My "Dangerous Idea"

Professor Jim Davila of Paleojudaica.com recently responded to a challenge for bibliobloggers to post "their one 'dangerous idea' for biblical studies." Being a biblioblogger wannabe myself (a biblioblogger is basically someone who blogs on the study of biblical and related texts) I thought I would submit my "dangerous idea":

The differentiation between Judaism and Christianity did not begin at the time of Jesus Christ's earthly life or afterward. The parting of ways between Judaism and proto-Christianity was already under way some time before Christ was born.

While attempting to find out if anybody else has conceived of my wild little idea, I learned that a scholar named Gabriele Boccaccini has written of what he calls "Enochic Judaism", apparently a parent community both of Essene Judaism and Christianity, and which parted ways from what he calls "Zadokite" Judaism, which had a closer connection to the Temple. Whether this relates to my "dangerous idea" I really don't know yet, since I haven't yet read Boccaccini. But I'm intrigued. Meanwhile, in my quest to master elementary Hebrew I've just been getting into the "absolute" and "construct" states and pronominal suffixes, so it'll be awhile before I can run with the big dogs of Biblical studies. Maybe by the time I've gathered the tools, someone will have already offered a compelling proof (or rebuttal) of my Dangerous Idea.

I like someone else's Dangerous Idea that "Q is a mirage". The Q Theory really isn't a bad theory. It's a very ingenious way of accounting for the fact that Matthew and Luke have lots of overlap besides the parts they share with Mark. But the Big Reason why people shouldn't be so dogmatic about Q is as simple as this: Nobody's ever found a manuscript of Q. There's an ancient tradition that Matthew is, in fact, the first Gospel written, and a number of scholars have been favorable to that theory lately. There's nothing like a missing primary source to tempt people to fill in the blanks themselves.