Johannes Weiss

[1] He was held in the highest regard by his contemporaries, and subsequent scholarship has continued to recognize his wide influence.

According to Weiss, the "Kingdom of God" was Jesus' understanding of an imminent end to history, and all continuous ethical teachings were additions made by the early Church to make Jesus' teaching relevant when the end of the world did not come about immediately.

[2] As a corollary, Weiss believed that the authentic teachings of the historical Jesus would be inapplicable to those who did not hold his first-century apocalyptic worldview.

Weiss also developed form criticism in its application to the New Testament, a theme expanded upon by Rudolf Bultmann and many other scholars.

[4] Many hold that Q stood for "Quelle", the German word for "source", but some recent scholarship indicates that the letter Q was chosen arbitrarily.