Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 22:34:54 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Lincoln Reply-To: Andrew Lincoln To: KOPECEKT@central.edu cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: Matthew 6 and Mark On Sun, 12 Jan 1997 KOPECEKT@central.edu wrote: > >So, to make the long story short, I'm pretty sure that GTh comes from mid > >1 c., along with the Q source. GTh precedes the synoptics. This, BTW, is > >the view that is held certainly by the overwhelming majority of GTh > >scholars, people who studied the document carefully. At the same time, my > >experience dealing with NT scholarship in general indicates to me that > >scholars in other area of NT research are often surprised greatly when > >they hear the above. "What a strange concept!" Why is there such a great > >discrepancy between the GTh specialists (admittedly a small group of > >people) and the rest of the great crowds of NT interpreters? This is an > >interesting question in its own right. > > We can ask Andrew about this, I suppose. He is a NT scholar who follows > the field carefully yet not, it appears, a GosTh specialist. And he has > the added advantage of being there at one end of that important Toronto/ > Claremont axis. Gee, thanks, Tom. I haven't yet noticed that being acquainted with Klopp and Vaage et al has somehow provided wisdom on Thomas. But it is an interesting question which must have something to do with issues like specialization itself and the vested interests of scholars. Steve himself has commented that he thinks it will be quite a while before the burden of proof is off him to show dependence of other gospels on GosThom, though the JSem of course, not all of whom are Thomas specialists, has as premises 24 and 44 in the Five Gospels that Thomas is earlier than the Synoptics and along with Q is the earliest source. But in general the growing consensus in one specialized field does take time to become the consensus in the field as a whole. And in some cases it takes longer because there are a variety of vested interests and prejudices to overcome. In the case of GosThom some of those are obvious. The majority of scholars who were trained to think of Gos Thom as "Gnostic" and later has a hard time thinking it might actually be at the source of the gospel tradition. And of course for some there are theological reasons why they might want to resist this. If GosThom is indeed this early, they are frequently not helped by the sort of arguments or sometimes just assertions made by some of the advocates of this view such as Crossan or Koester and therefore put off either doing the detailed analyses or studying the detailed analyses provided by more rigorous Thomas specialists. Scholarly prejudice and suspicion works both ways to obscure the issues. Just as some Thomas specialists suspect that the caution of other NT scholars might be theologically motivated, so the more conservative scholars suspect that those working on Thomas are too eager to believe their work is more significant for the study of Christian origins than it really is and that they too have particular ideological motivations for holding GosThom to be a source for the canonical gospels and having affinities with the alleged earliest sapiential stratum of Q. With these sort of prejudices to be overcome it is inevitably going to take time for the more rigorous work on GosThom to come into its own and for the more reasoned objections to emerge and, I was going to say, for a broader consensus then to arise, but realized that this dialectical view of scholarship is not always the way it works and sometimes you do simply get a stand off between opposing views. Clearly neither the Toronto end of the axis nor the Toronto "blessing" has turned me into a prophet and I shall have to refrain from responding to your calls for oracles. Best Wishes Andrew Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 20:52:05 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Lincoln Reply-To: Andrew Lincoln To: Stevan Davies cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Re: meaningless? Steve, Thanks for your post on Applying the HJ in Class. I can see getting students to work with GThom does have all sorts of advantages in terms of learning critical method without particular commitments to canonical gospels confusing issues for people. Both in that posting and in your previous meaningless? one, however, you make a statement that I would like to see you develop. First time you said the random list of sayings is like folks would have had before the evangelists got to work. Second time around this has reached the level of certainty. "Students can see the difficulties of trying to figure out what sayings mean WITHOUT being given gospel contexts to work with, which I am certain was the case with the evangelists themselves." Well, which evangelists are we talking about here? Might this really only apply to one view of the composition of Thomas? Luke and Matthew on most accounts do not simply work with a list of sayings. THey work with two narratives that have already put sayings in a context - Mark and Q. They may choose to put sayings in different contexts on occasion from their sources but they are not working from scratch with totally isolated sayings. They are expanding, developing and adding contexts. Isn't the same sort of process likely for Mark? If sayings were around for 30 odd years before Mark did his thing, how likely is it that they remained isolated meaningless sayings during that time? I know you are loathe to recognize oral tradition, but doesn't it make some sense that Mark inherited groups and clusters of sayings linked by catchwords (as Lew Reich reminded us), which already supplies a minimal context, and that others were associated with miracle stories and others (parables) were linked as teaching about the kingdom of God, and that he inherited others that predecessors had already put together with narrative about Jesus and his relation to disciples, authorities, a passion story etc. Similarly with Q, it makes a lot of sense to see someone not putting this together from scratch but it being the end result of expanding contexts of collections of sayings, an expansion that eventually was thought to need some narrative as well. I grant that you can always appeal to GThom, on your view of it, as an example of a relatively meaningless list, but even if we concede Mark used Thomas, this need not mean that MArk worked only with such a list. Some of these questions come from reading Gerald Downing's recent interesting article in JSNT 64 (1996) 29-48 - "Word-Processing in the Ancient World: The Social Production and Performance of Q" - where he claims that our views of how authors composed in the ancient world tend to be anachronistic. He cites as a prime example Mack's picture of Mark at work at "a desk in a scholar's study lined with texts." He asserts that we have not yet taken on board the implications of the oral culture of the Mediterranean world for thinking about literary composition. Written texts, he says, played the role of a script or score for oral performance and a small audience is likely to have been part of the production of such a score from the very start. Composition was a complex social event orchestrated by a particular band-leader. Downing's article uses these sort of observations to argue against strata representing different ideologies within Q. He wants to say that there is room within ancient compositional models for all manner of subtle changes from one performance of a script to another and for the script being changed on that basis, but there is simply no room for large and drastic changes. Whatever was added to any current form of Q, the expanded version must on its first appearance have appeared largely consistent to the members of the community, especially if the earlier version had been in any way a charter for the life of the community. He has other arguments about Q but what he says would also have implications for the composition of all the gospels - that they are likely to have been particular moments in an expanding oral and group performance of traditions rather than the result of isolated individuals freely inventing and composing something de novo on the basis of a list of isolated sayings. Is there anything to this? Andrew