> The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian "University" are . . . You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual yourself. Dismiss

> The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian "University" are . . . You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual yourself. Dismissing a fundamental question in textual criticism (about one of the most influential texts of all time) to a mere "interesting puzzle" and "fodder" for academic journals strikes me as openly hostile to scholarship as such. But even leaving that aside: Do you really think it would make no difference to our understanding of early Christianity were it conclusively demonstrated that a collection of Christian logia were circulating prior to the writing of the canonical gospels? Or, conversely, that no such collection existed? People have devoted their scholarly lives to this, because the question is so rich. Did Paul have any knowledge of this collection (and if he did, why doesn't he appear to quote it)? Did only Mark have access to it, or is it the source of sayings in more than one gospel? What is its relation to the Gospel of Thomas (and is the GoT itself a "sayings gospel" akin to Q?) If Q existed, why wasn't it preserved? What if (and this isn't a mainstream view) some kind of "proto-Matthew" existed in, say, Aramaic? Could Mark -- again, a minority view -- be, as some ancient commentators seemed to have believed, a condensation of Matthew? It just goes on and on. I fail to see why the idea that "most Christians" (an already problematic generalization) are bored by the subject has any bearing on whether this is important work. It's like saying, "theoretical computer science has no bearing on the lives of working programming. So who is it actually for?" The answer is, other scholars trying to understand the the subject at hand more deeply.