Donald Wiebe's persistent demand for the academic study of religion to distinguish itself from the enterprise of theology has left an undeniable mark on religious studies. Because the study of religion emerged in a mostly Christian milieu, the study of Christianity (especially Christian origins) was particularly susceptible to the influence of theology. Even though scholars have reinvented the study of early Christianity in a number of important ways, many theological convictions and assumptions still implicitly inform biblical scholarship and its institutional activities; these persist often in the face of contradictory evidence which should prompt a reevaluation of the enterprise. Scholarly research on the Q document, which is a witness to a first-century Galilean movement, suffers from these implicit theological influences, because the identity that Q is seen to represent—an exclusively proto-Christian movement as opposed to a Second Temple Jewish movement— is often made to mirror the traditional, theological narrative of nascent Christianity.

The Q document's role in the study of early Christianity is subject to some debate. Its infancy in the field was tied to issues of the Synoptic Problem, and indeed its very existence depends on arguments about textual relationships among the Synoptic gospels. Although many of those issues are still contested today, the Two-Document Hypothesis, positing the Gospel of Matthew's and the Gospel of Luke's independent use of the Gospel of Mark and Q, has emerged as the most compelling Synoptic solution.