Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 22:04:32 -0500 (EST) From: William E. Arnal To: Stevan Davies Cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Original GThomas On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Stevan Davies wrote: [much eirenic stuff deleted] > Ouch. A seemingly irrefutable line of argument for sure > for, as you know, I've long admired Davies' work myself. Yes, this was one argument from authority that I thought might be convincing. > Since the beginning I've been bothered by 83/84 because they > cohere with nothing at all. Maybe best to do a Yuri and just declare > them interpolations and so be done with them. I'm not sure whether they cohere or not. They don't make any sense to me at all (yes! I've finally brought my text of Thomas home with me), but that doesn't mean they didn't make sense to the author of Thomas. As you yourself have pointed out, "I don't understand it" is not the same thing as "it doesn't make sense." Stylistically, though, one can associate these sayings with the redaction of Thomas, regardless of what they actually mean. They are mythological (specific attributes of the Father, as well non-visible or metaphysical characteristics of human beings are described); they use light imagery; and they use repetition of terms within a given saying. > Foo. This is "equivocation". Synoptic-like means synoptic stuff and > others of very similar ilk (97,98) OR means reflect on identity etc. > What's synoptic like in one definition isn't so in the other. But that's EXACTLY my point. The accusation goes, "you've excluded everything from stratum one that isn't familiar." To which I respond, "the stuff in stratum two is also familiar, albeit in a different way." There may be a predisposition to include Q1-like stuff in an early layer of Thomas, but that doesn't mean that the secondary stuff in Thomas isn't equally, if in a different way, LIKE material found in the synoptics. > A bit of Stratum1 interacts with Stratum2, but not vice versa. > Right? I'm not clear on what does/doesn't interact with what in your > theory. No, glosses with the characteristics of stratum two are sometimes used to (re)interpret material which, also in secondary glosses but not FINAL glosses, reinterprets the material from stratum one. In other words, stratum 2 COMMENTS ON stratum one, but not vice-versa. > How do you defend a single redactional Stratum2 in the face of it? > The coherence of Stratum2 stuff? Much as I hate to criticize Davies, > he does of necessity ignore such things as 83/84, 13/108, 61 that > don't seem to have anything to do with his thesis and so he's not > claiming that everything coheres with it, only some stuff. The question here is whether one can come up with a reasonable list of characteristics that unite this material. I tried to do so above with 83 and 84, in spite of having no clue what they are about, just on the basis of stylistic or formal features. Same with #13 and 108: drinking imagery for learning, becoming LIKE Jesus, interest in hidden things for #108; same for #13, and in addition: obscure reference to unexplained specific thing ("three things") and emphasis on Thomas. > Or, as you might prefer it, the literary stratification was brought > about by the fact that the odd stuff creates a modality of reading > the text that controls the interpretation of the wisdom stuff. Yeah, > that's probably it. You read the thing? The meat is in the > introduction... most of the book is a set of Thomasine sermons on > Thomasine passages. But I digress.... I haven't read it. Alas, one more thing to do. > Do you think incipit/1 was added when the odd stuff was added? > If so this would account for deliberate obscurity business, if any, > and account for the diversity in the stuff, and even "let's put in > 83/84 because nobody's gonna figure THEM out" as a motivation. Actually, yes I do. This creates problems for dating, as you've pointed out. The question is, can the tradition-historical considerations that lead us to associate claims to apostolic authority with later writings OUTWEIGH the various tradition-historical factors that suggest an earlier date for Thomas (no circle of 12, use of sayings genre, etc.)? > You don't know about the five trees in paradise, but you > do know about the 24 prophets, you don't know about "mother" > but you do know about "father." Obscurity is coordinated with > prior knowledge. Obscurity also can come from taking something > mundane (lion) and assuming it means something spooky. Lions eat > people... not often in Wilkes-Barre, but pretty often in Kruger Park South > Africa. Probably eat a person or two in NYC every so often. Why > isn't this a wisdom saying? Observation of nature coupled with > beatitude form. Yes, there are lions in the sewers; people bring them home when they're little cause they're cute, but when they get bigger, they flush them down the toilet. It's awful. Anyway, I don't think I can buy this. The references to blessing and defilement in association with eating make the point rather more obscure than this reasoning suggests. How does this bless the lion? By alleviating his hunger? No, the issue is his consumption of something HUMAN. Anyway, don't you think it's a rather banal wisdom saying to point out that people who get eaten by lions are unfortunate? > 1. Are these 2 strata or just differences in type within one stratum? Here we're left guessing. Because of the structure of Thomas, which is less organized than that of Q, we can't see detailed micro-insertions into already-organized extended units of argumentation. Thus the strength available to Klop's claim that Q's underwent a written series of recesions is just impossible in the case of Thomas. One can make arguments one way or the other, but they won't have the same kind of force. What inclines me to the view that we've got a WRITTEN series of layers here is that a) the stuff I've identified as layer one is not heavily redacted from the perspective of layer two; BUT b) the materials which comprise layer two were obviously NOT all uniform COMPOSITIONS of the redactor. In other words, by teh oral aggregation model, we've got ONE kind of "oral tradition" which the redactor felt perfectly free to shape to his own interests, and another which the redactor tended to respecty, glossing here or there but not broadly reshaping. This gets us into the same problem as the Goulder hypothesis (though not as sharply defined): why is it that the redactor treated one sort of material differently than another? The easiest explanation is that the earlier stuff was presented to him already in written form, rather than being gradually reworked from his group's perspective via their oral memory. Again, I know perfectly well that this argument is not nearly so strong as the one that can be made for Q. So be it. It is also possible to explain this phenomenon, for instance, by claiming that the stuff I've identified as "stratum 1" was oral tradition that did NOT circulate within the Thomas group -- the text was thus written shortly after the author's exposure to this stuff. This is a reasonable argument, I think, though I find it intrinsically less plausible than the model of written redaction. But then, I'm pretty suspicious of genuine "oral tradition"'s role in early Christianity. > 3. Can the theory of multiple strata be argued against so that bits were > not just added here and there over time? --- Perhaps best by pointing > to the added-later 114 which does A) make a coherent point all by > itself which other odd stuff rarely does B) reflects a more or less datable > Christian epoch (post-150, time of Paul and Thecla) C) contradicts other > motifs (22) and D) brings in utterly novel notions. If other sayings in > Stratum2? don't do these things, then they are presumptively part of the > original. How's that? Again, the presence of the same clusters of ideas or stylistic features across a whole body of sayings would miliate in favour of a single, rather than piecemeal, redaction. I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of #114, by the way. It strikes me as an androcentric restatement of #22, not at all contradictory. As many feminists have pointed out, the image of the androgyne is normally, once you scrape the surface, male. Thomas is just taking femininity as an image of materiality, something we also see, I think, in sayings ## 15 and 79. In #22, he uses the dichotmoy male vs. female to militate against earthly differentiation -- being sexed is part of the fall. But since normally in androcentric writings (and other expressions), male is HUMAN and the only GENDER is female, I think that being FEMALE is also quite consistently part of the fall. The datability of these themes is also suspect: Thekla may be datable to about 150, but the Pastorals are earlier, and the deutero-Paulines earlier still. There is a debate within Christianity even in the first century about the role of women; Thomas #114 just takes up this debate. None of which is to say that piecemeal additions are impossible; indeed, they are very likely -- just look at the rearrangment of the text in the POxy vs. the Coptic. And, as you point out in GTCW, the most likely place to ADD a saying to a sayings collection is of course right at the end. I'm sure that there are a number of sayings that were tacked on later, piecemeal, on the basis of "hey, that sounds like something Thomas would have," and some of the sayings I was uncomfortable assigning to a particular stratum may fall into this category. So may some others. But on teh whole I see too much formal, stylistic, vocabularic, and thematic consistency in each SET of sayings to think that the whole thing grew piecemeal. Bill ________________________________________ William E. Arnal 19 University Place, #503 Religious Studies/Classics New York, NY 10003 New York University (212) 998-8990 (o) william.arnal@nyu.edu (212) 995-5036 (h)