We have here the alternatives of supposing that Luke invented these woes, that he found them in some altogether different source and inserted them here in the midst of his Q material, or that they stood, with the beatitudes, in his recension of Q. Since the beatitudes themselves, without the woes, show such difference as to preclude Matthew's and Luke's having drawn them from an identical source, but since they seem, if anything, to have stood in Q, it seems natural to assign these woes of Luke's, as we have assigned the beatitudes peculiar to Matthew, to the recension used by him. The sympathy shown in the Gospel of Luke for the poor has usually been referred to Luke himself. It may just as well have been a characteristic of one or more of his sources.
These two verses are inserted in the midst of Jesus' testimony to John the Baptist. They have the sound of a purely editorial insertion. On the other hand, if they were found elsewhere by Luke, his insertion of them in this place is accounted for by his desire to explain Jesus' saying about John. A possible hint of a source is found in the presence of [Greek: dikaioô]. This verb is found in three other passages that are peculiar to Luke and that are evidently not from QLk. If not from Luke himself, these verses are from some special source. But they are only what might be expected from Luke himself in the way of editorial comment.
Tho this narrative has considerable resemblance to that in Mk xiv, 3-9, and Mt xxvi, 6-13, the different placing of the story, and the differences in the story itself, far outweighing the resemblances, seem to indicate a special source for it. There is no reason to attribute it, or any saying in it, to Q.
This may either be attributed to Luke (or to some later scribe) as an amplification of the incident just related by both Matthew and Luke from Q, or may be assumed to have stood in Luke's recension of Q. The two facts, that such amplification would be quite unlike Luke, as his literary habits are revealed to us in his treatment of Mark, and that the saying about the man who has put his hand to the plow has an extremely original and genuine sound, lead us to the latter alternative.
Tho the existence and mission of a separate band of seventy disciples be attributed to Luke, he would certainly never have manufactured these sayings that are connected with their return. The sayings may indeed be ascribed to a special source; and are so ascribed by those who allow nothing to Q except the paralleled material. But these sayings are extremely primary in character, especially vss. 18 and 20; and they are similar to much Q material. If in Luke's recension of Q the mission of the disciples was a mission of seventy instead of twelve, Luke will be relieved of the burden of personal responsibility for the creation of this mission of the seventy; he has then merely conflated the account of the mission of the seventy which he found in his recension of Q with the mission of the twelve which he found in Mark. It must be admitted that such conflation is contrary to Luke's habit. The alternatives to this hypothesis are, either that he invented the mission of the seventy himself, or that he had before him three accounts of the sending out of disciples, one by Mark and one in Q, and a third in some unknown source. This lends probability to the ascription of these sayings to QLk.