The claim was that such a document had once existed in written form, and that it combined material that was common to both Matthew and Luke, and may even have been the source material that Matthew and Luke used for their Gospels.
The hypothesis might be read by an outsider as not really that surprising, given that it was in Germany that the various schools of Bible Criticism had grown up, with scholars such as Holtzmann and Bultmann applying to the Christian scriptures the theories that had been applied to the "Hebrew Bible" previously: a Christian Q where J, E, P and D had attempted to source the Jewish oral traditions. In fact, the "synoptic problem" had already been raised in England, in Herbert Marsh's translation of Michaelis' "Introduction to the New Testament", to which he added his personal opinion that the gospels had borrowed from each other.
A history of the development of the Q doctrine is worth reading, but not here alas. For the purposes of this document, the above paragraphs are sufficient.
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