What is the 'Q' document?

Answer 1

Biblical scholars long ago accepted that Mark's Gospel was the first of the New Testament gospels written, and that it must have been written in Greek. They also noticed that whenever Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel agreed with Mark, they almost always used the same words in Greek. Most scholars see this as evidence that Matthew and Luke are largely derived from Mark.

Scholars then noticed that many passages in Matthew and Luke also contain other sayings that are identical in their Greek wording, although the sayings are placed in different places, time and context by each of the two authors. They realised that the two authors must have been using a common source for those sayings, and that must be a written source, in fact written in Greek, for the wording of the sayings to be so consistent.

German scholars suggested a hypothetical document that they called the Quelle (or 'Q') Document. Scholars began to analyse the two gospels to see if they could piece together the original wording of the Q Document. Clearly it was almost entirely a book of sayings, since it contained no reference to the life of Jesus, or to any of his works. Scholars have been unable to explain the fact that Q has a central theme was the killing of the prophets but it never refers to the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus.

Gradually, scholars put together an outline of the original document. In 1964, J. M. Robinson noted the formal similarity of Q to other early Christian documents such as the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and the Didache, as well as the parables in Mark chapter 4. Parts of 'Q' may have been derived from these documents, or they may have been partly dependent on Q.

The Q-Document seems to have evolved over a period of time, with different layers reflecting theological beliefs of that time, but is nevertheless a well organised unit with an integral theological outlook, which can eventually offer a more plausible explanation of the twilight period of the emergence of Christianity and its advance to conquer the Greco-Roman world. The picture it gives is complete enough to help reconstruct the history of the early Church to the extent no other document from the earliest times has done, at least to this moment.

Q is considered likely to have come from a Christian community outside the direct influence of the Pauline and Jerusalem churches, the forerunners of orthodox Christianity. A view expressed by the Editorial Board of the International Q Project is that the Q movement, a mission limited to Jews, was less successful than the mission to the gentiles and gradually died out. Scribes no longer made new copies of the Q Gospel as the existing copies became damaged or lost, and it survived only as incorporated into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.