The Four Gospels and the Q Source

When we look at the gospels of Matthew and Luke we can see obvious parallels. That is due to the fact that Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark for most of their gospels. Matthew's gospel contains ninety percent of Mark's work. Luke's gospel contains fifty percent of Mark's work. This seems to suggest that Mark was their common source.

But how about the other 10% of Matthew's gospel and the other 50% of Luke's gospel that didn't derive its information from the Marcan Source (Mark's gospel)? Scholars have considered that there is a 2nd source that Matthew and Luke used to obtain the information to create their gospels. The basis is a questionable document called "Q." "Q" is the abbreviated form of the German word "Quelle" which means "source."

Instead of identifying Q sayings by verses in both Matthew and Luke, (because the sayings in Q are direct parallels to Matthew and Luke) scholars identify the sayings with Luke only because Luke appears to preserve the order of the "original" document. In other words, identifying Q sayings with Luke makes more sense.

But care needs to be taken that modern interpretations aren't simply projected onto the material. Just because we think in terms of early apocalyptic literature doesn't mean that it really happened that way, or that early Christians thought in precisely those terms. As we know from Paul's later letters, by roughly the year sixty-five, Christians started wondering if Jesus would return as some had thought. This makes the timeframe for Q of more than sixty-five years less likely. Some believe that the story of the struggle with the devil in Q makes reference to a situation in 39 when there was a huge demonstration against the putting up of a statue of the Emperor Caligula in Jerusalem [1]. If so, the Q material probably came into being after that time.

The Q material in Matthew and Luke is set in differing contexts, but in about the same order. This is a healthy argument against the scholars who (like Michael Goulder [2]) feel that there was no Q source and that Matthew and Luke either derived this material from somewhere else or created it themselves. The undeniably similar order strengthen the conclusion that Luke and Matthew weren't using unique sources, but the same one.

One example is:

Mark 4.25 is used in Matthew 13.12 and Luke 8.18. A similar version from Q also occurs in Matthew 25.29 and Luke 19.26.

Overall, many suggest that Luke's interpretation of Q preserves the original more accurately than Matthew's. Some reasons why the discovery of Q is so essential bear summarizing in the light both of conservatives continuing skepticism about the correctness of the information we know about Jesus, and of basic ideas presented that everything in the Bible actually occurred exactly as it is written there.

If one agrees that Q is a now-lost written record of "what Jesus really said", then 'Q' can be considered as a long-missing record of the things that Jesus actually said.

•The Q collection can be validly separated from the gospel text.

Several other assumptions can be reasonably drawn from the evidence [4]:

•The material within Q indicates that it had high status in the early Jewish-Christian communities based in Northern Galilee. The people looked to it for help in life-issues.

•Each of the 4 gospels (not including Thomas) were designed to get across a particular theological theme. Q is not like that. It is a collection lacking coherence. It fails to show literary design and is basically raw in form.

•Because Q is a collection, any indications we can pick up from it regarding the what was going on in the community which gave birth to it are likely to mirror the social context of the Q community.

What we know today about Jesus is therefore subject to all the strengths and limitations of ordinary human processes by which information is shared from person to person.

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[1] The Historical Jesus, G Theissen & A Merz, SCM Press, 1998

[2] Midrash and Lection in Matthew, SPCK, 1974.

[3] The New Testament, N Perrin & D C Duling, Harcourt, 1974

[4] After Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus, J L Reed, Trinity Press, 2002

The Universal Life Church Seminary, an online seminary, offers a course on the search for the Historical Jesus, as well as a wide variety of other classes for your edification.