Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 22:34:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: William Arnal <warnal@chass.utoronto.ca>
cc: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: re: Patterson and Thomas

On Sun, 4 May 1997, Stevan Davies wrote:

> > the Demiurge. Now watch Davies crucify me! He HATES arguments like
> > this.
> 
> Oh come now, you flatter yourself. This isn't an "argument" it's just 
> a nothing. 

Y'know, I almost put "argument" in quotation marks before I sent
this, and then I thought, Nah, Davies'll do it for me. This, I think
(correct me if I'm wrong), is the "argument" that isn't an argument
and that Davies hates so much: 1. Thomas is Gnostic. 2. When I read
Thomas, I interpret it as though it were Gnostic. 3. Therefore
Thomas is Gnostic. QED. Formally, this kind of "argument" doesn't do
much for me either: when it's applied to the question of the
original languages of texts (I can back-translate Dostoyevsky into
Aramaic, therefore The Brothers Karamazov was written in Aramaic) it
gives me seizures. Moreover, in the case of Thomas, it's usually
coupled with -- and a result of -- canonical bias, and the circular
argument extended even farther: 1. Thomas is non-canonical. 2.
Therefore Thomas is Gnostic. 3. Therefore Thomas is late, dependent,
etc. 4. Therefore Thomas is historically useless. 5. Therefore only
canonical writings are historically useful. This is one I don't buy
at all: Gnosticism doesn't date Thomas; rather, Thomas dates
Gnosticism. If anyone is really interested in this "was Thomas
Gnostic?" debate, Davies and I have hashed this out before on
IOUDAIOS, and the results are on his Thomas web-page.
	Anyway, I really don't think I was making the too-common
ultra-bogus circular "argument" at all. Here's the argument, as I
see it. 1. Thomas uses "Father" with fair consistency to refer to
God. 2. There are only two exceptions in the entire text, in which
the term "God" (p.noute) is used. 3. The first is #30, where it is
pluralized. Therefore, unless we imagine that Thomas was a
polytheist, it does not refer to the same high God as "Father." 4.
The only other reference is saying #100. 5. In saying #100,
grammatically, in a way that does not come across in English, Caesar
and God are paralled (ti na kaisar nkaisar ti na pnoute mpnoute),
and both are contrasted to Jesus (ayo pete poei pe matnnaeif). 6.
Normally Jesus is allied with "the Father,"  not contrasted with
him. 7. Therefore the word "God" in this saying is being used in a
not-very-straightforward way, and refers to an entity other than
"the Father." 8. The association with Caesar implies a "god" of this
world: there is a system in which the Father was opposed to the
deity responsible for this world, that system is Gnosticism, and in
that system, the God of this world is the demiurge. It's most
economical to assume that Thomas in this instance is referring to
some conception of the Gnostic demiurge. 

> Incidentally, Thomas  3 and 27 in Gk have
> Kingdom of God (but just Kingdom in Coptic) which means that 

So maybe the Coptic translation or the text version from which the
translation was made was "more Gnostic" than the original or
"Gnosticized" the original. But this is the version of the text we
have (more or less). Or MAYBE the Greek fragments are harmonizing
corruptions of the original, which the Coptic preserves. There's no
way to tell, is there?

Bill