The very peculiar Greek used by both Matthew and Luke in the saying about excommunication ([Greek: eiposin pan ponêron kath' hymôn] in Mt v, 11, and [Greek: ekbalôsin to onoma hymôn hôs ponêron] in Lk vi, 22) seems to go back to the one Aramaic phrase for giving one a bad name. In the speech against the Pharisees Matthew (xxiii, 25) says, "Ye cleanse the outside of the cup and dish but inwardly they [the cup and platter] are full of greed and baseness." Luke makes much better sense by reading (xi, 39), "Ye cleanse the outside of cup and platter, but inwardly ye are full of greed," etc. If it be assumed that the present tense of the verb "to cleanse" was represented in Aramaic by the participle (which would be the usual construction), and that the second person pronoun stood with it in the first clause but was not repeated in the second (as would also be natural in the Aramaic), Matthew's change of the verb in the second clause, from the second person to the third, and his consequent use of "cup and dish" as the subject of it, are easily explained; since the participle carries in itself no distinction between second and third person, and the plural form would fit equally the "ye" and the "they." Instances such as these (I owe them all to Wellhausen)[91] seem to prove conclusively (Jülicher says "beyond a doubt") that, not merely an Aramaic oral tradition, but an Aramaic document lies behind the Greek Q used by Matthew and Luke.
METHODS OF MATTHEW AND LUKE IN THEIR USE OF Q
Upon the hypothesis that Matthew and Luke used essentially the same text of Q, an elaborate treatment of their respective use of that document is called for to show which of them, in instances where they differ, is to be charged with the alterations, and to assign the reasons for those alterations. Two scholars, Harnack in his _Sayings of Jesus_ and Wernle in his _Synoptische Frage_, have made such an analysis, with the thoroness characteristic of them. The writer has studied these analyses carefully, and upon the basis of them and of such study of the texts as they suggested, made his own analysis. But upon the hypothesis of Q as originally an Aramaic document, used by Matthew and Luke in Greek translations going back to different Aramaic texts, such an analysis becomes superfluous, because superseded by the analysis of Q into the two recensions, QMt and QLk.