How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

by Bart D. Ehrman

Scholars have determined that some of our written accounts are independent of one another—that is, they inherited all or some of their stories from independent streams of oral transmission. It is widely thought, for example, that the Gospel of John did not rely on the other three Gospels for its information. The other three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the Synoptic Gospels because they are so much alike. The word synoptic means “seen together”: these three can be placed in parallel columns on the same page and be seen together, because they tell so many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence and often in the same words. This is almost certainly because the authors were copying each other, or rather—as scholars are almost universally convinced—because two of them, Matthew and Luke, copied the earlier Mark. That is where Matthew and Luke got a lot of their stories. But they share other passages not found in Mark. Most of these other passages are sayings of Jesus. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have mounted formidable arguments that this is because Matthew and Luke had another source available to them that provided them with these non-Markan passages. Since this other source was mainly made up of sayings, these (German) scholars called it the Sayings Source. The word for source in German is Quelle, and so scholars today speak about “Q”—the lost source that provided Matthew and Luke with much of their sayings material.