Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 12:45:29 -0000 From: Julio Anjos To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Conjecture on the origin of GTh, is this original or has allready been disproved? I have no academic degree nor any kind of curriculum in Classical or Religious studies, I'm just a computer technician with a side interest in the conjecture that the historical Jesus can somewhere/somewhen/somehow be found. In this pursuit I've read a few things and discovered many theories that were completely unknown to me in the past twelve months. My main sources have been the Church Fathers as found in various places on the Internet, Gospel of Thomas in several translations on the Internet and in books, the Complete Gospels (Ed. R.J. Miller) and a side influence of the past twenty years reading science fiction. This time period is, of course, too small to be able to apprehend two centuries of textual and formal criticism. Maybe I do not have really the necessary expertise to have valid original ideas, but on the other hand maybe by ignoring too many existing theories I can have original ideas more easily than others. However I allways remember that the transistor was invented by a man who didn't read a crucial work where it was matemathically proved that something that small couldn't be made to do that work! The fact is that I do not have the necessary Akademia nor Curricula to explore this idea on my own ( the fact that I do not know how to express this concepts on Greek language is proof of that ), to explore this any further and arrive at a point where I sure enough of it to try publish it who would publish the private ideas of an amateur?). Maybe it is not a valid one, but I do not have the information that would arrive from years of studying the subject, so I'd like to state a conjecture for the explanation of the existence of GTh, as IT STANDS, and let myself be criticized by those who know more about this than I do. J.P.Meier "Marginal Jew" Section 3 of Chap 5 asks on the subject of an explanation for the origin of GTh : "Is it probable that a real and primitive source of Jesus sayings, where GTh inspired, had material from so many different branches of first century Christianity like Q, Mspecial, LSpecial, Matthew redactions, Lukan redactions, triple tradition and GJo symbols ? What's the source, geographical origin and composition of such an incredibly vast and so ancient tradition ? Who where their carriers? Is it conceivable that such a primitive Christian source contained all of this?" ( sorry for the translation but the version I have is in may native tongue which is portuguese) A note on the side margin, by myself, dated two months ago says: "Yes if one can contemplate the possibility of a direct witness". I've for long nourished the idea that GTh is a notebook, a citation collection with some (unknown to us) theological point in mind, but of what? My answer to this, now, is definitively : yes, yes, yes, yes, but I do not know enough to prove it! I feel like Fermat, but he was sure he knew the proof of its theorem, I'm not even sure. This coalesced in my mind while trying to understand the Antioch incident between Paul and the Judeo-Christians and the Jerusalem meeting that followed where James ended up supporting Paul's position against circumcision of pagan converts. It has been pointed several times that it is Paul who, by rejecting the Mosaic Law, creates Christianity, and if there was a moment in time where we can pinpoint this event this meeting is it. The quantum jump I've made is: James, John and Peter ( to cite those that are quoted on the relevant passages of Acts and Galatians) would not have gone against their Lord's will on the matter of circumcision. Either Jesus was completely silent on the matter, or he said something on the subject so that the in-circumcision was admissible to the Jerusalem church. The only place in ( I believe) all the canonical, apocryphal and even the artificial gospels like Q where such a saying is stated is in Thomas 53. My side note on this: Thomas 53 revels an beautifull and problematic insight on the real world as we came to understand it in this age of reason and science, that would be completelly out of focus in the 1st century. Now! Which Gospel could be a complete single source for most of GTh? Which gospel ... *Could be misunderstood by Mathew and Luke *Could have the sources of the Mathew redactions at one point and the sources of the Luke redactions at another? ( Yes, yes, I know that it would be Q, but that is not enough to explain all the facts of GTh). *Would find survival of copies and making of new copies very difficult on the Pauline dominated Christianity. *Would be expendable in the second ( or was it third ) century so that its copies would be the be presented to the Roman soldiers when they came to confiscate sacred books without many regrets. Would even be eagerly surrendered by bishops as well as by rabbis? *Would have such a reverential allusion to John the Baptist (logion 46)? *Might have been used by Mathew and by Luke on different translations, or which Matthew and Like are different translations ( more ADAPTATIONS) of? *Would be of the knowledge of Paul ( Logion 17) before 70ad.? *Might very well have a symbolic system similar to GJo? *Has quotations of the church fathers that coincide with GTh, but not attesting to GTh as its origin? *Would be of knowledge and have authority with James ( not the gospel itself but its teachings)? *The Greek first hand translations, would preserve more efficiently, the Aramaic flavor of Jesus words? *Have the remains of three copies ( one of them an expensive production) in the garbage dump of Oxy, demonstrating that it was somewhat important but not as important as the canonic Gospels? * And for the piece de resistance, the true signature of its origin, the real and patent indication of the SOURCE OF THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS: WHICH GOSPEL would HAVE IN IT TEXT the contents of Logion 12 (an historical fact which became a fact as attested by Acts and Galatians)? And by that same reason would make it unusable in the Pauline circles as it stood. And that conjectural source of Logion 12 is attested by the Patristic Literature, and they give it a name! So: Non-withstanding *More than probable residual manipulations on the Gnostic point of view, but even then the same can be said from GJo. *Patent loss of information in the translation from Greek to the Nag Hamaddi Coptic. *And other problems I'm not aware of and that this forum participants will no doubt point to me. My proposition: GOSPEL OF THOMAS IS A CITATION BOOK OF GOSPEL OF THE HEBREWS|NAZOREANS ( I think they are the same). GTh might be, in fact, a very high percentage of it. Julio Anjos Lisbon, Portugal jda@lusodoc.pt Personnal Home Page: http://193.126.16.162