Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 01:21:36 -0400 From: Mahlon H. Smith To: Peter Kirby Cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Thomas an "offshoot" of Q? Peter Kirby wrote: > > Earl Doherty claims that the Gospel of Thomas is an "offshoot" of an early > stage of Q. He says further that Thomas originally had no historical > Jesus, and that a redactor simply went through and added "Jesus said" to > the sayings. I am not aware of any arguments offered for these beliefs. > > Indeed, I know of no other scholar who holds this position, so it is a bit > difficult for me to refute. What follows are only my musings concerning > Earl's hypothesis on Thomas. > > Any good hypothesis must be falsifiable. There must be a way to either > confirm or disconfirm a scientific suggestion. In order to test it, we > need some predictions based on the hypothesis. > > What follows are some of the things that I came up with (in chemistry > class), which may confirm Earl's theory if they turn out to be true. > > > Peter: Pretty good set of hypotheses. Here's a synopsis of my read of the evidence: >1. (*Every Q//Thomas parallel is in Q1*) & >2. (*Every Q1 verse is in Q//Thomas*) are really tautologous since one can simply define Q1 as Q sayings with Thomas parallels. I.e., even if the test is positive it proves nothing unless one has first established Q1 by independent criteria ala Kloppenborg or Mack. >3. (*There is a relationship between the order of sayings in Thomas and Q1*). Textual evidence proves FALSE. Some sayings which are conjoined in Q are scattered in Thomas. Some sayings which are separate in Q are fused in Thomas. >4. (* The later Thomasine redactions have a consistent theme*). Sometimes true. Thomas likes statements about unity that can be interpreted as typically Thomasine redaction. >5. (*The later Thomasine redacters insert second century Gnosticism*). Depends on how one defines "2nd c. gnosticism." Thomas is strikingly devoid of Apocryphon of John stuff but some sayings are amenable to a gnosticism like that of the Dialogue of the Savior or Valentinus' Gospel of Truth. These are quite distinguishable from the Q parallels however. 6. (*There is no sign of oral tradition behind the Thomasine redactions*). Textual evidence proves FALSE. Thomas is much more oral than Q. Even Q1 has marks of literary composition (e.g., the sermon & couplets with similar themes) that are not preserved in Thomas. Q has no doublets (i.e., duplicated or echoed sayings) while Thomas has several. >7. (*The Q//Thomas sayings have no reference to the speaker*). & >8. (*Generally, the sayings in Thomas have no reference to the speaker*). ?? The only reason Q sayings do not refer to the speaker is that Q is reconstructed by extraction from Matthew/Luke where references to the speaker are usually regarded as belonging to the redactional narrative frame. But Q1 must at least have had an incipit like GThom that credited the contents (rightly or wrongly) to Jesus & Q2 must have had some mechanism for distinguishing the oracles of JB from sayings of Jesus or else Matthew & Luke would not have both credited the opening Q sayings to JB. There also may have been Thomas-like "Jesus said" or "And he said" prefaces to a number of Q1 sayings that both Matthew & Luke dropped in favor of more refined prefaces. In any case the ascription to a speaker is secondary in any sayings collection (i.e., it is the product of a transmitter rather than the original speaker). So, its presence or absence does not prove very much. If anything GThom's monotonous repetition of "Jesus said" is a mark of orality, while the absence of the same in Q at every level is a sign of literary refinement. 9. (*There are sayings that don't make sense in the mouth of Jesus*). That's true of every level of the gospel tradition. Everybody then & now wants to use Jesus to endorse what one already believes whether he really did or not. So the presence of sayings that are better attributed to someone else proves nothing. What is striking however is that Thomas does not tend to repeat Q sayings that are dubiously ascribed to Jesus & vice-versa, so the Q//Thom is a pretty good filter for isolating primary Jesus material. I say pretty good because there are some singly attested Q or GThom sayings that are better ascribed to Jesus than to a later redactor. 10.(*There is no narrative material in Thomas*). ?? Not true. It's just that the "narrative" (generally in dialogs) in GThom is more rudimentary (they said/he said) than the traces of narrative in Q, which MarkG has summarized. I'd propose 2 more hypotheses that can readily be falsified which IF true would indicate that the text of GThom was derivative from Q1: 11. Sayings that are random in Q are organized in Thomas. Patently FALSE. Precisely the opposite is the case. Q tends to use blocks of similar sayings (couplets, clusters, & even a sermon) while Thomas often scatters aphorisms with similar motifs that are linked in Q. The problem of proving GThom's dependence on Q is analogous to the problem of proving Luke's dependence on Matthew. In both cases the author of the allegedly dependent work would have had to have been a disciple of Derrida bent dismantling well-constructed compositions. 12. Thomas presents more embellished versions of parallel sayings than Q. Again, demonstrably FALSE. Lining up the Q/Thomas parallels shows that Thomas regularly has the shorter, logically simpler form of the saying in question. The only way to maintain that Thom is an offshoot of Q is to hypothesize that it is only indirectly dependent & that that the compiler of Thomas was citing Q sayings from a very faulty memory. The problem with this hypothesis is that it often can be demonstrated that the Thomasine version of a given saying is logically tighter than the Q version. In other words, if there is any direct relationship between GThom & Q it is more likely that Q was a literary offshoot of GThom 1 than vice-versa because it is more polished. Shalom! Mahlon -- ***** Mahlon H. Smith Department of Religion, Rutgers University New Brunswick NJ 08901 Homepage: http://religion.rutgers.edu/mhsmith.html