Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 15:00:51 -0400 From: y.kuchinsky@utoronto.ca To: Stevan Davies cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Thomas and the Synoptics On Wed, 27 May 1998, Stevan Davies wrote: > Mark wrote: ... > > 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? Mark, your probably mean 1 Cor 15. I previously pointed you to the evidence that this is an interpolation. This is the only place in the whole Pauline courpus mentioning "the twelve" which alone should make us suspicious. > It's a good counterexample and shows lack of "twelve" in Thomas does > not in itself require earliness. That Thomas doesn't have the 12 should be seen as evidence that it is early. ... > 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. I don't think a good argument that GTh is late exists. All we have is a lot of unreasoned assumptions to this effect. > > 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 already mentioned to Mark G. the argument that some of Mk's passages that he probably means here seem like late expansions (the protoMk theory). But again, he neglects these valid arguments. So often he and so many others fall into the trap of assuming the "basic textual unity of NT texts". I said it before, and will say it again: There's little more than unreasoned faith on which to base our myth of the "basic textual unity of the gospels". Any wholesale comparison e.g. of "the unity of Mt" against the "unity of Mk" seems rather naive to me. In this sense, the "Synoptic Problem" as such is a myth in so far as these questionable assumptions are adhered to. Regards, Yuri.