Finding the Shards #8
A discussion of the efforts to remove the sheen of the miraculous from the gospel accounts is not directly relevant to the discovery of Q. That is because Q was uncovered in the course of comparing the four gospels to see which may have been the earliest, not by any of the attempts to explain away the miracles. Nevertheless, because the furor over the miracles frequently drowned out the more laborious quest for the earliest gospel, this background helps clarify why it took so long to recognize Q. The raging battle over the miracles simply overwhelmed enlightenment scholars and resulted in the studies that created sensations. From John Locke's little book on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), through David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835), to Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), a book that summed up the century, the quest was the same: how to explain the miracles. Locke thought that, even though reports of miracles in general could not be believed, the miracles of Jesus may actually have happened because they were so unusual, unrepeatable, and unique. Others thought that the common people imagined the miracles because they were so infatuated with this special man. Strauss and others wrote thousands of pages explaining the miracles away as illusions, legends, and myths. Strauss noted that they accrued in the course of early Christian attempts to say how important Jesus' appearance had been. Thus preoccupied with such a quest, scholars found it difficult to concentrate on the question of which gospel was written first. All of the gospels seemed to have so many miracles. And getting rid of the miracles seemed to be highest on the list of priorities if one wanted to get to the life of the man as he really was.