I had my first viral tweet. It was a super niche joke that I didn’t expect to go viral, but it turns out that audiences who get niche jokes also like to share them a lot. Here it is:
Fun Facts: There are four gospels in the New Testament — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke have lots of similarities. John tells some of the same stories, but overall, it’s very different. So it seems Matthew, Mark, and Luke have some common sources.
Most scholars think the Gospel of Mark was written first because Matthew and Luke say a lot of the same things as Mark verbatim. It seems that both of those gospels used Mark as a source.
But also, Matthew and Luke have material in common nearly verbatim that is not in the Gospel of Mark. So… it seems that the authors of Matthew and Luke used another source as well. And that one is lost to history.
Scholars call that source material Q, which is German for Quelle, meaning ‘source.’
So the joke is… remember when Q wasn’t QAnon but just shared source material between Matthew and Luke?
See — niche-y, nerdy!
This older Q includes the material that becomes the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. The QAnon crowd would do better to listen to the ethics of that Q, as would we all.
–Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 