Let us return to the conjectured text referred to as “Q,” said to be the source for those passages which the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have in common with each other, but do not share with St Mark. I have briefly mentioned that the theory takes a number of varying, sometimes contradictory forms; and that there are several deep assumptions beneath the Q theory. One presumption is that there are too many contradictions and divergences between Matthew and Luke for one to have had the other’s Gospel. A second assumption is that there cannot have been any true prophecies, or any miracles, so the evangelists cannot be eye-witnesses to the life of Christ. The evangelists are, rather links in a chain of the self-creation of the Christian Church (although academics tend to put the inception of the Church as far back as they can, speaking instead of a “Jesus movement” and so on).
Thus, if one approaches the Gospels from the perspective of Q, and everything which goes with it, the evangelists were not, as I have said: “… bringing a higher level of truth into this world: men illuminated and illuminating,” but rather were “pamphleteers, making idiosyncratic and wilful changes to the texts available to them, to present as historically based a ministry and teaching which they themselves knew to be their own creative production. I have put this bluntly, but I do not believe unfairly. Of course the academics do not say this, although Ehrman in his candour comes close, but it is a fundamental idea.”
Academics say that by comparing texts, with a knowledge of which was written first, we arrive at how the evangelists changed what had been handed down to them, and thus see how they creatively approached the past. In Ehrman’s words: “If Matthew, for example, altered a story he found in Mark, we can assume that his changes tell us something about his own theology or interests.” (111) This strikes me as wilfully myopic. It might that it is his knowledge of the life and teachings of Christ, not theology or interests which account for variations. Further, differences between Gospels may indeed reveal differences in theology, but these themselves may be the result and not the cause of different views as to the historical facts.
Let me give an example, both Plato and Xenophon wrote about the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Yet, the pictures have significant overlap and significant differences, approximating in some ways to the differences in emphasis between the portrait of Our Lord in the Synoptics and in St John’s Gospel. Xenophon’s Socrates is more given to ethical and practical matters, while Plato’s is more abstract, maybe you could say, more of a mystic. Both acquaintances base their recollection of Socrates and his teachings on what they knew of him; they are not altering facts to fit their convictions, their convictions have been framed by their memory of the facts. Different people just remember different matters. If I and a fried meet a third party, I may forget what they were wearing, but remember what they said. My friend might be just the opposite: remembering the clothes in some detail but forgetting much of what was said. How often have I been at a conference, where discussing later what had been said, three people have three sets of recollections, with overlap but also some substantial differences? So, differences in the Gospels, even in what we call “theology,” may reflect the fact that different witnesses invariably remember matters differently.
Matthew undoubtedly, on occasions, had a different recollection from that of Ss Mark and Luke, and also from St Peter whose testimony was captured by St Mark. Recall, the tradition of the Church is that St Mark was the young man in chapter 14 of his Gospel who fled from the capture in Gethsemane. If this tradition is true, and I am inclined for several reasons to believe that it is, then St Mark was not totally reliant upon what he had heard in writing his Gospel. He may himself have seen and heard Christ, and was close enough to the events to have a sound contemporaneous knowledge of them, which he could use as a guide stick when hearing accounts of what had happened when he had not himself been there.
Let us return to our beginning: that the differences between Matthew and Luke mean that neither had knowledge of what the other had written. The contemporary Bible studies establishment treats this as unarguable. In an article “Matthean Posteriority,” in Novum Testamentum, volume 67, 2025, 289-309, Christopher Tuckett declares that the thesis that Matthew used Mark and Luke, rather than Q, has difficulties because often “it is hard to see why Matthew chose not to include the relevant Lukan version of the tradition concerned, nor to provide even an echo of it.” (300) He offers several examples, one being the different birth narratives. Luke’s Gospel includes themes such as Jesus being the son of David, which would have been congenial to Matthew. Hence he writes: “Luke’s account has references to Jesus as the descendant of David and/or being born in the “city of David” (Luke 1:69; 2:4, 11) (302). But Matthew does not include these references to David, and much of Tuckett’s argument runs along the lines that it is inexplicable that Matthew would use one passage from Luke but not another which would support Matthew’s own outlook (305).
I do not think that this method of procedure is at all sound. It is not presenting evidence, it is saying rather: “I would have done this or that, and I will not accept that Matthew would not have done the same if he could have.” Hence Tuckett’s writing “it is hard to see” is revealing: he does find it hard to see, he is, after all, trained to read the Gospels through the preconceptions of the informal Bible studies establishment, rather than to confirm his thought to the Gospels. That is, something can be hard to see because of the angle at which I am standing. Sometimes a small shift of the head allows me to see from quite a different one.
Thus, Tuckett assumes that Matthew would have felt obliged to include these materials which are in Luke, and this assumption is, it seems to me quite arbitrary: after all, if Matthew knew the Gospel of Luke, then he has elected to write his own Gospel with a complementary account of the birth narrative. When we turn to Matthew, we find that he could hardly have established the Davidic connection more than he already had with his genealogy, and the references to Joseph as son of David (1:20) and to Bethlehem as the home of the ruler, understood as being both David and Christ (2:6). Tuckett’s rhetorical insistence of the importance of this motif is not to the point: Matthew has adopted a different and arguably no less powerful strategy to establish the Davidic theme. Why he wrote as he did and not as Tuckett would have is readily answered: because he was Matthew, an ancient apostle and not Tuckett, a modern academic. But re-read the genealogy of St Matthew. The notion that he squandered a chance to establish the Davidic theme is whimsical. Perhaps he felt that it was more effective to add some other matters and allow readers to find more material in Luke. He may have happily contemplated his readers making such discovery.
Also, from my perspective, St Matthew respected the unique tone of the Gospels of both Saints Mark and Matthew. St Mark set out the fundamental teaching as brought by St Peter, where everything leads up to the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ; while St Luke brought a more historical narrative with more background, especially to do with the Nativity of Our Lord and all which led up to it, and ornamented his Gospel with some remarkable parables such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. St Matthew did not include these, but he did include the eschatological parables of the Wise and Foolish virgins and of the Sheep and the Goats. There are other differences, but this suffices to indicate that I think it quite arbitrary to assert that because I believe St Matthew would have copied this or that from St Luke if he had read that Gospel, then he did not know that Gospel; and I have some reason for so thinking.
After all, even on Tuckett’s beliefs, Matthew had Mark, but he did not include everything in Mark. So why imagine he felt obliged to treat St Luke differently? Attempts to read the minds of the evangelists two thousand years after their writings strike me as ambitious to the point of fanciful if not delusional. I do not say that to be pejorative. I mean literally that the sincere confidence of these academics strikes me, sometimes, as deluded.
I have spent a bit of time critiquing academics, because my chief goal is to encourage Christians to read the scriptures with faith and trust: we are not bound to accept the presuppositions and assertions of anyone, not even a professor at an august university. But, I would suggest two important qualifications to any theory of the Synoptics. First, there may well have been other documents of the teaching of Our Lord which have not come down to us. For example, apart from the chance of history, there is reason to think that St Matthew may first of all have written something in either Aramaic or Hebrew, and that others in the Christian world made translations of this. Besides, St Luke refers to many people presenting narratives, whether oral or written he does not say, and while one might be quite certain that the Gospel according to Mark is among them, anything beyond that is guesswork.
Second, in any discussion of the Gospels and the New Testament generally, the idea that there was one original text and we can get pretty close to it by comparing and analysing texts is based on assumptions which need, as the late Dr Noel Weeks said, to be argued for and not just asserted. As Emanuel Tov has said, the idea of “one original text” has to be modified. He said, in a lecture I attended in Sydney, that in the scribal tradition there was no clear distinction between copying and editing. Copyists often made small changes. Besides, by the time most Old Testament texts come down to us, there are two or more families of texts.
Thus, for both reasons, while we can provisionally accept the thesis of Marcan priority, the four sources hypothesis is, to my mind, not just unfounded, but rash. We do not know very much at all about how the first Gospels circulated. It strikes me as quite possible that the evangelists made changes after the books had been written and disseminated, and so several autographs from the one evangelist circulated. I have often thought that there is some reason to think that St Luke had St Matthew’s Gospel, and he had St Luke’s, and that the Gospels mutually influenced one another. Hence, scholars who argue for Matthew having had the Gospel of St Luke, compare the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew with the Sermon on the Plain in St Luke, and say that one could fashion the former from the latter, but one would not have broken up the powerful Sermon on the Mount to produce the latter. So, they say, St Matthew had both Ss Mark’s and Luke’s Gospel. Other scholars such as Mark Goodacre reverse that argument, and offer reasons why St Luke would have used the Sermon on the Mount as a quarry rather than a source to be replicated. Most of these arguments from what seems plausible to the academic in question depend upon little more than ingenuity and what is today called “spin” but “strategic framing.”
It seems to me that the Gospels may have been updated, primarily but not necessarily, by the evangelists for a certain period, and that editions, with minor variations, may have circulated for a long time. For example, in Luke 23:34, Our Lord says: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” However, this sentence is not found in all manuscripts, and an academic like Fitzmyer rather thinks it breaks the flow. But, as he properly acknowledged, Streeter considered there was a good chance that it was authentic and, as Streeter said, it “illustrates the fact that absence from certain MSS. is not necessarily evidence of interpolation.” (138-139) In fact, the sentence is known to Irenaeus, Origen, and Tatian. The evidence for it is very good. If some manuscripts miss it then, in my humble opinion, this is but more proof, were more needed, that the Gospels did not circulate as modern books do. Some scholars have come up with ingenious explanations of how and why the verse might have been omitted (e.g. because if it concerned the Jews, then the destruction of Jerusalem showed that they had not been forgiven).But I do not see the value in this: it is still playing a game in the mind: what do I think someone back then might have thought and done.
To repeat, it is not just that we may not be able to reconstruct the original document. There may have been more than one. The evangelist may have reworked his Gospel, perhaps even more than once; and as the text was copied, certain small changes were certainly made. This is all the more reason not to become obsessed with small variations, btu to keep our eyes on the main game: the spiritual meaning of the Gospels.