Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 23:22:02 -0500 (EST)
From: William Arnal <warnal@chass.utoronto.ca>
crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Re: Yuri Thomas Q

On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Yuri Kuchinsky wrote:

> > Mainly they did that by leaving out chunks of it. The stratifications 
> > of Thomas by Arnal and Patterson presume that non-synoptic stuff is 
> > secondary.
> 
> Well, I'm not quite sure if they really do that. As Bill seems to be away
> from his computer recently, let's hope he'll be back soon to clarify his
> position on this.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Yuri. I have not in fact been
away from my compulter -- just been being quieter than usual of
late: listening, but contributing less in the interests of getting
my own work done. So I've let go some really fascinating threads on
Gnosticism in the first century, and on Thomas.
	On this, I think you're right that this is not really what's
going on. Or perhaps I should half-right. Patterson basically admits
up front that this is indeed what he is doing: seeking "common
ground" between Thomas and the synoptic tradition. If one assumes
MUTUAL independence, which Patterson does and which I did until
recently, this is a reasonable enough procedure from
tradition-historical perspective: if it's in both, neither invented
it, and so it predates the divergence and/or redactional activity of
both traditions. If you imagine, however, that there is any literary
dependence, one way or another, between Thomas and the synoptic
tradition, the situation becomes far more complicated. And even if
the starting assumption of mutual independence is correct, one
cannot draw literary stratigraphical conclusions on the basis of
such tradition-historical considerations -- Patterson tries, albeit
half-heartedly, to do so, and that is where he goes wrong.
	My own stratification, however, is I think innocent of these
charges. I isolate overarching themes which appear as a result of
late redactional acticvity on individual sayings, coordinate these
themes into larger clusters, and look at the literary pattern that
emerges. Since I assumed mutual independence, I also assumed that
where Thomas and the synoptics share wording, that wording, in the
saying in question, predates either Thomasine or synoptic redaction.
That is an assumption that might have to be retooled if there is
any sort of literary relationship between, say, Thomas and Mark. But
in fact it wouldn't affect the larger picture much at all. What I
certainly did not imagine -- and here I think my reconstruction of
Thomas' literary stages is much stronger than Patterson's -- is that
tradition-history is directly equivalent to literary history, to
paraphrase Kloppenborg. If a saying, or specific features of its
wording are shared by Thomas and the synoptics, the saying or said
features predate redactional rewriting or composition of the saying
in question, but that has NO bearing on the stage to which the
material is to be assigned in its incorporation into Thomas. There
are numerous synoptic parallels in the material I've suggested
respresents a secondary redaction to Thomas.
	I also suspect that it is misleading to refer to the kind
of pithy wisdom-like stuff that emerges from stratifying either
Thomas or Q as "synoptic-like." In fact, it is LIKE only one strand
of the synoptic tradition. To say that Thomas has been synopticized
(to coin a word) is really no more true than to say that the
synoptic tradition has thereby also been "Thomasized." For synoptic
material that fails to resemble Thomasine tendencies gets shrugged
aside as well (like, say, the narrative traditions about the 12).

Bill