(October 28, 2020 at 5:52 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I've always found it helpful to think of Q as the variety of sources - both oral and textual - which provided a rough framework for the Synoptics. Since we know that (as TGN said) none of the Gospels have the claimed authorship and none of them have a single author, it's reasonable to suppose that that the compilers of the Gospels were - to a significant extent - drawing on earlier source material.
In a way, it's a lot like Monmouth's Historia - written as fact, but based on folklore and earlier ballads.
Boru
So Q can be anything? Like what about King Arthur? Would you say that he had a Q?
But instead of waiting for a reply, I'll tell you further why it seems to me there was no Q. I guess you are trying to say that something existed before the first gospel was written and that we could call that Q, but it doesn't have to be the case. Just like when people started writing stories about King Arthur there was no Q, as well as with Robin Hood, Snow White, or when people write books and make movies about Santa...
There were myths and ideas about King Arthur but there was no Q. And when it comes to Jesus there were ideas about some messiahs. Like one of the survived documents from that period "The Apocalypse of Adam", makes references to a redeemer, a messiah-figure and even the idea of a virgin birth, but it nowhere makes any allusion to a real, historical messiah, living and preaching in Galilee, Judea, or anywhere else. And it seems that Paul was writing about some heavenly messiah who didn't live on Earth.
So if Mark was reverse engineering Paul to write his (1st) gospel then it seems to me that he didn't use Q because when he was writing about Jesus' life, like crucifixion, he could have used Q but he didn't. Instead, he used Jesus ben Ananias's story from Josephus, he used Psalm 22, and the rest of Torah. I mean why use all that if he had Q? And then that last part after Mark 16:8 that is known to be added by later generations, was that also from the Q or someone just made-up some shit?
So it seems Mark had Paul whose views and writings were tampered with later on to make it seem like he was writing about the carpenter from Galilee, like giving him more epistles that he didn't write but that was written by early Christians who falsely claimed that Paul wrote them. "The Apocalypse of Adam" could have also been tampered with to make it look like it was about Jesus, but they skipped that one and it was lost until 1945.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
