THE ORIGINAL ORDER OF Q

The following tables are intended to throw light upon the probable original order of Q. They will also facilitate comparison of the Q material in the two tables of contents given on pp. 222-25. The section numbers at the left are those in the tables for Matthew and Luke respectively on those pages. Table VII gives the sections in the order in which they come in Matthew, with the numbers of the corresponding sections as they occur in Luke; Table VIII, the sections as they come in Luke, with numbers of corresponding sections in Matthew. Unduplicated sections are not listed.

Since Matthew shows everywhere a tendency to group his material into discourses, it is a priori probable that the original order of the Q material is to be sought in Luke and not in Matthew. Given this tendency to combine, reasons are obvious for Matthew’s combining, in his Sermon on the Mount, much matter that Luke has scattered thru his Gospel. But if the Q material originally stood in such continuous discourses, no motive can be assigned for Luke’s breaking up these discourses and scattering their material thru so many chapters. The assumption that Matthew has combined, in his Sermon on the Mount, material which originally was separated as it still is in Luke, is corroborated by an analysis of that Sermon, which shows it to be anything but a unity. Much of the material which Matthew has combined into this Sermon has no duplicate in Luke. There is no means of telling where in Matthew’s Q this unduplicated material stood. But the fact that the duplicated matter has been brot forward by Matthew from later chapters in Luke would give the presumption that such of the unduplicated material as has no necessary unity where it stands also stood in QMt, not at the beginning where it now is, but later; and this is also what we should expect.

TABLE VII

TABLE VIII

Taking the hint that Luke’s order probably represents the original order of the Q material, we find this supposition confirmed by the present arrangement. In spite of Matthew’s transpositions, the sections in Luke and Matthew, as grouped in Table IX, still stand in the same relative order.

TABLE IX

Each of these groups—one of seven sections, two of four, and six of two sections each—probably stood, within itself, in the same order as that in which we now find it in Matthew and Luke.

The sections grouped in Table X have suffered such slight transpositions as to make it probable that each of the groups constituted a continuous passage, probably in the order preserved by Luke.

TABLE X

There is one other item, which I owe to Mr. Streeter,[136] that strongly supports the assumption that Luke has preserved the Q material in its most nearly original form. That is, that Luke allows himself much less liberty in the rearrangement of Mark’s order than does Matthew. The best single testimony to his faithfulness to Mark’s order is seen in the fact that where he makes his great omission from Mk (Mk vi, 45-viii, 26), beginning at that point his great interpolation (Lk ix, 51-xviii, 14), he does not, after returning to Mark, go back and pick up any single item that he has omitted. Detached sayings, some brief, and some, like the Beelzebul controversy, of considerable length, which he places in a different connection from that in which Mark gives them, can uniformly be shown to have stood in Q as well as in Mark,[137] and Luke follows Q’s order with Q’s wording. In the earlier part of his narrative, Luke does permit himself some little freedom in deviating from Mark’s order; notably in the imprisonment of John the Baptist, the call of the first disciples, and the rejection at Nazareth (in each case, apparently, at the expense of some anachronism). Except for these instances his transpositions of Marcan material are slight, and usually amount rather to its rearrangement within a single section than to a genuine change of order in the structure. An exception to this rule is his passion narrative, where his use of Mark is greatly influenced by his special source.

Q was apparently a collection of sayings, without chronological framework or data of any sort. But to the sayings of Jesus there was prefixed a slight account of the preaching of John the Baptist. This will not seem strange when it is remembered that Q was a Palestinian document, and that the cult of John the Baptist long survived the origin of Christianity. What is not so easy to explain is Q’s apparent inclusion of one narrative, the story of the centurion’s servant. It also contained an account of the sending out of the twelve, but apparently no reference to the passion. The absence of narratives, or of any chronological hints, would make its rearrangement easy; perhaps it suffered some derangement at the hands of those who added the sections peculiar to Matthew’s and Luke’s recensions (as it did at the hands of Matthew himself), and who are responsible for some of the deviations between the two. As Mr. Streeter suggests, if Mark were lost, we could not, from Matthew and Luke, be sure either of Mark’s content or his order. No more can we of Q. About all that can be said is that the strong probability is that Luke more nearly than Matthew reproduces that order.