God: Biblical Scholarship and Q

No, not the one from Star Trek. John DeLancie wasn't dictating scripture to Matthew or Luke. Thank goodness Gene Roddenberry died before he could write that episode.

I was going to launch into a brief history of scholarly thought on the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) at this point, but Wikipedia has a far better article on the subject than I can write. In the US the Two-source Hypothesis is the most common line of scholarly thought about the writing of the Synoptic Gospels. It states that Mark was written first and Mark, along with another document called Q, was used independently by both Matthew and Luke to write their own Gospels. This explains the common passages between Mark and the others along with the similarities between the other two which do not appear in Mark at all.

This is the theory I have heard most of my life. Not that I cared much because I'm far more interested in what the Gospels say rather than how they got that way. Personally, I think two-source hypothesis is so popular because it is useful to academics. If Q existed, it certainly doesn't exist anymore. There are no known copies of it anywhere. Therefore the academics can pontificate about Q's contents for a very long time. Hopefully lots of grant money is involved in this pontification and subsequent publication.

Paul Smith brings up a counter-argument to Q. His post eventually led me to Mark Goodacre's website and his Ten Reasons to Question Q. Goodacre is an advocate of the Farrer hypothesis which states that Mark was written first, was used as a source by Matthew, then Matthew (and possibly Mark) was/were used by Luke. His reasoning works except for reason number nine:

Q belongs to another age, an age in which scholars solved every problem by postulating another written source ... Classically, the bookish B. H. Streeter solved the synoptic problem by assigning a written source to each type of material - triple tradition was from Mark; double tradition was from 'Q'; special Matthew was from 'M' and special Luke was from 'L'. Most scholars have since dispensed with written 'M' and 'L' sources.

The problem with this is that he misrepresents Q as an invention of Streeter. L and M are inventions of Streeter but scholars were positing Q in one name or another since 1838, almost a century before Streeter. This explains why L and M are long gone, but Q still remains.

I have to say that the Farrer hypothesis makes good sense to me. It's simple and I like that. The truth of the Synoptics is that Matthew and Luke probably used whatever they could get their hands on and there were multiple possible sources. The prologue to Luke especially seems to indicate that his Gospel was compiled from multiple sources with an eye towards accuracy:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.