March 23, 2007

MINNEAPOLIS – Fortress Press is happy to announce the release of Jesus: According to Earliest Witness.

In these pages James M. Robinson, one of the premier scholars of the New Testament and the Sayings Gospel Q, asks what we can know of Jesus from what many believe was the earliest written source behind the Gospels.

Robinson explores the trajectories in orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism alike, from this early witness to the canonical Gospels and beyond. Surprising insights abound and the author includes an autobiographical essay charting the important currents in New Testament scholarship over the last fifty years. The book also includes a translation of Q.

Contents
• Introduction
• The Real Jesus of the Sayings Gospel Q
• The Image of Jesus in Q
• Jesus from Easter to Valentinus (or to the Apostles' Creed)
• Very Goddess and Very Man: Jesus' Better Self
• The Q Trajectory: Between John and Matthew via Jesus
• The Son of Man in the Sayings Gospel Q
• The Jesus of Q as Liberation Theologian
• The Critical Edition of Q and the Study of Jesus
• Jesus' Theology in the Sayings Gospel Q
• What Jesus Had to Say
• Theological Autobiography
• Appendix: The Sayings Gospel Q

"Over the years perhaps no one has reflected more sensitively and insightfully on the significance of Q for our understanding of earliest Christianity than James M. Robinson. This volume collects the best of Robinson on Q, from his early ‘Very Goddess, Very Man,' to the more recent ‘What Jesus Had to Say'-a series of classic essays by one of this generation's most creative minds. In these essays Robinson exhibits the broad-ranging historical exegesis for which he is so well-known, but also, with surprising candor, lays out what he thinks it all means and why it is so important to listen to the earliest remembered voice of Jesus." – Stephen J. Patterson, Professor of New Testament, Eden Theological Seminary.

"James M. Robinson is rightly credited with initiating and nurturing the modern study of the Sayings Gospel Q, the hypothetical source that lies behind much of the sayings material in Matthew and Luke. In these essays, the fruit of more than forty years of research, Robinson elaborates a portrait of the historical Jesus and his utopian vision of the Kingdom of God, consisting of reliance on God as birds and plants rely on God, and on a program of human sharing and debt forgiveness. Not since Adolf von Harnack's 1908 The Sayings of Jesus has Q been so deftly quarried to construct a compelling portrait of the historical Jesus." – John S. Kloppenborg, Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto.

James M. Robinson is Director of the International Q Project at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity and past Director of the Institute, as well as emeritus Professor of New Testament at Claremont Graduate University and past President of the Society of Biblical Literature. Among his many books are The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News (2005), The Sayings Gospel Q: Collected Essays (2005), A New Quest of the Historical Jesus and Other Essays (Fortress, 1983), and (as co-editor) The Sayings Gos-pel Q in Greek and English (Fortress, 2002), The Sayings of Jesus (Fortress, 2001), and The Critical Edition of Q (Fortress, 2000). Robinson is also the gen-eral editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (4th ed., 1996) and of the critical edition of The Coptic Gnostic Library (1975-95).

Jesus: According to Earliest Witness, By James M. Robinson, Item Number: 978-0-8006-3862-7, Spec: 6" x 9," paperback, 272 pages, Price: $20.00/CAN $24.00, Pub Date: February 2007, Publisher: Fortress Press.

To order Jesus: According to Earliest Witness please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the Web site at http://www.augsburgfortress.org/.

Fortress Press