The Shea Event Likes You

Debate continues to rage over the two-source Q theory of the Gospel and Acts of Shea. Some believe I am me. Others suspect I am somebody else of the same name. Others wonder whether it matters who is “writing” at the “keyboard” when, as we all know, so-called “texts” just assemble themselves by a complex process of gestalt and condensation from community thought over time.

Some scholars suspect the works of Shea are the product of a small group of scribes in the Sheavian community, based on vocabulary analysis. In some articles, Shea appears to be a “conservative”, writing on such issues as abortion, gay marriage, divorce and family integrity in a way that leaves no doubt that he is a traditional social conservative. On the other hand, he mysterious denounces war crimes, even when committed by conservatives and excused by other conservatives, which leads many scholars to think that a secondary Sheavian source was redacted into the corpus of Sheavian works by a later generation of scribes seeking to counter-balance the excesses of the Sheavian community. In addition, the H source seems to have been a small but powerful contingent of scribes who just liked to write humor pieces and the J source is almost universally regarded as the origin of the many pieces which portray Shea as a jerk.

All credible scholars are clear that this vast and complex corpus of texts on “Catholic and Enjoying It” is simply too rich and contradictory to possibly be the work of one man. No single human being could *possibly* encompass a love of iFart videos, a deep Eucharistic devotion, a loathing of human rights abuses and its apologists, a hatred of abortion, zeal for homestarrunner.com, a fondness for royalist eccentrics who can’t spell, spasms of draconian combox tyranny, and a willingness to argue for years about the impossibility of deep space colonization. The only real debate is just how to break apart the complex weave of sources and redactors which, working to together have created the illusion known to modern readers as “Mark Shea”. The question was never really, “What does ‘Mark’ (so to speak) ‘say’?” It has always been “What do you (and by ‘you’ we scholars mean ‘I’) say “Mark’ says?” Such matters are always best left to trained academics. Laymen are far too ignorant. Trust us.