What is the Q hypothesis

Question

What is the Q hypothesis

In: Other

Answer 1

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.