Pre-existence in the Synoptic Tradition

Abstract

In the Synoptic tradition the idea of pre-existence is always implied, never discussed explicitly. The two elements in the tradition which seem to imply pre-existence most clearly are the themes of Wisdom and the Son of Man. We shall therefore concentrate our attention on these themes as they occur in the different layers of the tradition. Q Before we take up the concepts of Wisdom and the Son of Man, certain preliminary considerations about the nature of Q as a whole will ease the way of understanding. W. D. Davies has shown, by careful argument, that Q is dominated by a sense of eschatological crisis. Its teaching was preserved and handed down not in catechetical channels but rather, The Church had preserved a tradition of the ethical teaching of Jesus which it regarded as in itself part of the crisis wrought in his coming . To put it yet more forcibly, this teaching itself helped to constitute that crisis …[it] was preserved not merely as catechetically useful, and not only as radical demand, but as revelatory: it illumines the nature and meaning of the coming of the Kingdom as demand, which is the concomitant of the coming of the Kingdom as grace.