Traditionally it has always been said that there are four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Today many scholars now want to speak of Five gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas. Robert Funk has headed up the research behind the idea of including the Gospel of Thomas among the New Testament canon (see his book The Five Gospels).. Personally I have never been much impressed with the case for including Thomas in the New Testament primarily because it does not claim to be an account of Jesus’ teachings and ministry pe se. My own concern here is with the traditional four plus the so-called “Q document”. This gives us six possible Gospels to read and ponder.
Incidentally, it should be noted that the Gospels of Mark and John contain no “Christmas Story”, nor does Mark say anything about Jesus’ resurrection. Both Luke and Matthew contain a good deal of material about Jerus’ supposed genealogy, although they do not always agree on the details thereof. Q has nothing to say about any of these topics. Mark’s style is always brief and “moving on”, while John frequently engages in heavy theological discussions.
Although the Q document per se has never been found, it can be deduced from the conflation of the passages in Matthew and Luke which are identical with each other, what is now called “Q”. Basically the so-called “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7) much of which is repeated almost exactly verbatim in Luke 6, constitutes the majority of what scholars call the “Gospel of Q.” Thus by abstracting these passages from both Matthew and Luke we obtain the “Gospel of Q”. Clearly the authors of Matthew and Luke both incorporated these materials into their own Gospels.
Since both Matthew and Luke use Q and neither Mark nor John reference it, it seems clear that initially there was yet another original Gospel which scholars now call “Q” because Q is the first letter of the German word for “Source.” What I find significant about “Q” is that it consists of almost entirely the teachings of Jesus with which we are all familiar and nothing else. For me, then, this “document” comes the closest we can get to the original teachings of Jesus himself. Without multiple references to cosmic events and supernatural healings, the Gospel of Q gives us with a straight-forward account of Jesus’ basic teachings about how to relate ourselves to God and to each other.
Interestingly enough, Q contains a great many of what scholars have come to call Jesus’ “hard sayings” because they seem to run counter to common sense. For instance, he says: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who treat you badly.” (Q 14) And: “When someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer them the other, too. When someone takes your coat from you, let them have your shirt as well. Give to everyone who asks. And if someone robs you, don’t demand your property back.” (Q 15) Indeed, the entire Sermon on the Mount runs counter to very much of what most of us were taught about how to manage ourselves in daily life.
So, I am in favor of using the traditional four Gospels, but also paying special attention to Q as it can be discerned amidst the chapters of Matthew and Luke. There is a tone and spirit of the texts in Q that seem to me to go directly to the heart of what the person of Jesus was about. He was not about “pie in the sky bye and bye”, but he was about radical love in the here and now. Follow Q and you will be the closest to the “original teachings” of Jesus as one can get.