What is the Q hypothesis
In: Other
For the first ~300 years after Christ’s life people just spread his story organically, through stories and letters to each other without any central control. As you can imagine, this lead to lots of disagreements just like a game of telephone.
In 325 CE, the now ‘official’ Christian Church gathered together to assemble “the correct story” from all the various stories and letters and versions they had. This group was called the First Council of Nicaea and from them we got the first version of what we’d now call “The Bible”.
Remember, this was ~ 300 years *after* the stuff was said to have happened so there was a lot of heavy editing and arguing to make a coherent version of “the official story”. In the end, they couldn’t even do that so they ended up agreeing to disagree and publish “the Gospels”, versions of the story they gathered from people who knew people who heard from people who’s uncle’s neighbor’s cousin’s friend’s former landlord heard it from a shepherd who claimed to have one met “Luke”, the disciple. As you can imagine, the Gospels don’t all agree on 100% of the basics of the story, but they generally align.
The Q Hypothesis is the idea that the gospel we attribute to Matthew, and the Gospel we attribute to Luke, were not actually original documents themselves, but were actually each – separately – “plagiarized” or second hand versions of – the gospel we attribute to Mark and some other lost document, called “Q”.
Imagine you gave 2 film students each a copy of Star Wars, a copy of The Avengers, and $1000 to film some new stuff and said “Tell us the story of the hero”.
You’d end up with two movies, each clearly having a section from Star Wars, each clearly having a section from The Avengers (and you can clearly and obviously tell those two movies apart) and then each clearly has a small random section that came from no where else. The Q Hypothesis being this idea. That Matthew and Luke are each part Mark (star wars), Part Q (The Avengers), and part something else – that film student’s added material.
Three of the gospels in the New Testament–Matthew, Mark, and Luke–all tell roughly the same story in roughly the same order. They are referred to collectively as the Synoptic gospels for this reason.
They were composed in Greek, and when you look at the Greek text, not only are the structurally similar, there is often verbatim correspondence. This would never happen accidentally in a language where word order has almost no impact on meaning. So some of these authors were copying from each other. So, who copied whom?
This is called the Synoptic Problem, and in the last 180-or-so years, there have been basically two models for how this copying relationship went:
The Q hypothesis is the older and more widely accepted solution. It hypothesizes that Mark was written first, and that Matthew’s and Luke’s authors had copies of it that they pulled material from. But there’s also text that is shared between Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark. Proponents concluded that there is a now-lost work that was the source for this material (Q is short for “quelle,” German for “source”). Q was mostly likely a non-narrative “sayings gospel” similar to the gospel of Thomas (basically a list of quotations attributed to Jesus).
The other model is the Goodacre-Farrar hypothesis that has no Q source, but says that Matthew was written first and the others used it as a source (this is a huge oversimplification, but I’m less familiar with this model).
Latest Answers