Q source
The Q source is a hypothesized written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings. Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's oral gospel traditions.
Q had been hypothesized by 1900 alongside Marcan priority. Some scholars have postulated that Q is actually a plurality of sources, some written and some oral. Others have attempted to determine the stages in which Q was composed. Despite the two-source hypothesis enjoying wide support, Q's existence has been increasingly questioned by alternative theories such as the Farrer and Matthean Posteriority hypotheses.
History
For centuries, biblical scholars followed the Augustinian hypothesis: that the Gospel of Matthew was the first to be written, Mark used Matthew in the writing of his, and Luke followed both Matthew and Mark in his. Nineteenth-century New Testament scholars who rejected Matthew's priority in favor of Marcan priority speculated that Matthew's and Luke's authors drew the material they have in common with the Gospel of Mark from the Gospel of Mark. However, Matthew and Luke also share large sections of text not found in Mark. They suggested that neither Gospel drew upon the other, but upon a second common source, termed Q. Along with Marcan priority, Q had been hypothesized by 1900, and enjoyed dominance in synoptic scholarship from the foundation of the International Q Project in 1983 until recent times; much of this ended with Mark Goodacre's Case Against Q, and many scholars today have come to doubt rather than defend Q. B. H. Streeter formulated a widely accepted view of Q: that it was written in Koine Greek; that most of its contents appear in Matthew, in Luke, or in both; and that Luke better preserves the text's original order than does Matthew. In the two-source hypothesis, the three-source hypothesis and the Q+/Papias hypothesis, Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q as sources. Some scholars have postulated that Q is actually a plurality of sources, some written and some oral. Others have attempted to determine the stages in which Q was composed.Despite the two-source hypothesis enjoying wide support, Q's existence has been increasingly questioned by alternative theories such as Farrer and Matthean Posteriority. A collection of dominical sayings would have been highly valuable to early Christians, but figures such as Jerome, who had access to the vast Library of Caesarea, make no mention of such a document. The making of copies of Q may have been seen as unnecessary, since its contents were preserved in the canonical gospels. Indeed, Christians may have prefered to make copies of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, "where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant".
Herbert Marsh is seen by some as the first person to hypothesize the existence of a "narrative" source and a "sayings" source, although he included in the latter parables unique to Matthew and unique to Luke. In his 1801 work, A dissertation on the Origin and Composition of our Three First Canonical Gospels, he used the Hebrew letter aleph to denote the narrative source and the letter beth to denote the sayings source.
The next person to advance the "sayings" hypothesis was the German Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1832. Schleiermacher interpreted an enigmatic statement by the early Christian writer Papias of Hierapolis, as evidence of a separate source. Rather than the traditional interpretation—that Papias was referring to the writing of Matthew in Hebrew—Schleiermacher proposed that Papias was actually referring to a sayings collection of the apostle Matthew that was later used, together with narrative elements, by another "Matthew" and by the other Evangelists.
In 1838, another German, Christian Hermann Weisse, took Schleiermacher's suggestion of a sayings source and combined it with the idea of Marcan priority to formulate what is now called the Two-Source Hypothesis, in which both Matthew and Luke used Mark and the sayings source. Heinrich Julius Holtzmann endorsed this approach in an influential treatment of the synoptic problem in 1863, and the two-source hypothesis has dominated ever since.
At this time, the second source was usually called the Logia, or Logienquelle, because of Papias's statement, and Holtzmann gave it the symbol Lambda. However, toward the end of the 19th century, doubts began to grow about the propriety of anchoring its existence to Papias's account, with the symbol Q adopted instead to remain neutral about the connection of Papias to the collection of sayings.
This two-source hypothesis speculates that Matthew borrowed from both Mark and Q. For most scholars, Q accounts for what Matthew and Luke share—sometimes in exactly the same words—but that are absent in Mark. Examples are the Devil's three temptations of Jesus, the Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, and many individual sayings.
In The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, Burnett Hillman Streeter argued that a third hypothetical source, referred to as M, lies behind the material in Matthew that has no parallel in Mark or Luke, and that some material present only in Luke might have come from an also unknown L source. This hypothesis posits that underlying the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are at least four sources, namely the Gospel of Mark and three lost texts: Q, M, and L.
Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, there were various challenges and refinements of Streeter's hypothesis. For example, in his 1953 book The Gospel Before Mark, Pierson Parker posited an early version of Matthew as the primary source. Parker argued that it was not possible to separate Streeter's "M" material from the material in Matthew parallel to Mark.
In the early 20th century, more than a dozen reconstructions of Q were made. However, they differed so much from each other that no one verse of Matthew was present in all of the Q reconstructions. As a result, interest in Q subsided, and the topic was neglected for many decades.
Following the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi library, the Jesus Seminar proposed that such an apocryphal Gospel could be the Q source, but many scholars reject this hypothesis, since they place Thomas and similar apocrypha in the first half of the 2nd century CE.
Composition
Redactional speculation, notably in the work of John S. Kloppenborg analyzing certain literary and thematic phenomena, argued that Q was composed in three stages. In the view of Kloppenborg, the earliest stage of its redaction was a collection of wisdom sayings involving issues such as poverty and discipleship. Then, he posits, this collection was expanded by including a layer of judgmental sayings directed against "this generation". The final stage included the Temptation of Jesus narrative.Although Kloppenborg cautioned against assuming that Q's composition history is the same as the history of the Jesus tradition, some recent seekers of the Historical Jesus, including members of the Jesus Seminar, have done just that. Basing their reconstructions primarily on the Gospel of Thomas and the oldest layer of Q, they propose that Jesus functioned as a wisdom sage, rather than a rabbi, though not all members affirm the two-source hypothesis. Kloppenborg is now a fellow of the Jesus Seminar himself.
However, scholars supporting the three-stage Q development hypothesis, such as Burton L. Mack, argue that Q's unity comes not only from its being shared by Matthew and Luke, but also because, in the layers of Q as reconstructed, the later layers build upon and presuppose the earlier ones, whereas the reverse is not the case. In this argument, evidence that Q has been revised is not evidence for disunity in Q, since the hypothesised revisions depend upon asymmetric logical connections between what are posited to be the later and earlier layers.
Some biblical scholars believe that an unknown redactor composed a Greek-language proto-Gospel. It may have been circulating in written form about the time the Synoptic Gospels were composed. The name Q was coined by the German theologian and biblical scholar Johannes Weiss.
Synoptic Gospels and the nature of Q
The relationship among the three synoptic gospels goes beyond mere similarity in viewpoint. The gospels often recount the same stories, usually in the same order, sometimes using the same words. Scholars note that the similarities among Mark, Matthew, and Luke are too great to be coincidental.If the two-source hypothesis is correct, then Q would probably have been a written document. If Q was a shared oral tradition, it is unlikely that it could account for the nearly identical word-for-word similarities between Matthew and Luke when quoting Q material. Similarly, it is possible to deduce that Q was written in Greek. If the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were referring to a document that had been written in some other language, it is highly unlikely that two independent translations would have exactly the same wording.
The Q document must have been composed before Matthew and Luke; some scholars even suggest that Q predated Mark. A date for the final Q document is often placed in the 40s or 50s of the 1st century, with some arguing its so-called sapiential layer was written as early as the 30s.
If Q existed, physical copies of it have since been lost. Some scholars, however, believe it can be partially reconstructed by examining elements common to Matthew and Luke. Versions of this reconstructed Q do not describe the events of Jesus' life: Q does not mention Jesus' birth, his selection of the 12 disciples, his crucifixion, or the resurrection. Instead, it appears to be a collection of Jesus' sayings and quotations.