[redwoolf]

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?

[dragontamer]

I think a lot of people are interested in a more academic treatment of the time of the Acts of the Apostles up though Paul's journey.

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.

[Suppafly]

>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?

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.

[moomin]

I think it would be operationally of great interest to those who maintain Bible translations. I read a book by someone who worked on the New Jerusalem text and they read every source they could for clarification. New Jerusalem is, of course, officially a translation of the Vulgate, which to the best of my knowledge is the only translation that is claimed to be divinely inspired.

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.

[FrustratedMonky]

Interestingly, just read something that "Evangelicals", 50-80 years ago, used to think more, and thought religion and government should be separate, hence they believed they should stay out of government. They were only recently 'radicalized' like other fundamentalist religions into a more terrorist 'like', leaning group.

[bluGill]

Perhaps, but only for a short time in history, go back 150 years ago and the various churches often were telling you who to vote for.

[moomin]

I’ve read things that basically say the group re-integrated with politics when Jim Crow stopped being a thing.

[prewett]

Is that implying that Evangelicals are essentially racists? Jim Crow stopped about the time that the Sexual Revolution got going strong, so there's some confounding factors there. Since the Sexual Revolution values are clearly against the Christian "rules", which at the time somewhat matched the legal rules, and there was a secular movement removing the legal rules, it would seem likely that this was the motivating factor, especially given the existence of groups named like "Moral Majority" (ick). Also, Evangelicals are not just a southern thing, and I've never heard Evangelicals (I've not been to the South) argue for any return to anything remotely near Jim Crow, but I've heard lots of talk deploring sexual mores.

[xenadu02]

Christian "University" in the USA tends to be extremely hardcore biblical literalists (and in modern times explicitly right-wing politically). Within that context you are correct: the likes of Bob Jones, PCC, etc are extremely anti-intellectual and teach very anti-biblical belief systems. You'll often find the same thing in primary school education curriculum from Abeka, ACE (Accelerated Christian Education), etc.

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.