| >> | >>197086
>I think what you're talking about is the supposed Q source. It may or may not have existed, it's a hypothesis. If it did exist, then it's sad that we lost it, but what we have been given in the four Gospels preserves Jesus' teachings so that's a consolation for us. My own theory, which has no real basis in fact, but is what I like to believe, is that the Q source was an oral tradition, just like the Genesis was an oral tradition before it was written down.
Gnostic sayings were long theorized to be a basis for Gnostic Acts and Gospels (on the same basis as the non-gnostic ones), but remained a theory until... found, in Nag Hammadi. So guess what, we wouldn't know.
>If the unedited text existed, we would know about it. So many texts exist for what is considered canonical, and we know about the supposedly suppressed Gnostic writings.
Epiphanius, Gerome and Origen, for instance, quote Ebionites, Nazarenes and Hebrews, and we know fuck all about these Gospels apart of these quotations. To boot, well, there are suppressed Gnostic writings that we do know of. It's the Nag Hammadi library, which was hidden in Nag Hammadi out of fear for persecution by Athanasius' men.
>If there was an unedited version of anything in the Bible it would be well known.
There is not "One, original Bible". The Gospels show blatant signs of intertextuality between themselves and the apocrypha and the pesudoepigrapha, present different accounts that cannot be reconciled, are further contradicted by Acts and the Epistles, which also contradict each other, because fuck consistency. The canonical Bible is a harmonized canon that was chosen from a larger body of works, some of which predated the synoptic Gospels!
>I do not believe that there is a collection of books that were written by God.
So far, so good.
>So a book being considered apocryphal is really no concern.
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