* The asterisk indicates Q material in Luke duplicated in Matthew.
As to the generally homogeneous character of the sections marked Q, there will be no dispute. Since these are restricted to the passages showing the very closest parallelism, there can be no question about the propriety of assigning them to Q. The only question will be as to the assignment of any unduplicated material to any form of Q, and the assignment of the duplicated but not closely paralleled sections to QMt and QLk instead of simply to Q. Reasons have been given[127] for such assignments in each case. But a few sections may be taken as again illustrating the advantages of the QMt-QLk hypothesis.
PASSAGES CLOSELY SIMILAR, YET WITH DIVERGENCES TOO GREAT TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR UPON THE HYPOTHESIS OF AN UNDIFFERENTIATED Q
Sections 42 in Matthew and 16 in Luke contain the saying about the house on the rock and the sand (with and without foundations). These sections are universally ascribed to Q, both from their general similarity and from their position in each Gospel as the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount (Plain). But the wording is very dissimilar. Only those words are alike which must necessarily be so if two men were using the same subject as an illustration; and this is true, not only of the wording, but of the thought. Those who assign the passage simply to Q are compelled to suppose that, Matthew representing the original text, Luke has observed that the correct antithesis is not between a house built on a rock and a house built on the sand, but between one built with a foundation and one built without one. So he says nothing about the soil, whether rock or sand, but says that in one case the man built upon the surface, and that in the other he digged deep and laid a good foundation. The amount of re-working, reinterpreting, and re-writing thus required of Luke is wholly unjustified by any treatment he has accorded to any of the sayings of Jesus in Mark. It is presumable that he exercised his editorial function on his recension of Q as he did upon the sayings-material in Mark. But it is much more natural to suppose that the story that lay before him in his source lay before him in a form considerably different from that which it had in Matthew's source. The assumption of the two recensions therefore has the advantage of preserving the section for Q, without the disadvantage of ascribing to Luke a wholly unwarrantable amount of re-working.