Q is a hypothetical Gospel. The letter Q stands for Quelle, German for “Source.” It has long been a popular hypothesis, and it serves a lot of agendas well. But there is no evidence whatever for it. Q never existed. And there is no rational reason to believe it did. Instead, it is defended with a panoply of lies or falsehoods and blatant violations of logic. A lot like the historicity of Jesus.

Q is one of the things that shocked me when I started my postdoc research on the historicity of Jesus (in pursuance to a fan-generated research grant). I had always assumed everything scholars told me about Q was true. It was just a sayings collection. Luke never followed Matthew instead of Mark. It didn’t contain a crucifixion narrative. All lies. And it was the shock at having been lied to, or misinformed so carelessly, by so many experts and so much of the reference literature that led me to realize you can’t trust experts or the consensus in this field. You always have to double check. Because there are a shit ton of falsehoods endlessly repeated in this field.

Even many experts don’t know how awash with falsities this field is. Too often, they just naively trust what they are taught in schools. An example is Mark Goodacre having been duped, by someone at some point in his career, into believing Paul wrote that he learned the gospel “from those in Christ before” him. On radio I told him no, no such verse exists (in fact, Paul says exactly the opposite, and so assertively that he even swears by it). Goodacre refused to believe me. Until, on a commercial break, we had a chance to try and find the verse he was sure was there. But it wasn’t.

That’s the lesson I learned from Q. Never trust anyone in this field. Never trust the consensus in this field. Until you have double-checked its validity by some dependable means. Not because they are all liars. But because there are so many lies no one has checked the truth of, so many fallacies no one has vetted the logic of. They instead just believe what they were taught. And keep repeating it. Or just keep citing “the consensus,” without ever actually checking if that consensus rests on sound facts or valid logic.

Q is one more product of that hall of fallacies and falsehoods.

What Is Q?

We all know Matthew copied Mark verbatim (without telling anyone; and yes, that was considered dishonest, even then). Then he snuck in a bunch of changes and additions. We also know Luke copied Mark verbatim (also without telling anyone who he was copying, when, or why). And then he also snuck in a bunch of changes and additions. That alone establishes that Matthew and Luke are really just redactions of Mark, expansions of the core Markan myth. The same way all other mythic narratives expand and grow over time. But in what Matthew and Luke added, there is a lot of material that’s certainly not from Mark, yet is verbatim identical between Matthew and Luke (as well as a lot of material that’s not identical but similar enough, changed up as needed, just as is the case with how Luke and Matthew used Mark).

By analogy with how Matthew and Luke used Mark, as early as 1800 it was hypothesized that the other material Matthew and Luke shared must also have been copied from a common source, just not Mark. And so that hypothetical (and conveniently lost) source was invented. A century later it acquired the name “Q.”

Wikipedia of course has an extensive entry. And yet when I wrote this article, it started right out of the gate with a full-on lie in its very first sentence, describing Q as “a hypothetical written collection of Jesus’ sayings.” Nope. It was not a collection of sayings. Nor simply of Jesus. It included narrative material. Including material expanding narratives found in Mark. And it included narrative material not just of Jesus, but of John the Baptist as well, and things spoken by John, not just Jesus. (And that’s only at the very least; the evidence indicates much more, which I’ll get to later.) So if it existed at all, Q was in fact a full Gospel, not a mere collection of sayings. It even included material from the crucifixion narrative. A fact often denied. Another lie. (Since I published, someone “fixed” the Wikipedia article to say “primarily Jesus‘ sayings,” which is still misleading.)

In fact all the evidence for Q is 100% consistent with Q being a redaction of Mark, one that added a bunch of material to Mark, expanding things in Mark that were too brief or unsuited for a later author’s tastes or needs. And that means Q sounds pretty much exactly like Matthew. In fact, it’s almost certainly Matthew. Q is literally the least likely hypothesis of any that’s plausible. It should be rotting now at the bottom of the barrel of bad ideas.

Lying for Q

The arguments “for” Q consist of two types: lies and fallacies.

The lies are the most appalling. That any consensus in biblical studies depends on repeated falsehoods is an indictment of the entire field. But even the fallacies call that field into question. Essential reading on why Q should be rejected include Mark Goodacre’s “A Monopoly on Marcan Priority?” and Michael Goulder’s “Is Q a Juggernaut?” For an extensive refutation of Q, see Goodacre’s The Case against Q and now (supporting that) Thomas and the Gospels. Further demonstrations by other experts are listed in On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 269 n. 33. But here’s a look at the top five arguments “for Q” and why they should be more embarrassing than respectable.

Lie Number 1: Q Did Not Contain Material in Mark

A common view (espoused by Bart Ehrman) is that everything Matthew and Luke share with Mark came from Mark; everything they share with each other came from Q; and everything they share with no one came from yet other lost hypothetical sources: called M, for the material unique to Matthew; and L, for the material unique to Luke.

This is 100% illogical.

Even if we illogically assume (against all evidence to the contrary) that none of these authors ever made anything up, and thus always “had a source,” since we don’t have Q, we have no way of claiming to know that M and L aren’t just material taken from Q by one rather than both subsequent authors. Just as Matthew and Luke each chose separately to omit material from Mark (e.g. Luke didn’t include Mark 6:45-8:26; Matthew didn’t include Mark 12:41-44; neither Matthew nor Luke included Mark 14:51-52; etc.), so we should expect they chose separately to omit material from Q (even assuming there was a Q). So the fact that something is in Matthew but not in Mark or Luke does not mean it came from M; likewise that something in Luke but not in Mark or Matthew came from L. It may very well have come from Q. And you cannot say otherwise.

But that’s not itself a problem for deciding whether Q existed. It just illustrates that many a consensus in biblical studies is not based on logic.

The real problem is this: how do we know Q did not contain verbatim material from Mark? In other words, how do we know Q wasn’t just an expansion of Mark?

We don’t. Period. Because we don’t have Q. So we don’t know if when Matthew and Luke copy from Mark, that that same material wasn’t also in Q. We don’t even know that when Matthew and Luke copy from Mark, that they were even copying from Mark. If that material was in Q, they may have only copied from Q. In fact, for all we know, they never even read Mark.

The only evidence we have that Luke, for example, was using Mark at all is that sometimes Luke repeats verbatim what’s in Mark, while Matthew changes it. But that only tells us that Luke did not copy Matthew. (And indeed it only tells us he didn’t copy Matthew at that specific point. Because guess what? Often Luke does copy Matthew’s redaction of Mark instead of Mark. Anyone who told you otherwise was lying, or lied to.) And that means they may have both only known of a Q that was an expanded Mark. The Q hypothesis thus entails Matthew and Luke may never have even seen or heard of the Gospel of Mark.

It’s a circular argument to claim that Q lacked Markan material “because” Q only contained the material shared by Luke and Matthew and not Mark, when the only way you can know Q only contained the material shared by Luke and Matthew and not Mark, is because you just arbitrarily defined it that way. This is so phenomenally illogical it should have been laughed out of the field a hundred years ago. And this means we cannot claim Q is an independent source from Mark. Which is the only function Q has ever had in biblical studies. And probably the only reason anyone wants it to be true. Which means claiming Q was written independently of Mark is another lie.

In any other not-fucked-up field of history, if we applied Ockham’s Razor—a valid logical principle—instead of this fallacy of circular argument adopted by all Q defenders, we’d get a different result. Because what is simpler? That Matthew and Luke used two sources one of whom we can only hypothesize the existence of? Or that Matthew used only one source (and made the rest up) and Luke only used Mark and Matthew (and made the rest up)? The latter theory requires no ad hoc hypothetical sources. It relies solely on evidence and texts we actually have. It is therefore the much simpler hypothesis (because the probability of all the facts it rests on is as near to 100% as makes all odds; which is not the case when we start depending on merely hypothesized facts, which for that very reason have a significantly higher probability of being false: see Proving History, index, “gerrymandering” and “Ockham’s Razor”). And on top of that, it turns out, unlike evidence for Q, there actually is concrete evidence Luke copied Matthew (as we’ll see). So we know he did. And that leaves nothing else to explain.

Q thus serves no more function than a Ptolemaic epicycle. Or the proverbial angels pushing the planets coincidentally in exactly the same way they’d move without them.

Q is fallaciously circular. Which means it’s explanatorily useless. Why, then, is it respectable?

Lie Number 2: Luke Can’t Have Used Matthew Because He Never Preferred Matthew to Mark

Christian fundamentalist Daniel Wallace provides the most convenient summary of the arguments any belief in Q still stands on.

And he lies. Or else carelessly repeats what some liar told him.

Wallace gives six arguments, labeled A through F.

Right out of the gate, in defense of Q against the far simpler and more obvious alternative that Luke just used Matthew, Wallace quotes an earlier scholar, wholly unquestioningly and uncritically, as saying (in defense of argument A):

One of the strongest arguments against the use of Matthew by Luke is the fact that when Matthew has additional material in the triple tradition (‘Matthean additions to the narrative’), it is ‘never’ found in Luke.

That is a lie.

Even Wallace himself (a whole section later) admits that “there are scores of agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark in terms of grammar and editing,” and he goes on to survey tons of them. Which are only a fraction of them. And he kind of hides the strongest examples. Particularly specific examples of Matthew expanding on or editing Mark, expansions or edits that Luke kept. Luke in fact contains many Matthaean additions to the triple tradition (meaning material common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

Quoting Mark Goodacre:

Luke prefers Matthew’s version to Mark’s in several triple tradition incidents: the whole John the Baptist complex (Matt. 3, Mark 1, Luke 3); the Temptation (Matt. 4.1-11 // Mark 1.12-13 // Luke 4.1-13), the Beelzebub Controversy (Matt. 12.22-30 // Mark 3.20-27 // Luke 11.14-23) and the Mustard Seed (Matt. 13.18-19 // Mark 4.30-32 // Luke 13.18-19) among them. On all of these occasions, the parallels between Matthew and Luke are more extensive than those between Mark and Luke.

I give an example myself in OHJ, p. 471:

For example, Mk 14.65a reads, ‘and some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say to him, “Prophesy!”’, which Mt. 26.67-68 expanded to ‘then did they spit in his face and buffet him: and some smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, “Prophesy unto us, Christ! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Luke 22.63-64 essentially combines Mark with Matthew, repeating the concluding text of Matthew verbatim: ‘and the men that held Jesus mocked him, and beat him; and they blindfolded him, and asked him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Except for dropping ‘unto us, Christ’ to economize the passage, the Greek of Luke here is identical to that of Matthew (legontes, Prophēteuson [hēmin Christe]! Tis estin ho paisas se?).

That is far too improbable on any theory other than direct literary borrowing (unless we grant that Mark originally read essentially as Matthew does now, and our text is simply corrupted). And so:

Luke then combines this with Mark’s detail that they covered his eyes, which Matthew omitted (or rather altered, having them spit ‘in his face’ rather than cover ‘his face’). Luke thus combined Mark with Matthew, recast mostly but not entirely in his own words, to make what he deemed to be a better passage. That Luke knows the details Matthew added, and even borrows his exact words, is sufficient proof that Luke knew and used Matthew. Note that on no theory of Q is this element of the Passion Narrative a part of Q, so this cannot be explained by appealing to Q. Luke is using Matthew. And if here, so everywhere. There is simply no need of an imaginary Q.

And as I cite there, these agreements are well known in the literature. They are just ignored. For example, see R.T. Simpson’s article ‘The Major Agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark’ in New Testament Studies 12 (1965–1966), pp. 283-84.

So this claim (Wallace’s argument A) is outright false.

Anyone who tells you Luke never agrees with Matthew against Mark (which agreement proves Luke’s knowledge of Matthew) is either a liar, or the dupe of a liar.

Lie Number 3: Luke Never Borrows Context or Order Unique to Matthew

Two more of Wallace’s arguments are that Luke “never” places “the common (double tradition) material in the same context as it appears in Matthew” and that there is a “complete lack of agreement in order whenever they disagree with Mark” (arguments B and E). In other words, that when Matthew and Luke would hypothetically be using Q or each other instead of Mark, they never put that material in the same place or order. This is supposed to indicate Luke didn’t know where Matthew put it. And therefore that Luke didn’t know Matthew.

But this is a lie.

Of course, even if it were true, it’s not really that strong an argument. Luke and Matthew frequently relocate and reorder material from Mark, so we should expect Luke would treat Matthew the same way. That he does so is therefore not that improbable. Of course, the argument is supposed at least to suggest that certainly if Luke was using Matthew, occasionally he would copy the same order or context invented by Matthew; therefore that he “never” does, is somewhat unlikely if he was in fact using Matthew. Even this weak bit of leverage, however, requires that he absolutely never did. And that’s simply false.

That Luke changes the context of material in Mark as well as Matthew is shown by the anointing scene in Mark 14, which Matthew 26 borrows from Mark nearly identically, yet it is completely relocated and altered in Luke 7. It’s an example of the non-verbatim redaction of Luke’s sources. It is certainly notable that these authors frequently copy their unnamed sources verbatim; but you should never assume that’s the only way they treated their sources. Rewriting them in their own words was also a way they adapted their source material (one more in line with accepted practice of the time). Comparable examples are what Luke does with the Nativity story and with John the Baptist material and the suicide of Judas. So that Luke does this same thing with Matthew is not evidence he didn’t use Matthew for that material, any more than it would be evidence he didn’t use Mark. Both Luke and Matthew did the same thing with Mark. So it was in fact a standard practice in Gospel composition, not something “inexplicable.”

Indeed the main reason almost all the material got changed in order and context is that Matthew and Luke chose completely different structures for their stories, not only from each other, but even from Mark. See how completely Matthew changes order and context even of the material he takes from Mark, and you already have a model for how Luke would change the order and context of the material he takes from Matthew. I show many details of how the Gospels’ artificial choices of structure molded the way they constructed their myths in On the Historicity of Jesus (e.g. pp. 412-13, 418-20, 460-67, 475-80). The result is that we should expect few parallels in order and context, even if Luke adapted material from Matthew. It is therefore not improbable to find exactly that.

And yet, even still:

It’s simply not true that Luke “never” copies Matthaean order or context. As I wrote in OHJ (p. 471):

Luke redacts Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, conspicuously ‘reversing’ it into a Sermon on a Plain. How do we know Luke is redacting Matthew? Because both speeches are followed by the otherwise-unrelated narrative of Jesus healing the centurion’s son in Capernaum. The latter occurs in Mt. 8.5-13, the Sermon having ended at 8.1 (only a brief healing of a leper lies in between). Luke 6.17-49 redacts that Sermon, and then immediately in Lk. 7.1-10 the centurion’s servant is healed in Capernaum, the story in many respects identical, even down to specific words and phrases (such as revising the centurion’s ‘son’ into the centurion’s ‘boy’, which some translators render as ‘servant’, but in context this is obviously just a different way of saying ‘son’). Likewise, Mt. 4.23–5.1 precedes the Sermon with a general account of Jesus healing many, and Lk. 6.17-19 does the same thing. These parallels are very improbable unless Luke was following and redacting Matthew’s narrative sequence…

Luke 3 and Matthew 3 likewise both place the same new John the Baptist material in the same place and order, almost even verbatim in cases. Likewise Luke 4 and Matthew 4, the temptation scene (another narrative, on top of the baptism and temptation and the Centurion of Capernaum, further exposing the lie that Q was a “sayings” source).

So Wallace’s arguments B and E are also outright false. Luke sometimes does put material in the same context or order as Matthew. Which is actually evidence he used Matthew. By concealing this, evidence that Luke used Matthew is conveniently “converted” into evidence he didn’t. Welcome to Christian apologetics. Ever masquerading as honest scholarship.

Lie Number 4: We Know Luke Would Never Do That

Wallace’s arguments C and D—that if Luke used Matthew, then Luke would never rearrange or simplify Matthew—consist of essentially complaining that Wallace doesn’t know why Luke would have made the choices he did, because Wallace would make different choices. Which certainly proves Wallace and Luke are not the same person. But it proves little else of any interest.

This is actually one of the most common fallacies deployed in defense of Q. There are countless arguments that consist of no actual evidence, not even evidence for the base rates of authorial practices, but simply a repeated armchair argument from incredulity, “But why would Luke do that!?” Really, that a scholar hasn’t thought of why Luke made the decisions he did is not evidence of anything but that scholar’s ignorance or lack of imagination.

There are actually very good reasons why Luke would do every single thing he did. And most scholars simply have baseless assumptions in that regard, for example assuming Luke would have “respected” his sources too much to leave good stuff out or compose his own material for the same purpose, when all the evidence refutes any such fancy: Luke often ignores suitable material in Mark and resorts to his own contrivances instead. We should expect him to do the same thing with Matthew. But even if we couldn’t think of any reasons for Luke’s choices, that still only tells us we don’t know what Luke was thinking. It doesn’t tell us Luke wasn’t redacting Matthew. The evidence that he was is simply far too concrete to conclude otherwise. Everything anyone complains about, regarding how Luke would supposedly have “ruined” Matthew had he done what he did with Matthew, is pretty much the exact same stuff Luke did with Mark. So we already know that’s how Luke treats his sources. It therefore is not evidence against his using those sources.

For example, Wallace laments how Luke ruined the beautiful structure of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (and I concur it’s an elegant literary masterpiece: OHJ, pp. 466-67). He concludes Luke surely would never do that, therefore he can’t have known of it. But Luke also “ruined” the equally beautiful structure of Mark’s sea narrative (OHJ, pp. 412-13). Yet Wallace doesn’t then conclude Luke must not have known the text of Mark! The correct conclusion from the evidence is exactly the contrary: this is simply what Luke does with his sources. Even as a matter of Bayesian probability, even if both hypotheses start out equally likely, both produce exactly the same expected outcomes in the evidence, to the same probability. So there is no evidence here. And both hypotheses do not start out equally likely. The evidence otherwise of Luke using Matthew is too vast for coincidence to explain it.

In this case, just as Matthew changed Mark’s elegant structure into his own completely different structure, and inserted five “long discourses” to emulate the Pentateuch of Moses, Luke changed Matthew’s elegant structure into his own completely different structure, and inserted his own innovations in place of Matthew’s. Luke is no more “ruining” Matthew than Matthew was ruining Mark. Luke clearly did not like Matthew’s five long discourse structure. He also didn’t like leaning so much on Moses. Instead, Luke focuses his literary model for Jesus mostly on Elijah and Elisha, reverses almost every message of Matthew’s Nativity narrative (erasing many of the Moses parallels), and spreads the sayings of Jesus more widely across a more engaging narrative, and gets rid of an excess redundancy among them, precisely to avoid ever breaking the action with too long and boring a soliloquy, or being too repetitive. Luke clearly had a very different idea of what is clunky and what is elegant. One just as valid as Matthew’s. There is nothing inexplicable about this at all. It’s actually typical: authors have different aesthetics, different aims. And comparing how Luke changed Mark with how he changed Matthew only confirms the point.

The bottom line is, whether a reading is more primitive or less elegant is a wholly arbitrary aesthetic invention of modern scholars. One that’s again quite circular: it is just assumed Luke always preserves the original form of something, that he wouldn’t simplify passages he thought needlessly verbose (even though all ancient authors often did exactly that; and we can confirm so did Luke), that he wouldn’t break up some material and scatter it into different scenes (even though all ancient authors often did exactly that; and we can confirm so did Luke). But if you don’t circularly assume the conclusion in your premises, it is no longer a given that Luke would never do this. To the contrary, it’s just as possible Luke would do exactly those things, just as every other author did. And when we look at test cases, like how Luke transformed Mark, it’s more than merely possible. It’s confirmed.

Q can only be defended by ignoring these facts. And by replacing facts with the anachronistic aesthetic opinions of modern ivory tower wonks.

There is no genuinely discernible difference between Matthew having embellished a Q statement and Luke having simplified a Matthaean statement. Accordingly, at no point does any scholar “know” one happened and not the other. Therefore, there is no C or D evidence. In the sense of actually existing evidence. It’s just the imaginations of scholars who think they magically know these things when in fact they never do.

And claiming to know something you know you don’t is not much different from lying. The more so when the evidence we have already demonstrates the contrary of what you claim to “know.”

Lie Number 5: We Know Luke Would Have Used More of Matthew

As Wallace argues, “the fact that Luke lacks the ‘M’ material (material unique to Matthew) and, conversely, the fact that Matthew lacks the ‘L’ material, argues that neither knew the other.” You might immediately notice that’s another fallacy of circular argument. We should always expect there will be material in Luke not in Matthew and material in Matthew not in Luke, because we see that’s exactly what happened with Mark: both Luke and Matthew left stuff out; yet still unmistakably used Mark. Therefore, that being the case can never be evidence against Luke using Matthew.

Wallace is aware this is circular reasoning. So he tries to escape that by changing the argument into another “but that’s not what I would have done, therefore Luke wouldn’t have” fallacy:

It should be carefully noted that this is not circular reasoning, though on the face of it it seems to be. As soon as we define ‘M’ as material unique to Matthew, then of course Luke would lack it! But that is not the real point of this argument. Rather, it is that there is so much material in Matthew—and rich material at that—which would in all probability have been utilized by Luke had he known of it, that for him not to have used it strongly suggests that he did not know of its existence.

There is exactly zero evidence Luke would have used any of the material he excluded from Matthew “had he known of it.” We should expect from the evidence of all authors throughout the entirety of human history, including Luke’s contemporaries, that Luke would always have excluded what he thought redundant, unnecessary, or excessive, and things less important to him that took up space he wanted to use for his own material (there being a limited standard size for a scroll; so far as we know the Gospels were not “codexed” until the next century), and, of course, he would have excluded what he outright didn’t like or couldn’t find a way to fit in. The effect of all that would be exactly the same as what we observe: Luke leaving out a ton of material Wallace loves. But even without any other evidence Luke used Matthew (of which actually there is a lot), it’s already just as likely that Luke didn’t love the material he excluded, as that Luke didn’t know of it. Wallace is not Luke. So what Wallace thinks is rich and wonderful does not constitute knowledge of what Luke thought was. Luke left a lot out of Mark, too, including what’s even called the “Great Omission” (Mark 6:45-8:26). Is that evidence Luke didn’t know Mark? No. Nor is it in the case of Matthew.

Even if we can say there is something in Matthew that “agrees” with something we can see from his Gospel Luke was selling, it is yet another circular argument to insist Luke would have used Matthew to do that, when the only premise we are basing this on, is the fact that Luke liked his own way of doing it better. In every other field of history and literary studies, the conclusion would not be to go against all the other evidence and insist Luke didn’t know Matthew; it would be to conclude Luke obviously felt he knew a better way of making his point. Parallels can be seen in redactions and reimaginings of Shakespeare’s plays: we would never say that because Arthur Laurents left out so many elegant and beautiful bits of Romeo & Juliet in his Westside Story, things so well suited to the latter’s message, that obviously he knew nothing of Shakespeare’s play and must only have had its plot-line on garbled hearsay. No. Trust me. Arthur Laurents read the play. And yes. He thought he could do better than Shakespeare.

Looking at It the Other Way Around

Wikipedia gets one thing right:

Two documents, both correcting Mark’s language, adding birth narratives and a resurrection epilogue, and adding a large amount of “sayings material”, are likely to resemble each other, rather than to have such similar scope by coincidence.

And Matthew and Luke don’t just coincidentally add birth and resurrection narratives with many peculiar parallels (and even some exact verbatim phrases), they also add narratives of Judas’s suicide that are peculiarly similar to each other, and John the Baptist and Temptation narratives that are often verbatim identical, and they both oddly feel a need to include a lengthy genealogy for a man from whom Jesus doesn’t even descend. And even in cases where Luke disagrees with Matthew, such as in his rewrite of the Nativity, it is conspicuously to reverse what Matthew said, as if presciently knowing what Matthew had said (see OHJ, pp. 470-73).

The most obvious explanation of all these strange coincidences is either that Luke is simply freely redacting Matthew (and often being happier with the Gentile-friendly sequence and content of Mark than the overly-Jewish content of Matthew) or Luke and Matthew were both using a “Q” that included genealogies, birth narratives, baptism narratives, temptation narratives, resurrection narratives, suicide narratives, and even a crucifixion narrative (as noted above). But that sounds so much like Matthew, that Ockham’s Razor leads to no more probable conclusion: Luke is simply redacting select content of Matthew into his redaction of Mark. There is no actual evidence for any other hypothesis.

This even explains why most of the content of “Q” consists of “sayings.” Because what we mean by Q is actually just Matthew, and most of what Matthew did to Mark was add five enormous speeches, which are in fact coherent literary products, in Greek, reliant on the Septuagint (a popular Greek translation of the Scriptures). They are not random collections of sayings. They are, like almost all speeches in all stories and histories of antiquity, the inventions of the author: Matthew. And Luke simply didn’t like that literary model. Long, ponderous speeches breaking up the action; and the heavy-handed Moses parallel in having five of them. So he broke them up, changed them up, dropped what he didn’t like or need, and used the rest as he wished. But he also borrowed and adapted lots of other stuff Matthew added, stuff about John the Baptist, the birth of Jesus, the suicide of Judas, and more. Some he took verbatim. Some he rewrote. Just as he did with Mark.

Since the above facts are then added to the even more incredible fact that there are hundreds of cases where Luke follows Matthew’s version of Mark and not Mark directly (in phrasing, grammar, vocabulary, and other elements), the notion that Luke did not use Matthew as a source is absurd. And if Luke used Matthew, there is no evidence left for Q, and no remaining justification for supposing there to have been one.

In future I’ll add here any other arguments for Q anyone thinks I’ve overlooked (anyone may post such to the comments field here, without being a patron, as long as you cite or give the evidence the argument draws its conclusion from). But I’m betting they’ll already fall into one of the five categories I’ve just dispatched as false or ridiculous.

Conclusion

Why is Q still believed, when it can only be defended with fallacies and lies? Why, indeed, is someone normally a skeptic like Bart Ehrman an obsessively fanatical defender of Q? Because of laziness, prestige-management, and stubbornness, perhaps. But it also serves agendas.

Christians like Q because it allows them to claim there were traditions earlier than Mark (even though the Q hypothesis entails nothing of the kind; even if Q existed, there is exactly zero evidence that it predated Mark). And they like it because the alternative entails Luke and Matthew are bald-faced liars, and Christians, um…cannot have that. They’d chop off their own fingers before allowing that to be true.

Non-Christians like it because it allows them to build careers out of guessing what was in Q, who wrote it, why, what their agenda was, and all manner of mythical nonsense that’s the equivalent of speculating on the precise shape of Saint Peter’s nose. In other words, secular bible scholars are essentially playing at being Vroomfondel and Majikthise.

Q is also a woobie that salves cognitive dissonance. The evidence for Jesus is so absolutely terrible, so egregiously fabricated, that historians are painfully grappling with the desperate need for there to have been more and better evidence than there really is. So they love to invent evidence whenever they can. It feels less scary. That’s why they just can’t let go of Josephus, despite all the evidence against Josephus ever having mentioned this Jesus. And that’s why they need Q. It’s the same reason they completely made up M and L, texts for which there is no evidence at all. Because then they can calm down and rest assured Jesus existed, because they “have” “multiple sources,” and therefore there is actually something to study about Jesus and this hasn’t been one fantastic lie all along entailing their entire degrees and careers were a total waste of money and time.

Evidence for this hypothesis is that defenders of Q so readily lie in defense of it, and so readily swallow obvious fallacies to believe it. But even clearer evidence is that they even outright tell the public we “have” these non-existent sources and therefore “know” Jesus existed. Their motive for believing this myth is included in their very assertion of the myth itself.

And this is a perfect model for the historicity of Jesus. All the same reasons Q is believed in, even by secular scholars, when in fact no rational person who believes in evidence-based reasoning should believe in it, are the reasons a historical Jesus is still believed in, even though the evidence for that Jesus is almost as lousy as the evidence for Q. Understand why so many experts believe in Q, and you will understand why they can’t tolerate any criticism of the historicity of Jesus, either. They either lie in defense of Q, or swallow lies in defense of it. They either lie in defense of Jesus, or swallow lies in defense of it. It’s the same phenomenon, the same field.