Jesus and Addiction to Origins - Toward an Anthropocentric Study of Religion - Willi Braun
6. The Sayings Gospel Q and the Making of an Early Jesus Group
Jesus and Addiction to Origins - Toward an Anthropocentric Study of Religion - Willi Braun
Willi Braun [+]
University of Alberta
Willi Braun is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Classics and the Program in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the former President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion and also the past President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Although a specialist in the writings and social formations of earliest Christianities in the Roman empire, his work also focuses on the methods and theories of the academic study of religion itself. He has published and presented his work widely and served as editor of a variety of books and journals, including his longtime role as editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion; most recently, he co-edited Reading J. Z. Smith: Interviews and Essay (Oxford, 2018).
Description
Keeping in mind the methodological thicket that surrounds the project of redescribing early Christianities, this chapter represents an initial stalking exercise to consider the conceptual and methodological issues when scholars understand Greco-Roman “schools” as arenas of socio-mythic formation, in order to see how the focus on “school” might help us to qualify the categories of mythmaking and social formation when it comes to understanding the Q document and the early communities that may have produced it.