The Q hypothesis has issues. For such an important document or source, nothing is known about it. Its existence is not mentioned or hinted at in external sources. No trace of it has been found.
In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up).
So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either.
See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.
Kind of odd to see this turning up here: this theory isn't new and in fact is one of the couple most accepted theories about the origin of the gospels. It was proposed more than a century ago, and this article doesn't say anything particularly new or interesting about it. Honestly, the Wikipedia page is probably better:
Q is something that has been hypothesised, it has never been actually found. The Wikipedia article shows that it's definitely not universally accepted by any stretch.
> The Farrer hypothesis proposes that Matthew used Mark as a source, but Luke used both Mark and Matthew as a source. This approach is simple and negates the need for a Q source altogether.
> A weakness of the Q source hypothesis is the absence of any textual evidence despite extensive scholarly efforts to find it. The entire hypothesis is based on statistical and literary analysis and inference. It adds complexity to the synoptic problem by introducing an additional layer of tradition, transmission, and composition, which may not be warranted given the available evidence (or rather lack thereof).
Wouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the Farrer hypothesis is most likely true?
Edit: Or, maybe I should just continue reading to the end first:
> On the other hand, it would also make for a more complex explanation than other scholars have proposed, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor. Alternatively, Mark could have been the source for Matthew, and Matthew for Luke, which is a much simpler explanation than the Q hypothesis.
I interned for a year with a public speaker who had five or six autobiographical stories he told regularly. I found it interesting that his stories ended up like how the gospels tell Jesus stories. His messages had a main point, but he spoke extemporaneously, so depending on what he had been saying before he got to the story, he would included different elements into the story. One of the last messages I heard, he incorporated a few pieces of context at the beginning that I had never heard him tell before, and although I had heard him tell that story multiple times by that point, it completely changed the meaning of the story. Not that it invalidated the previous tellings, but that bit of context made a big difference to the meaning of the story. The gospel stories read a lot like that. Jesus may have told the stories differently depending on the context, and/ or the writer may have told the story different depending on the points he was making with the story.
Which is to say, I think it less likely that Q was written. Mark is generally said (by people who follow Christ, at least) to be summarized from Peter's messages. It seems likely that Matthew and Luke took from Mark as well as a shared source of apostolic teaching, especially since Luke claims to have researched these things, and at least several of the original disciples are traditionally said to have been preaching in the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean.
If Q is not a written source, the Q hypothesis falls apart. The point is to explain what Matthew and Luke (but not Mark) have in common, much of which is word-for-word the same. Whole sentences between them that are verbatim in the Greek point to literary dependence, not oral tradition.
Second this. If you have any interest in the scholarship behind the ancient world, Bart Ehrman's books are phenomenal. He is one of the few people who can be both world leading scholar, and great writer who can really connect with a layperson and academic alike. He is also genuinely one of the best human beings I know, and I don't say that lightly.
I also really enjoyed his book about suffering. If you've struggled with your faith over the amount of suffering in the world, and/or yearn for answers to those hard questions, I highly recommend "God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer." It actually goes far beyond just the Bible (though that is covered very, very well) and includes much philosophy and other things. It's a deeply personal book where he opens up about his own struggle and really allows himself to be vulnerable. For me, I was struggling deeply with these questions and had nobody to talk to. Everyone close to me in life had strong faith and was perfectly satisfied with dismissing the problem as "God knows. He is perfect. That's enough for me." The book was like having a brilliant and deeply thoughtful friend to have a conversation with, and it was an important point in my life. I'll be forever grateful to Bart for writing it.
Disclaimer: Bart is a friend of mine, but I read most of his books before meeting him.
Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a fan) in his blog, which seems to be struggling at the moment.
What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?
You're greatly overestimating how much an oral tradition leads to fixed wording. This is a pretty well-studied field at this point in time, and non-poetry oral traditions just don't generate the kind of long word-for-word identical passages that we see in Luke and Matthew.
There's a lot of debate over the synoptic problem in the academy, but almost nobody doubts that the solution involves a literary source instead of an oral one.
John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years after Jesus's death.
Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.
Its the other way around actually. People assume that the gospel were written by 80 years after Jesus SO THEY COULD CLAIM oral tradition.
So they have to claim that, because otherwise their claim of 'oral' tradition falls apart even harder.
However, funny enough nobody seems to quote this oral tradition as evidence anywhere. Most of the church fathers arguing with each other in the 100-150 period never bring up this oral tradition or quote from the 'Q' source or the gospels. We have plenty of text from 100-170 period but somehow the actual supposed words from Jesus himself doesn't seem to interest people very much.
Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is not considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The same ground but not as similar to the other three?
Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.
Apart from the passion there are very limited points of contact between John and the others. Most of the "more famous" miracles or parables are in either John or the others (either all of them, or some of them), but almost never in both. While Matthew and Luke have "unique" episodes, they also have a lot of shared content between themselves and Mark.
Plus, when they talk about the same topic, the synoptic gospels have entire sentences that are basically the same, word by word.
The synoptic gospels have a huge amount of overlapping text between them. Over three-quarters of Mark's content is found in both Matthew and Luke, and 97% of Mark is found in at least one of the other two synoptic gospels. Much of that is word-for-word quoting.
Either they were copying off each other, or were copying from some other source. That's the sense in which they were "synoptic".
John is a separate document. It does tell different stories, but more importantly, it has completely different text even when the stories do overlap.
It is widely thought that the writer of John had access to some of the other gospels. But he wrote his text from scratch.
"Synoptic" is simply the adjectival form of "synopsis": Matthew, Mark, and Luke all strive to give a synopsis of Jesus' life, organized primarily around a chronological retelling of his approximately three-year ministry. Matthew and Luke include details of his birth and genealogy.
John, on the other hand, is organized around theological and moral themes, rather than the totality of Jesus' ministry and teachings. That's why it's not considered a synoptic gospel.
> Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote.
First, you can't just assume that 'the disciples' wrote those text. There is no evidence for that and lots of evidence against that. Basically no series scholars believe this anymore.
These text came into being later without titles. They circulated without titles. Its later church fathers who just assigned names to them based on tradition.
John is just to different. Especially in terms of 'Christology', meaning Jesus and his relationship to god. In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god. Mark Jesus is basically just a middle eastern wizard. In John Jesus is basically fully god doing some performance art in a human body.
But many people still believe that John had access to some of the likely earlier gospels (and not necessary just those in the bible). While they are quite different, there is no way they can be fully different. Some apologist want you to believe that John is an independent oral tradition but that is not accepted by most secular scholars.
John is much more philosophical in nature rather than narrative. It’s also written later so the author is explicitly trying to emphasize elements that aren’t a priority to the others, for example about the nature of God and Jesus and the relationship between them and the people/church.
Johns writing style is extremely different. It's clearly unrelated to the other three and written in its own way.
All the gospels have differences. None of them are historical work as different events are taking different orderings (or are missing from the other gospels).
But in terms of differences, John is the most overtly different.
John is mostly very different - it covers only a small number of events that are in the other gospel. John is thought to have been with Jesus (one of the disciples) and likely took his own notes so we can't say he didn't know what Jesus did, but the events he wrote about are almost entirely different. It is possible (but this is speculation) that John had some of the other gospel's and choose not to cover anything already in them unless it was really important, but it is just as possible he didn't know of (or maybe had heard of but never had access to?) the other gospels and wrote things all on his own.
They spent decades traveling around telling the gospels. Only when they grew old and realized Jesus wasn't coming back in their lifetime did they decide to start writing it down.
I would put my money on the similarities being tied to oral tradition. Probably listening to each other.
No, because comparison of the Greek in the earliest manuscripts shows evidence of textual copying. Same way teachers recognize plagiarism or students copying from one another.
Jewish oral tradition, at the time of the writing of the gospels, had largely been replaced by the robust scribal polity and the infrastructure that they created that was dominant at that time. This is further evidenced by the statistically insignificant amount of transposition errors for written works from that era.
Was oral tradition around and popular for the lay polity that time? Absolutely. Was it heeded in and above scribal tradition? No, not at all.
The absence of recent work on reconstructing and contextualizing Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon is disappointing, particularly given the implications for understanding early Christian texts and the development of the synoptic gospels. The pre-Lukan theory, which suggests Marcion’s gospel may represent a version of Luke predating the canonical text, challenges traditional views on the formation of the gospel narrative. This theory raises important questions about the so-called “Q” source, a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings used by Matthew and Luke.
People are working on Marcion, actually Marcion and things surrounding Marcion is a hot topic right now. Look at the work by Markus Vinzent. He is currently working on the Paul version of Marcions letters.
I highly recommend Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel to anyone who is interested in a factual understanding of the Bible. https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan
It’s a somewhat plausible notion so far as it goes, but the complete lack of primary or even secondary evidence for the existence of a Q document is a major problem for the conjecture.
Based on nothing other than that "people don't really change", I would guess that pretty soon after the death of Jesus, people started misattributing quotes to him. We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching.
So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends, and people get tired of it and decide to keep a list of accepted quotes from Jesus, so that people would stop making up new ones from that point on (and it doesn't appear to have worked -- the later gospels have additional quotes and stories -- in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
Then after that, you have this list of canonical quotes going around, and of course people want the context, because you don't necessarily know how to interpret a quote without the context in which it was said, and so you get the gospels of Mark and Luke.
The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died -within the lifetimes of people who could remember him.
> in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
That is the consensus, but there are people who think otherwise - the alternative theory, which is at least plausible, is that it was offensive at the time to suggest a woman could get away with adultery.
> We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching.
One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
Jesus definitely got the Confucius treatment. There were numerous "Gospels" in the (mostly oral) Christian tradition prior to the canonization of the Bible we now know. Some, like the Gnostic Gospels, Have Jesus teaching things that stray far afield of what would become traditional Christian ideology.
> So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends...
Indeed, and I'd add the fact that the vast majority of people could neither read nor write so most information was subject to memory creep within each person and telephone game each time it was passed on. Also, very few people spoke more than one language and most people of that time never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born, yet the earliest surviving documents on which the gospels were based were in other languages and originated in distant lands.
Also this youtuber[0] is extremely good at visually (and verbally) describing current scholarly understandings of this. Similar (but different) to 3blue1brown in that way.
The problem with all of these is they act as if these works came into being fully formed at time X. Any real solution has to overcome that and start to think as these text are in motion.
A question: what is the date of the first physical copy of any of these texts?
Much discussion about the temporal distance between the described events and the writers, but what about the distance between the writers and the text we know?
The Wikipedia article on "dating the Bible" list dates for the earliest known fragmentsb of the various books. If you want earliest complete copies it would be later than those dates.
I imagine Q as some official within the Roman empire doing psyop-type work in an effort to fracture the Messianic Jews, who I'm under the impression were giving them trouble at the time.
Most scholars thing the hypothetical "Q" gospel would have been a "sayings" gospel--which is to say, it was mostly a collection of quotes from Jesus, rather than a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas would be a comparable "sayings" gospel, for an example of what that would look like.
It might seem a little string to think of an entire book that's just quotes from someone, absent context. However, this tradition still exists today:
I never quite understood why it would not be the case that the book of Mark might be the original source, with Q being a Mark derivative, and Matthew and Luke being a Q derivative
The author mentioned that some of the "Q" sayings in Matthew have been modified and are worded a bit differently in Luke, and seemed to believe that this was an argument more for a separate "Q" source than for the hypothesis that Matthew added the "sayings of Jesus" to the framework of Mark to produce the gospel of Matthew. This does not make any sense to me -- Luke could have altered the wording of the "Q" document just as easily as the "Jesus sayings" in Matthew! And both Matthew and Luke tell the story a bit differently than Mark, and sometimes this is for pretty obvious theological reasons or to 'fix' problems they believed Mark contained. If Matthew didn't see the need to edit and change Mark, and Luke see the need to edit and change both Mark and Matthew, why did they write new gospels anyway?
tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.
I have been getting quite into this topic recently and this whole 'Q' theory more and more sounds like field hanging on to its older theories despite it not really making sense. I find it really hard to defend this view in my opinion.
The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend on each other doesn't really make sense. There are different styles of writting and so on in these text.
Its much more likely that there are multiple layers and that there are interdependent on each other between each of these.
As the typical standard attack on Q, I suggest people look at 'The case against Q' by Mark Goodacre. And he makes the case that if you simply have Markan Priority you don't need Q. This made more sense to me then Q. However he still accept a traditional view of gospel creation and to some extent dating.
A more 'radical' approach is being put forward currently by people who study Marcion and in general, the 'Apostolic Fathers'.
One of the big problems with biblical scholarship is that 'Gospel' period and 'Apostolic Fathers' period were treated as two different things. So by how the field was split, it was clear that Gospels came before the time of the Apostolic Fathers (this was the standard view in Christian tradition). The problem however is that in terms of external evidence, there is no evidence for the gospel that goes back that far back.
The first we have a clear external indication of these text existing with these names, is in the 170s. Lots of people we have text for, seem to either not know the texts, or not think its important. Both are quite strange if you assume they were in their final form before 100. You would assume that after that people constantly use them as references, but they don't.
So once you overthrow out that 'traditional' view, and you just assume the gospels are just like many other writing in the second century and treat them no different, all of a sudden lots of things make a whole lot more sense. This reevaluates not just Marcion but also other early church figures like Ignatius.
They work with Mark Bilby sometiems on using methods better then simple word counts and other traditional methods to try to understand the different layers in the text. He uses computational methods. See his work:
> The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke
(Hard to read, but you can find videos of him explaining a lot it). His 'Q' is quite different from the traditional one.
For those interested, the 'History Valley' youtube channel interviews a whole lot of different scholars with different points of view in the field on these topics. So if you want to get an overview on the different positions on Q, you can find all the different position on that channel.
Going off topic a bit, I've been reading a number of scholarly works on early Christianity over the past year. These include, "The Origin of Satan," "The Gnostic Gospels," "The Gospel of Mary Magdala," "The Passover Plot," "Jesus the Jew," "How Jesus Became God," and "From Jesus to Christ." To be clear, I am an atheist and a history nerd and I'm really enjoying the scholarship of these works.
I recently started reading works that argue against the historicity of Jesus Christ: "Salvation - From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus," "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus," and next up is, "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt."
I have become largely convinced that the epistles of Paul and pseudo-Paul are writing not about a man who recently lived, but about a being revealed to him / them in revelations from god (small "g;" remember, I'm an atheist). I won't litigate their arguments here as I'd have to write blocks of text, but I have been persuaded that the book of Mark was likely an allegory and it was only with time that such came to be taken literally.
The need to reset the expectations of the believers because the arrival of the kingdom of god kept getting pushed back from "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Mark), to now coming soon following the destruction of the temple (Matthew, Luke), to (paraphrasing) "it's coming eventually, so trust in the Church," (John) created a need to keep reinterpreting Mark (hence, why Jewish Christianity died out and mostly only Gentiles remained).
Anyway, it's a fun topic if you're a non-believer and won't get offended by the ideas presented. I'm enjoying it a lot and thought I'd share. Q is frequently cited in most of the above works and that was my jumping off point. There's also thought to be a "sayings" source that was made up of quotes by Jesus used in the gospels. The thing is, following the Nicene Creed, the variants of Christianity (of which there were at least three documented by ancient historians) were systematically wiped out. Were it not for the works found around the Dead Sea, we'd have little to go on other than descriptions from Christian apologists; what little we have demonstrates the rich tapestry of alternative beliefs fighting for supremacy (even Paul fought the Jerusalem apostles: Peter, James, John on topics such as The Law and kosher foods).
It's just after 6am where I live and I just woke up. Please forgive typos and errors, as I don't have the leisure of properly proofing this comment before getting on with my day / job.
I've read half of this article and learned nothing more than was explained in the opening paragraph. It feels as if I've just had the Q theory explained to me 5 times by the TFA.
There is a dead comment here talking about how bad the writing is here.
Maybe the comment is dead because it was too harsh? But in any case, the writing here is very poor.
The actual information offered is barely worth much more than my following summary:
Mark was written first. Then Matthew then Luke. Q is a hypothetical source that addresses the commonality between these gospels but has never been found. As Q was a theory, there are variations where only Matthew and Luke reference Q, or maybe Mark also referenced Q. Or maybe Q never existed and the oral tradition is sufficient to explain all the commonalities (especially between Matthew and Luke).
Which happens to be all my Religion class ever covered. Q theory has never been proven or disproven. The early Church had an oral tradition (Jesus never wrote anything down personally, which is why we rely upon Mark, Matthew and Luke). John has an obviously different writing style.
I am no theologian, but this seemed like an interesting topic until I started reading the article, which likely could have been summarized in a paragraph or two. The relentless onslaught of advertisements and white space made me want to claw my eyeballs out. Then the author plagiarized himself in his own article, telling us TWICE that "Q" is short for the German word “Quelle,” meaning “source”. It reads like a high-school essay that has to reach a word count.
I naively thought this about Q in Q-anon and therefore a conspiracy on the Gospels. Though it is, sort of.
The truth has been hidden from us! Yet again! This time Putin inserts himself in our past! Great powers will come to him! </s>
Today, by the way, idiots willing and christians duped into evil*), he'll have his greatest day.
*) Coerced by the clicks based business model of the non-political by law, modern, tax-exempt NGO dragons (aka churches). The christian truth has been very publicly keelhauled. The USA has lost its christian backbone. The 911 implosion is still in progress, and shows no sign of stopping. Neither candidate addresses the issue, and both will likely aggravate it. Sadly, because during my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the USA, as a work in progress, like all of us. Perhaps it's time for the world to say: USA we love you.
The Q hypothesis has issues. For such an important document or source, nothing is known about it. Its existence is not mentioned or hinted at in external sources. No trace of it has been found.
In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up).
So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either.
See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.
Kind of odd to see this turning up here: this theory isn't new and in fact is one of the couple most accepted theories about the origin of the gospels. It was proposed more than a century ago, and this article doesn't say anything particularly new or interesting about it. Honestly, the Wikipedia page is probably better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
Q is something that has been hypothesised, it has never been actually found. The Wikipedia article shows that it's definitely not universally accepted by any stretch.
I was kind of wondering if the reason it showed up was that it was AI generated and then edited.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
> The Farrer hypothesis proposes that Matthew used Mark as a source, but Luke used both Mark and Matthew as a source. This approach is simple and negates the need for a Q source altogether.
> A weakness of the Q source hypothesis is the absence of any textual evidence despite extensive scholarly efforts to find it. The entire hypothesis is based on statistical and literary analysis and inference. It adds complexity to the synoptic problem by introducing an additional layer of tradition, transmission, and composition, which may not be warranted given the available evidence (or rather lack thereof).
Wouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the Farrer hypothesis is most likely true?
Edit: Or, maybe I should just continue reading to the end first:
> On the other hand, it would also make for a more complex explanation than other scholars have proposed, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor. Alternatively, Mark could have been the source for Matthew, and Matthew for Luke, which is a much simpler explanation than the Q hypothesis.
You would think so, until you realize that Matt and Luke have some narratives in common to the exclusion of Mark.
That has to be accounted for, which is where Occam's Razor falls short. It's probably the strongest argument in favor of a Q source.
I interned for a year with a public speaker who had five or six autobiographical stories he told regularly. I found it interesting that his stories ended up like how the gospels tell Jesus stories. His messages had a main point, but he spoke extemporaneously, so depending on what he had been saying before he got to the story, he would included different elements into the story. One of the last messages I heard, he incorporated a few pieces of context at the beginning that I had never heard him tell before, and although I had heard him tell that story multiple times by that point, it completely changed the meaning of the story. Not that it invalidated the previous tellings, but that bit of context made a big difference to the meaning of the story. The gospel stories read a lot like that. Jesus may have told the stories differently depending on the context, and/ or the writer may have told the story different depending on the points he was making with the story.
Which is to say, I think it less likely that Q was written. Mark is generally said (by people who follow Christ, at least) to be summarized from Peter's messages. It seems likely that Matthew and Luke took from Mark as well as a shared source of apostolic teaching, especially since Luke claims to have researched these things, and at least several of the original disciples are traditionally said to have been preaching in the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean.
If Q is not a written source, the Q hypothesis falls apart. The point is to explain what Matthew and Luke (but not Mark) have in common, much of which is word-for-word the same. Whole sentences between them that are verbatim in the Greek point to literary dependence, not oral tradition.
This is a new-to-me and reasonable idea: that Q is the union of a collection of things.
I love this area of study. Bart Ehrman has very interesting books on the topic.
Second this. If you have any interest in the scholarship behind the ancient world, Bart Ehrman's books are phenomenal. He is one of the few people who can be both world leading scholar, and great writer who can really connect with a layperson and academic alike. He is also genuinely one of the best human beings I know, and I don't say that lightly.
I also really enjoyed his book about suffering. If you've struggled with your faith over the amount of suffering in the world, and/or yearn for answers to those hard questions, I highly recommend "God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer." It actually goes far beyond just the Bible (though that is covered very, very well) and includes much philosophy and other things. It's a deeply personal book where he opens up about his own struggle and really allows himself to be vulnerable. For me, I was struggling deeply with these questions and had nobody to talk to. Everyone close to me in life had strong faith and was perfectly satisfied with dismissing the problem as "God knows. He is perfect. That's enough for me." The book was like having a brilliant and deeply thoughtful friend to have a conversation with, and it was an important point in my life. I'll be forever grateful to Bart for writing it.
Disclaimer: Bart is a friend of mine, but I read most of his books before meeting him.
Me too. I can recommend Dan McClellan, who's an Oxford-education biblical scholar and has some books and makes videos on the topic.
ReligionForBreakfast is a Youtube channel I'd also recommend. Henry has hosted Bart Ehrman several times.
Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a fan) in his blog, which seems to be struggling at the moment.
https://www.richardcarrier.info
For others that may be curious:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bart-D.-Ehrman/author/B001I9RR...
I also recommend Pheme Perkins.
What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?
You're greatly overestimating how much an oral tradition leads to fixed wording. This is a pretty well-studied field at this point in time, and non-poetry oral traditions just don't generate the kind of long word-for-word identical passages that we see in Luke and Matthew.
There's a lot of debate over the synoptic problem in the academy, but almost nobody doubts that the solution involves a literary source instead of an oral one.
John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years after Jesus's death.
Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.
Its the other way around actually. People assume that the gospel were written by 80 years after Jesus SO THEY COULD CLAIM oral tradition.
So they have to claim that, because otherwise their claim of 'oral' tradition falls apart even harder.
However, funny enough nobody seems to quote this oral tradition as evidence anywhere. Most of the church fathers arguing with each other in the 100-150 period never bring up this oral tradition or quote from the 'Q' source or the gospels. We have plenty of text from 100-170 period but somehow the actual supposed words from Jesus himself doesn't seem to interest people very much.
Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is not considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The same ground but not as similar to the other three?
Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.
Apart from the passion there are very limited points of contact between John and the others. Most of the "more famous" miracles or parables are in either John or the others (either all of them, or some of them), but almost never in both. While Matthew and Luke have "unique" episodes, they also have a lot of shared content between themselves and Mark.
Plus, when they talk about the same topic, the synoptic gospels have entire sentences that are basically the same, word by word.
For a comparison table see https://www.ammannato.it/vangelo-di-vangeli/appendice/cronol....
(Just someone who had a very good religion teacher in middle school).
The synoptic gospels have a huge amount of overlapping text between them. Over three-quarters of Mark's content is found in both Matthew and Luke, and 97% of Mark is found in at least one of the other two synoptic gospels. Much of that is word-for-word quoting.
Either they were copying off each other, or were copying from some other source. That's the sense in which they were "synoptic".
John is a separate document. It does tell different stories, but more importantly, it has completely different text even when the stories do overlap.
It is widely thought that the writer of John had access to some of the other gospels. But he wrote his text from scratch.
"Synoptic" is simply the adjectival form of "synopsis": Matthew, Mark, and Luke all strive to give a synopsis of Jesus' life, organized primarily around a chronological retelling of his approximately three-year ministry. Matthew and Luke include details of his birth and genealogy.
John, on the other hand, is organized around theological and moral themes, rather than the totality of Jesus' ministry and teachings. That's why it's not considered a synoptic gospel.
> Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote.
First, you can't just assume that 'the disciples' wrote those text. There is no evidence for that and lots of evidence against that. Basically no series scholars believe this anymore.
These text came into being later without titles. They circulated without titles. Its later church fathers who just assigned names to them based on tradition.
John is just to different. Especially in terms of 'Christology', meaning Jesus and his relationship to god. In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god. Mark Jesus is basically just a middle eastern wizard. In John Jesus is basically fully god doing some performance art in a human body.
But many people still believe that John had access to some of the likely earlier gospels (and not necessary just those in the bible). While they are quite different, there is no way they can be fully different. Some apologist want you to believe that John is an independent oral tradition but that is not accepted by most secular scholars.
John is much more philosophical in nature rather than narrative. It’s also written later so the author is explicitly trying to emphasize elements that aren’t a priority to the others, for example about the nature of God and Jesus and the relationship between them and the people/church.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gospel-According-to-John
Johns writing style is extremely different. It's clearly unrelated to the other three and written in its own way.
All the gospels have differences. None of them are historical work as different events are taking different orderings (or are missing from the other gospels).
But in terms of differences, John is the most overtly different.
> Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote
My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples didn't write them.
John is mostly very different - it covers only a small number of events that are in the other gospel. John is thought to have been with Jesus (one of the disciples) and likely took his own notes so we can't say he didn't know what Jesus did, but the events he wrote about are almost entirely different. It is possible (but this is speculation) that John had some of the other gospel's and choose not to cover anything already in them unless it was really important, but it is just as possible he didn't know of (or maybe had heard of but never had access to?) the other gospels and wrote things all on his own.
Well, it contains things not found in the other three - the wedding at Cana with the water into wine bit etc.
The Beloved Disciple is not mentioned in any of the others.
That's the big thing.
John has a higher Christology in addition to what other people said
They spent decades traveling around telling the gospels. Only when they grew old and realized Jesus wasn't coming back in their lifetime did they decide to start writing it down.
I would put my money on the similarities being tied to oral tradition. Probably listening to each other.
No, because comparison of the Greek in the earliest manuscripts shows evidence of textual copying. Same way teachers recognize plagiarism or students copying from one another.
Jewish oral tradition, at the time of the writing of the gospels, had largely been replaced by the robust scribal polity and the infrastructure that they created that was dominant at that time. This is further evidenced by the statistically insignificant amount of transposition errors for written works from that era.
Was oral tradition around and popular for the lay polity that time? Absolutely. Was it heeded in and above scribal tradition? No, not at all.
If you like this, you will definitely like the Data Over Dogma podcast.
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The absence of recent work on reconstructing and contextualizing Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon is disappointing, particularly given the implications for understanding early Christian texts and the development of the synoptic gospels. The pre-Lukan theory, which suggests Marcion’s gospel may represent a version of Luke predating the canonical text, challenges traditional views on the formation of the gospel narrative. This theory raises important questions about the so-called “Q” source, a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings used by Matthew and Luke.
People are working on Marcion, actually Marcion and things surrounding Marcion is a hot topic right now. Look at the work by Markus Vinzent. He is currently working on the Paul version of Marcions letters.
I highly recommend Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel to anyone who is interested in a factual understanding of the Bible. https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan
Shame he doesn't do long form videos.
Better article: Questioning Q
https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html
I was really hoping for a wacky fan theory about Star Trek here.
"Based on your historical documents, wouldn't it make sense that your gospels came from the Q Continuum?" - the Thermians
I was hoping for an even wackier theory about the Q programming language <https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/>. Maybe something by Terry Davis.
Wikipedia provides a good overview of the different theories of the Synoptic gospels' origins (see the summary at the end of the entry especially):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synopti...
No, probably not.
It’s a somewhat plausible notion so far as it goes, but the complete lack of primary or even secondary evidence for the existence of a Q document is a major problem for the conjecture.
Based on nothing other than that "people don't really change", I would guess that pretty soon after the death of Jesus, people started misattributing quotes to him. We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching.
So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends, and people get tired of it and decide to keep a list of accepted quotes from Jesus, so that people would stop making up new ones from that point on (and it doesn't appear to have worked -- the later gospels have additional quotes and stories -- in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
Then after that, you have this list of canonical quotes going around, and of course people want the context, because you don't necessarily know how to interpret a quote without the context in which it was said, and so you get the gospels of Mark and Luke.
The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died -within the lifetimes of people who could remember him.
> in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
That is the consensus, but there are people who think otherwise - the alternative theory, which is at least plausible, is that it was offensive at the time to suggest a woman could get away with adultery.
> We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching.
One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
Jesus definitely got the Confucius treatment. There were numerous "Gospels" in the (mostly oral) Christian tradition prior to the canonization of the Bible we now know. Some, like the Gnostic Gospels, Have Jesus teaching things that stray far afield of what would become traditional Christian ideology.
> So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends...
Indeed, and I'd add the fact that the vast majority of people could neither read nor write so most information was subject to memory creep within each person and telephone game each time it was passed on. Also, very few people spoke more than one language and most people of that time never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born, yet the earliest surviving documents on which the gospels were based were in other languages and originated in distant lands.
If you like this, head over to /r/AcademicBiblical
Wikipedia has a neat table of "notable synoptic theories" with diagrams like the one in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories
Also this youtuber[0] is extremely good at visually (and verbally) describing current scholarly understandings of this. Similar (but different) to 3blue1brown in that way.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ
The problem with all of these is they act as if these works came into being fully formed at time X. Any real solution has to overcome that and start to think as these text are in motion.
A question: what is the date of the first physical copy of any of these texts?
Much discussion about the temporal distance between the described events and the writers, but what about the distance between the writers and the text we know?
Any hope earlier copies will surface?
The Wikipedia article on "dating the Bible" list dates for the earliest known fragmentsb of the various books. If you want earliest complete copies it would be later than those dates.
I imagine Q as some official within the Roman empire doing psyop-type work in an effort to fracture the Messianic Jews, who I'm under the impression were giving them trouble at the time.
Trust the plan?
Most scholars thing the hypothetical "Q" gospel would have been a "sayings" gospel--which is to say, it was mostly a collection of quotes from Jesus, rather than a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas would be a comparable "sayings" gospel, for an example of what that would look like.
It might seem a little string to think of an entire book that's just quotes from someone, absent context. However, this tradition still exists today:
https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/...
I read about this hypothesis many years ago.
I never quite understood why it would not be the case that the book of Mark might be the original source, with Q being a Mark derivative, and Matthew and Luke being a Q derivative
The author mentioned that some of the "Q" sayings in Matthew have been modified and are worded a bit differently in Luke, and seemed to believe that this was an argument more for a separate "Q" source than for the hypothesis that Matthew added the "sayings of Jesus" to the framework of Mark to produce the gospel of Matthew. This does not make any sense to me -- Luke could have altered the wording of the "Q" document just as easily as the "Jesus sayings" in Matthew! And both Matthew and Luke tell the story a bit differently than Mark, and sometimes this is for pretty obvious theological reasons or to 'fix' problems they believed Mark contained. If Matthew didn't see the need to edit and change Mark, and Luke see the need to edit and change both Mark and Matthew, why did they write new gospels anyway?
tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.
I have been getting quite into this topic recently and this whole 'Q' theory more and more sounds like field hanging on to its older theories despite it not really making sense. I find it really hard to defend this view in my opinion.
The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend on each other doesn't really make sense. There are different styles of writting and so on in these text.
Its much more likely that there are multiple layers and that there are interdependent on each other between each of these.
As the typical standard attack on Q, I suggest people look at 'The case against Q' by Mark Goodacre. And he makes the case that if you simply have Markan Priority you don't need Q. This made more sense to me then Q. However he still accept a traditional view of gospel creation and to some extent dating.
A more 'radical' approach is being put forward currently by people who study Marcion and in general, the 'Apostolic Fathers'.
One of the big problems with biblical scholarship is that 'Gospel' period and 'Apostolic Fathers' period were treated as two different things. So by how the field was split, it was clear that Gospels came before the time of the Apostolic Fathers (this was the standard view in Christian tradition). The problem however is that in terms of external evidence, there is no evidence for the gospel that goes back that far back.
The first we have a clear external indication of these text existing with these names, is in the 170s. Lots of people we have text for, seem to either not know the texts, or not think its important. Both are quite strange if you assume they were in their final form before 100. You would assume that after that people constantly use them as references, but they don't.
So once you overthrow out that 'traditional' view, and you just assume the gospels are just like many other writing in the second century and treat them no different, all of a sudden lots of things make a whole lot more sense. This reevaluates not just Marcion but also other early church figures like Ignatius.
Markus Vinzent and his PhD student Jack Bull have nice youtube channel that you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica
They work with Mark Bilby sometiems on using methods better then simple word counts and other traditional methods to try to understand the different layers in the text. He uses computational methods. See his work:
> The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke
(Hard to read, but you can find videos of him explaining a lot it). His 'Q' is quite different from the traditional one.
For those interested, the 'History Valley' youtube channel interviews a whole lot of different scholars with different points of view in the field on these topics. So if you want to get an overview on the different positions on Q, you can find all the different position on that channel.
Going off topic a bit, I've been reading a number of scholarly works on early Christianity over the past year. These include, "The Origin of Satan," "The Gnostic Gospels," "The Gospel of Mary Magdala," "The Passover Plot," "Jesus the Jew," "How Jesus Became God," and "From Jesus to Christ." To be clear, I am an atheist and a history nerd and I'm really enjoying the scholarship of these works.
I recently started reading works that argue against the historicity of Jesus Christ: "Salvation - From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus," "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus," and next up is, "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt."
I have become largely convinced that the epistles of Paul and pseudo-Paul are writing not about a man who recently lived, but about a being revealed to him / them in revelations from god (small "g;" remember, I'm an atheist). I won't litigate their arguments here as I'd have to write blocks of text, but I have been persuaded that the book of Mark was likely an allegory and it was only with time that such came to be taken literally.
The need to reset the expectations of the believers because the arrival of the kingdom of god kept getting pushed back from "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Mark), to now coming soon following the destruction of the temple (Matthew, Luke), to (paraphrasing) "it's coming eventually, so trust in the Church," (John) created a need to keep reinterpreting Mark (hence, why Jewish Christianity died out and mostly only Gentiles remained).
Anyway, it's a fun topic if you're a non-believer and won't get offended by the ideas presented. I'm enjoying it a lot and thought I'd share. Q is frequently cited in most of the above works and that was my jumping off point. There's also thought to be a "sayings" source that was made up of quotes by Jesus used in the gospels. The thing is, following the Nicene Creed, the variants of Christianity (of which there were at least three documented by ancient historians) were systematically wiped out. Were it not for the works found around the Dead Sea, we'd have little to go on other than descriptions from Christian apologists; what little we have demonstrates the rich tapestry of alternative beliefs fighting for supremacy (even Paul fought the Jerusalem apostles: Peter, James, John on topics such as The Law and kosher foods).
It's just after 6am where I live and I just woke up. Please forgive typos and errors, as I don't have the leisure of properly proofing this comment before getting on with my day / job.
I've read half of this article and learned nothing more than was explained in the opening paragraph. It feels as if I've just had the Q theory explained to me 5 times by the TFA.
There is a dead comment here talking about how bad the writing is here.
Maybe the comment is dead because it was too harsh? But in any case, the writing here is very poor.
The actual information offered is barely worth much more than my following summary:
Mark was written first. Then Matthew then Luke. Q is a hypothetical source that addresses the commonality between these gospels but has never been found. As Q was a theory, there are variations where only Matthew and Luke reference Q, or maybe Mark also referenced Q. Or maybe Q never existed and the oral tradition is sufficient to explain all the commonalities (especially between Matthew and Luke).
Which happens to be all my Religion class ever covered. Q theory has never been proven or disproven. The early Church had an oral tradition (Jesus never wrote anything down personally, which is why we rely upon Mark, Matthew and Luke). John has an obviously different writing style.
The truth of the matter has been lost to time.
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I am no theologian, but this seemed like an interesting topic until I started reading the article, which likely could have been summarized in a paragraph or two. The relentless onslaught of advertisements and white space made me want to claw my eyeballs out. Then the author plagiarized himself in his own article, telling us TWICE that "Q" is short for the German word “Quelle,” meaning “source”. It reads like a high-school essay that has to reach a word count.
All four Gospels have an origin in Eastern philosophy such as Confucianism, making it to Judea around 150 BCE via the Silk Road.
- Jesus & Confucius: Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.
- Jesus & Buddha: Love your enemies and forgiving those who wrong you.
- Jesus & Laozi: Those who humble themselves will be elevated.
- Jesus & Confucius: Emphasized cultivating inner virtue and sincerity above formal rituals.
- Jesus & Buddha: Non-Attachment to Material Wealth
- Jesus& Buddha : Compassion
- Jesus & Confucius: Remove the log from your eye before the speck from another.
- Jesus & Laozi: "I am the path to truth"
I naively thought this about Q in Q-anon and therefore a conspiracy on the Gospels. Though it is, sort of.
The truth has been hidden from us! Yet again! This time Putin inserts himself in our past! Great powers will come to him! </s>
Today, by the way, idiots willing and christians duped into evil*), he'll have his greatest day.
*) Coerced by the clicks based business model of the non-political by law, modern, tax-exempt NGO dragons (aka churches). The christian truth has been very publicly keelhauled. The USA has lost its christian backbone. The 911 implosion is still in progress, and shows no sign of stopping. Neither candidate addresses the issue, and both will likely aggravate it. Sadly, because during my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the USA, as a work in progress, like all of us. Perhaps it's time for the world to say: USA we love you.
Edit 17: what, no downvotes yet??
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