Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 01:37:17 +0000
From: Thomas Kopecek <kopecekt@central.edu>
Reply-To: kopecekt@central.edu
To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Re: More SBL: GThomas/Pagels

Bob Schacht wrote:
> 
> I apparently didn't make it to THE Thomas session that Stevan went to, but
> I went to several others, and herewith are some notes about them.
> 
> Session S79: Thomasine Working Group
> This session was scheduled to start at 9 AM with a paper by Elaine Pagels.
> Because of her popularity, I was afraid of finding a seat, so I went early,
> only to find a relatively dark and empty room. There were only about six of
> us in the room when Elaine got there, and the first thing she did was to
> turn on (more) lights. Since the title of her talk was printed as, "The
> Genesis background of the Gospel of Thomas", I brightly piped up with, "Let
> there be light!" To which she responded, "That's exactly my point!" and
> came over to shake my hand.

You mean she is no longer the femme fatale of the Christian Origins
world? When I last went to an SBL meeting, sometime around 1970, she was
spring chicken, swishy, tweedy, and packing "them" in.

> Therefore, John's prologue is a polemic not only against Jewish and pagan
> readings of Genesis (including "Gnostics" acc. to Bultmann & Dodd), but
> mostly against other Christians.

Is the stuff in the parentheses Pagels? In other words, is she still
doing what she did in The Gnostic Gospels, that is, opposing Gnostics to
Christians rather than Gnostic Christians to other sorts of Christians?

> 
> What commentators traditionally regarded as the decisive difference marking
> John as a Christian text (his insistence on the incarnate logos) cannot
> therefore be applied to all of John's fellow Christians.

If Pagels made a fuss out of this, no wonder the crowd was small.
Certainly those docetists whom Ignatius was concerned about ca 110 were
Christians. So too with the docetists whom the Johannine letters were
exercised about. As Plato would put it, How not? Am I missing something?

 John's idea that
> the divine logos actually lived and died on earth as a man, she alleges, is
> not only foreign to Thomas but repugnant to it. Conversely, the idea in
> Thomas that the divine anthropos dwells as _phos_ in all men [Logia 3, 50,
> 77?] is foreign to John.
> 
> She concludes with the idea that the triple negation in John's prologue is
> directed primarily at other Christians now unfamiliar to us, and that
> research on the Nag Hammadi texts, notably Thomas, shows that what scholars
> traditionally identified as "gnostic tendencies" may instead turn out to be
> forms of Christian teaching relatively unfamiliar to us because of the
> success of John's polemic.
> 
> So, Tom Kopecek, do you recognize here a strand of first century
> Christianity known to us by any other label?

What I know about first century Christianity would fit in a thimble. For
me, it is all darkness until Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of
Alexandria, and their friends and enemies from 185 on. The so-called
Apostolic Fathers whom I've said a few things about on Crosstalk
(Shepherd of Hermas, Didache, Ignatius, etc.) are pretty much dusk to me
as well. Indeed, the Ignatius that I know most about is the Ignatius of
the long recension (late fourth century expansion of the middle
recension of the letters, which most, including my teacher Bill
Schoedel, consider to be the "historical" Ignatius). I'm on Crosstalk to
learn from all you chaps who know about the earliest period. It reminds
me of a conversation  with Henry Chadwick when he was visiting the U of
Chicago and at work on his Early Church volume still available in the
Pelican/Penquin series: he allowed as he hadn't the foggiest idea of how
Christianity had gotten started in its first 100 years (30-130 CE). When
asked to explain what had happened between 130 to 185, he responded by 
just laughing and shaking his head.

Tom