It is named for Austin Farrer, who wrote On Dispensing With Q in 1955,[1] but it has been picked up by other scholars including Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre.

Instead, advocates of the Farrer theory argue, the Gospel of Mark was used as source material by the author of Matthew.

He also says (writing before the publication of the Gospel of Thomas) that "we have no reason to believe that documents of the Q type were plentiful", which would have made the hypothesis that Matthew and Luke drew on one more likely.

Goodacre puts forth an additional argument from fatigue, meaning cases where a derivative passage begins to make changes to its source but fails to sustain them and lapses back into the original version.

For example, the parable of the talents is more coherent in Matthew, but less so in Luke, who attempted to increase the number of servants from three to ten.