From: "Stevan Davies" To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 12:28:10 +0000 Subject: Re: Conflicted Jesus Reply-to: miser17@epix.net Eric Hovee wrote: > What follows are the Davies' Q/Thomas parallels organized > around themes of at least potential conflict in interpretation: I think you have found quite a few conflicts. If you were to take Thomas as a whole you would find many more. It doesn't seem to be the case that the redactor of Thomas tried very hard to achieve consistency. Even the 'make the two one' theme is contradicted here and there, and that's one of the few redactional themes that exist in the document. I have been trained since earliest childhood (and I mean that literally) to respond to a saying of Jesus by acknowledging that the saying was meant to have universal application not only at his time but at my time. But a couple years ago, as I was writing *Jesus the Healer* I suddenly realized what a bizarre idea that is. It is likely that Jesus said things to specific people at specific times for specific reasons. For example, if he said that you must hate your father and mother etc., he said that to a person or maybe a few people. And presumably he had some good reason for doing so. If he said "Blessed are you poor" ditto. And so forth. The assumption that we can take these statements as generic statements "everyone must in some sense hate his or her father and mother" "at all times it is the case that all the poor are blessed" is untenable. Ubiquitous but untenable. The Conflicted Jesus in the traditions arises from the premise that all that he said was universally applicable and so, it should follow, each saying should be consistent with all others so that the whole of them also are universally applicable. I think this is crazy, but I do it all the time except when by sheer willpower I make myself stop. That's the strength of childhood training, I suppose. Eventually I wrote a chapter in *Jesus the Healer* that took a variety of Jesus' sayings and tried to show what sense they make if they were spoken to people who came to him to be healed. They would, in that context, be applicable only to a certain sort of person and not to Humanity at large. Steve