Diskusi lintas iman beberapa waktu ini, membuat saya bernostalgia membaca
bahan-bahan lama yang saya miliki dan mencari bahan-bahan baru – terutama dari
non muslim - sebagai tambahan. Di malam idul fitri (berarti sudah masuk tanggal
2 syawal) saya mendapatkan buku yang cukup mengejutkan, berjudul:
THE LOST GOSPEL: The Book of Q & Christian Origins, karya BURTON L. MACK ,
penerbit HarperSanFrancisco
Q (Quella) yang diyakini sebagai injil asli dan telah hilang, ternyata secara
perlahan dikonstruksi dari berbagai naskah injil naratif (Mark, Luke, dll.),
caranya - masih perlu saya baca teliti - tampaknya adalah dengan menyeleksi
kalimat-kalimat yang secara ilmiah diyakini sebagai benar-benar perkataan Isa
(Yesus). Hasilnya, ternyata cukup mengagetkan. Untuk lebih jelasnya, saya
kutipkan pernyataan Mack, seperti berikut. Semoga mencerahkan kita semua.
By reading Q carefully, it is possible to catch sight of those earliest
followers of Jesus. We can see them on the road, at the market, and at one
another's homes. We can hear them talking about appropriate behavior; we can
sense the spirit of the movement and their attitudes about the world. A sense
of purpose can be traced through subtle changes in their attitudes toward other
groups over a period of two or three generations of vigorous social
experimentation. It is a lively picture. And it is complete enough to
reconstruct the history that happened between the time of Jesus and the
emergence of the narrative gospels that later gave the Christian church its
official account of Christian beginnings.
The remarkable thing about the people of Q is that they were not Christians.
They did not think of Jesus as a messiah or the Christ. They did not take his
teachings as an indictment of Judaism. They did not regard his death as a
divine, tragic, or saving event. And they did not imagine that he had been
raised from the dead to rule over a transformed world. Instead, they thought of
him as a teacher whose teachings made it possible to live with verve in
troubled times. Thus they did not gather to worship in his name, honor him as a
god, or cultivate his memory through hymns, prayers, and rituals. They did not
form a cult of the Christ such as the one that emerged among the Christian
communities familiar to readers of the letters of Paul. The people of Q were
Jesus people, not Christians.
This discovery upsets the conventional picture of the origins of Christianity.
The popular conception, based on the portrayal of Jesus in the narrative
gospels, is that Jesus appeared as the Jewish messiah to reform the religion of
Judaism. He challenged the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, called the
people to repentance, and instructed his disciples to be leaders in a kingdom
of God about to be inaugurated. Marching to Jerusalem, Jesus then cleansed the
temple and announced its destruction, countered the Jewish authorities there,
and was crucified in keeping with a conflict of cosmic and apocalyptic
proportions between the Jews and God's plan for his kingdom. At first confused
following Jesus' death, the disciples regrouped when he appeared to them as the
resurrected Lord and Son of God. They then formed the first church in Jerusalem
and started two great Christian missions, one to the Jews and one to the
gentiles. They did this in the conviction
that the miracle of the resurrection was a sign that Jesus' proclamation of
the kingdom of God was true and that God's final judgment upon the world had
begun.
None of this is reflected in the sayings gospel Q. In Q there is no hint of a
select group of disciples, no program to reform the religion or politics of
Judaism, no dramatic encounter with the authorities in Jerusalem, no martyrdom
for the cause, much less a martyrdom with saving significance for the ills of
the world, and no mention of a first church in Jerusalem. The people of Q
simply did not understand their purpose to be a mission to the Jews, or to
gentiles for that matter. They were not out to transform the world or start a
new religion.
Q's challenge to the popular conception of Christian origins is therefore
clear. If the conventional view of Christian beginnings is right, how are we to
account for these first followers of Jesus? Did they fail to get his message?
Were they absent when the unexpected happened? Did they carry on in ignorance
or in repudiation of the Christian gospel of salvation? If, however, the first
followers of Jesus understood the purpose of their movement just as Q describes
it, how are we to account for the emergence of the Christ cult, the fantastic
mythologies of the narrative gospels, and the eventual establishment of the
Christian church and religion? Q forces the issue of rethinking Christian
origins as no other document from the earliest times has done.
Salam hangat
B. Samparan
_______________________________________________
Is-lam mailing list
[email protected]
http://server03.abangadek.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/is-lam
