These verses have a strong Judaistic coloring: "Into a way of the Gentiles do not go, and into a city of the Samaritans do not enter," etc. They also betray the expectation of the early coming of the parousia. These two items are inconsistent with the invention of these verses by Matthew. They must have arisen long before Matthew's time. Yet they are imbedded in Q material. No theory of their origin suits all these facts so well as that they are a portion of the Q material which was added to that document after its original compilation, and in the recension that was finally used by Matthew. It is interesting to observe that Matthew here makes Jesus teach his disciples (vs. 7) the same formula which he himself had learned from John the Baptist.
Of the chapter in which this section occurs Mr. Streeter says that Matthew begins with Mark, adds some Q material parallel to Luke's Q material in the same connection, then Q material unparalleled, then Q material paralleled in other connections in Luke, then material from a totally different part of Mark.[106] The verses enumerated here are not paralleled in either Mark or Luke. They are not like the verses, for the most part, which Matthew and Luke agree in taking from Q; and they show marked difference in some respects from those which we have thus far assigned to Matthew's recension of Q. In his _Apostolic Age_ Professor James Hardy Ropes[107] suggests that at least one purpose of the collection of Jesus' sayings was "to furnish a kind of handbook of missionary practice for those times." These verses, better almost than any other section out of the instructions to the disciples, answer this purpose. If they rest upon words of Jesus spoken at the time he sent out his disciples, they are at least colored by the needs of Christian missionaries who went out toward the end of the apostolic age. They betray the conviction that the time of the parousia is near. As coming from Jesus they contain a prediction so obviously unfulfilled as to make their later invention and ascription to him very difficult. On the other hand no words ascribed to him would by themselves more easily originate in the times of the early Christian missions. Considering their position here, and giving due weight to Professor Ropes's suggestion, it seems much more probable that they are taken by Matthew from some written source than from an oral tradition. If so, no better source can be posited than Matthew's recension of Q.