premjan

every religion inevitably generates both gnostic and faith branches. the faith branch never gets along with the gnostic branch because the gnostics like to lord over the mere believers in their knowledge. hence your attempt to indicate that christianity was unique, and that jesus was a unique savant whose knowledge included no gnostic element, and none of whose disciples possessed gnostic knowledge, flies in the face of the manifest pattern of world religions. however, if it feeds your sense of uniqueness to believe that he was the son of God, then so be it.

Vorkosigan

If we don't have that, you're stuck as much as I am. But essentially, you're saying that.....

• Mary said to Jesus: Whom are thy disciples like? He said They are like little children dwelling in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say: Yield up to us our field. They are naked before them, to yield it up to them and to give them back their field. Therefore I say: If the master of the house knows that the thief is coming, he will keep watch before he comes, and will not let him dig into his house of his kingdom to carry off his vessels. You, then, be watchful over against the world. Gird up your loins with great strength, that the brigands may not find a way to come at you, since the advantage for which you look they will find. May there be among you a man of understanding! When the fruit was ripe, he came quickly, his sickle in his hand, and reaped it. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

...mixes up sayings from Mark and John. Essentially, that John plucked out one saying, but rejected the others, while Mark plucked out all but that one saying which coincidently was used by John. That's asking a lot of coincidence.

No, I don't know exactly how Thomas depends on Mark and the other gospels.

I have no idea, but it is most likely that he had something written in front of him.

There is a partial list in Holding, and in the appendices of Birth of Christianity, which you have. Unfortunately Davies' site is down; it has a complete list.

No, because you have not established that this is based on some oral tradition of sayings going back to the hoary antiquity prior to the canonicals.

Yes, that saying could well be an insertion. But "Mark may have added it there because it fit" is totally ad hoc. We know where the saying from Joel has a context that reflects a specific author's style: Mark. We know where it doesn't: Thomas. The conclusion is simple. Similarly, Mark 12:1-12 is reflected in GThom 65-66. Again in Mark those sayings have a certain context that is very rich, including Elijah-Elisha parallels, and usefulness in Mark's later program of presenting the scribes, priests, and pharisees as the Priests of Ba'al. Again in Thomas the sequence has no context -- but the order is preserved! Again the "lamp" metaphor in Thomas is simply a metaphor about preaching, but Mark has an additional pointer to Jesus' messianic status as the lamp of the house of David promised to Israel. That context is gone from Thomas too.

Why not? We know that the other Gospelers made similar moves. Luke edited and changed many things in Mark and Matthew. All four cited from the Old Testament but in many cases changed the context completely. Context-elimination and re-formation was a common practice in NT writing.

Your position requires that MMLJ all used different parts of Thomas. That John simply rejected large portions, which coincidentally, the Synoptics all liked. Hoding turns up several John parallels that Patterson did not think were parallels, but sure look like it to me.

Redaction-criticism has an underlying assumption that the shorter text must be the earlier. That is not a valid assumption.

Nor did I say it was. What I said was that it had three sets of material, one of which is gnostic flavored, one of which is Cynic-flavored, and one of which is OT flavored. For some reason the canonicals picked up on the second and third, but ignored the first. Why?

It's hard to tell, since the social setting didn't really change fundamentally over the 1st and 2nd century. Peasant farming stayed peasant farming, and Cynics stayed Cynics.

..so why not label the sayings "Secret" as thomas does? Yet Mark mocks his own secrecy, one reason scholars like Davies and Weeden thought he was doing parody. Mark's secrecy motif could also be drawn from Dan 12 (Helms)

• "There in Daniel, Mark found a "secret" that was "sealed until the time of the end" (Dan 12:4). "None...shall understand" that secret; "only the wise leaders shall understand" (Dan 12:10). (1997, p17)

..which would be perfectly consistent with his normal practice of taking out of the OT.

Yes, but if you want to claim that Mark used Thomas or knew this material, you gotta explain why he ignored the bulk of it and the stuff he ignored was picked up by John, who didn't pick up any stuff that Mark did. Strange, eh? It is easy to explain why Mark didn't use the Q material in Mt and Lk; he didn't know it (there is no Q and no Q community). The Mark-Q overlaps that Tuckett thinks are so devastating contain style markers of Mark...that's a separate discussion.

I am not interested in that portion of Meier's argument, but in the portion I cited to show the problem of the mixed material in GThom and how the gospelers dealt with it.

No, it runs.

Thomas shares his material with these sources. Yet the sources that supposedly depend on Thomas strangely all agree on ignoring certain parts of it. Apparently four different authors agree that Logia 98:

(98) Jesus said: The kingdom of the Father is like a man who wanted to kill a great man. He drew the sword in his house and drove it into the wall, that he might know that his hand would be strong. Then he slew the great man.

...was completely unsuitable. Other examples abound. The authors of the gospels ignore the same stuff? One would expect that there would be considerable overlap and considerable diversity if Thomas was accessible to all three Synoptics and all four gospelers. But instead the use of Thomas is remarkably uniform: certain statements, like logia 74:

He said: Lord, there are many about the well, but no one in the well.

...are ignored by everyone. Apparently this innocent logia was so offensive nobody wanted it. Apparently 4 different gospelers could find nothing it to their respective individual tastes.

And how could Mark have missed 102:

(102) And Jesus said: Woe to them, the Pharisees! For they are like a dog sleeping in the manger of the cattle; for he neither eats, nor does he let the cattle eat.

Yowza! It is hard to imagine a better fit with his anti-Pharisee program than that one. It is easy to understand if GThom postdates Mark, harder to understand if Mark knew GThom. And what are the Pharisees doing in Thom anyway, since their influence postdates 70 AD?

I agree. The compiler of GThom often eliminated the Gospel redaction. In Logia 71 Jesus is held to say:

(71) Jesus said: I will des[troy this] house, and none shall able to build it [again].

As Holding points out, Patterson's argument on this is absolutely ludicrous.

Even Patterson has to admit that Thomas has been edited in light of the gospels. Once you admit that, all the bets are off.

I agree completely!

[quote]There is nothing strange here. Ultimately, how many sources do you think underlie the Gospel of Mark? Parable lists, miracle lists, passion, an earlier proto gospel, apocalyptic discourse, sayings collection and oral tradition? Why is it so hard to fathom when we treat GThomas in a similar fashion?

OT, Jewish apocrypha, jewish legends and traditions, common sayings and proverbs, cynic tradition. No passion, Mark created that off the OT. No miracle lists -- they are all apparently from the OT. No proto gospel. Mk 13 is not an apocalypse, as the SBL committee decided a while back. In any case Mk 13 is not only a riff on the OT, but Mark has even managed to work in an Elijah-Elisha parallel.

We are both treating Thomas the same way, as a compilation of diverse sources. The difference is in what the sources are.

Just poking around for a second:

• John 10:33- in Dialogue of Justin
  And Trypho answered, "We shall remember this your exposition, if you strengthen [your solution of] this difficulty by other arguments: but now resume the discourse, and show us that the Spirit of prophecy admits another God besides the Maker of all things, taking care not to speak of the sun and moon, which, it is written,[172]

The point is that sayings shorn of context are not at all abnormal in Christian composition. The gospelers did it to the OT; now GThom did it to the gospelers.

No, because there are ways, and one is to look at the usage patterns. It is difficult to explain why all 4 gospelers ignored the same sayings.

But your logic is circular. According to my view and holdings, there were sayings gospels alive in the second century. Both sides appear to be begging the question on this point.

I don't agree with Holding that "memory" is at work here. I totally agree that the terms "oral tradition" and "memory" can explain anything. That is why Patterson's claims on the oral tradition are nonsense.

We date the gospels differently. I put them in the period of about 115-145, with Thomas shortly after.

It isn't a timestamp but an indicator of dependence. In order for a secret tradition to arise there must also be, side by side, a recognized public tradition. But there was no public tradition until the gospels appeared; Paul does not know any "sayings" of the lord.

A red herring. They do not have to contain ALL public teachings in order to designate the existence of A public teachings tradition. Which Paul does not.

Assumes facts not in evidence. There is no evidence of any tradition of Jesus sayings in circulation except for those demonstratably Cynic-oriented and those from popular culture and tradition. Paul knows of no sayings tradition. Papias is evidence only for the second century, and his "living voice" may well be a reference to the indwelling of the spirit rather than the oral tradition (there is also the possibility that Eusebius simply invented him).

I don't understand your point. Surely if Thomas' compiler is adding sayings that the gospels don't have, he is buttressing his thesis that these were secret ones that no one knew!

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I have no idea how any of this relates to my question and none of it seems to relate to any position I have ever held or even defended as a "devil's advocate". :huh:

andrewcriddle

We have pre-Eusebian evidence of the existence and nature of Papias's work see Irenaeus Against Heresies Book V chapter 33

We also have several post-Eusebian writers who seem to have independent knowledge of Papias's work.

Andrew Criddle

Vinnie

and papias wrote his works ca 100 c.e. not 135 as if often claimed.

I'll respond to your post tomorrow Vork, but you seem to mistakenly assume I am asaying Luke and John and co. were dependent upon Thomas. I did not argue any such thing. Merely that the instance you brough up does not show Thomas' dependence on Mark. For me to argue Thomas is completely independent I have every burden as do you in showing it is.

""""""How do you differentiate between ignorance of parables or apocalyptic sayings and a deliberate avoidance of them?""""""""

First,I am not 100% sure if you really can.

Second, I'd venture a guess an say on a thorough case by case analysis. We have to com up with a few examples and compare with all the rest I guess and see if the theory consistently explains the final result found in Thomas. Are there certain omissions he hsouldn't have made?

I would say the lack of order coupled with a lack of any Markan, Johannine, Matthean or Lukan redactional material is good evidence of independence. Some fatigue or clear creation of Mt Lk, Mk should have slipped in whether Thomas was directly using them or indirectly remembering them. This has to be more than can be ascribed to scribal tendencies as well (see Davies!)

I find the lack of significant redactional material persuasive. Others see some there. That is where the entire argument rests, not on finding overlap and parallel material which is of no value.

Vinnie

Rick Sumner

[Somewhat Tangental]
Given that scholarship at large (most certainly including Thomasine scholarship), doesn't pay much attention to the Jesus myth (not saying it's right, just saying it's how it is), your position here is nonsensical.

Virtually nobody is arguing the historicity of Jesus on the academic front. You're suggesting that a position is being advocated in response to a question that is scarcely being asked, much less being adressed.
[/Somewhat Tangental]

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Amaleq13

I can't think of a good reason for the author(s)/compiler(s) to intentionally avoid parables but I had Crossan in mind with regard to apocalypticism. If I recall correctly, he considers GTh and Q to represent diverging movements from a shared collection of sayings. The former moved in a gnostic direction (and away from apocalypticism?) while the latter became more apocalyptic. Within that context, an absence of apocalyptic pronouncements would be expected and not informative.

The absence of parables seems to me to be more consistent with early rather than late although "partially early" still seems reasonable (ie later additions did not include parables because the original was purely a sayings collection). I tend to think of GTh as late in its current form but likely containing an original core of sayings from the 1st century.

Chris Weimer

I don't see the gospels as being apocalyptic, maybe Matthew, certainly John, but John didn't come from Q.

Vorkosigan

I beg your pardon.

It's whether there is a lack that's under discussion.

Thank you.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Given that my point had nothing to with the Jesus Myth either, your position here is nonsensical. You seem to have a thing for raising the Jesus Myth at the oddest moments. Were it not for you, it would hardly be mentioned around here.

Vorkosigan