The vast majority of Bible scholars today believe that there was an ancient document filled with the sayings of Jesus Christ that is now unfortunately lost to the sands of time. This document would have originally been written in Greek and would have floated around within the first couple of decades after the death of Jesus and would have predated the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This ancient document is called Q, sometimes called the Q source or even the Q gospel. The interesting thing about Q is that most Bible scholars believe that Matthew and Luke used Q to help them write their gospels. But there is a problem with Q, and that is that there is no physical manuscript evidence that it ever existed.
Q is a hypothetical document. On the surface, Q is actually pretty easy to understand. But depending on how far down the rabbit hole you go, it can get pretty confusing in a hurry.
Check out this graph as an example. There is a lot to analyze here and really this is only part of it. So in this video I want to clearly explain what Q is and then lay out the evidence for its existence.
Now before diving too deep into Q there are going to be some terms thrown around in this video and I want to make sure we understand what those terms are. The first term is the word source. Q is best defined as a source. Q is the first letter of the German word Quelle which means means source. So what does source mean in this context?
In biblical studies, there is a branch of academic research called source criticism. This is just a fancy name for trying to figure out where the authors of the Bible got their information. Scholars who specialize in source criticism have long realized that the authors of the Bible did not get all of their information strictly from divine revelation, but often borrowed stories from their neighboring cultures, or from other ancient documents, or even from oral traditions.
Now, when we are talking about Q, we are only looking at the New Testament. And more specifically still, we are only looking at the Gospels. And even more specifically, only the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The word Synoptic comes from the Greek synoptikos, syn meaning together and optikos meaning view.
Optikos is where we get the English word optics, and it has to do with our eyes and sight and vision. So the Synoptic Gospels... are the three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that have a similar way of seeing Jesus and a similar way of telling his story.
John's gospel is sometimes referred to as the spiritual gospel because John, more than any other evangelist, speaks of the eternal spiritual home of Christ. John also has numerous stories about Jesus that are not found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So in this video, when I use the term source, what I'm talking about is an ancient document or tradition that Matthew, Mark, and Luke used to help them write their gospel accounts. Scholars that specialize in source criticism notice something peculiar when analyzing the synoptic gospels. The first thing they realize is that Mark's gospel was probably written first, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark's gospel to help them write their gospel.
So Mark is a source for Matthew and Luke. As a matter of fact, so much of Mark is found within Matthew and Luke that if you've never read Mark, but you've only read Matthew and Luke, you have read all of Mark's gospel with the exception of just 18 verses. That means Mark only has about 3% of unique material found in his gospel that isn't found in Matthew and Luke. Mark's gospel is the shortest with only 16 chapters, but Matthew and Luke's gospels are much longer. So here's where the conundrum comes in.
If Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, where did they get their other information? If they didn't get it from Mark, where did it come from? Well, there must have been another source. And in scholarship, this is called the synoptic problem. And the synoptic problem isn't as much a problem as it is a puzzle.
Over time, scholars have come up with a number of solutions to the synoptic problem, but none have gained as much steam as Q. But why is this? Why is Q viewed by most scholars to be the best explanation for where Matthew and Luke got their extra information? Why couldn't Matthew have just copied Luke?
And why couldn't Luke have just copied Matthew? Or why couldn't they all have gotten their information from various other sources? And how do we know Mark's gospel came first? Why couldn't Matthew have come first and then Mark copied from Matthew? Or what about Luke copying from Matthew and Mark?
Why Q? Or even more mischievously, how do we know that Matthew and Luke didn't just make up the other stories not found in Mark? Why do we have to have a Q? source.
Could Matthew and Luke be co-conspirators trying to come up with forged stories about Jesus? Well, some scholars do indeed believe that one or all of the things I just mentioned are possibilities. But as I mentioned before, this is not the consensus among most biblical scholars. Let's talk about why that is.
If you want to uncover the evidence for Q's existence, the first question you must answer is which gospel was written first and how can you prove it? As I stated earlier, Mark is almost unanimously viewed as the first gospel ever written. But why?
Well, first off, it's the shortest with only 16 chapters. Stories are usually added to over time, not subtracted from. So just the length of Mark's gospel can be a little bit of evidence to suggest that it was written first. Because as the story of Christianity grew, it got more and more popular. And so people wanted more and more information about this popular person of Jesus Christ.
And so the earliest and the shortest gospel is probably Mark. But also, Mark's gospel has what scholars call the lowest Christology, meaning that Jesus' humanness is emphasized more than his divineness. As time went on, leading all the way up to the 4th century, Jesus' divine nature was emphasized more and more. So much so that some believe that Jesus wasn't really a human at all, but only seemed to be a human.
This is called a high Christology. So if this pattern is true, that Jesus' Christology got higher and higher over time, then we just work our way backwards and look at the gospel with the lowest Christology. And in this case, it happens to be Mark. But there is an argument used against using Christology as a form of dating gospels. Because Paul wrote before the time of the gospels, and Paul had a very high Christology.
So some scholars believe that this throws a wrench in using Christology as a method to date the Gospels. Dating Gospels is serious science, and it goes far beyond what I am able to mention in this video. But rest assured that there is a ton of scientific, historical, archaeological, papyrological evidence that scholars look at to make these determinations. And most scholars agree Mark was written first. There is one last piece of evidence I want to look at that shows with a high degree of certainty that Mark was written first.
But it also shows with a high degree of certainty that Matthew and Luke used Mark when writing their Gospels and not the other way around. The evidence has to do with the sequence of events that occur in chronological order in the Gospel accounts. Because if you've ever read the Synoptic Gospels you can see that a lot of the stories are the same but they're not exactly the same.
And if they copied each other you would expect them to be more alike than they are. The truth of the matter is this. When Luke and Matthew include a story or saying that is also found in Mark, they always have the exact same sequence, meaning they show up in the same part in the same context within the broader gospel narrative.
But when Luke and Matthew have similar stories that are not found in Mark, the sequence is almost always different. For example, consider the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes. The Lord's Prayer does not show up in Mark at all.
But it does show up in both Matthew and Luke, but in two totally different contexts. In Matthew, the Lord's Prayer shows up in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells the audience not to heap up empty prayers like the Gentiles do, but to pray in the following way.
Then Jesus quotes the Lord's Prayer. But in Luke, the Lord's Prayer is not recorded as having happened on the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is not even recorded in Luke.
Luke documents something called the Sermon on the Plain. But in Luke, there is a conversation between Jesus and his disciples where one of the disciples asks him how they ought to pray. Then Jesus gives them the Lord's Prayer.
So what's going on here? Did Jesus give the Lord's Prayer twice and Matthew recorded one version and Luke recorded the other? Or did Matthew and Luke get the saying of the Lord's Prayer from somewhere else, aka a different source? And then they just tried to fit that source into their gospel narratives wherever they saw fit. The Lord's Prayer is the same story, but two different contexts.
And this is also true with the Beatitudes. Did Jesus preach them on the Sermon on the Mount, or on the Sermon on the Plain? Or did he preach them twice?
Christian apologists and scholars tend to believe that Jesus said the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes twice. Matthew recorded one version, Luke recorded the other. Yet some Christian, and especially non-Christian scholars, tend to believe that Jesus only preached them once in Mark.
and Luke just put them in different contexts within their gospels. If this is true, then this would be pretty good evidence that Matthew and Luke used Mark's gospel to help them write, or more accurately, to help them structure their gospel narrative. But when they get a story that's not from Mark, they don't know where in the context it fits in, so they stick it in wherever they can. This is really good evidence that Mark was written first.
This is pretty clear evidence that Matthew and Luke... got some of their information from somewhere else. But where? This other source is, of course, the hypothetical Q source. How do we know Matthew and Luke didn't just hear the same oral traditions?
Well, because as I said, they are in different sequences within the two gospels, but they say the same thing. If it was oral tradition-based, the sequence of both gospels would be the same. Also, all of the sayings that Jesus says that are only recorded in Matthew and Luke are almost verbatim.
They're word-for-word exact. but in different sequences. And despite what you may have heard about oral traditions, this is not the way oral traditions usually worked.
The sequence would be the same, but the exactness would be off a little. But this isn't what we see in Matthew and Luke. So how exactly do we know that Matthew didn't copy Luke or Luke didn't just copy Matthew? Well, why would the sequence be different among the two gospels?
The best explanation for why the sayings of Jesus are the same, but in a different sequence is because they did not. copy each other, but both had access to a second outside source called Q. To me, personally, this seems like an incredibly airtight argument.
There are, of course, brilliant scholars out there that think differently and think that Q did not exist at all, but to me, it just seems like all of the evidence points to Q. So there is some evidence for Q's existence, but what can we really say about Q? What kind of a document... was Q? What did it say?
What did it not say? Oddly enough, we can actually have a pretty good idea of what was in Q. Now, some of this evidence will indeed be speculative, but it does make the most sense with all of the evidence we have today.
Q is said to have been a sayings source written in Greek. But what is a sayings source exactly? Well, a sayings source is basically just a document that has no narrative, no storyline whatsoever. It's basically just a bullet point list of things someone heard Jesus say. An example would be like, 1. Jesus said this.
So how in the world can we say that Q is a saying's source, especially when we've never even discovered the Q source? I'll answer that question with a question. How is it possible that Matthew and Luke can almost agree word for word, 100%? verbatim on certain sayings of Jesus, but put them into very different contexts. The best explanation is that the source they used had the saying, but no context.
Like a sayings source. And we can see that the grammatical syntax fits in really well with the traditional Koine Greek. So we can be pretty sure that Q was a Greek sayings source originally written in the Greek language.
There are no Aramaic to Greek transliterations, so to speak. There was some pushback on the belief in Q in the early 1900s due to a pretty convincing argument, and it was a great argument that ended up being completely debunked. The argument was that Q could not have existed as a saying source because there is no physical material evidence that a saying source ever existed. So not only is Q hypothetical, but the entire saying source genre of literature is hypothetical as well. So not only is Q hypothetical, but the entire genre of saying source literature is hypothetical as well.
That's a pretty good argument. As good of an argument as this was, things all changed with the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas found within the Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt in 1945. The Gospel of Thomas finally gave scholars real physical manuscript evidence that a saying source really existed. The Gospel of Thomas is a list of 114 sayings of Jesus with no context. The one found at Nag Hammadi was written in Coptic, but most scholars believe it was originally written in Greek and later translated into the Coptic language. Scholars also think the Gospel of Thomas was written around the same time, if not earlier, than the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, just like Q.
And to top it all off, some scholars believe that the Gospel of Thomas also had access to Q and copied a couple Q sayings into the Gospel of Thomas. So there you have it, Q clearly explained. Now there is a lot more I could say on source criticism, but I want to limit this video to just talking about Q. So leave a comment down in the comment section and let me know, do you think Q existed? What are your arguments for or against it?
I'd love to hear them. I think it's time now for a bonus fact. Did you know Q is the least common letter used in the entire English alphabet?
Q is only used on average once out of every 510 letters spoken or written. And Q is the only letter not found in any U.S. state name. Stay thirsty for knowledge.