Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 17:20:50 -0400
From: Kevin Johnson <kjohnson@truesoft.com>
To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Original GThomas

At 11:21 AM 4/5/98 -0400, Bill Arnal wrote:
>
>On Sat, 4 Apr 1998, Kevin Johnson wrote:
>
>> I'm trying not to shout here, but I would just like 
>> to underscore one point: Catchword association is a sign 
>> of oral tradition, not written redaction!

> This is simply not true. The movement from oral
> transmission to writing is not as clear-cut as this. 

I merely argue that this principle is generally true, not that you cannot
imagine an exception.

> The
> text of Thomas seems to be a list of orally-transmitted
> materials. They are not in the sequence in which they occur
> in Thomas in the oral tradition! (That is, we would not
> expect one of Thomas' contemporaries to recite them in the
> same order in which they were written down.) 

Are they currently "in the sequence in which they occur in Thomas in the
oral tradition?"  My point earlier was that the large number of the
connections between sayings suggests that, yes, a substantial amount of it
may actually be in the sequence in which it circulated orally at some
point. But just as we cannot say definitely that the order is the same, we
cannot say definitely that the order is different.

> So, a bunch of
> oral traditions are written down in a list, from a
> disticntive redactional perspective (i.e., with consistent
> principles of selection and emendation); then another scribe
> gets this list, has his own oral traditions and
> perspectives, and adds them to the list. 

What you describe is possible, but please tell me why recent critics always
seem to imagine redaction of GThomas by the process of addition?  It seems
to me equally likely that a redactor could have created our present version
of GThomas by removing sayings. It was against this hypothetical situation
that Grenfell and Hunt were forced to defend the P. Oxy. fragments. That
is, early critics suggested that the sayings Grenfell and Hunt had found
might represent extracts from a longer gospel (such as a Gospel of the
Hebrews).  And when we compare the P. Oxy. fragments with Coptic GThomas,
we see that sayings #6 and #36 have apparently been truncated (assuming the
direction from P.Oxy. fragments to Coptic GThomas).

> Where is he going
> to locate this new material in text? Well, inter alia, in
> the places suggested to him by catchword connections of his
> oral traditions to sayings already in the text.

I'm not so sure I buy this last part.  You've gotten around the
clever-gnostic-redactor-who-understands-the-catchword-connections-and-uses-t
hem-to-hide-his-subtly-gnostic-sayings scenario (which is problematic) by
having multiple instances of oral tradition to written text combined in our
present GThomas.  The difficulty here is that the text is rough (and
therefore not likely to have received extensive literary editing) and that
it shows a certain consistency in both the themes it contains and the
manner in which it presents them (and therefore may be the product of a
single author or group). But I will be the first to admit that neither of
these arguments is fatal to your position here.  

- Kevin
(kjohnson@truesoft.com)