Biblica
The Q Hypothesis

Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont Graduate University

Whether ot not Q exists, this page will be a convenient place to review the directionality of the material common to the Seond-tier Gospels (Matthew and Luke) but not present in Mark.

The first clear statement that Mark was the earliesdt of the Synoptic Gospels was that of Lachmann in 1835, followed by Wilke in 1838. Also in 1838 there appeared Weisse's hypothesis of an early but now lost source in addition to the Synoptic Gospels themselves. These two proposals were soon combined to form what is now known as the Two Source Hypothesis (2SH), according to which Matthew and Luke separately used Mark and this lost source, called Q (short for Gm Quelle, "source"). In the 19th century, when the idea of mutual independence among the Gospels was still strong, Q offered a way to explain the material common to Matthew and Luke (but not in Mark) without assuming that one had made use of the other, and also without assuming that either Matthew or Mark had made anything up. Holtzmann gave this Two Source view important support in 1863, and from that time to the present, the 2SH has been the dominant theory of the Synoptic Gospels. There are many statements of the content and the logic of Q, but the simplest for our purposes is the one given by Harnack: Q is the material absent from Mark, but present in both Matthew and Luke. The Q material is of interest because it lacks any reference to the Resurrection, so if Q exists, it would seem to qualify theologically as an Alpha document. That character has been used as an argument for an early date, and even a Galilean provenance, for the supposed Q.

As variants of Q, and as a sort of introduction to the complexity of the subject, we give Harnack's inventory plus the recent reconstructions of Kloppenborg and Allison, both of whom propose a three-stage formation model. For purposes of this page, however, we will regard "Q" as the list of passages published by the International Q Project or IQP (Fortress 2000), the current official standard. Its inventory separates many passages into constituents, reaching a total of 102. (By contast, Fleddermann 2005, whose Q closely corresponds in substance to that of IQP, but who, for example, counts the Sermon on the Mount as a single item, winds up with only 38 passages). For discussion purposes, we will reduce the IQP 102 passages by eliminating the 20 passages which IQP prints as crossed out, double bracketed, or question marked, and the 45 passages with Markan parallels (44 of them so presented in IQP, plus one more so marked in Fleddermann), Some passages with Markan parallels are also in one of the previous categories, so the net reduction is 65 passages, leaving for our consideration a core of 37 passages, a third of them from the Sermon on the Plain. These should provide a sufficient preliminaty test of the cogency of Q, and an overview of the directionality of its components. Should there prove to be reason to do so, the IQP passages not considered here can be put back on the table at any time.

The possibility that Luke was composed in several stages, one of which was earlier and another of which was later than Matthew, radically alters the terms of the original argument for Q, since it provides an alternative way in which the present bidirectional situation of the Matthew/Luke common material (some passages seeming earlier in their Lukan form, and others in their Matthean form) can be explained. Whether the new explanation, when fully worked out, leaves a residue of passages for which a Q-type outside source remains the best explanation, is not clear as of this writing.

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2 June 2010 / Contact The Project / Exit to Biblica Page