Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 20:17:45 +0000 From: Stevan Davies To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Original GThomas Bill wrote: > 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. Yeah. I guess so. This extends the catchword idea internally, people recalling things that are brought to mind by other people recalling things but not immediately... so "light" shows up a lot. > > 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. This one belongs in Stratum2 of Thomas. Deliberately obscure. Needs the hermeneutic secret to be puzzled out, one that only you (and maybe Valentasis) possess. Could you try again? > > 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. You are looking at things differently than I do. I look for "what does this mean" and you look for "what words are here." Maybe I should try that more. Leads to different sorts of conclusions, and not necessarily wrong ones. > > Why > > isn't 7 a wisdom saying? Observation of nature coupled with > > beatitude form. > 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. Blessed are the hungry isn't less obscure. The first clause isn't a bit obscure, fits right in with the great chain of being idea. > How does this bless the lion? By alleviating his hunger? So he turns into a human. Good. He's better off being a human than a dumb animal. Or so we are led to believe. > No, the issue is his consumption of something HUMAN. So the human becomes lion and goes down the scale. Bad. You have to rewrite the thing to hope to make any sense of it. The last clause must be "and the man will become lion." If you leave it as it is it's gibberish and the heck with it. Opening of saying 8 also has a scribal error. Scribe was tired. Or, more likely, being tempted by a wily succubus and trying to ignore her charms by frenziedly writing. > Anyway, > don't you think it's a rather banal wisdom saying to point > out that people who get eaten by lions are unfortunate? Wisdom sayings are banal. That's what they do. That's their essence. "A city on a hill cannot be hidden." Response isn't "Wow! Who knew that!?" Or the blind leading the blind or you don't hide a lamp under a bushel or the rest. So banal as to be literally meaningless outside of a context. > By the 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 > respect, glossing here or there but not broadly reshaping. Wow. Wait a minute. Hold on here. YOU DO NOT KNOW what possible forms the nonsynoptic material has outside of Thomas. You do know forms for the synoptic material. That's how you can spot a "redaction" in the one sort and why you CANNOT say that the other isn't redacted. If you didn't have the synoptic versions, how would you have spotted redaction in the synoptic paralleled materials? > 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? See above. You wanna show that 11,21, 28, 61, 62, are identical to their originals and thus not redacted? I'll bet 18's redacted with the "not taste death" conclusion, also 85 with same. "Consistent redactional tendency...". 111 is redacted -- glossed. 28 has what appears to be a redactional conclusion. Etc. > 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 Only in 114. In 22 "the male will not be male nor the female female." Now you can schlep in all the feminists you want and put them in a great big barrel and have them attest to their vision of the image of the androgyne, but 22 still won't say what you'd like it to. > 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. Right for 22... not relevant to your point though. #15 doesnt' help either, I don't think. I can imagine a feminist critique of it, but as it stands it seems to refer to God's Image. (could be Adam, but 85 speaks against that). #79 (good support for Crossan's views) has "blessed is the womb... and the breasts..." etc. Not anti-woman but anti-reproduction. Pro woman, if anything. > 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. I don't see why you can't think that. Lots of people seem to. Good solid evidence for it, some will say... but Thomas doesn't (cf. 22, 79!) except in 114. > 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. Thekla turns into a "man." That's the point of my reference. Don't know about girls becoming guys in the pseudoPaul scriptures... see little evidence of that kind of intentionality among Evangelical Christians today, only in the Liberal churches and they are not as scripturally based as they should be. So I doubt that girls should become guys in canonical pseudoPaul. > But on the whole I > see too much formal, stylistic, vocabularic, and thematic > consistency in each SET of sayings to think that the whole > thing grew piecemeal. Also NO demonstrably Christian or demonstrably Gnostic stuff anywhere. At least 114 has a theme of which we can say "yeah, this fits tightly with this other later stuff." If later folks were tossing things in they should be clearly identifiable as such, otherwise what would be the point? As we see in NHC materials (pace Jim) when Christians interpolate stuff into non-Christian texts they are Christian! And not just Thomas' "what the hell was that?" material. Steve