It does not appear upon the surface why the same five investigators should not reach results concerning Q in Luke with the same consensus as concerning Q in Matthew. It is perhaps explained by the fact that Luke's blending of his material from different sources and his freer treatment of it render Q less identifiable with him. If, however, Wernle, Wellhausen, and Weiss be disregarded, and attention be paid only to the lists of Hawkins and Harnack, these latter lists will be found to agree as closely in their identification of Q material in Luke as in Matthew. This merely shows that we are on firm ground in the identification of Q, so long as we restrict ourselves closely to the duplicate passages in Matthew and Luke, and require a reasonably strict agreement before admitting a common source. It is when we leave this duplicate material, to extend the limits of Q beyond it, that the uncertainties begin.
THE NECESSITY FOR A FURTHER EXTENSION OF Q
Yet the presence in both Matthew and Luke, especially in the former, of much sayings-material which is not only imbedded in Q matter, but has all the characteristics of Q; the presence of "translation variants"; the natural assumption that even if Matthew and Luke had before them the same identical copy of Q, they would not agree entirely in the amount of material they would respectively quote from it; and the desire to assign as much as seems reasonable to this source before positing another, all lead us to the task of a further determination of the content of Q. This further determination issues in an analysis of Q into QMt and QLk.
Q ORIGINALLY AN ARAMAIC DOCUMENT, USED IN GREEK TRANSLATIONS BY MATTHEW AND LUKE
The starting-point of a further determination of the content of Q is the fact that Matthew and Luke seem to have taken their duplicate matter from a Greek document, but that this Greek document was a translation from the Aramaic. If Matthew and Luke had been independently translating from an Aramaic document, they could not have hit so generally upon the same order of words, especially where many other arrangements would have done as well (and occasionally better), nor would they have agreed in the translation of an Aramaic word by the same unusual Greek word, as notably in the [Greek: epiousion] of the Lord's Prayer. The Q they used was a Greek document.