Well, the Q source hypothesis is new only relative to the history of Christianity. It is a fact that discovery of new manuscripts, specifically the Alexandrian text type of the New Testament, and the developments, since the late 1700s, in philology and textual criticism, as well as careful scrutiny of the most ancient manuscripts, have provided us new insights into the Bible.
However, I am firmly against some forms of “higher criticism” which is analysis other than textual, or “lower criticism”, because while the latter seeks, through objective means, to try to determine the most reliable manuscripts, and also identify interpolations and also scribal errors, which should be documented, and avoided, respectively, the former is a much more subjective field, and some avenues of higher criticism make decisions I don’t think we should make without consulting the traditions of the early church.
An example of this would be three well known probable interpolations, the first two identified through textual criticism through manuscript analysis, and the specifically because they are not attested in the oldest known manuscripts: the Longer Ending of Mark (Mark 10:10-16), and the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7-9, which explicitly identifies the persons of the Trinity who are otherwise implied. Then there is the Adultery Pericope (John 8:1-20) where textual criticism is less clear but higher criticism suggests St. John the Beloved probably did not write it, and one thing textual criticism can say is that it is found in manuscripts of texts other than the Gospel According to John. Many newer bibles like the NIV simply omit the longer ending of Mark and the Comma Johanneum, while usually making a subjective decision that the Adultery Pericope in John was worth retaining, although I know of one particularly liberal Bible edition which omits it.
I am of the view that while educated Christian readers should be aware that these are not attested in the oldest manuscripts, there is no compelling reason to remove any of them. Of these, the only one which seems an obvious post-apostolic writing is the Comma Johanneum, but it is also harmless; indeed, it is doctrinally correct and makes explicit what was implicit, which is of benefit for less educated laity.
I see no reason to doubt that our Lord said what is recorded in the Longer Ending of Mark, and the inclusion of this text seems further justified by its presence in the Byzantine text type which is the basis for the Textus Receptus or Majority Text, and which also is the textual variant used by the second and third oldest surviving translations of the New Testament (namely, the Syriac Peshitta and the Latin Vulgate; the older Vetus Latina, which is the oldest extant translation into classical Latin, which was replaced for purposes of the lectionary by St. Jerome’s Vulgate, but was retained in liturgical phrases in the Latin liturgy, most notably “Gloria in Exclesis Deo”, which represents the kind of Classical Latin which is inherently more beautiful than the more vulgar, which is to say, later and less elegant, “Gloria in Altissimus Deo” we find in the Vulgate, uses the obscure Western text type). Indeed, Mark 16:9-20 is even found in the aforementioned second century Vetus Latina, which really validates its antiquity; I see no reason why it should be deleted simply because it is absent from the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.* Now, from a catechtical perspective, of late (by which I mean for at least a century) this pericope has been abused in a particularly annoying manner, by the notorious Snake Handling Pentecostals of the Appalachians as justification for their reckless worship, however, the fact that a text is read out of context and abused by churches with strange, heterodox or even heretical beliefs is not justification for removing it, because virtually all parts of the Bible have been abused in that way.
This takes us to the adultery pericope; there was a controversy over some manuscripts omitting it even in the early Church. Higher criticism and its presence in some manuscripts of the Didascalia and other texts, and according to Eusebius of Caesarea in the Gospel of the Hebrews suggests it is not of Johannine authorship, but it is extremely important, and is in some of the oldest manuscripts, indeed it is in the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate, and while the Greek fathers who exposited the scriptures book by book, like St. Chrysostom, do not mention it, it was clearly very important to the Latin fathers. It is also in the Greek Codex Vaticanus, albeit marked with an umlaut character indicating its provenance was not certain.
Now, some important context is the Roman church, where this pericope was well regarded, was arguably the most conservative in the third, fourth and most of the second and fifth century, managing to avoid innovations and controversy except during Pope St. Victor, who attempted to flex over the Church in Corinth, which was not in his jurisdiction, but was corrected by one of his own bishops, St. Irenaeus of Lyons; it was also Pope Victor (technically Bishop Victor, as the title Pope was first used by the Bishop of Alexandria in the 3rd century and not adopted in Rome for another 300 years or so) did make a rare but justifiable innovation in having the first Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina, composed, and in introducing Latin language church services, which had the very positive effect of opening up the Roman church to the less wealthy and less well educated common folk of ancient Rome; previously the exclusive use of the Greek language denied these members of Roman society easy access to the Church, even as the Eastern church starting with St. Thomas used Aramaic and Syriac as it followed the Jewish trade routes through Edessa, Syria and Mesopotamia to Kerala, India, home of the Kochin Jews since the second century AD**, but converting Jews and Gentiles alike, thanks to the lingua franca that was Syriac Aramaic. That justifiable innovation aside, the Roman church tended to avoid change as much as possible. Indeed, it did not introduce antiphonal hymns, which were the standard in the Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches, until St. Ambrose introduced them in the 380s in a vigil to keep the Arians from taking possession of a basilica in Milan, of which he was bishop. This extreme conservativism was not without benefit however, as Rome managed to avoid being on the wrong side of any heresies until Pope Honorius I in the late sixth century, who was a Monothelite, and the only Pope deposed, albeit after his death, for heresy (in the 14th-17th century Honorius I acquired a certain legendary infamy, believed by some Catholic and Protestant laity to be a sorcerer, with a grimoire spuriously attributed to him). This was a very good record, considering that the other three major autocephalous churches, namely Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople, and possibly the next most important autocephalous church, Jerusalem, all suffered from heretical bishops, although in the case of Alexandria these bishops were Arians illegally appointed by the Arian emperors to replace St. Athanasius, who was in exile until around 360 AD, and were despised by the people.
So when we consider how conservative the Roman church was, and that of the adultery pericope, its removal was associated by no lees a man than St. Athanasius with Novatian and Donatist heretics***, proactive higher criticism that suggests it should be removed seems gravely misguided.
Finally, I think biblical criticism at its worse is in the 19th century monstrosity of Source Criticism that dominated seminaries for decades, the Documentary Hypothesis, which was only seriously challenged in the 70s, and still had adherents even today, particularly among older seminary educated clergy. The Documentary Hypothesis, in brief, argues that the Pentateuch (Torah) was cobbled together or otherwise edited by four figures, the Priestly Source, the El source, the Yahwist source, and the Deuteronomist, which is an idea predicated on the belief that Hebrews were not originally Monotheistic, and became monotheistic after a period of Henotheism preceded by Polytheism, that El-Elyon and YHWH were originally separate deities, that El may possibly have been connected to Ba’al or was Ba’al (or Bel), basically a Semitic word meaning Master, or that El-Elyon was the Northern , and that four people with their own agendas collectively composed the Torah:
- The Yahwist, or J source, who wrote from a Judean perspective and had a particular interest in the history of Judah, and depicted YHWH in an anthropomorphological way. The J source is alleged to be critical of the Northern tribes, and despite anthropomorphic depictions of God, paradoxically also stressed his separation from humanity, as well as the progressive decline of human civilization into disobedience and sinfulness.
- The Elohimist, or E source, who wrote from the perspective of the Northern Kingdom and from a historical perspective stressed Northern heroes such as Joseph, and the ancestors of the ten Northern tribes****. E was less anthropomorphic, and despite being complimentary towards Levi and the Levites, was critical of Aaron (and presumably of the Aaronic Priesthood; I find this particularly difficult to swallow given the Samaritans, the descendants of the Northern Kingdom, have Kohanim who based on genetics appear, like their Jewish counterparts, to be at least somewhat likely to share a common ancestor, who is believed to be Aaron in the Samaritan religion.
- The Priestly, or P source, who was chiefly interested in exalting the hereditary priesthood, and in describing the liturgical services and sacrificial rituals with great detail, and underscoring their importance to Israel.
- The Deuteronomist, or D source, which the most recent interpretations of the Documentary Hypothesis regarded as being Levite refugees from the Northern Kingdom, who resettled in Judah following the Assyrian conquest, bringing with them the belief that only El-Elyon, who they identified with YHWH, was worthy of worship (although other deities might have been recognized as existing at this point, but as evil deities, a belief system known as Henotheism. As the name implies, the Deuteronomist Source, or Deuteronomists as we might call them, were argued to be responsible for that book, while the Priestly, Elohist and Yahwist sources were credited with the other four, the so-called Tetrateuch, which the D source also edited. When Babylon conquered Judah, D focused on providing a theological understanding for this, by stressing in Deuteronomy the idea of covenant theology, and also by documenting the history of St. Jeremiah the Prophet, who I believe some proponents of this hypothesis would claim was a Deuteronomist. After the return from exile after the fall of Babylon, the introduction to Deuteronomy was rewritten and additional laws were added. D was credited, in addition to Deuteronomy and Jeremiah (and one might assume Lamentations) with the authorship of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. While the idea of an editor who completed the Torah and wrote Joshua seems plausible enough, one problem is the nearly identical Samaritan Torah, whereas they have their own completely different Book of Joshua (of course, they could have edited their Torah to make it closer to the Jewish one, perhaps because they believed it better narrated the death of St. Moses; another is that before the implementation of the reading of the entire Torah in the Temple and in synagogues by St. Esdras (Ezra)*****, the priest who partnered with St. Nehemiah the Prophet to organize this system, the basics of the Law were read by the King as part of his royal duties to the assembled people of Israel at Sukhot, the Feast of Tabernacles, from the book of Deuteronomy.
There is more to it than this, of course; indeed the theology as fully developed is fiendishly complex, as shown by this diagram:
So for me, a traditionalist priest, the aforementioned liturgical discrepancy concerning the D source, although not impossible to resolve, combines with every other non-traditional belief including this presumptive progressive metamorphosis from polytheism to monotheism via paganism, to shoot down this hypothesis (which it must be stressed, is not a theory, because theories must be falsifiable according to the Scientific Method, and the Documentary Source Hypothesis cannot be tested in a definitive way, but only against subjective alternative Biblical scholarship, and also the traditions of the Christian faith and what the Scriptures themselves say of their history. Ergo scholars less bound by tradition and a belief in the inspired nature and honesty of Scripture than myself naturally rejected it based on more “scholarly reasons.”:
Despite its complexity, and for me at least, a lack of credibility, I still encounter this system among older clergy, for example, a retired Episcopalian priest I am friends with.
Before the obligatory footnotes I attach to a post like this, I feel a desire to ask some of my seminary-educated friends
@Deegie @Paidiske @Shane R and
@GreekOrthodox if when they were in Seminary this was still being taught, or if it had been set aside in favor of newer and better source theories, or was simply not used, with the traditional belief that Moses composed most of the Pentateuch except for the obvious portions dealing with his demise, which seem to flow effortlessly into the historical narrative of Joshua, his successor, taught instead.
*The two primary Alexandrian manuscripts that include the Alexandrian form of the Gospels; the former was mostly stolen from the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catharine in Sinai by a German adventurer in the 19th century who intended to sell it to the Russian State Library, which has a small fragment, but most was instead sold to the British library, and the monastery managed to hang on to another fragment which was only recently discovered; the latter is owned by the Vatican, indeed, it has been in the Vatican Library since it opened in the 15th century and is believed to have been received from the Eastern Orthodox during the attempted reunification at the Council of Florence; before that, it was believed to have been in Caesarea for some time and to have been written in Alexandria; in the fourth century both Rome and Constantinople ordered a large number of Bibles for the time (about fifty each) from the Church of Alexandria and the theological school in Caesarea in Judaea under Eusebius, but knowing exactly where this Bible was composed, where it was composed, and what it was used for is impossible; all we know is that it, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus are all very ancient, and represent the Alexandrian text type (except for the Gospels in Alexandrinus, which lean to the Byzantine type.
** a handful of whom live there today, although the synagogues normally cannot get a minyan (in Orthodox Rabbinical synagogues, a quorum of ten or more male Jews who have had the Bar Mitzvah required for davening, that is to say, congregational Jewish prayer); most emigrated to India and elsewhere, most notably Vidal Sassoon, whose family according to the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia was particularly important among Indian Jewry.
*** St. Augustine specifically endorsed John 8:1-20 “Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin.”
**** Of course, Levites also remained in the Kingdom of Judah, and there are Jews descended from Levites and Kohanim even now; the last names Levy and Cohen (among Syriac and Antiochian Orthodox Christians of Jewish descent, Khoury, an Arabic word meaning Priest, is often used by those who would be called Cohen otherwise; also the Russian word Kaplan, which literally means Chaplain, is found).
***** The system of synagogue worship, and the equivalent reading of the Bible to the extent it existed at that time in both the thrice daily prayers in the Synagogue and at the Temple, a system which began to be implemented by St. Ezra the Priest, is the basis for Christian worship going back to the early church, which stressed three daily prayers, the timing of which was determined by the need to hide from Roman and Jewish persecutors, often in catacombs or seminaries where martyrs were buried, with the main services being Vespers at sunset, Matins or Vigils at midnight, which could be followed, especially on Sunday, if a bishop, or later, a presbyter, was present, of the bloodless and rational sacrifice of the Eucharist, or Holt Communion, and Lauds at Sunrise. This contrasts with Jewish worship and the worship of Christianity after persecution, for example, the more relaxed Anglican divine office consisting of Morning Prayer, the Litany and/or the Eucharistic liturgy or at least the reading of its Bible lessons and a sermon, known as “Ante Communion”, and Vespers; likewise the daily and Sabbath Jewish prayers are in the morning, afternoon and evening.
I could cite Karen King, Hal Taussig and Elaine Pagels, and quite possibly Bart Ehrman, as among those influenced by Funk and the Jesus Seminar. 
