What is the Q hypothesis
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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).
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