I had a look around for this recently discovered book, but can't find references -- can you point me towards some please, it'd be fascinating to read the contents / context.
'Recent' needs to be interpreted in biblical terms - the book I was thinking of is the Gosple of Thomas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas - discovered in 1945 (the 'Q' hypothesis having been made around 1900).
Okay, Thomas - lots of dispute about when it was written, and the anthology style makes timing even harder to determine, while increasing the chance it was modified over the centuries.
I recalled something about the intrigue over some parchments from this collection, and found this recent story [0] about the alleged illegal sale, recovery, translation efforts, and (this year) publication of some fragments.
One of the researchers is quoted in that article with a 'This is not Q' statement.
Yes - before I go on, please note this is not my area of expertise, but just something I am interested in.
I haven't seen anywhere which suggests that Thomas is Q, but to me if a book of biblical quotations is hypothesised when none has previously been found, and forty-five years later a book of biblical quotations is discovered (which, despite uncertainty about its timing, certainly dates to at least a millennium before the hypothesis) that lends some weight to the hypothesis.
Of course, given my general ignorance in this area, perhaps books of quotations from this time are common, and hypothesising the existence of one is like hypothesising the existing of a website for a popular TV show in 2023 (i.e. a meaningless proposition).
No, that sounds fairly reasonable - not necessarily the 'hypothesised and then discovered, therefore credible' (that may be survivorship bias), but certainly the potential for that document to be 'Q'.
Given 'Q source' (tautology, forgive me) was a conceptual construct to try to explain a part of the synoptic problem, there's no reason to believe it was necessarily a single document in the modern sense, or that earlier versions (that we don't have) may be subsets of things we actually subsequently got our hands on.
I can’t find anything either. Q is probably an aggregate of the best creative free form half truth conspiracy writings that one was able to gather from various internet sources mixed with a garden variety of new age mystical belief and a dash of pure fn magic.
The best current scholarship is that there was no such thing as a "Q", and that what is in Luke and Matthew but not in Mark, the author of Luke just cribbed directly from Matthew.
"Q", like "oral traditions", Docetism, and Gnosticism, turns out to be a fever dream of "biblical scholars" working before sound textual analysis had been invented.
