Abstract:
The community of Q1 as prototype of the church in the New Testament The New Testament bears witness to a wide variety of communities, representing a spectrum of ideas and teachings about Jesus and the meaning of his life. In this article these communities are regarded as prototypes of churches which have a certain bearing on churches and their teachings today. The article aims to investigate communities behind Q as prototypes. It focuses on the community responsible for the first layer of Q material, with the intention of asking whether they might have constituted such a prototype of the church. To achieve this, the “kingdom of God” is studied as their symbolic universe. The result is that, while the Q1 community cannot be called “Christian” or “church” in the strict sense of the word, it challenges the church by representing the kingdom of God in a world of uncertainty, danger, and misuse of power.
