Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] An argument for Q, the hypothetical source that seems to have existed written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch.
[00:00:12] Why should we think there was a Q, the hypothetical document that contained principally sayings of Jesus that was, according to this hypothesis, used by Matthew and Luke but not by Mark in constructing their Gospels?
[00:00:27] It is an issue because if Matthew and Luke both used Mark as almost everyone agrees for reasons I laid out in my earlier post, then one has to explain why they have so many other materials in common not found in Mark. They didn't get them from Mark. Where then? In my earlier post I claimed that Matthew does not seem to have gotten those sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew, and so they both must have gotten them from some other one time existing source, that is a source commonly called Q for the German word quelle source.
[00:01:06] But some readers have asked exactly why it is unlikely that Matthew got these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew in particular? Isn't the best theory the one that has the least hypotheticals? Why invent a hypothetical source for the saying common to Matthew and Luke when you could just say that one of them copied the sayings from the other? We're talking Occam's razor. The simplest solution wins. I will agree there is a case to be made for the non existence of Q and the scholar who has made it. The best, and most emphatically, is Mark Goodacre, whose students are like the 70 disciples Jesus sent out through the promised land to spread the good news.
[00:01:46] Mark and I disagree on the point, but he makes the strongest case on the planet in my view. If you want to see him discuss the synoptics at length as a group and individually, including his views of Q, etc. Check out his 15 lecture course the Mysteries of the Synoptic Discovering Matthew, Mark and Luke on Bart Ehrman courses online.
[00:02:10] My sense is that a lot of readers who hear there was a Q and then here there probably wasn't, thinking hey, why bother with it? It's hypothetical, just get rid of it and things are easier. It would indeed be easier to get rid of Q if getting rid of it did not create more problems than it solves. But alas, in this post I want to explain one of the main arguments for the existence of Q, which involves a situation that is hard to explain without it. I found this argument persuasive for decades, and it's not an argument I hear much in the conversation. It's a bit tricky and I need to simplify a bit to make sense of it, but I'LL try to keep things clear.
[00:02:51] So here's the deal. Matthew, Mark and Luke often present their accounts of Jesus in the same Jesus did this, then he did that, then he said this, then he said that, etc. What is odd is that when Matthew and Luke preserve the same sequence of material, it is almost always with stories that are also found in Mark. The other passages that they share, that is Those not found in Mark, are often located in different places in their narratives. That is true especially when these involve sayings of Jesus. There are two major exceptions.
[00:03:30] Sometimes Matthew and Luke contain the same or roughly the same non Markan accounts of Jesus, either sayings or narratives focused on sayings that they both connect to narrative accounts that are found in Mark. For example, unlike Mark, both Matthew and Luke narrate the three temptations of Jesus by the devil in the wilderness, no one lives by bread alone, etc. These fuller accounts of the temptations are not found in Mark. He has only a brief two verse statement that Jesus was in the wilderness to tempted by Satan. It's natural and to be expected that if Matthew and Luke are going to give fuller accounts of the temptation that include key sayings of Jesus, that they will put it in the passage about the temptation taken from Mark.
[00:04:20] Sometimes Mark and Luke have the same sequence of stories not found in Mark because they are stories that make sense only where both of them put them. Both Matthew and Luke have birth narratives. These are very different stories. Most of the episodes are found in only one or the other of the Gospels and they have very few verbatim overlaps. That means they didn't have the same source of information, which among other things shows that Luke did not get his account from Matthew or vice versa. Even though Mark doesn't have a birth narrative, it's no big surprise that both Matthew and Luke were put it where they did at the beginning of Jesus life.
[00:05:03] So too with the preaching of John the Baptist. Matthew and Luke have some key similarities in John's preaching not found in Mark, and they appear in the same narrative sequence in the account of John's baptizing ministry which is found in Mark. Nothing too remarkable about that otherwise. Usually when Matthew and Luke have verbatim agreements in materials not connected with Mark, the sequences of these materials is not the same between the two. As I said, there are usually teachings, for example the Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, sayings about serving two masters, the two ways, judging others, divisions within the household, etc. So let me explain what I mean and why it is significant Suppose you number the passages that are found in all three Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke. They occur, say, in the sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And then you give letters to the passages found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. ABCDE what is striking is that when Matthew and Luke have the same sequence in the passages that are numbered, that is that are found also in Mark, it is usually in the passages also found in Mark. But when it comes to the lettered stories, mainly sayings found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark, they are frequently not in the same sequence in Matthew and Luke. Why would that be?
[00:06:35] Let me give a simplified illustration to show how it works. This is not what you actually find. It's an illustration. To make clear what I mean, let's say Matthew's Gospel presents the following accounts. The numbered ones shared with Mark and Luke. The lettered ones shared only with Luke.
[00:06:53] 1a, b, 2, 3, 4, c, 5, d, 6e.
[00:07:03] But Luke's sequencing is normally the same for the numbers, but not for the letters in this simplified illustration. For example 1, 2c, a, 3e, 4b, 5, 6d.
[00:07:20] So the materials in the same sequence between Matthew and Luke are almost always the ones found in Mark. The others are often in a different order. How do we explain that? Why aren't the materials found in Matthew and Luke not regularly in the same sequence when the materials found in Matthew, Mark and Luke usually are? The best explanation is that if, as we think for other reasons I explained in my earlier post, Matthew and Luke each used Mark as one of their sources. They also had a different source, that is Q, that they plugged into the narrative framework of Mark at different places.
[00:08:00] This source was mainly sayings of Jesus, but there was not a narrative context for many of the sayings. Kind of like what we find in the Gospel of Thomas later, which could not be Q, but which is indeed a list of Jesus sayings without narrative context, that is to say, not having any indication from Mark's Gospel, where traditions like the Lord's Prayer or the Beatitudes or the statement about serving two masters or about judging others, etc. Would have to fit into the life of Jesus. Each author put them in wherever he saw fit. Almost never did those passages go in at the same places. It is extremely difficult for me, at least, okay, for most scholars who deal with this stuff, since I wasn't the one who came up with these arguments, to see how this would have happened if there was no cue. If those scholars are right, who argue to the contrary that Luke used both Mark and Matthew, with Matthew being the source for the materials in Luke that are not found in Mark. And like Matthew mainly followed Mark's sequence for his narratives but got his lettered material A, B, C, D, E from Matthew. I don't see why Luke would so often change the non Markan materials. What's wrong with their original sequence or in fact how he would do it. It would be the same problem if someone said that Mark was first Luke copied Mark and Matthew got his non Markan sayings from Luke instead of Q.
[00:09:34] That is to say, if there were not a hypothetical source Q for these mainly sayings of Jesus not found in Mark but located in different portions of Matthew and Luke, then how could we explain why just those materials, the non Markan, are found in a different sequence than the Markan materials? Did Luke copy Matthew? And whenever he ran across a saying, did he read through the Gospel of Mark to see if he had it as well and say hey, that one's not anywhere in Mark? I think I'll put it somewhere else in my Gospel. Why? And technically speaking, how would he know it's not in Mark unless he re read Mark all the way through each time to make sure? That seems unlikely. So the sequence of stories seems to show that neither Matthew nor Luke copied the other, but they got their sayings from some other source. That's an argument then for the existence of a now no longer surviving source we call Q. Arguing against Q ends up causing a bigger problem than it can solve.
[00:10:39] In my next post, instead of a simplified illustration to explain what I mean about the sequencing, I'll show how it actually does work with the Q sayings arranged differently in Matthew and Luke.
