OK, I'm back. Sort of. Things are busy between the new job and various dental issues, but here I am...
I believe you have mischaracterized my statement. By restating it inside a strawman of hyperbole, I might add.
It's possible that I was engaging in a bit of deliberate sarcasm there.
With Jesus gone whatever things he said and did were circulated as opinions, accounts, stories, exaggerations, mythologised history depending on WHO was doing the telling.
Even apart from any allowance for the supernatural, it seems to me that we should be able to expect a reasonable degree of accuracy from accounts that were circulated by the people who were taught by Jesus and walked with him for three years. It's not like the only source of information was some sort of rumor mill. People were alive who knew Jesus well, and they were the primary ones who reported on his life. If such first-hand sources are to be dismissed as unreliable, we have very little basis for the study of history at all.
How do we know this? Paul had to face off with the guardians (eyewitnesses and fellow travelers with Jesus, mind you!) and CORRECT THEM in their UNDERSTANDING of what this NEW religion (Christianity) was and what it wasn't.
Jesus didn't teach everything about everything to his followers. He acknowledged that the Holy Spirit, whom he would send, would lead them into "all truth." It isn't surprising that there would be misunderstandings about doctrine among his followers after his death, and the conflict that arose was evidence of that. Paul was the primary one who formulated doctrine in the early years of the church - the first systematic theologian, if you will.
What Saul/Paul had was a MYSTERIOUS MYSTICAL ENCOUNTER with a vision he identified (how?) as Jesus. About this same time other divergent branches of Messianic Christianity were blossoming as GNOSTICISM!
Just as today there are "divergent branches" of Christianity like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. The existence of such groups need not be given equal status with orthodoxy. The apostles and their successors opposed Gnosticism as a heresy, right from the beginning. Your linking of Paul with Marcion sounds as if you are accusing Paul of being a Gnostic; I find no evidence for that in his writings. Paul was a Jew and a Pharisee; he was not a Greek thinker (though he was obviously well educated in contemporary philosophies).
MY POINT with Paul's letters is that they WEREN'T holy to anybody or they would have been enshrined, preserved and guarded to the death. Instead, parts were copied and handed around and the originals allowed to rot.
And so we return to your original, absurd (imho) contention that the ones who received the writings of the NT somehow held them in low enough esteem to "let them rot," but were somhow impressed enough by them to make copies and circulate them widely. Those two concepts seem inherently contradictory to me. They didn't have copiers, fax machines or "Forward" buttons on their e-mail back then. It was a lot of work to sit down and make a copy of a document. Surely they would not have seen fit to make such an effort for documents that were fit to be allowed to rot.
The point is that many Christians throughout history have, in fact, guarded the Scriptures "to the death." We know of major persecutions that happened in the early years of the church. It seems very likely that whoever possessed the autographs may well have guarded them to the death, but that the Romans acquired and destroyed them in hopes of wiping out Christianity. You intimated in an earlier post that the Roman army might have been effective enough to destroy any literature across the breadth of the Empire that was seen as "heretical," yet you refuse to acknowledge that the autographs of the NT might have met the same fate. I find it far easier to believe that the Romans could have located and destroyed single documents (such as the NT autographs) than that they could somehow have gathered up every single copy of disapproved literature across the Empire so as to wipe it from existence.
The SYNOPTIC gospels harmonize because they reference the same sources: Q and Mark.
WHAT HAPPENED TO Q? Q wasn't Holy enough to be a concern for preservation. It was only important enough to be plagarized! Then, discarded and allowed to rot.
Q is a hypothetical document. Nobody has ever proven that Q existed. It is assumed that because Matthew and Luke report similar material that does not appear in Mark (the earlier source) that there "must have" been a particular document that contained that material, but that has passed from existence. Another possible explanation is that Matthew, Mark and Luke are all reporting events as they actually happened. Of course, that explanation can't be admitted as a possibility by one who denies the supernatural a priori.
Even if a Q document did exist (and I'm not completely disallowing the possibility), it's entirely possible that it met the same fate during periods of persecution that the other autographs did; its absence does not prove that it was regarded of low value. Again, if it was seen as of little worth, why would Matthew and Luke see fit to include its material in their own writings?
Once the Gospels and Paul's letters became enough of a stimulus to encourage rabid Christianity to flourish and become a PAIN IN THE ASS for Roman overlords--the crackdown on Christian foolishenss (persecution) targeted their writings.
Which is pretty much what I've been saying all along, isn't it?
Like family photos and letters that are in a flood or fire---suddenly families who let them gather dust in a closet are beating their chests and squirting tears for the IRREPLACEABLE heirlooms and family treasures!!
Right - because they ARE irreplaceable heirlooms and family treasures. Their worth is never questioned. I only have a few pictures of certain members of my family who are no longer living. I don't pull them out and look at them every day. I keep them in a box or a drawer and I know where they are. They are precious to me; I have no qualms about the value I assign them. If someone tried to destroy them or steal them, I would strive very hard to prevent that from happening.
I have another example that might be even more germane: I had a friend when I was young who was a musician, and who is no longer living. At some point during our friendship, he made me two tapes of his music performances. I loved his music, and still sing and play some of his songs whenever I take my guitar out. One of the tapes has disappeared; I suspect it was lost one of the times I moved. I keep hoping I'll find it one of these days, but I've looked everywhere I can think of. I still have the other tape. I keep it in my drawer. One time recently, I took it out and played it so that I could record it to digital files and add it to my iPod. Now, to a certain extent this is just keeping up with the technology, but in another sense, I am preserving the original tape because it is very valuable to me, and still enjoying the music from the "copies" on the iPod.
It may have been something like that with the autographs. It isn't that they were not seen as valuable at all, rather, because of their value, they were not circulated, but were used as the basis for copies. The copies were then circulated and read precisely so that the sacred originals could be preserved. Unfortunately, the Roman persecutions resulted in their destruction nonetheless. That scenario makes a lot more sense to me than the originals being perceived as of little value, yet being copied and circulated by the thousands.
The rest is history (or speculation called: history.)
As long as you know that what you are doing is speculating and calling it history...