Preface

The Sayings Gospel Q is an archaic collection of sayings ascribed to Jesus, even older than the Gospels in the New Testament. In fact, it is the oldest Gospel of Christianity. Yet it is not in the New Testament itself. Rather, it was known to, and used by, the Evangelists of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and then lost from sight. After all, Q is the Gospel of Jewish Christianity, which continued in Galilee to proclaim Jesus’ sayings, but the New Testament is the book preserving the ancient sources of Gentile Christianity, the oldest being the letters of Paul, for whom Jesus’ cross and resurrection, not his sayings, were central to the Christian message.

This is clearest in the case of Matthew. For this Gospel is oriented in Matt 3-11 primarily to vindicating the Jesus of Q, but then in Matt 12-28 simply copies out Mark, the Gentile Gospel. For the Q movement, limited to a mission to Jews, gradually died out, and its Sayings Gospel survived only as incorporated into the Gospel culminating in the Great Commission to evangelize of Gentiles.
During the second century, when the canonizing process was taking place, scribes did not make new copies of Q, since the canonizing process involved choosing what should and what should not be used in the church service. Hence they preferred to make copies of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant.

This validated the Narrative Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but not Sayings Gospels such as the Gospel of Thomas and Q. Indeed the Apostles’ Creed, which had been formulated in Rome during the second century as a baptismal confession, bypassed completely the sayings of Jesus, and hence provided no basis for canonizing Sayings Gospels, such as Q and the Gospel of Thomas.

The Sayings Gospel Q contains some of the most memorable of Jesus’ sayings. It is thanks to Q 11:2b-4 that we know the Lord’s Prayer. Q presents it in a more original form than what we use in our liturgy today. (We use Matthew’s revision of the Q Prayer: Matt 6:9-13). Q also preserves for us the certainty of the answer to prayer (ask, search, knock, for a caring Father does provide, Q 11:9-13), the beatitudes (Q 6:20-23), the love of enemies (Q 6:27-28, 35c-d), turning the other cheek, giving the shirt off one’s back, going the second mile, giving, expecting nothing in return (Q 6:29-30), the golden rule (Q 6:31), the tree known by its fruit (Q 6:43-45), indeed most of what we think of as the Sermon on the Mount—and more: storing up treasures in heaven (Q 12:33-34), free from anxiety like ravens and lilies (Q 12:22b-31), taking one’s cross (Q 114:27), losing one’s life to save it (Q 17:33), parables of the mustard seed Q 13:18-19), the yeast (Q 13:20), the invited dinner guests (Q 14:16-23), the lost sheep (Q 15:4-7), the lost coin (Q 15:8-10), the entrusted money (Q 19:12-26).
Particularly the first part of Q (Q 3-7) seems carefully structured, to prove the case that Jesus is the “one to come” prophecied by John (Q 3:16b-17). For in Q 7:18-23 John sends a delegation to ask if Jesus is indeed that “One to Come,” which Jesus promptly answers in the affirmative (Q 7:22), by listing his healings (for which reason the healing of the Centurion’s Boy immediately precedes in Q 7:1-10), climaxing in his giving good news to the poor (referring back to Q’s early draft of the Sermon on the Mount in Q 6:20-49).

Although Jesus’ mother tongue would seem to have been Aramaic, his sayings were very early on translated into Greek and collected into small clusters, which were brought together into the Sayings Gospel Q. For the high degree of verbal identity in the Q sayings of Matthew and Luke make it apparent they were working from a shared Greek text. Each could not have translated from Aramaic to Greek, independently of the other, into such highly similar, often identical, Greek language. This Greek text of Q, as shared by Matthew and Luke, dates from around the time of the war with Rome (since Q 13:34-35 seems to envisage the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.).
At one place (Q 12:27) the fact of a written Greek text of Q is strikingly attested by the presence of a Greek scribal error: Whereas both Matthew and Luke (Matt 6:28b par. Luke 12:27), and hence Q, list as the three tasks that ravens and lilies do not perform, as rôle models for humans free of anxiety. But in the case of the lilies, “how they grow: They do not work nor do they spin,” the first is neither a negative statement, nor a verb naming a task in the process of making clothing. But a very slight change in the Greek lettering produces the meaning: They do not card, nor do they work, nor do they spin,” with the formulation “not card” faintly attested in an ancient manuscript of Matt 6:28b preserved at Mt. Sinai, and in the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 36.

The Sayings Gospel Q, though on the surface only reporting about Jesus, also reveals almost all we know about the Jewish Christianity of the first generation. For the New Testament, as we have it, is a collection of primary texts from Gentile Christianity, in which there are occasional passing references to Jewish Christianity. Paul gained acceptance for his non-Jewish mission from the “pillars” of the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem (James, Cephas/Peter and John, Gal 2:1-10), though this amicable division of labor soon broke down (Gal 2:11-21), when the Jewish Christians sought to “judaize” Gentile Christians (Gal 2:14) . Paul withstood the claims of any other “Gospel” than his own (Gal 1:6-12), meaning no doubt the Jewish Christian preference for proclaiming sayings of Jesus.
Actually, the Jewish Christians of the Q movement do not seem to have been these Jewish Christian leaders stationed in Jerusalem, since they are not mentioned in Q, nor does Q make any reference to the problem of circumcision, which was the touchstone of that debate with Paul. The followers of Jesus who transmitted his sayings that were brought together into the Sayings Gospel Q would seem to be composed of those left behind in Galilee. They were largely overlooked in the Acts of the Apostles. For the description of the mission “from Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), simply bypasses Galilee, with only one passing reference later in Acts (9:31) to a church in Galilee being built up. Nor can one find in Acts any attestation for a variety of religious experience consisting primarily of re-proclaiming Jesus’ sayings. The Sayings Gospel Q thus supplements in a very important way what we know of the first generation of Christianity from the book of Acts.

When there is considerable uncertainty as to whether a given word was in Q, it is put in double square brackets [[ ]]. If there is a still higher degree of uncertainty, the space is left blank, with three dots (…) indicating that there was some text here, but not of adequate certainty to include. Two dots (…) indicate that it is even uncertain whether anything at all was here, in which case the reference is enclosed in question marks.
There is no historical evidence that Q actually existed, if that’s what you mean by “actual evidence,” its existence is justified by textual criticism alone. None of the fathers talked about it, there are no fragments of it extant today, nothing. This is the big reason why people still support the idea that the material peculiar to Matthew and Luke are just from Matthew.