The Pastoral Purpose 83 Lord without the requisite matching actions might explain the almost total reluctance on the part of Q to apply it to Jesus. One Christological title that Q appears willing to own, albeit sparingly, is “Son of God”. In the context of the temptation story the title is used by the devil on two occasions to question Jesus status (Q 4,3.9), but for readers of this story such an identification as “Son of God” is not meant to be doubted. The second Q context which alludes to this title does not employ the full form, but simply has Jesus refer to himself as “Son” of his Father (Q 10,22). However, in both cases the use is a little unusual. In the first it is provocative. Discussing the conditional statement eij uiJo;" ei\ tou' qeou', Fleddermann notes, “[t]his clause raises immediately the question ‘Who is Jesus?’ by suggesting that Jesus is the Son of God” (7). Similarly the echoes of Johannine language in Q 10,21-22, have made commentators question how well the theological perspectives of this passage cohere with the rest of Q. Therefore, the three titles discussed, “Christ”, “Lord” and “Son of God”, offer little insight into the Christological understandings either of the author of Q or those for whom he was writing. 2. The Present Son of Man If the three titles mentioned above suffer from a paucity of use in Q, the same cannot be said for the title “Son of Man”. Connections have been noted between the concept of wisdom and references to Jesus as Son of Man. Tuckett comments upon the example of Q 7,35. He states, [t]he Wisdom saying in Q 7,35 is immediately preceded by the saying (v. 34) that it is as ‘Son of Man’ that Jesus is experiencing hostility to his failure to adopt an ascetic lifestyle (8). Thus there is recognition of the link between wisdom and the suffering Son of Man. Yet within the Q tradition there is another aspect to Son of Man Christology which revolves around the notion of the eschatological disclosure of the identity of this Son of Man figure. Hence, the term “Son of Man” is multivalent in Q. Thus, as Fleddermann observes, this is reflected in a two-stage Christology which builds upon the understanding of the two comings of the “Son of Man”: In the past Jesus came as the Son of Man to inaugurate the kingdom of God by his ministry of exorcising, healing and teaching, and through his life of faith, suffering and death. In the future Jesus will come as the eschatological Son of Man to save and to judge and to usher in the definitive manifestation of the kingdom (9). Such a distinction is helpful, but it raises the further question of the reason for Q formulating its Christology via this somewhat convoluted two-staged process. Fleddermann appears to allude to a partial answer to this question, although he does not explicitly raise the issue himself. He sees this split (7) FLEDDERMANN, Q: A Reconstruction and Commentary, 258. (8) C.M. TUCKETT, Christology and the New Testament. Jesus and His Earliest Followers (Edinburgh 2001) 196. (9) FLEDDERMANN, Q: A Reconstruction and Commentary, 130.