Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 17:31:20 +0000 From: Stevan Davies To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Original GThomas Bill Arnal wrote: > With all this conversation about Thomas you'd think that > there have not been any recent attempts to stratify the > document. There have, and they're fairly easily accessible. > Maybe folks should read them. Anyway . . . You'd mean that "Rhetoric of Marginality" article in Harvard Theological Review 88:4 1995 I suspect. By William E. Arnal. Just so happens I have an autographed copy right here. Business about 1,2,3,4,5,6, characteristics deleted because I am not smart enough to understand it. > One would have to determine whether influence in either > direction could be detected. If all this material was > originally circulating in the same group, it should be, I > think, somewhat homogeneous in form and themes. Overall > themes and interests should be distributed among them in a > roughly even fashion. This seems to characterize Thomas. My theory of origins supposes a similarly minded group (I'm beginning to hate the word "community") who can be expected A) to recall diverse but "somewhat homogeneous" stuff and B) to redact stuff orally toward what they want it to be. We tend, I think, to assume oral tradents are essentially random, but in a group we should think that oral tradents will be revised in certain directions. Thus, if Thomasine material shows some redactional tendencies, no textual redaction is therefore necessitated. > How is one to date Thomas anyway? I myself, for no especially > good reasons, like a date around 50-70 CE or so. This means > that if I think Thomas went through redactional stages, > those stages would have to be "fairly early", i.e., before > or up to about 50-70 CE. What else is one to say? Or am I > missing something here? Dunno. I agree with you on the date because the "list" form is presumptively early and Thomas is lacking LOTS of things one knows developed in later Christianity. This doesn't prove a later date, but it does mean to me that the later date advocates have the burden of proof. The old idiotic argument that Gnostics would leave Christ and Savior and Lord and Resurrection out of their texts has been amply disproven in the course of the recent Davies/Davila Jewish Gnosticism debate. > Let's first try to get away from the terminological dispute > here, which really is NOT the point. Let's just say Thomas > ain't Gnostic, nowhere and no how. This is going to cause problems vis a vis "Rhetoric of Marginality" > it is (or should be) impossible to stratify > Thomas on the basis of the assumptions either that a) > material shared with the synoptics = stratum 1; or b) > "synoptic-like" material, since it is allegedly older, must > = stratum 1. Another problem for "R of M" because, as far as I can tell, this is what you do, although using the term "wisdom" as a substitute for "synoptic-like." Or, if its not what you did, it's what you ended up with by going a different route. > > world bits and so forth. Any stratification theory has to explain > > what it is about these elements that testify to a common origin > No it doesn't. A stratification theory is a theory of > literary development, not a theory of why an author did what > he did. Maybe he was on drugs, and worried he was going to > be eaten by lions. Who knows? WHATEVER may link diverse > elements THEMATICALLY, all a stratification theory needs to > demonstrate is that they ARE linked, LITERARILY. I suppose so, in the purest sense. But surely in the real world we do presume that redactors do things for discoverable reasons. An insane redactor makes the argument for confirmable redaction deceptively easy because all of the wild inconsistencies in the redactional material can be accepted as OK procedure for a lunatic. Though, come to think of it, most lunatics are fanatically consistent about their certain bits of looniness, aren't they? Now to "Rhetoric of Marginality." There Bill argues that there is a sapiental stratum to be defined by sayings that are "wisdom" in both form and content. Turns out virtually of these are paralleled in the synoptics. Then Bill declares that "In contradistinction to the sapiential stratum, another body of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is characterized by a gnostic orientation, manifested most trenchantly in their invocation of gostic mythological motifs." Turns out none of these are paralleled in the synoptics. Perhaps we can save some time here by agreeing that this last-quoted sentence is false. But then the principal ideological orientation of the whole stratum disappears and we are left with what I keep calling "odd stuff." Bill thinks that "one of the overriding formal characteristics of this stratum is its deliberate obscurity" but obscurity is hardly a formal characteristic, meaning as it does "I don't understand it" and, in any event, "deliberate obscurity" characterizes the whole parable tradition which Bill puts in the other stratum. This sentence concludes, "and corollary use of extratextual points of reference (cf. 15, 84)." But, as no saying in Thomas makes an extratextual reference, including 15, 84, one is rather left with a blank here. Further, if "extratextual" means that we would probably understand what the saying meant if we had some context for it in some other text, there's a likelihood of synoptic bias... for one cannot help but read the deliberately obscure(?) synoptic style material in light of the contexts we're familiar with (e.g. 54, 55). Bill claims that "the identification of the gnostic-leaning stratum as a secondary redaction to the initial, wisdom-oriented body of material proceeds on three bases. First, in terms of the history of the tradition, this order makes the most sense in its progression from inversionary wisdom to Gnosticism." I think this is a misuse of the Trajectory theory for it takes a (somewhat dubious) history- of-ideas claim and applies it to confirm a history-of-a- particular-text theory. Need I explain why you can't do this? "Second, the interpretation of the document as a whole is controlled by the incipit and the first two sayings, directing the reader to a 'hermeneutic of penetration' for all of what follows. It is precisely through this device that the gnostic redaction is able to subsume and reinterpret the wisdom material in line with its own perspective." A. I still deny that "it" has a perspective. I do not think that 83,84 and 13,108, and 27,28 can be said to constitute "a perspective." THE SIMILARITY THAT THIS MATERIAL HAS IS ITS ODDNESS TO US! Because we think "this is wierd stuff, I wonder what it's about" we put these things together. But such material does not allow one to interpret the wisdom material in accordance with it because there is no "it" there. The abovementioned have no overarching ideological set of ideas. If those six do have some clear principle underlying them, do tell me what it is. If it is just "there are secret things that can be revealed" that characterizes your wisdom material (3, 5, 6)!! B. Since we agree on the date of Thomas, surely we can agree that the incipit is secondary. Or, of all first century texts, was Thomas the originator of the apostolically authored gospel idea? That would be another bombshell. "Third, and finally, although the themes which characterize each stratum appear to be distinct from each other, there are secondary glosses to the wisdom material from the gnostic perspective." There's a secondary gloss to the gnostic material in 111 which may be the only actual technical "gloss" in the whole text. The "make the two one" bits are integrated into the sayings, they are sayings-variants and not "glosses." I see no reason why such glosses(?), simple things that they are, such as "and become a single one" could not have been introduced within the oral tradition of a particular group. The one gnostic (sigh) saying that has some hint of an ideological basis for the single one motif is 22, which seems to have circulated among synoptic style material quite happily by itself. And, frankly, I don't even know of an actual gnostic text that talks about becoming "monachos" but I suppose there's one out there somewhere. Is there? What the glosses have to do, to allow a thesis such as yours, is to cohere with the gnostic redactional material... but they don't apart from 22. Not that I know of. "Rhetoric of Marginality" divides Thomas into two categories of sayings based on form and content considerations. OK you can do that. But it can be done other ways if you try, you can do it by references to the Kingdom and dialogues and sayings having something to do with world and wealth. Put them in one list. Then put everything else in the other list. Where would that get you? Nowhere, I'd say. And I don't see where it gets you to put things into a "wisdom" list and everything else in the other list. I remind you that the categorization "wisdom" is a twentieth century invention. And the categorization "gnostic" is also twentieth century meaning, as I see it, odd-stuff-not-in-the-Bible. I don't see any reason to think that "wisdom" material necessarily circulated orally independently of "gnostic" material everywhere. But if they could circulate together, then Thomas isn't stratified. If one concedes the stratification case, one is left with the fact that one group thought that these types of material should be transmitted together, which in turn supports the idea, against the stratification case, that they could have done so orally. So maybe there's a lot to this I'm not getting, but so far I've not found much that convinces me that Thomas is a literarily stratified text. Steve