations” in Christianity—each with its own Gospel. The success of the gentile mission of Paul and Barnabas had resulted in the decision at the Jerusalem Council, held around 50 C.E., to admit uncircumcised gentile converts to Christianity. But to avoid mixing Christian Gentiles with Christian Jews, which would make the Christian Jews ceremonially impure in Jewish terms, the Christian Gentiles were to form a separate branch of Christianity. This gentile church wrote up its traditions about Jesus and thus produced the Gospel of Mark as its Gospel. [But Paul was busy writing various missives to his churches as early as 51 AD...so was “first to press’]
The “Sayings Gospel” Q was written for a Jewish-Christian audience. It includes derogatory statements about Gentiles like those that were no doubt common in the Aramaic-speaking Jewish villages:......The narrative Gospels do not seem to have been composed in a community of persons who actually heard Jesus speak......But the sayings of the Sayings Gospel Q—of course not all of them, but the oldest layer—do go back to the community of those who had heard and remembered what Jesus had said. Indeed, they preserved them not just as nostalgic memories of a past leader, but rather as the true message that they continued to announce in Jesus’ name.
The Sayings Gospel Q makes Jesus’ role as faith healer clear in the narration of the healing of the centurion’s boy, and his role as exorcist clear in the exorcism initiating the Beelzebul controversy.....Not only are stories presenting Jesus as faith healer and as exorcist prominent in the narrative Gospels; so are dramatic scenes presenting him as providing food for hungry masses.
No copies of Q survived. The Sayings Gospel Q has been lost for a very long time!
The first chapters of Acts do describe the Jerusalem church, but just in order to have them validate Paul’s gentile church. The rest of Acts is the success story of Paul’s gentile mission.
Luke-Acts seems quite consciously to be playing down the Jewish Christian Q movement.
The continuation of Jesus’ ministry by the Q community is not visible in Acts, which focuses instead on the gentile mission led by Paul: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. [But there is evidence elsewhere that this Nazarean branch of Christianity, drawing on the “Sayings” document and other writings.....survived elsewhere in the Middle East...Especially in Syria and Iraq...and apparently In (what is now) Saudi Arabia and Yemen].
After the Roman armies had marched through Galilee and Judea and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, Judaism was of course in terrible disarray. The very question of its survival was at stake. The Q community, as a part of the Judaism of the day, was caught up in this dilemma.....When the temple that they all claimed was destroyed, the Jewish leaders came together and merged all these parties into a unified Judaism, which soon became the rabbinic Judaism out of which modern Judaism emerged......As a result, these individual groups disappeared from history, among them the Christian Jews who had composed the Sayings Gospel Q.
The most prominent such cluster [of teachings] is what is called the Sermon, though that is really a misnomer, since it is not assumed to be a speech Jesus made on a given occasion. Rather, it is an early collection of Jesus’ sayings into what was no doubt considered to be the core of his message.....Matthew enlarged the Sermon by including in it the most important other old clusters, such as the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the certainty of the answer of prayer,
TWO: THE SAYINGS GOSPEL Q
Since the Gospel of Matthew was rooted in the Q community, it often continued Q’s language more faithfully than did the gentile Christian Gospel of Luke. But since the Gospel of Luke did not come from a congregation still making use of the Sayings Gospel Q, it had less need to update the Q text and hence often has the older reading.
[Robinson goes to considerable lengths to prove that he and collaborators have done a good job in extracting the Q text from the Narrative Gospels and some of the other holy books like the Gospel of Thomas. I found him pretty convincing and I’m impressed by his knowledge and thoroughness].
THREE: JESUS WAS A GALILEAN JEW
Since the New Testament is a gentile Christian book, we probably do not realize just how pervasive his Jewish lifestyle was in actual practice,..... Jesus’ mother tongue was Aramaic, for Hebrew was no longer spoken colloquially by the Jewish population at that time.
It is not very probable that the son of a carpenter in an Aramaic-speaking village in Galilee would have learned to read and write....Nazareth has been calculated to have been a small hamlet of, at most, a couple hundred inhabitants........Hence it is not even clear whether Nazareth had a synagogue with a school in which Jesus could have learned enough Hebrew to read the Jewish scriptures.
The striking thing about Jesus’ acumen is that it is based more on his observation of nature than on the Hebrew scriptures
Almost nothing has survived of the Galilean Aramaic of Jesus’ time except for the few expressions of Jesus since the Aramaic-speaking population was largely illiterate.
But thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now have an overwhelming mass of Jewish texts of the first two centuries before the Christian era and the first century of the Christian era......Copies of almost all of the Hebrew scriptures have turned up in the jars found in the caves, and these copies are about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copies known before!.....Perhaps the most important result of half a century of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls in relation to Jesus is the fact that the scrolls are not very much like the teachings of Jesus, especially where it counts. This calls for some explanation.
Jesus’ sayings are, however, dominated by two idioms that have engrossed the attention of scholars: the “son of man” and the “kingdom of God.” Jesus never defined either term; his failure to do so is explained by assuming they were concepts so common in that day that they called for no explanation—
But neither term plays an important role in the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Gospels in the New Testament are all documents of the gentile church, and hence do not go into great detail about the many Jewish practices of daily life to which Jesus of course conformed......Matthew even presents Jesus limiting his disciples’ activities to Judaism:
The massive conversion of Gentiles to the Christian movement did not occur during Jesus’ lifetime. It was left to Paul to find a way to accomplish that.
number of Gentiles. They went to Jerusalem to seek approval. So they took with them a test case, Titus, who was a member of the Antioch church, though he was a Gentile, indeed an
One may recall that Peter himself had needed to be pushed into accepting his first Gentile convert, Cornelius, and then Peter had to persuade the unwilling Christian Jews in Jerusalem to agree. Obviously it was extremely difficult to break with the divinely sanctioned Jewish custom.
FOUR: WHAT WE DO AND DO NOT KNOW ABOUT JESUS
[Jesus] really was a first-century Galilean Jew. Hence, he did not address directly the issues of major importance to us, at least not in the language of our own cultural context. To us, he was not even politically correct.
Actually, if we could light upon a wealth of information about Jesus as a young Galilean, it might do no more than document the pervasive extent to which Jesus shared the lack of knowledge, indeed much of the misinformation, of his day and age.
FIVE: JESUS WAS CONVERTED BY JOHN
Jesus was one of those common people who went out to John. He obviously believed John’s message, for he underwent John’s rite of initiation symbolizing his message: that one should end one’s life in the evil society and begin a new life for the new world
His—and their—basic problem was this: After the renunciation...Jesus went directly to the people with the good news of a lifestyle underwritten by God himself—his “gospel,” to which the present book is dedicated
The last resort of Jesus’ followers does seem to have been to turn to the Gentiles.
This step had been taken rather readily by Paul, but the Galilean disciples of Jesus himself, represented by the Q community that became the Matthean community, seemed to have held out as long as they could,
SIX: JESUS’ LIFESTYLE UNDERWRITTEN BY GOD HIMSELF
A result of such archaizing tendencies on his part, Luke’s version of Q’s mission instructions is nearer to the Sayings Gospel Q, and hence to Jesus himself, than are the mission instructions of the other Gospels.
SEVEN: JESUS’ TRUST IN GOD
For Jesus, God is in charge of nature, and on all sides is showing how he is—and how his children should be—kind to all, to the bad as well as to the good.
In the Gospel of Matthew the “kingdom of God” is usually referred to as the “kingdom of heaven,” leading them to think that the kingdom is in heaven—something one can experience only in the afterlife or at the end of time. But Jesus was talking about God reigning in the here and now.....As a result of God reigning in the here and now, the people of the Q community thought they were already “in” the kingdom:
EIGHT: JESUS’ VIEW OF HIMSELF
The Sayings Gospel Q never uses the title “Christ.”......It is clear that he did not use the title of himself....The “young woman” of the Hebrew text becomes “virgin” in the Greek translation used by Christians.....At his baptism, a voice from heaven calls out: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. ......This notion ended up as the heresy of adoptionism, which maintained that Jesus became God’s Son only when God adopted him at his baptism.
The Gospel of John forestalled the same problem by identifying Jesus with God from the very beginning of it all:
Once the Roman Empire became Christian, calling Jesus “Son of God” functioned in that wrong way. The power of the Christian emperor of the Byzantine Empire rested on his claim to be the delegate on earth of that foreboding Son of God.....This is all the more ironic, indeed tragic, since he seems to have used the title “son of God” in the very reverse meaning, and not just of himself, but also of his followers
TEN: THE GOSPEL OF JESUS AND THE GOSPEL OF PAUL
The core of Jesus' teaching is what we are familiar with under the title Sermon on the Mount. Yet Paul did not explicitly ascribe this teaching to Jesus......in Paul's presentation, it stands in its own right:....”Bless those who persecute you..etc.,”..... Yet Paul was more learned in the scriptures than was Jesus
Jesus' message of God reigning, which his disciples had resumed proclaiming after his death, did not create a mass movement within Judaism. Quite the contrary, the number of disciples decreased over the coming generation. Jesus' disciples actually underwent intra-Jewish persecution:
Apparently the only way Paul could make sense of Jesus' terrible death on the cross was to think of a loving but angry God needing in this way to avenge humanity's disobedience. This is why Paul could focus his message so pointedly:...... Paul's gospel was:.....Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.
[But actually], Jesus' message was not a new law....... Of course it was not Paul's gospel of "Christ crucified," but Jesus' own gospel of the kingdom of God: God reigning for and through people who listened to what Jesus had to say.
EPILOGUE WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Where, after all, [in the Gospel of Jesus] is "the saving work of Christ": dying for our sins, rising on the third day, appearing to the apostles resurrected from the dead? These are, after all, the gospel about Jesus, which you, understandably enough, believe and cherish. But if you really are committed to Jesus, then you should be committed to the gospel of Jesus, which is what I have written this book to try to help you see and understand:
What's my overall take on the book? I'm really impressed. An excellent bit of scholarship. Five stars from me.

[Rick Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robinson explores the relationship of the Q document to Jesus' original preaching and the faith of Jewish Christianity. He argues that when, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., Jewish Christianity was absorbed into the Gentile church, the original Gentile gospel (Mark) was fused with Q by two different evangelists, one writing for a thoroughly Gentile faith community (Luke), and the other for one that perpetuated a more Jewish perspective (Matthew). He presents his case well.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say that the approach Robinson takes made me consider what Jesus, the man, really gave his followers. I enjoyed it immensely even though the man needs to edit his use of the exclamation point. Nothing is that exciting!

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News is a profound academic work by James M. Robinson. Prof. Robinson was a scholar specializing in the New Testament and the Nag Hammadi codices. In this book, Robinson attempts to explain and uncover the so-called "Gospel of Jesus." Before addressing potential concerns among Christian believers, it’s important to clarify that the "Gospel of Jesus" refers to the sayings attributed directly to Jesus during His ministry in Galilee, rather than the narratives penned by His apostles or followers.

The main topic explored in the book is the synoptic problem, which refers to the shared sources used by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that are absent in Mark. One proposed solution is the Q (Quelle, meaning "source") Gospel, representing the oral tradition of Jesus’ sayings. Prof. Robinson reconstructs the theoretical Q Gospel by analyzing shared verses unique to Matthew and Luke while undertaking linguistic work to translate these Greek verses into the Aramaic or Hebrew that Jesus likely spoke. However, it’s crucial to note that the Q Gospel presented here is not verbatim but rather a theoretical reconstruction.

A central focus of the Q Gospel is not on the divinity of Jesus Christ but rather on His human teachings during His ministry. As such, the Q Gospel offers a more secular perspective on Jesus' life. While it includes His sayings and actions, it also explores Jewish practices reflected in the Q source. I found it particularly interesting how Robinson explains the Q Source as a representation of the lost oral traditions practiced by the Jewish-Christian sect. He contrasts this with the Gospels of John and Mark, which lean more toward Gentile Christian perspectives.

Beyond the Gospels themselves, Robinson delves into the divergence between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, exploring how each Gospel reflects its source of inspiration. He also includes discussions on aspects of Jesus’ life not covered in the canonical Gospels, offering theoretical interpretations. Moreover, there’s a fascinating comparison between the teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus, as well as references to non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

The book also touches on the dogmatic ideas Jesus preached during His ministry, presenting a perspective that challenges Church dogma. As such, it’s important to approach this book as an academic work rather than a piece of religious scripture.

While I found parts of the book repetitive, I appreciated Robinson’s discussion of the divergence between Jewish-Christian sects and Gentiles. The exploration of the Gospels’ sources and their connections to these sects was particularly enlightening. However, the Q Gospel itself was somewhat disappointing for me; it felt derivative of Matthew and Luke and incomplete as a standalone work. Despite this, the historical, biblical, and linguistic effort that went into reconstructing the Q Gospel is remarkable.

In the end, while the book has its flaws, it is an excellent academic exploration of early Christianity. I’d rate it 4/5.

[Kat Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full Disclosure, I made it to page 147 or so and called it quits. I appreciated Robinson's thorough knowledge and research of ancient Christian writings. I appreciated his devotion to finding out what Jesus's true mission was by reading between the lines, studying the Q writings, and taking into consideration that the writer's of the Bible did not actually know Jesus himself. I like that kind of Christian scholar. It's academic. It's real. No blind literal worship of the Bible as it's written. That all being said, I got the point by page 148, but this is a personal decision, not a slight on the book itself. This isn't a subject matter I find interesting for long. I'd certainly recommend this book to someone who is.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really complicated and hard to follow, but worth a dig to see what the Q source material says and how it compares to other gospels. The author tends to end too many sentences in exclamation points! It does not fit the subject, and seems too emphatic for a scholarly work. I think this is personal to him! So the scholarly part went out the window. A lot! I think he wrote in the introduction that “God was the type of person who...” and I had to laugh; since when is God a person? I thought that was at least clear in all our world views!
! ! ! Huston Smith, a devout Christian, wrote some beautiful analyses of his religion that made me rethink my aversion to it, but this did not. !

[Mary Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a book that gets straight to the history and message of the original 4 gospels, this is excellent. It's short, direct, readily accessible, and well indexed and referenced.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well researched and presents a great introduction to Q. Definitely meant to be read a little bit at a time to fully appreciate the historical tracings.

[Andres · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Gospel of Jesus is garbage. I would even take it a step further and call it poison garbage. Not only does it have little to offer in value but it seems to subvert its reader. James M. Robinson is a New Testament scholar who speaks with authority on known facts about the creation of scripture. However he weaves facts and opinions together in a way that only people familiar with the material can catch. To the uninformed I believe they may leave feeling that Jesus is not who he says he is. Which is exactly what James M. Robinson wants. I couldn't recommend this book to anyone unfortunately.

[Richmond Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

True gospel

Forget the watchful God who provides atonement through his son on the cross. The rain of compassion falls on all of us as it did on Jesus. Like a budding tree he grew in love of God and so can we, if we share the rain of compassion with others, even those we don't like. The rest of the Gospel story is fiction made up by humans who want to use fear to keep us in line. We need to love them, too, unconditionally.