What is Q and what does it have to do with Thomas?
If you realize that Matthew and Luke are revised versions of Mark you will see that an extended set of sayings are in Matthew and Luke that do not occur in Mark. Those sayings, it is generally agreed in scholarship, were taken by both Matthew and Luke from a mid-first century document that consisted of a list of Jesus’ sayings. That document, which German scholars called “Quelle,” has come to be known as Q. It does not exist any longer, but it can be recovered by analysis of Matthew and Luke (simply put, Q was the written list of sayings that we find both in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark). Q was nothing more than a list of sayings. The Gospel of Thomas is also nothing more than a list of sayings. Many of the sayings are the same, but most of the sayings in Thomas are not in Q. Thomas is the same sort of thing as Q was but Thomas is not Q. Probably Thomas and Q circulated separately in the middle or the later part of the first century. Their points of view are quite different, Thomas
