What About Q and Other Earlier Sources
Remembering, Sharing, and Writing Down What Happened
“For we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
— Acts 4:20 (CSB)
There are moments in life that are so unusual, so frightening, wonderful, or unexpected that afterward everyone seems to ask the same question: “What just happened?” People gather and talk. One person remembers something another missed. Someone says, “No, that happened first,” while another remembers exactly what was said. If the event is important enough, somebody may begin writing things down because nobody wants the details to be lost.
I think it helps to remember that very ordinary part of human nature when we think about the first followers of Jesus.
They had watched Jesus teach, heal, challenge religious leaders, welcome people others pushed aside, and speak about God in ways that amazed them. Then they watched Him die. Afterward, they became convinced that He had risen from the dead. They saw Him again, and after His ascension they gathered together, prayed, and received the Holy Spirit. Whatever else we say about those events, the people who experienced them believed something life-changing had happened.
Of course they talked about it.
Trying to Understand What Had Happened
Acts gives us a picture of Jesus’ followers gathering together after His ascension. They prayed, waited, remembered His words, and eventually began telling others what they had witnessed. After receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, they did not quietly return to their old lives. They began speaking about Jesus openly.
Peter and John later explained why:
“For we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
— Acts 4:20
That sounds very human to me. When something changes the way you understand your whole life, you talk about it. You go over what happened and remember things that suddenly make more sense than they did before. The disciples may have found themselves remembering teachings of Jesus in a new way after His resurrection. A saying that had once confused them might suddenly have seemed much clearer, and a parable they had heard many times could take on new meaning.
Jesus had also promised that the Holy Spirit would help them remember what He had taught:
“But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
— John 14:26
For Christians, that promise gives a spiritual side to what was also a very human process. The followers of Jesus remembered, discussed, taught, and eventually wrote, while also believing the Holy Spirit was helping them understand and remember.
We do not have to separate those two things.
Were People Writing Things Down?
We do not know exactly when the first written notes about Jesus began to appear. The New Testament never tells us that the disciples gathered after Pentecost with parchment and said, “We need to write all of this down before anyone forgets.” It would be tempting to imagine that scene, but we should not present imagination as history.
What we do know is that written accounts appeared, because Luke tells us so plainly.
At the beginning of his Gospel, he says:
“Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us…”
— Luke 1:1
Luke does not say that one other person had written something. He says many had undertaken to write accounts. That means there were early Christian writings about Jesus that we no longer possess. Some may have been long accounts. Others may have been shorter collections of teachings, memories, or stories. We simply do not know.
But the idea that earlier written material existed is not a modern invention. Luke himself tells us that it did.
Jesus Probably Gave the Same Teaching More Than Once
There is another thing worth remembering before we begin talking about proposed written sources.
Jesus was a traveling teacher. He went from village to village and spoke to different crowds over several years. It would be very unusual for Him to teach an important truth only once.
Most teachers repeat themselves. Grandparents certainly do. Sometimes we repeat ourselves because we forgot we already told the story, but often we repeat something because it matters.
Jesus may have taught the same lesson in different places and expressed it a little differently depending on who was listening. He could speak about fishing when teaching people who knew the sea, about seeds when speaking to farming communities, or about Scripture when challenging religious leaders.
That means two similar teachings in the Gospels do not necessarily have to describe the exact same moment. Sometimes they may be different memories of one event, while in other cases they may reflect separate occasions when Jesus taught the same truth again. Usually, we cannot know for certain which explanation applies.
Remembering that Jesus was a traveling teacher keeps us from assuming too quickly that every difference must be a mistake.
So What Is Q?
Q is the name scholars have given to a proposed source that may have contained sayings or teachings of Jesus.
The name comes from the German word Quelle, which simply means source.
No ancient manuscript titled Q has ever been discovered. No early Christian writer says, “Here is the book called Q,” and nobody has found a dusty scroll in a cave with “Q” written across the top.
Q is a scholarly theory.
That distinction matters because books, documentaries, and online discussions sometimes talk about Q almost as though we know it once existed. We do not.
Why Did Scholars Propose Q?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain many of the same stories and teachings, which is why they are often called the Synoptic Gospels. The word simply means they can be viewed together and compared.
At times, their wording is remarkably similar. Many scholars think Mark was written before Matthew and Luke and that Matthew and Luke may have used Mark when preparing their own Gospels. That is a widely held theory, although it is still a scholarly conclusion rather than something the Gospel writers themselves tell us.
Matthew and Luke also share a considerable amount of teaching that does not appear in Mark. Some scholars therefore wondered whether Matthew and Luke were both using another earlier source containing sayings of Jesus.
They called that proposed source Q.
In simple terms, the theory says that Matthew and Luke may have had Mark available and may also have had another collection of teachings that we no longer possess.
That is possible, but possible is not the same thing as proven.
What Might Q Have Looked Like?
If Q existed, scholars generally imagine it as a collection containing sayings and teachings of Jesus rather than a full story of His life like one of our Gospels.
That would not be especially strange in the ancient world. People collected sayings of respected teachers, students remembered memorable lessons, and early followers of Jesus may very well have written down teachings they wanted to preserve.
Considering how much Jesus traveled and taught, it would make sense if different collections of His sayings began circulating. But we still have to keep one foot firmly on the ground: we do not possess Q.
Any attempt to reconstruct exactly what it contained is based on comparing Matthew and Luke and working backward. That can be useful scholarship, but it is still reconstruction.
There Are Other Explanations
Q is not the only possible explanation for the similarities between Matthew and Luke.
Some scholars think Luke may have known Matthew. Others propose different relationships among the Gospels. Oral tradition probably remained important even after written material began circulating, and Jesus may also have repeated teachings on different occasions, as we have already discussed.
The real history may even have involved several of these things at once.
Early Christian communities were probably not working with one neat stack of documents labeled “Source A,” “Source B,” and “Source C.” They were living communities where people talked, traveled, preached, remembered, exchanged letters, and shared written accounts.
Real life is usually a little messier than our diagrams.
A Lost Source Is Not the Same as a Lost Gospel
This is another distinction worth making.
If Matthew or Luke used a source that no longer survives, that does not automatically mean we have lost part of the Bible. Writers use sources all the time, and Luke openly tells us he investigated earlier material. An earlier witness, collection of sayings, or written account could help a Gospel writer preserve the story without that source itself ever being regarded as Scripture.
Think of someone writing a family history. She may use her grandmother’s letters, an old photograph, her uncle’s memories, and notes written by another relative. Those sources help her tell the story accurately, but that does not mean every note and letter becomes part of the finished book.
Something similar could have happened in the writing of the Gospels.
The existence of an earlier source would tell us something about how the story was preserved. It would not automatically tell us that a missing book should have been included in the New Testament.
Why Didn't Those Earlier Writings Survive?
We really do not know.
Ancient writings disappeared for many ordinary reasons. Papyrus wore out. Copies stopped being made. A document intended for a small group might never have circulated widely. Later writers could include its useful material in more complete accounts, making the older document less necessary.
There does not have to be a conspiracy behind every lost ancient writing.
Most ancient writings have been lost, and the surprising thing is how much survived.
If an early collection of Jesus’ sayings was copied into Matthew or Luke, people may simply have found the fuller Gospel more useful and stopped copying the earlier source. That is only a possibility, of course, and with a source such as Q, we should become comfortable saying something we will say quite often in this series:
We do not know.
The Holy Spirit and the Human Process
It may be tempting to think that if the Holy Spirit was involved, there should have been no gathering of sources, no comparing memories, and no human decisions about what to write.
But that is not the picture Luke gives us.
Luke says he investigated, gathered information, considered eyewitness testimony, and arranged what he had learned into an orderly account. That does not sound like faith being absent. It sounds like faith working through careful human effort.
God can work through people who are thinking, remembering, asking questions, comparing what they heard, and doing their best to preserve the truth. The presence of a human process does not mean the absence of God.
What Q Can and Cannot Tell Us
Q is useful because it reminds us that the four Gospels were probably not the only written material about Jesus circulating among the earliest Christians. Luke tells us directly that there were other accounts, and Q may have been one of those sources.
Or it may not have existed in the form scholars imagine.
At this point, there is simply no surviving manuscript that settles the question. So we should neither dismiss Q as foolish nor speak of it as established fact. It is a reasonable scholarly proposal used to explain certain similarities between Matthew and Luke, and nothing more needs to be claimed.
Remembering the Bigger Picture
It can be easy to get lost in theories about who copied whom, which source came first, and whether one ancient document stood behind another. Those questions can be interesting, and sometimes they help us understand how the Gospels developed, but they should not become heavier than the story itself.
The followers of Jesus believed something extraordinary had happened. They had followed Him, heard Him teach, watched Him die, and then became convinced that He had risen from the dead. They gathered together, tried to understand what they had experienced, remembered His words, received the Holy Spirit, and began telling others. Some memories and teachings were eventually written down, some writings survived, and others did not.
Luke tells us enough to know that there was more written material than what remains in our New Testament today, but he does not give us the titles, contents, or history of every early source. So we can remain curious without pretending to know more than we do.
In the next chapter, we will look at another question that naturally follows from this one. Paul appears to mention letters that are no longer in our New Testament. Were some apostolic letters lost, and if they were, does that mean part of Scripture is missing?
