Sources of the Synoptic Gospels

The above content being made out for the material common to Mark and Q, the use of Q by Mark may be permitted to rest upon its general probability, there being nothing to contradict it or to substantiate the opposite hypothesis. How closely Mark used Q, whether actually copying certain passages from him, or merely recalling what he had read or heard read from Q, cannot be determined, since what stood in the text of Q used by Mark is only an inference from what stood in the recensions used by Matthew and Luke.

DO THE VOCABULARY AND STYLE OF MARK AND Q, RESPECTIVELY, THROW ANY LIGHT UPON THEIR LITERARY RELATIONSHIP?

The inquiry might perhaps be carried a step farther by a comparison of the vocabularies of Mark and Q. Hawkins, between the first and second editions of his Horae Synopticae, made a second and more diligent search for linguistic peculiarities in Q, and declares himself unable to find any. Harnack, on the contrary, believes he finds some such.

Sentences in Q, according to Harnack, are generally connected by καί, δὲ being used but seldom. The same is true of Mark. But this only indicates the comparative nearness of both Mark and Q to the Semitic. The same may be said of the preponderance of simple verbs in distinction from compound in both Mark and Q. Ἐὰν is used twice as frequently as εἰ; Mark also appears to use the former thirty-six times and the latter but fifteen. This fact seems to have more significance by reason of the other, that Luke uses one word thirty-two and the other thirty-three times. Matthew, however, uses ἐὰν exactly twice as often as εἰ. When we remember that all we have of Q is contained in Matthew and Luke, and only a small portion of it in Mark, these facts do seem to indicate a preference for ἐὰν over εἰ as between Mark and Q on the one side and Luke on the other, but between Mark and Q on the one side and Matthew on the other no such contrast appears. Mark and Q are here no nearer to each other, or very little, than either of them is to Matthew.

The particle τε is never found in Q.[135] It occurs five times in Mt and seven times in Lk, and but once in Mk. Ὡς in temporal clauses seems to be absent; it is also absent from Matthew, while Luke uses it nineteen times and Mark but once. Clauses with γίνομαι, frequent in Matthew and Luke, are absent from Q; they also occur in Mark; but their absence from Q may be due simply to Q’s lack of historical matter. Παρὰ and σὺν are absent; the first is used about evenly by Mark and Matthew, and more frequently by Luke; the second, three times by Matthew, five times by Mark, and twenty-four times by Luke.

CONCLUSION AS TO MARK’S DEPENDENCE UPON Q

These facts do not all point in the same direction. They seem sometimes to indicate a linguistic affinity between Q and Mark, but this affinity usually extends to Matthew also. What seems to be proved by them is that Mark and Q and Matthew all stand nearer to the Semitic than does Luke. But this is only the obverse of the statement that Luke is the best Grecist. It throws no light upon the literary relation of Mark and Q. Such literary relation, in fact, cannot in the strict sense be “proved.” It can only be rendered probable, tho perhaps extremely probable, by the unlikelihood that Mark and Q should have fifty verses in common without any literary relationship. Such relationship being assumed, the dependence is on the side of Mark.

CHAPTER VII

Since Matthew shows everywhere a tendency to group his material into discourses, it is a priori probable that the original order of the Q material is to be sought in Luke and not in Matthew. Given this tendency to combine, reasons are obvious for Matthew’s combining, in his Sermon on the Mount, much matter that Luke has scattered thru his Gospel. But if the Q material originally stood in such continuous discourses, no motive can be assigned for Luke’s breaking up these discourses and scattering their material thru so many chapters. The assumption that Matthew has combined, in his Sermon on the Mount, material which originally was separated as it still is in Luke, is corroborated by an analysis of that Sermon, which shows it to be anything but a unity. Much of the material which Matthew has combined into this Sermon has no duplicate in Luke. There is no means of telling where in Matthew’s Q this unduplicated material stood. But the fact that the duplicated matter has been brot forward by Matthew from later chapters in Luke would give the presumption that such of the unduplicated material as has no necessary unity where it stands also stood in QMt, not at the beginning where it now is, but later; and this is also what we should expect.

TABLE VII

TABLE VIII

Taking the hint that Luke’s order probably represents the original order of the Q material, we find this supposition confirmed by the present arrangement. In spite of Matthew’s transpositions, the sections in Luke and Matthew, as grouped in Table IX, still stand in the same relative order.

TABLE IX

Each of these groups—one of seven sections, two of four, and six of two sections each—probably stood, within itself, in the same order as that in which we now find it in Matthew and Luke.

The sections grouped in Table X have suffered such slight transpositions as to make it probable that each of the groups constituted a continuous passage, probably in the order preserved by Luke.

TABLE X

There is one other item, which I owe to Mr. Streeter,[136] that strongly supports the assumption that Luke has preserved the Q material in its most nearly original form. That is, that Luke allows himself much less liberty in the rearrangement of Mark’s order than does Matthew. The best single testimony to his faithfulness to Mark’s order is seen in the fact that where he makes his great omission from Mk (Mk vi, 45-viii, 26), beginning at that point his great interpolation (Lk ix, 51-xviii, 14), he does not, after returning to Mark, go back and pick up any single item that he has omitted. Detached sayings, some brief, and some, like the Beelzebul controversy, of considerable length, which he places in a different connection from that in which Mark gives them, can uniformly be shown to have stood in Q as well as in Mark,[137] and Luke follows Q’s order with Q’s wording. In the earlier part of his narrative, Luke does permit himself some little freedom in deviating from Mark’s order; notably in the imprisonment of John the Baptist, the call of the first disciples, and the rejection at Nazareth (in each case, apparently, at the expense of some anachronism). Except for these instances his transpositions of Marcan material are slight, and usually amount rather to its rearrangement within a single section than to a genuine change of order in the structure. An exception to this rule is his passion narrative, where his use of Mark is greatly influenced by his special source.

Q was apparently a collection of sayings, without chronological framework or data of any sort. But to the sayings of Jesus there was prefixed a slight account of the preaching of John the Baptist. This will not seem strange when it is remembered that Q was a Palestinian document, and that the cult of John the Baptist long survived the origin of Christianity. What is not so easy to explain is Q’s apparent inclusion of one narrative, the story of the centurion’s servant. It also contained an account of the sending out of the twelve, but apparently no reference to the passion. The absence of narratives, or of any chronological hints, would make its rearrangement easy; perhaps it suffered some derangement at the hands of those who added the sections peculiar to Matthew’s and Luke’s recensions (as it did at the hands of Matthew himself), and who are responsible for some of the deviations between the two. As Mr. Streeter suggests, if Mark were lost, we could not, from Matthew and Luke, be sure either of Mark’s content or his order. No more can we of Q. About all that can be said is that the strong probability is that Luke more nearly than Matthew reproduces that order.

CHAPTER VIII

6. Various facts, especially translation variants, require the assumption that this Q was originally an Aramaic document, used by Matthew and Luke respectively, in two Greek translations that went back to two different Aramaic texts.[138]

7. This furnishes the clue for the analysis of Q into QMt and QLk, and for the assignment to these two recensions of Q of much material which has hitherto been assigned to unknown sources.

8. Mark has some literary dependence upon Q; but the Q which he knew was an earlier form than those in the hands of Matthew and Luke.

9. The original order of Q is best seen in the order of the Q material preserved in Luke.

INDEXES

I. PASSAGES CITED