Every careful reader of the Gospels notices that there are passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke that correspond very closely in thought and wording, which is why those three works are called the “Synoptic Gospels”. Also noticeable are places where Matthew and Luke agree without any Markan parallel. For about a century, since Sir John Hawkins and Adolf Harnack formulated the theory, most, though certainly not all, New Testament scholars have inferred that Matthew and Luke drew on a lost book, conventionally called “Q” (from the German Quelle, “source”), that contained sayings of Jesus and at least a sketchy narrative of his ministry.
The “Q” hypothesis can’t be called an established fact. While it accounts for a great many phenomena, other explanations are possible. Short of discovering an actual copy of “Q”, definitive proof will always elude us. Nonetheless, it is a decent working theory, the one that appears in virtually all mainstream commentaries on the Gospels.
If we assume arguendo that “Q” was a real document, an incomplete reconstruction of its content is possible. Harnack undertook the first rigorous compilation of the text (Sprüche und Reden Jesu, die zweite Quelle des Matthaeus und des Lukas (1907)). As he observed, the original work was undoubtedly fuller. Whatever the two later authors did not use is now unidentifiable as “Q” material or is forever lost. Despite that limitation, one can discern certain surprising characteristics in the remnant.
Most striking, as Sir William Ramsay emphasized in his review of Harnack (“The Oldest Written Gospel”, reprinted in Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion (1908)), is the lack of any visible awareness of Jesus’ death. The absence of a passion narrative might be an accident of preservation, but –
. . . the teaching of Q is inconsistent with the idea that the writer of the lost Source regarded the death of Jesus as the fundamental fact in the Gospel. One acquires the impression throughout that Jesus was to him the great Teacher, not that He was the Redeemer by His death: Jesus was to him a Son of God, the King who reveals the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of God stood out prominently, and its nature, with the conditions of entering it, were emphaticallystated. . . . The way of salvation,i. e., the Kingdom of God, does not lie outside of, or apart from, the common life, but in the ordinary life of man (i. e., it is the spirit in which that life is lived); and every man has the opportunity of being justified by the spirit of wisdom. The revelation by the Son is the only and necessary way by which man can obtain knowledge of God; this way of salvation is a difficult path with a single narrow entrance; it was unknown to many prophets, though now shown publicly to those who know Him; it is hidden from the wise and educated, but revealed to infants; the Kingdom of God has come near those cities whither the true teachers and Apostles go; there is need for many workers in this harvesting of the world. [Citations to Harnack’s reconstruction have been omitted throughout.]
In this Teaching there lies implicit the Gospel of Christ, but the foundation on which alone (according to the universal Christian Gospel from Peter and Stephen onwards) the Kingdom of Heaven can be built up, is wanting, for there is no allusion to the death of Christ, which gives the needed driving force and the power.
Later researchers have called attention to other ways in which “Q” is distinct from the Gospels in general: observance of the Jewish law is taken for granted; the themes of repentance and the imminence of the end times are strongly emphasized; Jesus is portrayed as the culmination of the line of Old Testament prophets; those who reject His teaching are likened to the persecutors of the prophets, though there is no sign that they are as yet engaged in actual persecution; the gentiles are scarcely noticed, except when the Jews are warned that their rightful inheritance could be forfeited through failure to heed Jesus.
From the data, Ramsay believed that one could draw a highly probable, though at first glance startling, conclusion about the date and sitz im leben of this lost document:
There is only one possibility. The lost Common Source of Luke andMatthew . . . was written while Christ was still living. It gives us the view which one of His disciples entertained of Him and His teaching during His lifetime, and may be regarded as authoritative for the view of the disciples generally. This extremely early date was what gave the lost Source the high value that it had in the estimation of Matthew and Luke, and yet justified the freedom with which they handled it and modified it by addition andexplanation. . . . On the one hand, it was a document practically contemporary with the facts, and it registered the impression made on eye-witnesses by the words and acts of Christ. On the other hand, it was written before those words and acts had begun to be properly understood by even the most intelligent eye-witnesses.
If one imagines the disciples acting like human beings rather than the peculiar mannequins of higher critical tradition, nothing could be more plausible than Ramsay’s proposition. Writing down the words of a teacher who has made an immense impression is natural to his pupils. Modern historians of early Christianity presume that Our Lord’s sayings were either recollected years after the fact or forgotten and reinvented. Isn’t it more rational to think that they were contemporaneously recorded? That record was superseded in great measure when the Resurrection fundamentally altered the disciples’ understanding of their Lord, which explains why “Q” did not survive independently. Instead, it was drawn on by the authors of the Gospels that we have today. (N.B. There are a few indications that Mark also made use of “Q” to a limited extent, but he evidently found most of his material elsewhere; it’s easily conceivable that “Q” was not Our Lord’s only Boswell.)
Sensible as Ramsay’s theory may sound, you will look in vain for mention of it in standard reference works. So far as I can tell, it has never been refuted, just ignored. And the reason why it made no impression is not hard to figure out: The assumption that underlies virtually all scholarly work on the New Testament is that we have scanty or no eye-witness evidence concerning Jesus’ ministry. What we learn from the Gospels has to be the product of one or more “communities” transmitting (or concocting) oral tradition.
It would be bold to assert dogmatically that Sir William Ramsay was right and the consensus of the learned wrong, but the hypothesis that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were in large part taken down as he uttered them seems too plausible to be dismissed without examination.
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