Footnote 2 – Is There a Gospel of Q?

This number is rounded off slightly. My comparison assigns 130 passages—65 from Matthew and 65 from Luke—into one of four percentage categories: 1–24.9%, 25%–49.9%, 50%–74.9%, or 75–100%. Matthew 6:9–13 (the Lord’s Prayer), for example, shares 26 identical words with its counterpart in Luke 11:1–4. These 26 words are 43% of Matthew’s total of 61 words, but 59% of Luke’s total of 44 words. In this case the two parallel passages fit into different percentage categories. This pattern repeats itself in about a dozen of the 65 pairs. That is why we get 53 passages (out of the 130), an odd number, in the 25–49.9% category, and 29 passages (out of the 130) in the 50–74.9% category. These have been rounded to 26 out of 65 pairs of parallel passages and 15 out 65 parallel passages, respectively. Despite this complication we still get an accurate picture of the overall verbal correspondence between Matthean and Lucan passages alleged to reflect the common Q source. The numbers show that, overall, the correspondence is hardly overwhelming.