Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 12:34:34 -0500 (EST) From: "William E. Arnal" To: Antonio Jerez Cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Thomas! On Sat, 31 Jan 1998, Antonio Jerez wrote: > case. Unfortunately neither of you have done so yet. > So let us stop guessing. Skip point 4 as an argument > for either side altogether. Let us deal with the texts as > they are. Well, I have attempted to do so. But I echo your interest in the texts as they are, with the qualification, however, as I said in my post to Stephen, that a single instance, or a handful of instances, of probable synoptic redaction in Thomas DOES NOT PROVE that Thomas was dependent. For the reasons I've already given. If you think that, logically, it does prove this, then I challenge you to make sense of Thomas #65 in a way that is completely non-speculative. > Thomas is a text that is esoteric and blurry quite > on purpose. Given the fact that we don't have > the mindset and the mythological keys of the > group who lay behind Thomas I can well understand > why it is often hard to make sense of the sayings > in Thomas. Oh, I didn't say it was hard to make sense of the sayings in Thomas. I think I can, actually, at least most of them. What I can't do is make Thomas' apparent redactional interests compatible with what he supposedly did if he in fact used synoptics texts as his source. > I think even Stevan agrees with me that Jesus > and his original disciples hardly came from a > gnostic Jewish first-century environment. It is > a lot more reasonable that they all belonged to > the apocalyptic school. I do not see any sign at > all in the synoptics of Thomasine "gnostic" sayings > having been converted to an apocalyptic frame. > The signs point the other way around. The Thomas > people has taken Jesus the apocalyptist and turned > him into a "gnostic". This, according to me, most > probably happened in the second century. This all begs the question. We have first century material -- 1 Corinthians -- that is no more or less gnostic than Thomas. So we know there were early Christians with Gnostic tendencies. In any case, we can hardly date a document on the grounds that such documents do not fit the general historical framework when the document itself is a key piece of the evidence for the character of that historical framework. > I may be wrong on this one. But I do recall reading > some essay months ago by a frenchman about > thematic threads in Thomas. My memory may fail > me. I will look it up again. No doubt the effort has been made. Davies, also, in GTCW, attempts a full-scale account of Thomas' organization. It's not that people have not tried to do this. It's just that the results are not, in my humble opinion, very compelling. > I think Stephen's latest message gave some > objections to this line of reasoning. I agree with > him. Huh? How did he address it at all? On what points do you agree with him against Attridge? On what basis do you and Stephen, against the vast majority of text-critics of the P.Oxy fragments, think you can establish an A --> B relationship between the Greek and the Coptic? > See what I wrote above. I've known all along > that there isn't an absolutely clearcut tendency > in greek and coptic Thomas. I was just waiting for > you or Steve to give some counterexamples. I > think I know where they are, but I would appreciate > if the other side could put their cards on the table > so that we can compare. Well, I wish you would have made this clear from the start -- I wouldn't have wasted so much time pursuing dead-end arguments. > wording of the original). Statistically I therefore > think that the odds are higher that the fragments > of greek Thomas are closer to the greek original > than coptic Thomas. This may be so, in fact it is probably so, but the general superiority of the text does not establish its relationship with an inferior text. In general, there may be less corruption in the Greek, BUT that does not mean that the corruption of the Coptic will be the same as, only more, that of the Greek. You dig? > I think Stephen has answered this reasoning well > enough. Thomas does not stand in a relationship, > either theologically or literary, as Luke stands to > Matthew. What an interesting slip, Antonio. So which hypothesis have you given up on -- the one that says Luke used Matthew, or the one that says Thomas was dependent on the synoptics? Nice, at any rate, to see that you've changed your mind! > Therefore there is little reasons to expect > the same kind of assimilation as between the > synoptics. Wrong-o. This kind of assimilation is not limited to the gospels. Early Christian literature which refers to Jesus and especially which QUOTES Jesus (as does Thomas) tends to asimilate to current versions of the sayings in question. Most of those "current versions" are drawn from the synoptics. > And I am curious to know what arguments make > you think that Stevan's Mark-knew-Thomas hypothesis > stands on hard soil. It can hardly be the simple fact I agree with Steve on this one: his argument is PREMISED on the hypothesis that Thomas was independent of the synoptics. Without granting this, his argument makes no sense at all, and, really, can't evaluated. What's the point? So it's not surprising that, since you DON'T adopt this premise, you find the argument to be nonsense. Of course it is. To take an example that isn't prejudicial to YOUR side of things, let's take the question of what KIND of cheese the moon is made of. I say, "it's swiss, not cheddar, on the basis of x evidence." To which you say, "you dumb putz, the moon isn't made of cheese." Well, that right away renders my argument for swiss over cheddar completely nonsensical, doesn't it? Amnd it does so in such a way that for you to argue, "no, it couldn't be SWISS cheese," sorta misses the point. We need to address whether there's good grounds or not for the moon as cheese hypothesis before we can have any kind of debate about the sort of cheese it's made of. Bill ________________________________________ William E. Arnal 19 University Place, #503 Religious Studies/Classics New York, NY 10003 New York University (212) 998-8990 (o) wea1@is7.nyu.edu (212) 995-5036 (h) "Dominance, or power in itself, is evil; but it takes power to counter it. The categorical imperative must carry a gun wherever and for so long as power can be crushed by no other means." -- Ernst Bloch