From: "Stevan Davies" To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 22:41:56 +0000 Subject: Re: More SBL: GThomas/Pagels Bob Schacht wrote: > >But this is much later stuff and not too good for explaining Thomas > >from the Pagels Davies perspective that it is temporally and > >ideologically prior to those developed-gnostic texts. > > > > Irenaus is "much later"??? Yep. > To say that Jesus was a living human being is not the same as saying that > the divine logos dwelt within him in a way different from other mortals. In > other words, the difference between John & Thomas is whether the divine > logos dwells only in Jesus, or also in all men? Oh. If that's what she's saying I suppose this is so. My intuition is that John has Jesus as the incarnation of the spirit and other folks as later possessed by the spirit and these are not at all the same thing. So Jesus is still unique. I intuited that the actual function of Jesus and the Paraclete in John were the same, and then discovered that Raymond Brown (who knows everything) opines identically. So the spirit is Jesus while he's alive and dwells then in all Xians later on. Pagels could point out that Thomas presumes that the divine spirit has always dwelled in all men from the beginning. I don't like the "logos" term as a big Johannine deal for it vanishes after the pome. > >> So, Tom Kopecek, do you recognize here a strand of first century > >> Christianity known to us by any other label? Or are we stuck with the idea > >> that John's polemic in the prologue was directed at Thomasine Christianity? > > > >I can't see ANYTHING in those negations that Thomas Christians > >couldn't have agreed with (e.g. 28). > > > > Aw, Steve, you're no fun at all ;-) > But seriously, what you've done, in essence, is to deny her main points of > difference between Thomas and John. Do you really think that Thomasine and > Johannine Christianity were essentially the same? If not, where do they > differ? See above. For Thomas Jesus reveals the secret of what is already there, for John Jesus starts something new. For John it all depends on acknowledging things about Jesus, but for Thomas finding the good stuff in and outside yourself. And, alas, Thomas really doesn't have much spirit stuff in it while John definitely does. So I'd not say they are the same, nor do I think that their differences would have led to polemics of Pagelsian or Rileyist varities. I'd put Thomas and John into the same clump just as I would Mark and Paul, or Q Matthew Luke. Four basic clumps (giving Hebrews its own wierd clump). > >Now I wish I'd gone and heard it. But it's likely she'll be able to > >find a publisher for her essay, wouldn't you say? > >... > > Maybe we ought to figure out a way to share your critique with her, and see > how she responds. She won't respond. She's famous for not responding to mail etc. One way of coping with the demands of real fame, I guess. Now if only I had been able to question her from the audience! ... But no. I'm not able to absorb the nuances of things sitting and listening to them read out loud at me. The SBL is such an amazingly primitive format for scholarly interchange... must go back to the middle ages when the professor read something aloud and then people could comment... yet back then they probably were oral enough to take verbatim notes and remember nuances of what they heard. I can't. Few can. All this "giving papers and responses" seems to me just a cover for the real purpose of the SBL which is sorting out individuals' statuses. There are ascribed statuses and achieved statuses (and sometimes both for the same person). At the SBL you find out what your status is, which can vary a bit year to year. But when it's over, you know. You may not like what you know, but you know. Steve