You're right. I'm extremely colored by my Evangelical upbringing and the contemptuous American Evangelical community.
That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it, would it change much about our understanding of that time in history?
That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it, would it change much about our understanding of that time in history?
There is a huge amount of early Catholic/Christian history that comes down to oral traditions and the flowery language of the Bible. Which forces us to wonder what parts are metaphor and which parts were real history.
Like we know St. James somehow ended up in Spain (erm, Iberia or whatever it was called back then). But did they take with them oral tradition alone or did they have books to help keep the story consistent?
If Q existed, it may have been a book or reference for the early Bishop/Apostles. It's be insight to how they lived and worked.
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Oral Tradition is how the world worked back then. But it also existed in a time of writing and documentation (see the Roman Empire around that time).
I think most people are happy with oral tradition as an explanation. But the gospels seem too similar for oral tradition alone.
I'm not a biblical scholar by any means, but I don't think Q needs to be a specific individual source (although it could be), you just need to understand that the later books all incorporate shared material that came from somewhere other than mark. It could be that all incorporate the same subset of oral histories, or the same material from multiple sources. It's just the idea that there is some larger source of material that predates mark that the others are pulling from.
But, imagine if we did find a Q text. Let’s assume that it was the real one. We’d still be debating it till kingdom come.
And yes, that’s my experience of evangelicals as well. Almost an anti-curiosity about the source of their beliefs.
It was eye-opening for me to get out from under that sort of lifestyle (thankfully pre-college). I began to understand there is a much wider set of beliefs under the "Christian" label, many of which are not anti-science nor politically motivated.