Description
Book SynopsisExamining the hypothetical earliest layer of Jesus’ sayings known as Q, Sara Parks argues that Jesus deliberately crafted parabolic teachings regarding the basileia of God to appeal to both male and female adherents. For a century after Q, vestiges of gender-paired teachings popped up in multiple independent texts related to Jesus, from Mark to Paul to the Synoptics and John—making it more likely that this inclusion of women originated with Jesus himself. In this book, Parks engages the divided scholarship on the meaning of gendered pairs for an evaluation of the gender politics of Q, arguing that even though Q’s peculiar rhetoric of gender equality was an innovation, it was also a product of its time, as evidenced in other contemporaneous texts which struggled with ambiguous equalities, from Philo to Musonius Rufus to Joseph and Aseneth. In addition, she shows that Jesus’ rhetoric of gender, as remembered in Q constitutes some of the earliest evidence for the study of first-century Jewish women, and women in Christian origins.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Methods and Mapping Chapter 2: Q and the Q People Chapter 3: What are They Saying about the Gendered Pairs in Q? Chapter 4: Gendered Pairs in Q: Taxonomy and Analysis Chapter 5: Were There Gendered Parable Pairs before Jesus? Chapter 6: Gender Pairs in Contemporaneous and Later Texts Chapter 7: Conclusions and Next Directions Appendix: The Q Gender Pairs in English
