This difference in orders presents a challenge for redactional criticism.

Redactional processes are documented in numerous disciplines, including ancient literary works and biblical studies.

Textual scholars argue that the ritual is composed from three sources, and a couple of redactional additions:

The other five occurrences are all within the context of parables and are widely held to be redactional additions by Matthew.

It is still debated whether the closest parallels to the New Testament canon are part of the Apocryphon's last redactional hand or else part of its sources.

He agrees that the original Common Sayings Tradition, presented by Patterson, contained neither Gnosticism nor Apocalypticism but required redactional adaptation towards either or both of those eschatologies.

Criterion 5: If different Gospels present logia in different orders, the interpreter should consider the Evangelists' literary tendencies and prefer the order that "displays the least redactional dislocation."

Redactional fatigue is an important related concept: when making changes to a large text, a redactor may occasionally overlook a piece of text that conflicts with the redactional goals.

The focus of the redactional activity is in the organisation and assembling of the contributions, including their own material like interviews, found footages or critiques, in order to create for each issue a strong and original unity.

This burst of interest after the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas led to increasingly more sophisticated literary reconstructions of Q, and even to redactional speculation, notably in the work of John S. Kloppenborg.

He was a member of the redactional committees for Psychometrika, Numerische Mathematik, Linear Algebra and Its Applications, and has been editor in chief of the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.

By the 19th century, scholars widely agreed with John Calvin's view of the Sermons as two versions of the same speech, both of which were redactional compositions and as such the direction of the scholarship turned toward seeking the sources that were used by the evangelists.

Putting aside "a purely hypothetical Aramaic source" of Matthew and Luke, which would mean that "Q would never be more than a hypothesis," Robinson claims, in the introduction, that such approaches have been "completely replaced by objective criteria, based on empirical observation of Matthean and Lukan redactional traits" (xix).