(Lk ix, 60b-63)
This may either be attributed to Luke (or to some later scribe) as an amplification of the incident just related by both Matthew and Luke from Q, or may be assumed to have stood in Luke’s recension of Q. The two facts, that such amplification would be quite unlike Luke, as his literary habits are revealed to us in his treatment of Mark, and that the saying about the man who has put his hand to the plow has an extremely original and genuine sound, lead us to the latter alternative.
THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY
(Lk x, 17-20)
Tho the existence and mission of a separate band of seventy disciples be attributed to Luke, he would certainly never have manufactured these sayings that are connected with their return. The sayings may indeed be ascribed to a special source; and are so ascribed by those who allow nothing to Q except the paralleled material. But these sayings are extremely primary in character, especially vss. 18 and 20; and they are similar to much Q material. If in Luke’s recension of Q the mission of the disciples was a mission of seventy instead of twelve, Luke will be relieved of the burden of personal responsibility for the creation of this mission of the seventy; he has then merely conflated the account of the mission of the seventy which he found in his recension of Q with the mission of the twelve which he found in Mark. It must be admitted that such conflation is contrary to Luke’s habit. The alternatives to this hypothesis are, either that he invented the mission of the seventy himself, or that he had before him three accounts of the sending out of disciples, one by Mark and one in Q, and a third in some unknown source. This lends probability to the ascription of these sayings to QLk.
THE GREAT COMMANDMENT
(Lk x, 25-28)
Mark has a partial parallel to this section in Mk xii, 28-31, which Matthew takes from him (Mt xxii, 34-40). Luke’s account is evidently not from Mark, however. Luke may have omitted the Marcan narrative because of this parallel of it in his own Gospel. The logian material in the section is of a primary character; the implication that one might inherit eternal life by merely keeping the commandments is not such as to have been later invented, and sounds particularly strange in Luke’s Gospel. No source is more probable for it than QLk.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
(Lk x, 29-37)