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, such as 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 if it were 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 datable texts, we see how the evangelists changed what had been handed down to them. 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 be that it is St Matthew’s knowledge of the life and teachings of Christ, not theology or anything else which account for the variations. Further, variations between Gospels may indeed reveal variations in theology, but these themselves may be the result and not the cause of different views as to the historical facts. Besides, the Church may have intended this so that the field of theology, or reflection on God, was that much richer.
Let me give an example, both Plato and Xenophon wrote about the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Yet, the pictures have both 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 the teaching of Plato’s Socrates is more abstract, maybe you could say, more of a mystic. Both acquaintances base their recollection of Socrates on what they knew of him; they are not inventing facts about his life 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 friend meet Bill, for example, I will probably forget what Bill was wearing, but remember what he said. My friend may remember the clothes but not what was said. How often do three people at a conference, have three sets of recollections, with overlap but also substantial differences? So, differences in the Gospels 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 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, which he could use as a guide stick when hearing accounts of what had happened when he had not himself been there.
I wish to dwell on this point: it is, I suggest, a limitation in the method of academics, that they fail to even ask: what might the evangelists have known when they began writing? What might they themselves have seen of Jesus, or of the twelve, or of the disciples? By not asking such questions they effectively treat the evangelists as if they were modern academics like themselves, writing about a person and a period from which they were quite removed. This cannot have been correct: the evangelists must have known very many people who had heard and seen the Lord Himself, and the disciples who had. This is apart from the tradition, which I accept, that Ss Matthew and John were eyewitnesses. It means that whatever written sources were available to them, they were not totally at a loss to weigh and sift them not from subjective feelings alone but from a deep and rich formation in the living current of the tradition. It is not as if there is no material for such a study: the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles would be a great starting point to reveal the knowledge circulating in the early Church.
Let us now return to our beginning: that the Q hypothesis is supported by the assertion 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. I shall take a recent example from a prominent scholar. In his 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. He notes: “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). Much of Tuckett’s argument runs along the lines that Matthew does not include these references to David, but that itself is inexplicable. Why would Matthew use one passage from Luke but not another which would support Matthew’s own outlook? (305).
I do not accept that this method of procedure is at all sound. It is not evidence, only a declaration of incredulity: “I would have done this or that, and do not accept that Matthew would not have done the same.” Hence Tuckett’s precise choice of words is revealing, for he wrote: “it is hard to see.” He does find it hard to see, being trained to read the Gospels through the preconceptions of the informal Bible studies establishment, rather than to conform his thought to the Gospels. 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. And if I project my assumptions, they are all I will see.
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 upon the importance of this motif is beside the point: Matthew has adopted a different strategy to establish the Davidic theme. Why he wrote as he did and not as Tuckett would have is readily answered: because he was St Matthew, an ancient apostle and not Tuckett, a modern academic. Re-read his genealogy. The notion that he squandered a chance to establish the Davidic theme is whimsical. He forcibly presents the connection. Perhaps he felt that it was more effective to add some other matters and allow readers to find more material in Luke. But I do not like to enter such discussions because it involves me in the type of conjecture I am deploring. I reiterate, therefore, the real issue is that St Matthew makes a powerful connection between Our Lord and David; why he did not do even more by taking passages from St Luke if he knew of that Gospel is a futile conjecture. 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? Tuckett might as well take a passage in St Mark’s Gospel which is not in St Matthew’s or St Luke’s, such as the parable of the growing seed, and argue that they would have included it had they known it. 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.
Further, perhaps St Matthew respected the unique tone of the Gospels of both Saints Mark and Luke. 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 supplemented them with 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 the Gospels each bring complementary perspectives. It seems to me that the evangelists realised, as did the early Church, that the remarkable combination of continuity and variation between the Gospels gave them an extraordinary value: one could ponder the life and teaching of Our Lord from different vantage points, providing a rich and layered effect.
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 a sandstone 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 Hebrew scribal tradition there was, for a long time, no clear distinction between copying and editing. A lot of Bart Ehrman’s work seems to me to show that the same was happening within the early Christian world.
Thus, while I 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 possible that the evangelists made changes after the books had been written and disseminated, and so several autographs from the evangelist circulated. I have thought that St Luke may have had St Matthew’s Gospel, and he had St Luke’s, so that the Gospels mutually influenced one another, back and forth at least once, perhaps more. This could explain the contradictory positions of scholars. Some 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 argue 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. Other scholars such as Mark Goodacre reverse that argument, saying that St Luke used the Sermon on the Mount as a quarry rather than a source to be replicated. Most of these arguments depend upon little more than the academic’s ingenuity.
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, saying it “illustrates the fact that absence from certain MSS. is not necessarily evidence of interpolation.” (138-139) In fact, the evidence for its authenticity in Luke is very good: the sentence is known to Irenaeus, Origen, and Tatian. If some manuscripts miss it, then in my humble opinion, this is but more proof, were it 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 the destruction of Jerusalem showed that the Jews 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 conclude, the Q hypothesis is the result of a series of modern assumptions. It tells us a lot about those assumptions, but nothing about the Gospels or about Christ. This is all the more reason to keep our eyes on the main game: the spiritual meaning of the Gospels.