Wed, 27 May 1998 17:14:17 -0400 (EDT) From: "Stevan Davies" To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 17:04:11 -0400 Subject: Re: Thomas and the Synoptics Mark wrote: > How do we know that 'the "sayings collection" form preceded the > "narrative gospel" form'? Common sense. Simple precedes complex. Also by analogy to miracle-list leading to miracles incorporated into narrative (signs and Achetemeier's catanae). "Which came first, sayings or 'sayings incorporated into narratives with explanations added to them and adjacent sayings supposedly commenting on each other'?" Answer is obvious... not necessarily solid proof beyond doubt... but obvious. Also, despite wierdly unsupportable claims by scholars who should know better, there isn't any known example of a narrative generating a separate written list-text (before the nineteenth century!).. > Is it just because of the Q theory? No. > Is it specifically because of a Kloppenborg-type stratification theory? Certainly not. You're the first even to suggest this, far as I know. > Is the assumption of a simple development from sayings collection > to narrative collection a bit too simplistic? In scholarship everything is too simplistic, that's why we have dozens of dissertations and books on Philippians. But, the simple answer is no, it's not too simplistic, it's what happened. Question might be what sorts of lists preceded narratives, but surely not whether lists preceded narratives. >If we are going entirely > on reconstructions isn't the premise a that sayings collections > preceded narrative gospels shaky? I guess. IF. But Thomas isn't a reconstruction, it's a text. > To what extent does low Christology (or even non-existent > Christology) necesssarily imply a late date? There's no "necessarily" in much of any humanistic study. But the probability, the likelihood, the commonsense, indicates that implication is reasonable. The later daters always seem to founder on the fact that when they say Thomas COULD have been an example of a late low (non) Christology sayings list they haven't got anything else of the sort late to compare it to. >And Paul is already > referring to "the Twelve" in the 50s in material that he says he has > received (1 Cor. 11). Is that therefore probative? It's a good counterexample and shows lack of "twelve" in Thomas does not in itself require earliness. > > - When compared to the synoptics, the sayings in GThomas do not show > > the redactions that the synoptics frequently contain > > Tuckett and others have argued the contrary though I have to admit > that I am not entirely convinced. I would like something more > blatant to convince me, and I would like to see more agreement in > order. I think the strong point here is that one can argue against Tuckett et al. by the use of a variety of approaches. If this had to be done A LOT then "special pleading" could be raised as an objection. But there isn't all that much to argue against, not many instances, and so few blatant, and of such diverse sorts, it's hard to see why Tuckett et al. are winning the day without bringing in ad hominem "they do this to protect the canon" argumentation. Valid ad hominem, I'd say. One occasionally finds it written that Thomas has so very few "redactional" bits that Thomas must have been deliberately trying to avoid any synoptic references at all (which is then, falsely and ignorantly, said to be characteristic of Gnostics). What Tucket et al. really need is some way to say this is how Thomas does what he does, why he takes this fragment from Matthew and that word from Luke and this redactional item from Mark. But this is NEVER done.... can't be done, I'd say. > The difficulty with this, and with Dodd's apparent coup, is that it > assumes a straightforward development: low allegory = early; high > allegory = late, a theory that Dodd (along with Jeremias) did much to > promote. Why assume this? Luke in his redaction of Mark's parables > consistently makes them less allegorical, yet he is later than Mark. I recall a discussion of this before where a crucial point came up. Luke's redaction is less allegorical but still allegorical, he doesn't make them NON allegorical. Thomas' generally are non-allegorical. Less allegorical is the result of a tendency to epitomize. Non-allegorical is something else entirely. Again, common sense has to play a role. Do human beings tend to add meaning or subtract it? Did Christians interpret sayings or deinterpret them? > I have commented on this before on the list. Suffice to say here > that I think the idea of a a steady, easily traced development from > low allegory to high is a bit too simple. Life is more complicated > than that. As said above, there's never any necessity in humanistic study, only probability and pattern. Thomas COULD have removed allegory. COULD have made a list out of a narrative. COULD have gone toward low no Christology. COULD have avoided 99% of redactional material. But after awhile it should become pretty clear that all of these COULDS don't add up to a DID, and the sheer number that are required mean that the collectivity becomes much less probable than any one of them. Hence, I think, one finds an air of desperation in Thomas dependence writers sometimes... the "if there is even one certain redactional element then Thomas is dependent everywhere on the synoptics." But you're not arguing this way. > Is not, though, Thomas anti-apocalyptic rather than non-apocalyptic? > In which case, this cannot function as an argument for earliness. > Do not some Thomas experts take this line? I do. But, still and all, Thomas knows of and disapproves of apocalypticism doesn't give chronological priority to apoc/anti-apoc one way or the other. Thomas' view "Jesus' disciples thought in terms of apocalyptic but we know that Jesus himself didn't" is AMAZINGLY up-to-date isn't it? > Thomas may of course have known the synoptics and still 'used' oral > traditions independent of them in which case the discussion of > 'scissors and paste' would not be so relevant. But the "scissors and paste" is the ONLY argument available that Thomas could have known the synoptics! It's the heart and soul of the argument (Tuckett et al.) and so highly relevant. What's needed and isn't there is what you called "blatant" use in even one single solitary case! > My own gut feeling > would be that Thomas interacted with oral traditions, some of which > had themselves had interacted with the synoptics. This > plausible picture would make sense of the data produced by both sides > in the argument, dependence and independence, wouldn't it? No. The dependence side doesn't have anything solid to go on. The oral traditions side is prima facie reasonable. And by and large you DO NOT find either orthodox or gnostic texts that are doing this. You find virtually everybody is using synoptic texts, or their cognates (G. Hebrews etc.) which sometimes they quote from memory wrongly. The theory that there was a wealth of second century oral tradition available for utilization sounds good but there's not a bit of evidence to support it. Remember, if we talk about oral tradition around 140 AD it's over one century after the guy died and seventy years after people started writing narratives and using them. Mid second century oral tradition is a chimera. > These are just tentative thoughts and comments of one searching for > the truth on Thomas, much enlightened by Crosstalkers who > continue to help on this. I look forward to hearing from you again on this. Steve