The Unknowable Q
(avg. read time: 6–11 mins.)
Unfortunately, this is not the Q we are talking about today. But it is similarly fictitious or, in the preferred terms of scholarship, hypothetical. That is, it is the purported textual source commonly used by Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels.
One of the projects I am currently working on is a Gospel synopsis commentary, which will be a gargantuan volume. What it will involve is setting all of the parallel texts of the Gospels, divided into sections concerning free-floating teachings and comments, parallels between two Gospels, parallels between three Gospels, and parallels between all four Gospels. Each parallel will have accompanying commentary noting the similarities and differences and exploring explanations given by opposing views of the relationships among the Gospels. My plan is to approach this study inductively, rather than setting forth a theory and seeking to show why I think what I do. I want to help people engage more directly with the texts rather than get caught up with deciding between the different theories about how the Gospels relate to each other before engaging the texts. I do plan to provide the arguments for and against each view, and I will highlight where each theory is stronger and weaker relative to the others. I am not trying to convince anyone of a view before they actually look at the texts the theories try to explain. Too often, the issues are presented simplistically, and presenters try to push the audience to decide on a theory or suggest a most likely theory to the audience without them having to examine the evidence for themselves. I do not aim to promote a theory, in part because at this point I am not settled in my own mind about what I think is most likely. I will say that I am not convinced by any presentation that assumes that the only way to account for similarities among the Gospels is to posit that the authors had manuscripts of another Gospel or other Gospels at hand. Even when the scope of comparison is restricted to where the texts parallel, each Gospel is more different from each other Gospel than they are similar in terms of wording. But beyond that, I am not attempting to push readers in one direction or another.
And while I will aim to present this popular theory fairly in the commentary, I will say here without reservation that I am skeptical of the hypothetical source called “Q” (from the German Quelle, which is translated “source”). I will not get into all the theories of accounting for the Synoptic Puzzle (more popularly called the Synoptic Problem) here, but the positing of a text dubbed as Q is the most popular explanation among biblical scholars (though its popularity is not quite as high among Synoptic Puzzle specialists) for the similarities between Matthew and Luke that they do not share with Mark. That is, proponents of Q think that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark and Q, in addition to other sources, in composing their Gospels. Various statistics are given as to how many verses this theory accounts for, but that is not really a good metric, since verses were later developments of division, and verses can have vastly different levels of similarity from those few verses that are identical between texts to those verses that have nothing in common but are still part of parallel pericopes (sets of text that comprise one coherent unit or thought).
A few proponents of the Q hypothesis have gone even further, and thought to write commentaries on Q or compose translations of Q. You can even go to some academic libraries and check out a critical edition of a hypothetical text arranged in a hypothetical order. When you have a critical edition of a hypothetical text—the parameters of which are open to the imagination, as there is no reason to think Matthew and Luke would have used everything they found there in this scenario—and theories about redactional layers of a hypothetical source, or of communities built around a hypothetical source, you know that scholarship has gone too far.
Even if we assume that there was a text that failed to be preserved as it was that stands behind the similarities that only Matthew and Luke share, we could never know, even with 50% confidence, what it said. I mean this in terms of both wording and order. And I will tell you why I am certain of this.
Consider that the Q hypothesis is inevitably, as far as I know, paired with the notion of Markan priority, the idea that Mark was written first. On this theory, by far the most popular one concerning the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke used Mark. For the sake of the argument, let us assume this theory. Let us suppose that history had gone differently so that we did not have a single manuscript of Mark anywhere. Let us then say we had to reconstruct the text of the Gospel of Mark using methods similar to scholars who think they can reasonably determine what Q said; could it be done?
We could simplify the experiment further. Let us say that we removed from consideration texts designated as coming from Q, and we were then tasked with reconstructing Mark based on the other commonalities between Matthew and Luke. We could then compare the results with Mark after the reconstruction is completed. Would it resemble with even 50% accuracy the wording and order of Mark, whether based on a critical edition or on any particular manuscript?
Maybe you have heard popular talking points about how similar Matthew and Luke are to Mark; you may have even seen this chart or something like it floating around.
With so much of Mark in Matthew and Luke, surely based on those commonalities one could reasonably reconstruct Mark, right? If you answered “yes,” well good for you, you’re wrong. But seriously, if you answered “no,” you are correct. Let us explore further.
Based on my own work for my Gospel synopsis commentary, which uses the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece as the base text (simply because it is so widely used among scholars, not because it is by any means immaculate), I have tried to tabulate the similarities between the Gospels. I counted every case of absolute verbal similarity, or identical words between texts, as 1, even if they appear to have been incidental similarities, just to try to get the highest score of similarity. For words that were different forms of the same word used in multiple texts, I counted those similarities with a score of .75. For words that were synonymous, I counted those similarities with a score of .5. I do not know how best to score similarities based on word order variation, and so when word order varied, I simply marked those cases with a < sign to signify that the actual degree of similarity is less than the simple ratio provided. With these parameters, setting aside John for now, and including Mark 16:9–20 (for reasons outlined here), here is how similar the texts are only where they parallel each other (rather than in total) in absolute terms (including only when the same words are used the same number of times) and in weighted terms to include the other instances of similarity noted above:
And so before we even get into the complexities of when Matthew is more similar to Mark than Luke, when Luke is more similar to Mark than Matthew, and when Matthew and Luke are more similar to each other than to Mark, the basic presentation of the data here makes it exceedingly unlikely that one could arrive at a reconstruction of the wording of Mark in those texts where Mark parallels Matthew and/or Luke that is accurate at a rate of 50+%.
This is to say nothing of getting the word order right. The word order of Mark compared to Matthew and Luke, even just restricting the scope to the similar words, is more often than not different when you go pericope by pericope. On a pericope-by-pericope basis, one could not accurately reconstruct Mark from looking at the similarities of Matthew and Luke while excluding the apparent Q texts.
Even worse, one could not reasonably accurately guess the order of the contents. Free-floating sayings and descriptions cause enough of a problem, even though they do not concern a large amount of text (Matt 4:23 // Mark 1:39 // Luke 4:44; Matt 7:28–29 // Mark 1:21–22 // Luke 4:31–32; Matt 9:36 // Mark 6:34; Matt 10:40–42 // Mark 9:41 // Luke 10:16; Matt 13:12 // Mark 4:25 // Luke 8:18; Matt 24:14 // Mark 13:10). There are several points at which Matthew is more structurally similar to Mark than Luke, and both Matthew and Luke have unique parallels to Mark, but for the sake of the analogy with Q, we focus on instances where both Matthew and Luke parallel Mark. Here are the instances in which Matthew and Luke resemble Mark’s order in consecutive texts without interruptions from either Mark or the other texts:
Matt 9:1–8 // Mark 2:1–12 // Luke 5:17–26; Matt 9:9–13 // Mark 2:13–17 // Luke 5:27–32; Matt 9:14–17 // Mark 2:18–22 // Luke 5:33–39; Mark 2:23–28 // Luke 6:1–5; Mark 3:1–6 // Luke 6:6–111
Matt 12:22–24 // Mark 3:22 // Luke 11:14–15; Matt 12:25–30 // Mark 3:23–27 // Luke 11:16–23; Matt 12:31–32 // Mark 3:28–292
Matt 8:23–27 // Mark 4:35–41 // Luke 8:22–25; Matt 8:28–34 // Mark 5:1–20 // Luke 8:26–39; Mark 5:21–43 // Luke 8:40–563
Matt 14:12b–13a // Mark 6:30–31 // Luke 9:10a; Matt 14:13b–21 // Mark 6:32–44 // Luke 9:10b–17
Matt 16:21–28 // Mark 8:31–9:1 // Luke 9:22–27; Matt 17:1–9 // Mark 9:2–10 // Luke 9:28–36
Matt 19:1–2 // Mark 10:1; Matt 19:3–12 // Mark 10:2–12; Matt 19:13–15 // Mark 10:13–16 // Luke 18:15–17; Matt 19:16–30 // Mark 10:17–31 // Luke 18:18–30
Matt 20:17–19 // Mark 10:32–34; Luke 18:31–34; Matt 20:20–28 // Mark 10:35–454
Matt 22:15–22 // Mark 12:13–17 // Luke 20:20–26; Matt 22:23–33 // Mark 12:18–27 // Luke 20:27–40; Matt 22:34–40 // Mark 12:28–345
Matt 22:41–46 // Mark 12:35–37a // Luke 20:41–44; Matt 23:1–7 // Mark 12:37b–40 // Luke 20:45–47
Matt 24:1–2 // Mark 13:1–2 // Luke 21:5–6; Matt 24:3–8 // Mark 13:3–8 // Luke 21:7–11
Matt 24:29–31 // Mark 13:24–27 // Luke 21:25–28; Matt 24:32–36 // Mark 13:28–32 // Luke 21:29–33
Matt 26:36–46 // Mark 14:32–42 // Luke 22:39–46; Matt 26:47–56 // Mark 14:43–52 // Luke 22:47–53; Matt 26:57–68 // Mark 14:53–656
Matt 27:11–14 // Mark 15:2–5 // Luke 23:2–5; Matt 27:15–23 // Mark 15:6–14 // Luke 23:17–23
These are not the only cases of parallels between these Gospels, but I have only highlighted where the parallels are directly preceded and/or followed by other parallels in the same location because these demonstrate common structure. What can be reconstructed from the procedures some Q proponents present as valid would invariably lead to an abominable malformation of Mark. Why, then, ought we to assume that following the same procedures regarding a hypothetical source would yield anything approaching insightful results?
If Matthew and Luke did use Mark, the authors have used the text in such a way that they have broad similarities, and neither in this scenario would be all that dedicated to Mark’s structure (again, assuming that it is Mark’s). Why would their habits be so markedly different for another source they used that we would have any reason to believe it could be reasonably reconstructed by reading Matthew and Luke? If Mark could be uniquely paralleled with Matthew and Luke at various points, why would this not also be the case with Q, meaning that we could not really know anything about its extent, much less its wording and order? In the end, Q remains unknowable, most likely because it never existed.
These last two texts have parallels in Matt 12, but that obviously violates the stated parameters, as there is much intervening text in Matthew’s work after the last parallel and before these two.
There is a parallel for these texts in Luke 12:10.
Again, there is a Matthean parallel here from Matt 9, but there is intervening text that parallels earlier portions of Mark noted above.
The Lukan parallels are in multiple texts.
The Lukan parallel to this text is in 10:25–28.
The Lukan parallel in ch. 22 includes intervening text.