Britannica Sources used in this answer

What shared source may have been used by the authors of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew?

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St. Luke the Evangelist — St. Luke St. Luke, illuminated page from the Beatus Apocalypse, Mozarabic, 975; in the Gerona Cathedral, Spain.

Biblical scholars generally agree that the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke utilized the Gospel According to Mark as a primary source for their narrative material and chronological structure.12

Beyond Mark, Matthew and Luke share a significant amount of material—primarily logia (sayings) attributed to Jesus—that does not appear in Mark. To account for this shared content, scholars hypothesize the existence of a lost, hypothetical source known as Q (from the German Quelle, meaning "source").31

Under the two-source hypothesis, Mark and Q are considered the main components used by the authors of Matthew and Luke. While no physical copy of Q has been discovered, its existence is supported by intensive textual analysis of the verbatim agreements found in the sayings common to both Matthew and Luke.13