Your acceptance of Q surprises me.
IT reminds me of when a synod met over a century after Mohammed’s death for to determine which were the spurious
and which weren’t of the several stories told about him. With such much
written and little if anything known of their sources the determination was little more than divination with the belief of
the group being the deciding factor. I believe the same has occurred with Q. And
while the collection has a certain ring of being reasonable to the more enlightened Christians, this is a mere reflection
of the expectation of biblical scholars who sat and judge. Moreover, they came
to the table clouded with faith in Christ and a Christian creed. A group of non-Christian
scholars would be a better judge, or better yet agnostics and atheists.
But there is yet another reason not to believe in Q. First, Paul and the
other authors of the Epistle not only did not know of the Gospel fictions, they did not know of Christ’s teachings. And being before Mark, and presumable after Q, their silence is extremely problematic.
Paul traveled widely, and communicated with the Consol in Jerusalem, yet he knew not Q.
Paul declares his ignorance in I Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 17ff. A
number of my essays address these problems: especially, http://skeptically.org/enlightenment/id2.html, which deals with all the reasons for assuming the Gospels are fictions; and http://skeptically.org/newtestament/id4.html which is on sources of the Jesus Legend.
And as for Pagan parallels (which you close with in the discussion of Q) try http://skeptically.org/newtestament/id11.html by Kerry Temple, Editor of Notre Dame Magazine. Given all this and that the claims concerning Q are not made by independent scholars, but by Christians,
I must reject, until better evidence presented in support of the hypothetical Q.
I hope that you find things on my sites that are of use. Your comments
would be more than welcomed. I am interested in how to become better placed in
the search engines. I have been using the links Tripod provides. But with so
many articles, this is tedious. My email address is *@skeptically.org
