"Deftly written, this book reads like a good mystery, saving the payoff of Q's impact on Christianity for its final chapters." -- LIBRARY JOURNAL Burton Mack's The Lost Gospel, which finally presents the Book of Q to a public readership, impresses me as an immense clarification of Christian origins." -- HAROLD BLOOM, author of The Book of J Mack offers an earthy, colloquial translation of the Book of Q with its wisdom sayings, exhortations, parables and apocalyptic pronouncements. His portrayal of the early Jesus movement reveals a community based on fictive kinship without regard to class, gender, or ethnicity." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Serious discussion of Q, a collection of Jesus' sayings, has taken place mostly in academic circles. There is nothing substandard about Mack's scholarship, but this treatment has the added advantage of being accessible to average readers. Mack's thesis is that Q is the best record available for the first forty years of the various Jesus movements." -- BOOKLIST (American Library Association) A masterful analysis of the entire Q tradition... Its scope is large and its argument compelling." -- BIBLE REVIEW A powerful and persuasive analysis emphasizing this lost gospel's role in both the church politics of the first century and the scholarly politics of the twentieth." -- JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN, author of The Historical Jesus BURTON L. MACK is professor of New Testament at the School of Theology at Claremont and is author of A Myth of Innocence.