For anyone who wants to get at the original teaching of Jesus without the agendas of specific early Christian communities, this is the book to buy. I love Jesus and his wisdom, but I recognize that the NT is the record of what men thought about Jesus and not so much what he actually said. Q is comprised of the teachings of Jesus extracted from Matthew and Luke. The evidence that these wrtiers drew from a written document consisting of Jesus sayings is, to me at leas, irrefutable. Q is the best attempt of very able scholars to identify which teachings in Matthew and Luke come from that lost source. This is the pure gospel of Jesus himself.

I'm not a big fan of "Q" or "Q" studies. I believe that those who pursue this line of inquiry have gone well beyond the evidence, not in their suggestion that a sayings source existed prior to the composition of the canonical Gospels (even Papias essentially says as much when he speaks of Matthew recording the Lord's "logia," his sayings), not even in their reconstructions of the source (though I believe a great deal more humility is warranted in speaking about what Q did not include, since we only know what parts of the Q tradition were accepted into both Matthew and Luke and not what parts were accepted into one but not the other, or into neither), but in their claims about the kind of faith and the kind of Christianity that "Q" represented. This is especially apparent in Kloppenborg's position that there was a Christianity in the pre-Marcan (etc) period that did not focus on Jesus' passion and resurrection, which, I believe, the evidence does not BEGIN to support (see comment on reconstructing "Q," taken in tandem with the earliest evidence of early Christian preaching in the traditions used by Paul, e.g., 1 Cor 15:3-7 and Phil 2:5-11).

That said, a short primer on "Q" by THE leader in the field is a great way to get into "Q" studies and understand what the issues are surrounding its existence, reconstruction, and import for thinking about early Christianity. We do not grow by wrestling only with writers with whom we agree, and I have personally learned a great deal from "Q" scholarship -- even if this learning came through disagreement, re-thinking of the evidence "Q" scholars bring forward, and formulating alternative views. And at the closeout price? What a deal!

PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. I am greatly disappointed that CBD would sell such a horrible book. Just the description given for it should make you mad "Though this document has never been found... etc." SERIOUSLY? This throws a truckload of doubt on the word of God. This makes me sick.