14 ms·

Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?

173 points by Tomte 2y ago

berkeleynerd 2y ago
The absence of recent work on reconstructing and contextualizing Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon is disappointing, particularly given the implications for understanding early Christian texts and the development of the synoptic gospels. The pre-Lukan theory, which suggests Marcion’s gospel may represent a version of Luke predating the canonical text, challenges traditional views on the formation of the gospel narrative. This theory raises important questions about the so-called “Q” source, a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings used by Matthew and Luke.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  People are working on Marcion, actually Marcion and things surrounding Marcion is a hot topic right now. Look at the work by Markus Vinzent. He is currently working on the Paul version of Marcions letters.
vertnerd 2y ago
I am no theologian, but this seemed like an interesting topic until I started reading the article, which likely could have been summarized in a paragraph or two. The relentless onslaught of advertisements and white space made me want to claw my eyeballs out. Then the author plagiarized himself in his own article, telling us TWICE that "Q" is short for the German word “Quelle,” meaning “source”. It reads like a high-school essay that has to reach a word count.
- deleted 2y ago
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ImHereToVote 2y ago
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- userbinator 2y ago
  Wrong Q.
  - tyre 2y ago
    that’s what they want you to think
jcmontx 2y ago
I love this area of study. Bart Ehrman has very interesting books on the topic.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Second this. If you have any interest in the scholarship behind the ancient world, Bart Ehrman's books are phenomenal. He is one of the few people who can be both world leading scholar, and great writer who can really connect with a layperson and academic alike. He is also genuinely one of the best human beings I know, and I don't say that lightly. I also really enjoyed his book about suffering. If you've struggled with your faith over the amount of suffering in the world, and/or yearn for answers to those hard questions, I highly recommend "God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer." It actually goes far beyond just the Bible (though that is covered very, very well) and includes much philosophy and other things. It's a deeply personal book where he opens up about his own struggle and really allows himself to be vulnerable. For me, I was struggling deeply with these questions and had nobody to talk to. Everyone close to me in life had strong faith and was perfectly satisfied with dismissing the problem as "God knows. He is perfect. That's enough for me." The book was like having a brilliant and deeply thoughtful friend to have a conversation with, and it was an important point in my life. I'll be forever grateful to Bart for writing it. Disclaimer: Bart is a friend of mine, but I read most of his books before meeting him.
  - wahern 2y ago
    Related Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil The question is a central one in Western philosophy and religion. Less so in some other traditions. But it predates Christianity.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      It's certainly touched on in Ecclesiastes, albeit more obliquely than presented in the wikipedia article.
- 2y ago
User23 2y ago
No, probably not. It’s a somewhat plausible notion so far as it goes, but the complete lack of primary or even secondary evidence for the existence of a Q document is a major problem for the conjecture.
dragontamer 2y ago
There is a dead comment here talking about how bad the writing is here. Maybe the comment is dead because it was too harsh? But in any case, the writing here is very poor. The actual information offered is barely worth much more than my following summary: Mark was written first. Then Matthew then Luke. Q is a hypothetical source that addresses the commonality between these gospels but has never been found. As Q was a theory, there are variations where only Matthew and Luke reference Q, or maybe Mark also referenced Q. Or maybe Q never existed and the oral tradition is sufficient to explain all the commonalities (especially between Matthew and Luke). Which happens to be all my Religion class ever covered. Q theory has never been proven or disproven. The early Church had an oral tradition (Jesus never wrote anything down personally, which is why we rely upon Mark, Matthew and Luke). John has an obviously different writing style. The truth of the matter has been lost to time.
- moomin 2y ago
  It also repeats itself. The question is interesting, but the article is blogspam and could be AI-generated.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    I concur. It reads like AI to me. I think it was doing okay when it was comparing early passages. But somewhere it becomes really spammy and circular. Maybe the start was written by human and the they filled out the later sections with AI??
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Indeed. This is one of those articles where I struggle to decide to upvote. I wish I could upvote the discussion without upvoting the article itself, because this article does not deserve it
    - deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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JKCalhoun 2y ago
Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is not considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The same ground but not as similar to the other three? Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.
- david927 2y ago
  > Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples didn't write them.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Indeed, I believe most of the disciples (except Matthew, I think) were illiterate. I don't believe he's generally held to be the author of The Gospel of Matthew, though. However, this doesn't preclude the idea of their evangelism being recorded by someone else. Paul—while not an Apostle himself—is generally held to be the true author of at least some of his letters and is likely the closest we'll find to identifying the earliest authors of the new testament with real, historical figures.
    - vineyardlabs 2y ago
      Luke would have been literate. Paul states elsewhere that Luke is a physician, and in the book Luke states he was contracted by a third party to write the book.
  - vineyardlabs 2y ago
    Questions about authorship aside, note that only Matthew and John claim to be disciples/people who directly interacted with Jesus. Luke is purported to be a physician/associate of Paul who was paid by an unnamed benefactor to document the life of Jesus based on interviews with eyewitnesses and research from earlier sources, and Mark is purported to be writing down an account of the life Jesus based on Peter's eyewitness testimony in Rome several decades after the fact.
neallindsay 2y ago
If you like this, you will definitely like the Data Over Dogma podcast.
- calvinmorrison 2y ago
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redwoolf 2y ago
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- currymj 2y ago
  there are other Christian communities than American-style Evangelical Christianity who tend to be more intellectual and do like arguing about this kind of thing.
  - redwoolf 2y ago
    You're right. I'm extremely colored by my Evangelical upbringing and the contemptuous American Evangelical community. That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it, would it change much about our understanding of that time in history?
    - dragontamer 2y ago
      I think a lot of people are interested in a more academic treatment of the time of the Acts of the Apostles up though Paul's journey. There is a huge amount of early Catholic/Christian history that comes down to oral traditions and the flowery language of the Bible. Which forces us to wonder what parts are metaphor and which parts were real history. Like we know St. James somehow ended up in Spain (erm, Iberia or whatever it was called back then). But did they take with them oral tradition alone or did they have books to help keep the story consistent? If Q existed, it may have been a book or reference for the early Bishop/Apostles. It's be insight to how they lived and worked. -------- Oral Tradition is how the world worked back then. But it also existed in a time of writing and documentation (see the Roman Empire around that time). I think most people are happy with oral tradition as an explanation. But the gospels seem too similar for oral tradition alone.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Interestingly, just read something that "Evangelicals", 50-80 years ago, used to think more, and thought religion and government should be separate, hence they believed they should stay out of government. They were only recently 'radicalized' like other fundamentalist religions into a more terrorist 'like', leaning group.
empath75 2y ago
Based on nothing other than that "people don't really change", I would guess that pretty soon after the death of Jesus, people started misattributing quotes to him. We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching. So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends, and people get tired of it and decide to keep a list of accepted quotes from Jesus, so that people would stop making up new ones from that point on (and it doesn't appear to have worked -- the later gospels have additional quotes and stories -- in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.) Then after that, you have this list of canonical quotes going around, and of course people want the context, because you don't necessarily know how to interpret a quote without the context in which it was said, and so you get the gospels of Mark and Luke.
- graemep 2y ago
  The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died -within the lifetimes of people who could remember him. > in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.) That is the consensus, but there are people who think otherwise - the alternative theory, which is at least plausible, is that it was offensive at the time to suggest a woman could get away with adultery. > We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching. One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
  - empath75 2y ago
    Not everyone involved in a religion is a believer. A lot of people get involved for their own purposes. But yes, the desire of believers to be accurate is why I'd expect something like Q to be written down eventually. Also, people misattributing quotes to people is not a recent phenomenon. Many commonly misattributed quotes have a long history going back 100s of years or more. It's only the massive amount of information we have about recent historical figures that allows us to definitively say that the misattributed quotes are wrong. If you go back more than a few hundred years, it gets very difficult.
calvinmorrison 2y ago
If you like this, head over to /r/AcademicBiblical
asimpletune 2y ago
I highly recommend Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel to anyone who is interested in a factual understanding of the Bible. https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan
- Suppafly 2y ago
  Shame he doesn't do long form videos.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    He does a long form podcast "data over dogma"
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      ah, I've seen that recommended before, didn't realize it was the same guy.
derbOac 2y ago
Wikipedia provides a good overview of the different theories of the Synoptic gospels' origins (see the summary at the end of the entry especially): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synoptic_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synopti...
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
Most scholars thing the hypothetical "Q" gospel would have been a "sayings" gospel--which is to say, it was mostly a collection of quotes from Jesus, rather than a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas would be a comparable "sayings" gospel, for an example of what that would look like. It might seem a little string to think of an entire book that's just quotes from someone, absent context. However, this tradition still exists today: https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/1578266408 https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/...
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  It makes sense as a reference to build a more cohesive narrative structure from. Imagine you are actually physically there following Jesus on all his adventures. It's unlikely you have the supplies or resources or time to accurately transcribe a narrative as you yourself are involved. You probably treat it more like you would treat being the "note taker" in a modern Zoom project management call. "So and so said this". "He said that and said he would talk about it again next week for an update" ... Seems like a sayings gospel to me. Makes sense a sayings gospel would be the most contemporaneous source and then other gaps could be filled in in other ways in order to build a coherent narrative once you've got the time to sit down and really put something big and official together.
- pram 2y ago
  Gospel of Thomas actually has one of my favorite parables. It really stuck in my mind since I read it: "The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman who takes a vessel of flour and sets out on a long road. The handle of the vessel broke: the flour spilled out on the road behind her without her knowing it and stopping it. When she arrived at the house she put the vessel down and found it was empty."
alsetmusic 2y ago
Going off topic a bit, I've been reading a number of scholarly works on early Christianity over the past year. These include, "The Origin of Satan," "The Gnostic Gospels," "The Gospel of Mary Magdala," "The Passover Plot," "Jesus the Jew," "How Jesus Became God," and "From Jesus to Christ." To be clear, I am an atheist and a history nerd and I'm really enjoying the scholarship of these works. I recently started reading works that argue against the historicity of Jesus Christ: "Salvation - From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus," "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus," and next up is, "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt." I have become largely convinced that the epistles of Paul and pseudo-Paul are writing not about a man who recently lived, but about a being revealed to him / them in revelations from god (small "g;" remember, I'm an atheist). I won't litigate their arguments here as I'd have to write blocks of text, but I have been persuaded that the book of Mark was likely an allegory and it was only with time that such came to be taken literally. The need to reset the expectations of the believers because the arrival of the kingdom of god kept getting pushed back from "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Mark), to now coming soon following the destruction of the temple (Matthew, Luke), to (paraphrasing) "it's coming eventually, so trust in the Church," (John) created a need to keep reinterpreting Mark (hence, why Jewish Christianity died out and mostly only Gentiles remained). Anyway, it's a fun topic if you're a non-believer and won't get offended by the ideas presented. I'm enjoying it a lot and thought I'd share. Q is frequently cited in most of the above works and that was my jumping off point. There's also thought to be a "sayings" source that was made up of quotes by Jesus used in the gospels. The thing is, following the Nicene Creed, the variants of Christianity (of which there were at least three documented by ancient historians) were systematically wiped out. Were it not for the works found around the Dead Sea, we'd have little to go on other than descriptions from Christian apologists; what little we have demonstrates the rich tapestry of alternative beliefs fighting for supremacy (even Paul fought the Jerusalem apostles: Peter, James, John on topics such as The Law and kosher foods). It's just after 6am where I live and I just woke up. Please forgive typos and errors, as I don't have the leisure of properly proofing this comment before getting on with my day / job.
- gnatman 2y ago
flotzam 2y ago
Wikipedia has a neat table of "notable synoptic theories" with diagrams like the one in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The problem with all of these is they act as if these works came into being fully formed at time X. Any real solution has to overcome that and start to think as these text are in motion.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    That's much more true for the new testament than the old. The main four books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) emerged in such a condensed time frame with such similar structure and content it's very difficult to reason about the genesis of them outside of comparisons to each other. This gets even more complicated when you realize that names are re-used and authors likely intentionally made use of pseudonyms, so it's very hard to draw conclusions of authorship from third-party sources. By the time historians start to mention it Christianity had been wildly popular for centuries. However, much of the historiography dealing with authorship—including the research done by many distinct churches—absolutely treats them as the product of time and multiple contributors. I think there's a tendency to view the simplest narratives as representative because those are the narratives that tend to propagate the widest and fastest, but it's just not representative of what serious scholars think.
  - cxr 2y ago
    They aren't assuming that, and it's weird that you would claim they are. Where do you get this? Those in the field of textual criticism are well aware of the existence of "variant texts"—those "textual witnesses" (documents) that differ for various reasons from the sources they were copied from.
- mhuffman 2y ago
  Also this youtuber[0] is extremely good at visually (and verbally) describing current scholarly understandings of this. Similar (but different) to 3blue1brown in that way. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ
panick21_ 2y ago
I have been getting quite into this topic recently and this whole 'Q' theory more and more sounds like field hanging on to its older theories despite it not really making sense. I find it really hard to defend this view in my opinion. The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend on each other doesn't really make sense. There are different styles of writting and so on in these text. Its much more likely that there are multiple layers and that there are interdependent on each other between each of these. As the typical standard attack on Q, I suggest people look at 'The case against Q' by Mark Goodacre. And he makes the case that if you simply have Markan Priority you don't need Q. This made more sense to me then Q. However he still accept a traditional view of gospel creation and to some extent dating. A more 'radical' approach is being put forward currently by people who study Marcion and in general, the 'Apostolic Fathers'. One of the big problems with biblical scholarship is that 'Gospel' period and 'Apostolic Fathers' period were treated as two different things. So by how the field was split, it was clear that Gospels came before the time of the Apostolic Fathers (this was the standard view in Christian tradition). The problem however is that in terms of external evidence, there is no evidence for the gospel that goes back that far back. The first we have a clear external indication of these text existing with these names, is in the 170s. Lots of people we have text for, seem to either not know the texts, or not think its important. Both are quite strange if you assume they were in their final form before 100. You would assume that after that people constantly use them as references, but they don't. So once you overthrow out that 'traditional' view, and you just assume the gospels are just like many other writing in the second century and treat them no different, all of a sudden lots of things make a whole lot more sense. This reevaluates not just Marcion but also other early church figures like Ignatius. Markus Vinzent and his PhD student Jack Bull have nice youtube channel that you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica They work with Mark Bilby sometiems on using methods better then simple word counts and other traditional methods to try to understand the different layers in the text. He uses computational methods. See his work: > The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke (Hard to read, but you can find videos of him explaining a lot it). His 'Q' is quite different from the traditional one. For those interested, the 'History Valley' youtube channel interviews a whole lot of different scholars with different points of view in the field on these topics. So if you want to get an overview on the different positions on Q, you can find all the different position on that channel.
echelon_musk 2y ago
I've read half of this article and learned nothing more than was explained in the opening paragraph. It feels as if I've just had the Q theory explained to me 5 times by the TFA.
- falcor84 2y ago
  Almost as if there was a single original source which was then adapted by multiple followers
- cxr 2y ago
  I've noticed this happens a lot in this field. If you read Bart Ehrman's books, you'll get the same sense of repetitiveness, and then if you you read the blogs from folks who are from the same sphere, the effect is bad there, too—not just someone repeating the same thing in every post, like a friend who has run out of stories to tell, but they'll have written a bunch of stuff where they repeat themselves several times within a single post. It's very odd. Having said that, I just read the article, and it's not as bad as some of the others.
dzannetandreevn 2y ago
[dead]
cperciva 2y ago
I was really hoping for a wacky fan theory about Star Trek here.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  "Based on your historical documents, wouldn't it make sense that your gospels came from the Q Continuum?" - the Thermians
- pyuser583 2y ago
  I was hoping for an even wackier theory about the Q programming language <https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/ https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/>. Maybe something by Terry Davis.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Maybe something by Terry Davis. Terry A. Davis unluckily died in 2018.
    - pyuser583 2y ago
      Q programming language has been around since 2003.
noworld 2y ago
Better article: Questioning Q https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html
irrational 2y ago
> The Farrer hypothesis proposes that Matthew used Mark as a source, but Luke used both Mark and Matthew as a source. This approach is simple and negates the need for a Q source altogether. > A weakness of the Q source hypothesis is the absence of any textual evidence despite extensive scholarly efforts to find it. The entire hypothesis is based on statistical and literary analysis and inference. It adds complexity to the synoptic problem by introducing an additional layer of tradition, transmission, and composition, which may not be warranted given the available evidence (or rather lack thereof). Wouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the Farrer hypothesis is most likely true? Edit: Or, maybe I should just continue reading to the end first: > On the other hand, it would also make for a more complex explanation than other scholars have proposed, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor. Alternatively, Mark could have been the source for Matthew, and Matthew for Luke, which is a much simpler explanation than the Q hypothesis.
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  You would think so, until you realize that Matt and Luke have some narratives in common to the exclusion of Mark. That has to be accounted for, which is where Occam's Razor falls short. It's probably the strongest argument in favor of a Q source.
  - Cacti 2y ago
    Which ones do they have in common?
  - Detrytus 2y ago
    Mark, according to tradition was a student of St. Paul, and he personally met St. Peter. Matthew was a Jesus disciple himself. Luke was also a friend of St. Paul, and possibly met St. Peter as well. So, for me the simplest explanation is that Mark had to write his gospel on his own, because he was first, but Matthew and Luke could both use previous works as a source, so they do not have to start from scratch, but still they both did have enough of their own stories to add. So, in the end "the Q source" isn't any written source it is just what they both remembered from their conversations with Peter and Paul (or, in Matthew's case, even with the Jesus himself).
prewett 2y ago
I interned for a year with a public speaker who had five or six autobiographical stories he told regularly. I found it interesting that his stories ended up like how the gospels tell Jesus stories. His messages had a main point, but he spoke extemporaneously, so depending on what he had been saying before he got to the story, he would included different elements into the story. One of the last messages I heard, he incorporated a few pieces of context at the beginning that I had never heard him tell before, and although I had heard him tell that story multiple times by that point, it completely changed the meaning of the story. Not that it invalidated the previous tellings, but that bit of context made a big difference to the meaning of the story. The gospel stories read a lot like that. Jesus may have told the stories differently depending on the context, and/ or the writer may have told the story different depending on the points he was making with the story. Which is to say, I think it less likely that Q was written. Mark is generally said (by people who follow Christ, at least) to be summarized from Peter's messages. It seems likely that Matthew and Luke took from Mark as well as a shared source of apostolic teaching, especially since Luke claims to have researched these things, and at least several of the original disciples are traditionally said to have been preaching in the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean.
- jbaber 2y ago
  This is a new-to-me and reasonable idea: that Q is the union of a collection of things.
  - OkayPhysicist 2y ago
    In my theology courses (attended a Jesuit university, so had a couple mandatory semesters), this was presented as the common assumption in the field. The different books of the Gospels are different because they were pulling from different sources. Mark is assumed to be the oldest, since Luke, Matthew, and John all clearly had access to it. Luke and Matthew seem to be contemporaneous, several decades later than Mark, and thus had access to, on top of Mark, the evolving, partly oral, canon of information that formed within the first century and a half or so of Christianity. That's labeled "Q".
foxglacier 2y ago
What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?
- aidenn0 2y ago
  John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years after Jesus's death. Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    Oh, I thought CE started exactly at crucifixion but I guess that wouldn't really be possible if people didn't know when it really was. So it's accepted that those 3 authors may have personally seen Jesus and followed him around collecting stories?
    - cameron_b 2y ago
      Q being their lived experience is not out of the question. Finding a written Q would for some detract from the quality of the gospels as a primary source. Lee Strobel has a good take on the authenticity of the Gospel account in his book The Case For Christ [0] and as always the book is better than the movie [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Christ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Chris...
    - chungy 2y ago
      It's clearer to use the original term and meaning: Anno Domini is "in the year of our Lord", and follows the same year numbering system that has been followed by various kings in history (even Japan still does for their Emperors). The birth of Jesus Christ signified his reign on earth, and that's when AD 1 happened. It's estimated he lived about 33 years until being killed on the cross, but since our current numbering is based on a 16th-centry estimate of how long ago it was, there is room for debate about Jesus's birth being shifted around a few years. Instead of changing our year numbers ("We've decided that 2024 is actually 2030..."), we instead talk about "maybe Jesus was born in 6 BC"
LarsDu88 2y ago
I read about this hypothesis many years ago. I never quite understood why it would not be the case that the book of Mark might be the original source, with Q being a Mark derivative, and Matthew and Luke being a Q derivative
- AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
  So looking at this chart for the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:Relationship_between_synoptic_gospels-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:R... From my understanding (I did have a BA in this at one time but it's been over 10 years, so, memory's a bit rusty), the "triple tradition" part is the section where scholars believe Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. The "Double tradition" is the part where Matthew and Luke agree but deviate from Mark, and hence are the imagined "Q" source material. Then there are the sources/traditions known only to Luke or Matthew. You will notice, however, the orange and red lines indicating instances where Mark and Luke or Mark and Matthew attest, but not with all three. I think those could potentially make your theory unlikely. Because if Q were derivative of Mark, then in theory there shouldn't be anything in Q that wasn't already in Mark. But for there to be some lines that are in Matthew/Mark or Luke/Mark but not in the double tradition would suggest that they had a Q-annotated version of a passage, but opted to drop it in favor of the Mark version. Why would they do that?
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    I suppose there could have been something like Q derives from Mark but overwrites or omits some details, then Matthew and Luke are written by authors with access to both Mark and Q but are unsure which source has precedence. This rooted hypothesis would still have Mark be the source of all gospels.
- kyle_grove 2y ago
  As I understand it, the Q-hypothesis is often situated within the hypothesis of Marcan priority (Mark was the source for Luke and Matthew), and Q is a way of explaining agreements within Luke and Matthew that are not also found in Mark. The hypothesis would be that Luke and Matthew each combined text from Mark with Q.
bill_from_tampa 2y ago
The author mentioned that some of the "Q" sayings in Matthew have been modified and are worded a bit differently in Luke, and seemed to believe that this was an argument more for a separate "Q" source than for the hypothesis that Matthew added the "sayings of Jesus" to the framework of Mark to produce the gospel of Matthew. This does not make any sense to me -- Luke could have altered the wording of the "Q" document just as easily as the "Jesus sayings" in Matthew! And both Matthew and Luke tell the story a bit differently than Mark, and sometimes this is for pretty obvious theological reasons or to 'fix' problems they believed Mark contained. If Matthew didn't see the need to edit and change Mark, and Luke see the need to edit and change both Mark and Matthew, why did they write new gospels anyway? tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.
wazer5 2y ago
All four Gospels have an origin in Eastern philosophy such as Confucianism, making it to Judea around 150 BCE via the Silk Road. - Jesus & Confucius: Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. - Jesus & Buddha: Love your enemies and forgiving those who wrong you. - Jesus & Laozi: Those who humble themselves will be elevated. - Jesus & Confucius: Emphasized cultivating inner virtue and sincerity above formal rituals. - Jesus & Buddha: Non-Attachment to Material Wealth - Jesus& Buddha : Compassion - Jesus & Confucius: Remove the log from your eye before the speck from another. - Jesus & Laozi: "I am the path to truth"
- chx 2y ago
  Extremely heavy citation needed for Confucianism spreading across the Silk Road. As far as I am aware it just didn't happen. Also, the Analects use a very different version of the Golden Rule, much more a prohibition than a moral standard: what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. But roughly around the same time Egypt and Greece also had this thought recorded and it's somewhat hard to believe this was due Confucianism spreading like wildfire. Thales used this in ~624-546 where Analects is later than that.
- deleted 2y ago
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narag 2y ago
A question: what is the date of the first physical copy of any of these texts? Much discussion about the temporal distance between the described events and the writers, but what about the distance between the writers and the text we know? Any hope earlier copies will surface?
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  The Wikipedia article on "dating the Bible" list dates for the earliest known fragmentsb of the various books. If you want earliest complete copies it would be later than those dates.
wheels 2y ago
Kind of odd to see this turning up here: this theory isn't new and in fact is one of the couple most accepted theories about the origin of the gospels. It was proposed more than a century ago, and this article doesn't say anything particularly new or interesting about it. Honestly, the Wikipedia page is probably better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  I was kind of wondering if the reason it showed up was that it was AI generated and then edited.
  - zifpanachr23 2y ago
    Perhaps
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    The conclusion feels a bit AI-ish.
- zargon 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    Well yeah, but you can just post the wiki article if that's better. HN is usually cool with that.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      We should reduce all links to Wikipedia if feasible? Sounds like redux of https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
      - andrewflnr 2y ago
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I imagine Q as some official within the Roman empire doing psyop-type work in an effort to fracture the Messianic Jews, who I'm under the impression were giving them trouble at the time.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Trust the plan?
october8140 2y ago
They spent decades traveling around telling the gospels. Only when they grew old and realized Jesus wasn't coming back in their lifetime did they decide to start writing it down. I would put my money on the similarities being tied to oral tradition. Probably listening to each other.
- goatlover 2y ago
  No, because comparison of the Greek in the earliest manuscripts shows evidence of textual copying. Same way teachers recognize plagiarism or students copying from one another.
- no-dr-onboard 2y ago
  Jewish oral tradition, at the time of the writing of the gospels, had largely been replaced by the robust scribal polity and the infrastructure that they created that was dominant at that time. This is further evidenced by the statistically insignificant amount of transposition errors for written works from that era. Was oral tradition around and popular for the lay polity that time? Absolutely. Was it heeded in and above scribal tradition? No, not at all.
abrenuntio 2y ago
The Q hypothesis has issues. For such an important document or source, nothing is known about it. Its existence is not mentioned or hinted at in external sources. No trace of it has been found. In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up). So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either. See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.
childintime 2y ago
I naively thought this about Q in Q-anon and therefore a conspiracy on the Gospels. Though it is, sort of. The truth has been hidden from us! Yet again! This time Putin inserts himself in our past! Great powers will come to him! </s> Today, by the way, idiots willing and christians duped into evil*), he'll have his greatest day. *) Coerced by the clicks based business model of the non-political by law, modern, tax-exempt NGO dragons (aka churches). The christian truth has been very publicly keelhauled. The USA has lost its christian backbone. The 911 implosion is still in progress, and shows no sign of stopping. Neither candidate addresses the issue, and both will likely aggravate it. Sadly, because during my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the USA, as a work in progress, like all of us. Perhaps it's time for the world to say: USA we love you. Edit 17: what, no downvotes yet??

173 points by Tomte 2y ago

The absence of recent work on reconstructing and contextualizing Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon is disappointing, particularly given the implications for understanding early Christian texts and the development of the synoptic gospels. The pre-Lukan theory, which suggests Marcion’s gospel may represent a version of Luke predating the canonical text, challenges traditional views on the formation of the gospel narrative. This theory raises important questions about the so-called “Q” source, a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings used by Matthew and Luke.

panick21_ 2y ago
People are working on Marcion, actually Marcion and things surrounding Marcion is a hot topic right now. Look at the work by Markus Vinzent. He is currently working on the Paul version of Marcions letters.

vertnerd 2y ago

I am no theologian, but this seemed like an interesting topic until I started reading the article, which likely could have been summarized in a paragraph or two. The relentless onslaught of advertisements and white space made me want to claw my eyeballs out. Then the author plagiarized himself in his own article, telling us TWICE that "Q" is short for the German word “Quelle,” meaning “source”. It reads like a high-school essay that has to reach a word count.

deleted 2y ago
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ImHereToVote 2y ago

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userbinator 2y ago
Wrong Q.
- tyre 2y ago
  that’s what they want you to think

jcmontx 2y ago

I love this area of study. Bart Ehrman has very interesting books on the topic.

freedomben 2y ago
Second this. If you have any interest in the scholarship behind the ancient world, Bart Ehrman's books are phenomenal. He is one of the few people who can be both world leading scholar, and great writer who can really connect with a layperson and academic alike. He is also genuinely one of the best human beings I know, and I don't say that lightly. I also really enjoyed his book about suffering. If you've struggled with your faith over the amount of suffering in the world, and/or yearn for answers to those hard questions, I highly recommend "God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer." It actually goes far beyond just the Bible (though that is covered very, very well) and includes much philosophy and other things. It's a deeply personal book where he opens up about his own struggle and really allows himself to be vulnerable. For me, I was struggling deeply with these questions and had nobody to talk to. Everyone close to me in life had strong faith and was perfectly satisfied with dismissing the problem as "God knows. He is perfect. That's enough for me." The book was like having a brilliant and deeply thoughtful friend to have a conversation with, and it was an important point in my life. I'll be forever grateful to Bart for writing it. Disclaimer: Bart is a friend of mine, but I read most of his books before meeting him.
- wahern 2y ago
  Related Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil The question is a central one in Western philosophy and religion. Less so in some other traditions. But it predates Christianity.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    It's certainly touched on in Ecclesiastes, albeit more obliquely than presented in the wikipedia article.
2y ago

User23 2y ago

No, probably not. It’s a somewhat plausible notion so far as it goes, but the complete lack of primary or even secondary evidence for the existence of a Q document is a major problem for the conjecture.

dragontamer 2y ago

There is a dead comment here talking about how bad the writing is here. Maybe the comment is dead because it was too harsh? But in any case, the writing here is very poor. The actual information offered is barely worth much more than my following summary: Mark was written first. Then Matthew then Luke. Q is a hypothetical source that addresses the commonality between these gospels but has never been found. As Q was a theory, there are variations where only Matthew and Luke reference Q, or maybe Mark also referenced Q. Or maybe Q never existed and the oral tradition is sufficient to explain all the commonalities (especially between Matthew and Luke). Which happens to be all my Religion class ever covered. Q theory has never been proven or disproven. The early Church had an oral tradition (Jesus never wrote anything down personally, which is why we rely upon Mark, Matthew and Luke). John has an obviously different writing style. The truth of the matter has been lost to time.

moomin 2y ago
It also repeats itself. The question is interesting, but the article is blogspam and could be AI-generated.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  I concur. It reads like AI to me. I think it was doing okay when it was comparing early passages. But somewhere it becomes really spammy and circular. Maybe the start was written by human and the they filled out the later sections with AI??
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Indeed. This is one of those articles where I struggle to decide to upvote. I wish I could upvote the discussion without upvoting the article itself, because this article does not deserve it
  - deleted 2y ago
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JKCalhoun 2y ago

Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is not considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The same ground but not as similar to the other three? Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.

david927 2y ago
> Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples didn't write them.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  Indeed, I believe most of the disciples (except Matthew, I think) were illiterate. I don't believe he's generally held to be the author of The Gospel of Matthew, though. However, this doesn't preclude the idea of their evangelism being recorded by someone else. Paul—while not an Apostle himself—is generally held to be the true author of at least some of his letters and is likely the closest we'll find to identifying the earliest authors of the new testament with real, historical figures.
  - vineyardlabs 2y ago
    Luke would have been literate. Paul states elsewhere that Luke is a physician, and in the book Luke states he was contracted by a third party to write the book.
- vineyardlabs 2y ago
  Questions about authorship aside, note that only Matthew and John claim to be disciples/people who directly interacted with Jesus. Luke is purported to be a physician/associate of Paul who was paid by an unnamed benefactor to document the life of Jesus based on interviews with eyewitnesses and research from earlier sources, and Mark is purported to be writing down an account of the life Jesus based on Peter's eyewitness testimony in Rome several decades after the fact.

neallindsay 2y ago

If you like this, you will definitely like the Data Over Dogma podcast.

calvinmorrison 2y ago
[flagged]

redwoolf 2y ago

[flagged]

currymj 2y ago
there are other Christian communities than American-style Evangelical Christianity who tend to be more intellectual and do like arguing about this kind of thing.
- redwoolf 2y ago
  You're right. I'm extremely colored by my Evangelical upbringing and the contemptuous American Evangelical community. That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it, would it change much about our understanding of that time in history?
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    I think a lot of people are interested in a more academic treatment of the time of the Acts of the Apostles up though Paul's journey. There is a huge amount of early Catholic/Christian history that comes down to oral traditions and the flowery language of the Bible. Which forces us to wonder what parts are metaphor and which parts were real history. Like we know St. James somehow ended up in Spain (erm, Iberia or whatever it was called back then). But did they take with them oral tradition alone or did they have books to help keep the story consistent? If Q existed, it may have been a book or reference for the early Bishop/Apostles. It's be insight to how they lived and worked. -------- Oral Tradition is how the world worked back then. But it also existed in a time of writing and documentation (see the Roman Empire around that time). I think most people are happy with oral tradition as an explanation. But the gospels seem too similar for oral tradition alone.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Interestingly, just read something that "Evangelicals", 50-80 years ago, used to think more, and thought religion and government should be separate, hence they believed they should stay out of government. They were only recently 'radicalized' like other fundamentalist religions into a more terrorist 'like', leaning group.

empath75 2y ago

Based on nothing other than that "people don't really change", I would guess that pretty soon after the death of Jesus, people started misattributing quotes to him. We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching. So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends, and people get tired of it and decide to keep a list of accepted quotes from Jesus, so that people would stop making up new ones from that point on (and it doesn't appear to have worked -- the later gospels have additional quotes and stories -- in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.) Then after that, you have this list of canonical quotes going around, and of course people want the context, because you don't necessarily know how to interpret a quote without the context in which it was said, and so you get the gospels of Mark and Luke.

graemep 2y ago
The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died -within the lifetimes of people who could remember him. > in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.) That is the consensus, but there are people who think otherwise - the alternative theory, which is at least plausible, is that it was offensive at the time to suggest a woman could get away with adultery. > We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching. One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
- empath75 2y ago
  Not everyone involved in a religion is a believer. A lot of people get involved for their own purposes. But yes, the desire of believers to be accurate is why I'd expect something like Q to be written down eventually. Also, people misattributing quotes to people is not a recent phenomenon. Many commonly misattributed quotes have a long history going back 100s of years or more. It's only the massive amount of information we have about recent historical figures that allows us to definitively say that the misattributed quotes are wrong. If you go back more than a few hundred years, it gets very difficult.

calvinmorrison 2y ago

If you like this, head over to /r/AcademicBiblical

asimpletune 2y ago

I highly recommend Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel to anyone who is interested in a factual understanding of the Bible. https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan

Suppafly 2y ago
Shame he doesn't do long form videos.
- cogman10 2y ago
  He does a long form podcast "data over dogma"
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    ah, I've seen that recommended before, didn't realize it was the same guy.

derbOac 2y ago

Wikipedia provides a good overview of the different theories of the Synoptic gospels' origins (see the summary at the end of the entry especially): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synoptic_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synopti...

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

Most scholars thing the hypothetical "Q" gospel would have been a "sayings" gospel--which is to say, it was mostly a collection of quotes from Jesus, rather than a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas would be a comparable "sayings" gospel, for an example of what that would look like. It might seem a little string to think of an entire book that's just quotes from someone, absent context. However, this tradition still exists today: https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/1578266408 https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/...

zifpanachr23 2y ago
It makes sense as a reference to build a more cohesive narrative structure from. Imagine you are actually physically there following Jesus on all his adventures. It's unlikely you have the supplies or resources or time to accurately transcribe a narrative as you yourself are involved. You probably treat it more like you would treat being the "note taker" in a modern Zoom project management call. "So and so said this". "He said that and said he would talk about it again next week for an update" ... Seems like a sayings gospel to me. Makes sense a sayings gospel would be the most contemporaneous source and then other gaps could be filled in in other ways in order to build a coherent narrative once you've got the time to sit down and really put something big and official together.
pram 2y ago
Gospel of Thomas actually has one of my favorite parables. It really stuck in my mind since I read it: "The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman who takes a vessel of flour and sets out on a long road. The handle of the vessel broke: the flour spilled out on the road behind her without her knowing it and stopping it. When she arrived at the house she put the vessel down and found it was empty."

alsetmusic 2y ago

Going off topic a bit, I've been reading a number of scholarly works on early Christianity over the past year. These include, "The Origin of Satan," "The Gnostic Gospels," "The Gospel of Mary Magdala," "The Passover Plot," "Jesus the Jew," "How Jesus Became God," and "From Jesus to Christ." To be clear, I am an atheist and a history nerd and I'm really enjoying the scholarship of these works. I recently started reading works that argue against the historicity of Jesus Christ: "Salvation - From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus," "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus," and next up is, "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt." I have become largely convinced that the epistles of Paul and pseudo-Paul are writing not about a man who recently lived, but about a being revealed to him / them in revelations from god (small "g;" remember, I'm an atheist). I won't litigate their arguments here as I'd have to write blocks of text, but I have been persuaded that the book of Mark was likely an allegory and it was only with time that such came to be taken literally. The need to reset the expectations of the believers because the arrival of the kingdom of god kept getting pushed back from "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Mark), to now coming soon following the destruction of the temple (Matthew, Luke), to (paraphrasing) "it's coming eventually, so trust in the Church," (John) created a need to keep reinterpreting Mark (hence, why Jewish Christianity died out and mostly only Gentiles remained). Anyway, it's a fun topic if you're a non-believer and won't get offended by the ideas presented. I'm enjoying it a lot and thought I'd share. Q is frequently cited in most of the above works and that was my jumping off point. There's also thought to be a "sayings" source that was made up of quotes by Jesus used in the gospels. The thing is, following the Nicene Creed, the variants of Christianity (of which there were at least three documented by ancient historians) were systematically wiped out. Were it not for the works found around the Dead Sea, we'd have little to go on other than descriptions from Christian apologists; what little we have demonstrates the rich tapestry of alternative beliefs fighting for supremacy (even Paul fought the Jerusalem apostles: Peter, James, John on topics such as The Law and kosher foods). It's just after 6am where I live and I just woke up. Please forgive typos and errors, as I don't have the leisure of properly proofing this comment before getting on with my day / job.

gnatman 2y ago

flotzam 2y ago

Wikipedia has a neat table of "notable synoptic theories" with diagrams like the one in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories

panick21_ 2y ago
The problem with all of these is they act as if these works came into being fully formed at time X. Any real solution has to overcome that and start to think as these text are in motion.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  That's much more true for the new testament than the old. The main four books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) emerged in such a condensed time frame with such similar structure and content it's very difficult to reason about the genesis of them outside of comparisons to each other. This gets even more complicated when you realize that names are re-used and authors likely intentionally made use of pseudonyms, so it's very hard to draw conclusions of authorship from third-party sources. By the time historians start to mention it Christianity had been wildly popular for centuries. However, much of the historiography dealing with authorship—including the research done by many distinct churches—absolutely treats them as the product of time and multiple contributors. I think there's a tendency to view the simplest narratives as representative because those are the narratives that tend to propagate the widest and fastest, but it's just not representative of what serious scholars think.
- cxr 2y ago
  They aren't assuming that, and it's weird that you would claim they are. Where do you get this? Those in the field of textual criticism are well aware of the existence of "variant texts"—those "textual witnesses" (documents) that differ for various reasons from the sources they were copied from.
mhuffman 2y ago
Also this youtuber[0] is extremely good at visually (and verbally) describing current scholarly understandings of this. Similar (but different) to 3blue1brown in that way. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ

panick21_ 2y ago

I have been getting quite into this topic recently and this whole 'Q' theory more and more sounds like field hanging on to its older theories despite it not really making sense. I find it really hard to defend this view in my opinion. The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend on each other doesn't really make sense. There are different styles of writting and so on in these text. Its much more likely that there are multiple layers and that there are interdependent on each other between each of these. As the typical standard attack on Q, I suggest people look at 'The case against Q' by Mark Goodacre. And he makes the case that if you simply have Markan Priority you don't need Q. This made more sense to me then Q. However he still accept a traditional view of gospel creation and to some extent dating. A more 'radical' approach is being put forward currently by people who study Marcion and in general, the 'Apostolic Fathers'. One of the big problems with biblical scholarship is that 'Gospel' period and 'Apostolic Fathers' period were treated as two different things. So by how the field was split, it was clear that Gospels came before the time of the Apostolic Fathers (this was the standard view in Christian tradition). The problem however is that in terms of external evidence, there is no evidence for the gospel that goes back that far back. The first we have a clear external indication of these text existing with these names, is in the 170s. Lots of people we have text for, seem to either not know the texts, or not think its important. Both are quite strange if you assume they were in their final form before 100. You would assume that after that people constantly use them as references, but they don't. So once you overthrow out that 'traditional' view, and you just assume the gospels are just like many other writing in the second century and treat them no different, all of a sudden lots of things make a whole lot more sense. This reevaluates not just Marcion but also other early church figures like Ignatius. Markus Vinzent and his PhD student Jack Bull have nice youtube channel that you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica They work with Mark Bilby sometiems on using methods better then simple word counts and other traditional methods to try to understand the different layers in the text. He uses computational methods. See his work: > The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke (Hard to read, but you can find videos of him explaining a lot it). His 'Q' is quite different from the traditional one. For those interested, the 'History Valley' youtube channel interviews a whole lot of different scholars with different points of view in the field on these topics. So if you want to get an overview on the different positions on Q, you can find all the different position on that channel.

echelon_musk 2y ago

I've read half of this article and learned nothing more than was explained in the opening paragraph. It feels as if I've just had the Q theory explained to me 5 times by the TFA.

falcor84 2y ago
Almost as if there was a single original source which was then adapted by multiple followers
cxr 2y ago
I've noticed this happens a lot in this field. If you read Bart Ehrman's books, you'll get the same sense of repetitiveness, and then if you you read the blogs from folks who are from the same sphere, the effect is bad there, too—not just someone repeating the same thing in every post, like a friend who has run out of stories to tell, but they'll have written a bunch of stuff where they repeat themselves several times within a single post. It's very odd. Having said that, I just read the article, and it's not as bad as some of the others.

dzannetandreevn 2y ago

[dead]

cperciva 2y ago

I was really hoping for a wacky fan theory about Star Trek here.

fsckboy 2y ago
"Based on your historical documents, wouldn't it make sense that your gospels came from the Q Continuum?" - the Thermians
pyuser583 2y ago
I was hoping for an even wackier theory about the Q programming language <https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/ https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/>. Maybe something by Terry Davis.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Maybe something by Terry Davis. Terry A. Davis unluckily died in 2018.
  - pyuser583 2y ago
    Q programming language has been around since 2003.

noworld 2y ago

Better article: Questioning Q https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html

irrational 2y ago

> The Farrer hypothesis proposes that Matthew used Mark as a source, but Luke used both Mark and Matthew as a source. This approach is simple and negates the need for a Q source altogether. > A weakness of the Q source hypothesis is the absence of any textual evidence despite extensive scholarly efforts to find it. The entire hypothesis is based on statistical and literary analysis and inference. It adds complexity to the synoptic problem by introducing an additional layer of tradition, transmission, and composition, which may not be warranted given the available evidence (or rather lack thereof). Wouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the Farrer hypothesis is most likely true? Edit: Or, maybe I should just continue reading to the end first: > On the other hand, it would also make for a more complex explanation than other scholars have proposed, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor. Alternatively, Mark could have been the source for Matthew, and Matthew for Luke, which is a much simpler explanation than the Q hypothesis.

jdthedisciple 2y ago
You would think so, until you realize that Matt and Luke have some narratives in common to the exclusion of Mark. That has to be accounted for, which is where Occam's Razor falls short. It's probably the strongest argument in favor of a Q source.
- Cacti 2y ago
  Which ones do they have in common?
- Detrytus 2y ago
  Mark, according to tradition was a student of St. Paul, and he personally met St. Peter. Matthew was a Jesus disciple himself. Luke was also a friend of St. Paul, and possibly met St. Peter as well. So, for me the simplest explanation is that Mark had to write his gospel on his own, because he was first, but Matthew and Luke could both use previous works as a source, so they do not have to start from scratch, but still they both did have enough of their own stories to add. So, in the end "the Q source" isn't any written source it is just what they both remembered from their conversations with Peter and Paul (or, in Matthew's case, even with the Jesus himself).

prewett 2y ago

I interned for a year with a public speaker who had five or six autobiographical stories he told regularly. I found it interesting that his stories ended up like how the gospels tell Jesus stories. His messages had a main point, but he spoke extemporaneously, so depending on what he had been saying before he got to the story, he would included different elements into the story. One of the last messages I heard, he incorporated a few pieces of context at the beginning that I had never heard him tell before, and although I had heard him tell that story multiple times by that point, it completely changed the meaning of the story. Not that it invalidated the previous tellings, but that bit of context made a big difference to the meaning of the story. The gospel stories read a lot like that. Jesus may have told the stories differently depending on the context, and/ or the writer may have told the story different depending on the points he was making with the story. Which is to say, I think it less likely that Q was written. Mark is generally said (by people who follow Christ, at least) to be summarized from Peter's messages. It seems likely that Matthew and Luke took from Mark as well as a shared source of apostolic teaching, especially since Luke claims to have researched these things, and at least several of the original disciples are traditionally said to have been preaching in the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean.

jbaber 2y ago
This is a new-to-me and reasonable idea: that Q is the union of a collection of things.
- OkayPhysicist 2y ago
  In my theology courses (attended a Jesuit university, so had a couple mandatory semesters), this was presented as the common assumption in the field. The different books of the Gospels are different because they were pulling from different sources. Mark is assumed to be the oldest, since Luke, Matthew, and John all clearly had access to it. Luke and Matthew seem to be contemporaneous, several decades later than Mark, and thus had access to, on top of Mark, the evolving, partly oral, canon of information that formed within the first century and a half or so of Christianity. That's labeled "Q".

foxglacier 2y ago

What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?

aidenn0 2y ago
John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years after Jesus's death. Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Oh, I thought CE started exactly at crucifixion but I guess that wouldn't really be possible if people didn't know when it really was. So it's accepted that those 3 authors may have personally seen Jesus and followed him around collecting stories?
  - cameron_b 2y ago
    Q being their lived experience is not out of the question. Finding a written Q would for some detract from the quality of the gospels as a primary source. Lee Strobel has a good take on the authenticity of the Gospel account in his book The Case For Christ [0] and as always the book is better than the movie [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Christ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Chris...
  - chungy 2y ago
    It's clearer to use the original term and meaning: Anno Domini is "in the year of our Lord", and follows the same year numbering system that has been followed by various kings in history (even Japan still does for their Emperors). The birth of Jesus Christ signified his reign on earth, and that's when AD 1 happened. It's estimated he lived about 33 years until being killed on the cross, but since our current numbering is based on a 16th-centry estimate of how long ago it was, there is room for debate about Jesus's birth being shifted around a few years. Instead of changing our year numbers ("We've decided that 2024 is actually 2030..."), we instead talk about "maybe Jesus was born in 6 BC"

LarsDu88 2y ago

I read about this hypothesis many years ago. I never quite understood why it would not be the case that the book of Mark might be the original source, with Q being a Mark derivative, and Matthew and Luke being a Q derivative

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
So looking at this chart for the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:Relationship_between_synoptic_gospels-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:R... From my understanding (I did have a BA in this at one time but it's been over 10 years, so, memory's a bit rusty), the "triple tradition" part is the section where scholars believe Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. The "Double tradition" is the part where Matthew and Luke agree but deviate from Mark, and hence are the imagined "Q" source material. Then there are the sources/traditions known only to Luke or Matthew. You will notice, however, the orange and red lines indicating instances where Mark and Luke or Mark and Matthew attest, but not with all three. I think those could potentially make your theory unlikely. Because if Q were derivative of Mark, then in theory there shouldn't be anything in Q that wasn't already in Mark. But for there to be some lines that are in Matthew/Mark or Luke/Mark but not in the double tradition would suggest that they had a Q-annotated version of a passage, but opted to drop it in favor of the Mark version. Why would they do that?
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  I suppose there could have been something like Q derives from Mark but overwrites or omits some details, then Matthew and Luke are written by authors with access to both Mark and Q but are unsure which source has precedence. This rooted hypothesis would still have Mark be the source of all gospels.
kyle_grove 2y ago
As I understand it, the Q-hypothesis is often situated within the hypothesis of Marcan priority (Mark was the source for Luke and Matthew), and Q is a way of explaining agreements within Luke and Matthew that are not also found in Mark. The hypothesis would be that Luke and Matthew each combined text from Mark with Q.

bill_from_tampa 2y ago

The author mentioned that some of the "Q" sayings in Matthew have been modified and are worded a bit differently in Luke, and seemed to believe that this was an argument more for a separate "Q" source than for the hypothesis that Matthew added the "sayings of Jesus" to the framework of Mark to produce the gospel of Matthew. This does not make any sense to me -- Luke could have altered the wording of the "Q" document just as easily as the "Jesus sayings" in Matthew! And both Matthew and Luke tell the story a bit differently than Mark, and sometimes this is for pretty obvious theological reasons or to 'fix' problems they believed Mark contained. If Matthew didn't see the need to edit and change Mark, and Luke see the need to edit and change both Mark and Matthew, why did they write new gospels anyway? tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.

wazer5 2y ago

All four Gospels have an origin in Eastern philosophy such as Confucianism, making it to Judea around 150 BCE via the Silk Road. - Jesus & Confucius: Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. - Jesus & Buddha: Love your enemies and forgiving those who wrong you. - Jesus & Laozi: Those who humble themselves will be elevated. - Jesus & Confucius: Emphasized cultivating inner virtue and sincerity above formal rituals. - Jesus & Buddha: Non-Attachment to Material Wealth - Jesus& Buddha : Compassion - Jesus & Confucius: Remove the log from your eye before the speck from another. - Jesus & Laozi: "I am the path to truth"

chx 2y ago
Extremely heavy citation needed for Confucianism spreading across the Silk Road. As far as I am aware it just didn't happen. Also, the Analects use a very different version of the Golden Rule, much more a prohibition than a moral standard: what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. But roughly around the same time Egypt and Greece also had this thought recorded and it's somewhat hard to believe this was due Confucianism spreading like wildfire. Thales used this in ~624-546 where Analects is later than that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

narag 2y ago

A question: what is the date of the first physical copy of any of these texts? Much discussion about the temporal distance between the described events and the writers, but what about the distance between the writers and the text we know? Any hope earlier copies will surface?

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
The Wikipedia article on "dating the Bible" list dates for the earliest known fragmentsb of the various books. If you want earliest complete copies it would be later than those dates.

wheels 2y ago

Kind of odd to see this turning up here: this theory isn't new and in fact is one of the couple most accepted theories about the origin of the gospels. It was proposed more than a century ago, and this article doesn't say anything particularly new or interesting about it. Honestly, the Wikipedia page is probably better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

readthenotes1 2y ago
I was kind of wondering if the reason it showed up was that it was AI generated and then edited.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  Perhaps
- emmelaich 2y ago
  The conclusion feels a bit AI-ish.
zargon 2y ago
https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  Well yeah, but you can just post the wiki article if that's better. HN is usually cool with that.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    We should reduce all links to Wikipedia if feasible? Sounds like redux of https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
    - andrewflnr 2y ago

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

I imagine Q as some official within the Roman empire doing psyop-type work in an effort to fracture the Messianic Jews, who I'm under the impression were giving them trouble at the time.

Vecr 2y ago
Trust the plan?

october8140 2y ago

They spent decades traveling around telling the gospels. Only when they grew old and realized Jesus wasn't coming back in their lifetime did they decide to start writing it down. I would put my money on the similarities being tied to oral tradition. Probably listening to each other.

goatlover 2y ago
No, because comparison of the Greek in the earliest manuscripts shows evidence of textual copying. Same way teachers recognize plagiarism or students copying from one another.
no-dr-onboard 2y ago
Jewish oral tradition, at the time of the writing of the gospels, had largely been replaced by the robust scribal polity and the infrastructure that they created that was dominant at that time. This is further evidenced by the statistically insignificant amount of transposition errors for written works from that era. Was oral tradition around and popular for the lay polity that time? Absolutely. Was it heeded in and above scribal tradition? No, not at all.

abrenuntio 2y ago

The Q hypothesis has issues. For such an important document or source, nothing is known about it. Its existence is not mentioned or hinted at in external sources. No trace of it has been found. In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up). So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either. See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.

childintime 2y ago

I naively thought this about Q in Q-anon and therefore a conspiracy on the Gospels. Though it is, sort of. The truth has been hidden from us! Yet again! This time Putin inserts himself in our past! Great powers will come to him! </s> Today, by the way, idiots willing and christians duped into evil*), he'll have his greatest day. *) Coerced by the clicks based business model of the non-political by law, modern, tax-exempt NGO dragons (aka churches). The christian truth has been very publicly keelhauled. The USA has lost its christian backbone. The 911 implosion is still in progress, and shows no sign of stopping. Neither candidate addresses the issue, and both will likely aggravate it. Sadly, because during my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the USA, as a work in progress, like all of us. Perhaps it's time for the world to say: USA we love you. Edit 17: what, no downvotes yet??