This book makes an extremely important contribution to the schol-
arly reconstruction of Christian origins. That is because Michael L.
Humphries has identified a critical unit of textual material lying at
the otherwise uncertain overlap between the two earliest texts we
have for the Jesus schools. These texts are the Gospel of Mark, the
first narrative "life" of Jesus, and the nonnarrative collection of the
"teachings of Jesus" known as Q. Since both texts contain variants
of an anecdote about Jesus and "Beelzebul," one can be sure that a
very early, shared snippet of Jesus lore is in hand. Thus this pericope
is important as a documentation for two "memories" of Jesus in two
branches of the Jesus movement at particular moments of the earli-
est histories for which we have any evidence.

The Beelzebul pericope is important for another reason, however.
It contains the earliest saying on record about the "kingdom of
God," the only concept that we know of used by the Jesus schools
to register their ideology and self-designation. Humphries sees this
conjunction of textual and conceptual traditions as a most fortu-
nate circumstance for scholars interested in Christian origins. He is
right. If one could find a way to control the analysis of these two
texts, two or possibly three critical moments of social formation and
mythmaking in the early Jesus schools will have been determined.

This is exactly what Humphries has been able to do. His study is
a stunning demonstration of the knowledge to be gained by careful
and competent text-critical historiography. He discovers that the two
variants of the anecdote share a form of speech common to the cul-
ture of the time. Moreover, the Greeks had a name for this form of
speech, calling it a chreia (meaning "useful") and using it for exer-
cises in rhetorical education. Voila. There was even a standard exer-
cise on the chreia called an "elaboration," and Humphries finds that

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