Vinnie

Interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas isn't one of your strong suits is it?

Proof text hunting like this is silly. Maybe Holding is right after all? If only you read GThom #22

At any rate, if that wasn't an adddition to Thomas (it interupts the nice opening and closure of 3-113) then it is in all probability following Thomas' strategy of going back to the beginning.

Take this from JD Crossan:

"If your experience of the present world finds it radically amiss, you can only go, in terms of time, either to future or to past to find that ideal or utopian world whose existence profoundly subverts present normalcies and fundamentally criticizes present actualities. Negation of the present world goes either backward or forward in time to locate that perfect otherworld alternative."

Crossan goes on to quote three passages dealing with Jewish speculation about divine wisdom:

Proverbs 8:22-23
The Lord created me [Wisdom] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

Sirach 24:9
Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me [Wisdom], and for all the ages I shall not cease to be.

Wisdom 7:26
For she [Wisdom] is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.

Crossan goes on to write, "Hold together creation, wisdom, light, and image, reread the creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:2 against that background, and apply those readings to Jesus and to Christians.

God begins, in Genesis 1:3, by saying, "'Let there be light'; and there was light." So Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas 77:1, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained." God ends his creative proclamations in Genesis 1:26-27, by saying, "let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness," and the story concludes, in Genesis 2:2, with these words: "[O]n the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done." So the Gospel of Thomas 50 can present a small catechetical summary of Christian existence derived from God, light, image, and rest:

Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are chosen of the living Father.' If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

"But what about Genesis 2-3? What about the story of the first sin, the fall, and the expulsion from Eden? To get back to that inaugural moment of creation, of wisdom and light, of motion and rest, you would have to get back before the story of the fall. It would be necessary to get back before sin--better still even earlier, before that androgynous being called Adam-the-Earthling was split into Adam-the-male and Eve-the-female. It was that primal and as-yet-undivided being who was made in God's image. It was those split beings, Adam and Eve, who sinned, fell, and were expelled from paradise. The ideal state imagined by the Gospel of Thomas is that of the primordial human being, Adam as one, as single and unsplit, as neither male nor female, as asexual. First came split, thence came the sexes, thence came sin. The Gospel of Thomas is about returning to that inaugural moment at the dawn of creation, before sin, before serpent, before split. It is about paradise regained from the past, not about parousia awaited in the future."

Reread the text I put in bold. It is important. Notice that the Gospel of Thomas does not hate women. Its theology is about males becoming female and females becoming males. I actually like it. I was going to develop my own religious mythology through modification of the GThomas called Thomasine Panentheism. I still may do it one day

In general, this description of Thomas certainly seems correct to me. Saying 21a features the motif of stripping naked which refers to the "ideal primordial time before the fall, prior to which Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed (Genesis 2:25). Subsequently they became aware of their nakedness and were ashamed (Genesis 3:7). The Gospel of Thomas advocates return to the time of the Beginning, and so also to the nakedness symbolic of that time."7 Saying 22 focuses on making the female and male into one and about returning to the beginning. Saying 106 enforces our discussion as well.

Here is the pickle. Some think 114 contradicts this well documented theme in Thomas. Plus its at the end, the best place to attach a saying and it seems to interrupt the framework of 3 and 113 IIRC. Ergo, the argument that it was attached later.

Stevan Davies would argue exactly that(see GThom p. 138). But others like Valantasis would argue that it as consistent with Thomas theology of the male becoming female and the female male (see GThom, p.194-195).

At any rate, regardless of which interpretation you take, GThom is not a misogynist text that hates women. It askes both sexes to transcend their own gender and go back to that primordial time of the beginning before sin and the splitting of the sexes.

Vinnie

Haran

Personally, I rather agree with those who find GThomas to be a pointless pastiche of mostly early gnostic myths and not what the Jesus seminar scholars want it to be...a gospel for the new age...

Vinnie

I kind of like it when my nethers are violated. As long as the "great rectal probe is the size of a woman's finger, of course

That was probably too much information.....

Anyways, ufos suck. Why? I'll tell ya:

Given 1: The universal speed barrier = speed of light.
Given 2: Huge frikken distances in Space that cannot be traversed given the short age of the universe (15 byo). I mean, can a first generation star like our sun (which is a 3rd generation star) even support life?
Given 3: Improbilities of Life Forming and the fact that we may be alone.
Given 4: Improbabilites of advanced life surviving and evolving into a class II or III civilization
Given 5: the off chance that this did ever occur, the time needed for it to occur and for them to reach us.

Basically, all we have for ufos are advanced civilizations who can manipulate spacetime and reach us. This outlook is fraught with so many theoretical difficulties its just too hard for me to swallow UFOs. We might as well take the Christian approach and call them demonic activity!

So yeah, put this on a billboard:

I'm prejudiced because I believe
Asses don't talk and Ufos don't abduct people



Vinnie

Vinnie

Pointless???? Have you ever read it? Maybe you are erring to the opposite extreme of those whom you disagree with?

Would you call Thomas a full blown Gnostic text? At most it has "rudimentary gnosticism" in it which is well documented in the 1st century C.E.

At any rate, the Jesus Seminar does goes overboard some when they stop doing history and start preaching about new Jesuses.

Vinnie

Haran

Yep. Pointless. And if you can really pull a coherent theological message from this relatively incoherent and haphazard collection of sayings, you shall truly become a "Thomasine Panentheistic" Apologist in my eyes.

I thought you knew me better than that by now. I have it in at least four different translations and have read them all more than once...Layton's Gnostic Scriptures, Robinson's Nag Hammadi Library (w/ intro by your favorite scholar - Koester), Elliot's Apocryphal New Testament, and Schneemelcher's New Testament Apocrypha.

No. I think that would mostly likely be anachronistic. That's why I said early gnostic myths.

Finally something we can agree on. Someone should kick them in their Koester!

Vinnie

I know you read it but I'm still in shock that you called it pointless I've never heard anyone call it pointless. Who finds it pointless anyways? Who are you agreeing with?

Glad you admit Thomas is a raw list. I take it you see it as independent of the canonical Gospels then?

Re: its message: it depends. Thomas was written by a few hands and it certainly evolved and was added too.altered so the message of who? The final redactor? There are certain stains oftheology in Thomas that are pretty consistent. For example, the one I outlined above about Thomas going back to the beginning.

At any rate, I take it you don't believe there was a community behind the Gospel of Thomas? I found Patterson's reconstruction here interesting.

When do you date it? For what purpose was it made? It couldn't have been without purpose for whoever was using it

And yay, something we can agree on re: Jesus Seminar.

Vinnie

Haran

It is definitely a raw list. I do not, however, believe that it is independent of the Gospels (sans the extra "proto-gnostic" additions).

You might have meant "strains", but "certain stains of theology" would be right.

Personally, the examples sound more like eisegesis than exegesis.

Dating is a subject I'd rather not broach because there will never be agreement. Suffice it to say that I think GThom relies on what we know as the canonical gospels and probably followed them by decades.

It was surely compiled from preferred sayings found in the gospels and expanded with early gnostic-like teachings for a "proto-Gnostic" community of some sort.

I suppose if you want to get technical, people can find a purpose for just about anything. However, GThom doesn't seem to have a real coherent organization or even much of an over-arching theme.

Sauron

Nice try, Haran.

The problem with your approach is that it violates the first rule of debate: he who makes the affirmative claims, must prove them. In this case, the first claimant is the person stating that the bible is authentic, correct, authoritative, etc. The burden to prove authenticity, miracles, claims, reliability, is squarely on the back of the bible literalist. Not merely because they made their claims first, but because they are affirmative claims. Moreover, since the claims are extraordinary in nature, that means the quality of evidence has to likewise be extraordinary.

Holding/Turkel's aproach is a subtle attempt to shift the burden of proof from the claimant, onto the skeptical audience. By saying that critics must first prove their case (and their intellectual worth, educational background, etc.), before their arguments will be considered, all he has done is put a more elegant face on the old debating fallacy of "My arguments are true by default, and deserve credence. What I say is automatically true, unless you can prove me wrong." Moreover, by focusing on the background and education of the critic -- instead of the substance of the argument preseented -- Holding/Turkel's approach borders on argument from authority.

And if you're sympathetic to his position, then you're likewise complicit in those same cleverly disguised fallacies. I'm coming late to this thread, so I'm sure someone has already pointed that out. But just in case....

Doctor X

Vinnie:

To continue the analogy . . . how DARE you try to RESTRICT the UFOs to the "physical laws" of mere humans?!![!--Ed.] Note the clever use of ""!

For the UFOs have POWERS and KNOWLEDGE--capitals, of course, make it true--that FAR SURPASS what we understand.

So there! Nyaah!

Reads a bit like "goddidit." The final answer to any conflict in text--"Big Daddy/Junior can do ANYTHING--even if it is self-contradictory or "breaks the laws of physics, Captain!" Even if the thing seems unethical . . . ordering mass slaughters of children . . . forgetting to warm the rectal probes . . . WHO ARE WE to question the WISDOM of the blah . . . blah . . . blah.

Probably the best demonstration of logic came from a rant from Harlan Ellison that I wish I taped. It was on the SciFi channel . . . back when it had science fiction . . . sort of like when A&E had arts and entertainment. . . .

He calculated--based on UFO'r claims, the numbers of people who have been abducted--something like a few million. He then wondered about a race of beings that could "break the laws of physics" to travel the immense distances, spending whatever megatons of currency and energy, all to probe millions of human rectums! "I don't know about you, but one or two exams would exhaust the intellectual potential of the human rectum for me!"

Rectums? Recti?

Similar logical absurdity exists in both the OT and the NT.

As for the Jesus Seminar--"Never have so many been so proud to accomplish so little with so much." They are like psychology departments that rename themselves "behavioral science" and sociologists who call themselves "social scientists." Just pretending to be "scientists" does not make the process SCIENCE!!

They should know better . . . it did not work for Mary Baker Eddy either.

--J.D.

Secular Pinoy

Uhm, psychology has always been psychology. I think it was the social sciences that rechristened themselves as the behavioral sciences. At least that's what my behavioral science textbook says.

And I agree with Vinnie's skepticism of intelligent aliens visiting us and choosing to abduct those who have no credibility. You might like to read the book Rare Earth.

And the Jesus Seminar isn't all that useless. They did publish a funnily entertaining (though perhaps inadvertently) translation of the New Testament, which is curiously titled the Scholar's Version.