If Mark was the first Gospel written, as  I tried to explain in my previous post, and it was used by both Matthew and Luke, how do we explain that there are many places in Matthew and Luke that agree with each but are not in Mark.? They didn’t get these passages from Mark, but if they agree word for word in places, there must be copying.  What are they copying?  Welcome to the world of Q!

Q is the hypothetical source that scholars believe was used by Matthew and Luke to supplement the materials they got from Mark (“hypothetical” because it no longer survives – which is true, of course, of the vast majority of the earliest Christian writings).  The Q hypothesis was developed in the 19^th century and has been the dominant view of scholarship for the past century, but it has come under attack in recent years (as I mention below).  But it continues to be the most widely accepted hypothesis to help solve the Synoptic Problem, for reasons I’ll explain in a later post.

For now: here is what I say about Q in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 7^th ed (Oxford University Press).

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Once Mark is established as prior to Matthew and Luke, the Q hypothesis naturally suggests itself. Matthew and Luke have traditions not found in Mark; and in these traditions, they sometimes agree word for word. Whence do these other traditions come?

It is unlikely that one of the authors used Mark, that he added several passages of his own, and that his account then served as the source for the other. If this were the case, it would not be difficult to explain the phenomenon noted earlier—that those passages found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark are usually inserted by these other authors into a different sequence of Mark’s narrative. Why would an author follow the sequence of one of his sources, except for materials that are not found in his other one? It is more likely that these passages were drawn from another source that no longer exists, the source that scholars have designated as Q.

Many of you will know that some scholars are now disputing the existence of Q; Mark Goodacre, my friend, sometime guest-blogger, and colleague at cross-town rival Duke has been leading the charge. In a later post I’ll explain his views and why I do not find them persuasive.  For now I’ll stick with what is still the mainline judgment that there was a Q and that we can say some things about it.

Scholars who do agree that Q was a source for Matthew and Luke sometimes go overboard in claiming what we can know about it.  The reality is that – for one thing — we simply do not know the full extent or character of Q.  One popular and widespread view, for example, is that Q did not contain a Passion narrative but consisted entirely of sayings of Jesus, and that it was therefore very similar to the Gospel of Thomas: a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus without any stories of his deeds or experiences and no references to his death and resurrection.

That’s certainly possible, but we can’t know what was NOT in Q because our only evidence of what WAS in Q are passages where Matthew and Luke agree in material not found in Mark.  That means that if EITHER Matthew or Luke both chose not to copy something in Q, then we would have no way of knowing if a passage in Matthew not in Luke or a passage in Luke not in Matthew came from Q.  It may have – but since it wasn’t copied by both, we simply have no evidence one way or the other.

And so it is probably best for methodological purposes to define this source strictly as material shared by Matthew and Luke that is not also found in Mark. It is indeed striking that almost all of this material comprises sayings of Jesus. But there are at least two narratives involved: the full story of Jesus’ three temptations in the wilderness (Matt 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13; Mark has only a brief mention of the temptation, Mark 1:12–13) and the story of the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt 8:5–10; Luke 7:1–10).

Most scholars think that Q must have been a written document; otherwise it is difficult to explain such long stretches of verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke. It is not certain, however, that Matthew and Luke had Q in precisely the same form: they may have had it in slightly different editions. The same could be true of their other source, the Gospel of Mark.

Finally, most scholars are convinced that of the two Gospels that utilized Q, Luke is more likely than Matthew to have preserved its original sequence. This is chiefly because when Matthew used Mark, he often gathered together in one place stories scattered throughout his Markan source. As a much-noted example, Matthew assembled miracle stories dispersed throughout Mark chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5 into one large collection of miracles in Matthew 8–9. If this propensity for reorganizing similar kinds of stories was also at work in his treatment of Q, it would make sense that Matthew combined various sayings of Jesus scattered in different portions of Luke. The Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, for example, are in different sections of Luke (chaps. 6 and 11) but are joined together as part of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew (chaps. 5–6). It would make less sense to think that Luke arbitrarily disrupted this kind of unity. Luke’s version is therefore probably closer to the original sequence of stories in Q.

Among the materials that we can say were found in Q are some of the most memorable passages in the Gospels, including the following (for simplicity, verse references only from Luke are given):

• The preaching of John the Baptist (Luke 3:7–9, 16–17)
• The three temptations in the wilderness (Luke 4:1–13)
• The Beatitudes (Luke 6:20–23)
• The command to love your enemies (Luke 6:27–36)
• The command not to judge others (Luke 6:37–42)
• The healing of the centurion’s slave (Luke 7:1–10)
• The question from John the Baptist in prison (Luke 7:18–35)
• The Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4)
• The need for fearless confession in light of the coming judgment (Luke 12:2–12)
• The command not to worry about food and clothing (Luke 12:22–32)
• The parable of the unfaithful slave (Luke 12:39–48)
• Entering the kingdom through the narrow door (Luke 13:23–30)
• The parable of the great wedding feast (Luke 14:15–24)