should be
obeyed.

{36}

II

JERUSALEM

For the history of the disciples after the death of Jesus we are
dependent upon a single source, the Acts of the Apostles, which can,
however, be controlled, and to some extent corrected, by the gospels
and by the epistles of Paul.

It is now generally recognised that if any one wishes to write a life
of Christ he ought to base his work not on the gospels as we have them
now, but rather on the information provided by the critical analysis of
the gospels as to their sources. These sources, or at least the two
oldest and most important, have become well known as Mark and Q. Every
one nowadays is aware that behind Matthew and Luke is a document which
was almost or entirely identical with our Mark, and that in addition to
this both Matthew and Luke used another source, or possibly sources, to
which the name of Q is given. In general, however, there is a tendency
among those who have acquired this insight into the composition of the
gospels from lectures or from little books rather than by the study of
a synopsis to {37} attach altogether too rigid an importance to these
results.

Mark, though a document of early date and unsurpassed value, is the
Greek edition of an earlier Aramaic tradition, probably, though not
certainly, in documentary form before it was translated. It would be a
miracle if it contained nothing due to the Greek circle in which its
present form was produced.

Q, after all, is the name, not of an existing document, but of the
critical judgement that there is a documentary source behind material
common to Matthew and Luke but absent in Mark. This critical judgement
is accepted by theologians as well as critics; but theologians, with a
distrust of criticism not wholly unjustified, frequently prefer a
mechanical to a rational application of this discovery, and dignify
their preference by calling it objective, though it is difficult to see
why a process should be regarded as objective, in any valuable sense of
the word, because it automatically accepts as derived from Q everything
common to Matthew and Luke, and leaves out all the rest. It is merely
a method of canonising the subjectivity of Matthew when it agrees with
that of Luke, or of Luke when it agrees with that of Matthew, and
damning both of them when they happen to disagree. Why the
subjectivity of the editors of the gospels becomes objective when it is
accepted by modern writers is a lit