Subject: Re: Thoughts of GosThom
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 1998 16:01:19 +0900
From: Anne Quast <anneq@senet.com.au>
To: miser17@epix.net, crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com

At 20:57 1/10/98 -0400, Stevan Davies wrote:
>
>> From:          Bob Schacht
>
>
>> Well, now, these "inauthentic" sayings interest me (for the moment). I can
>> understand inauthentic sayings as part of redactional material or editorial
>> reworking, but if its just a collection of sayings, why should there be any
>> inauthentic sayings? That is, if Thomas avoids editorial comment, why would
>> he make up a saying (which is, after all, an editorial comment inserted
>> into the mouth of a speaker.)
>
>Thomas avoids editorial comment and does not make things up.
>[The inauthentic stuff is extraordinarily various and not such that
>you could point to several things and say "these he made up."]
>
>> Or are you just saying that Thomas was a
>> somewhat indiscriminate collector of sayings and
>> things-somebody-said-that-were-attributed-to-Jesus, and
>that Thomas didn't
>> know the difference?
>
>Yes, that's it. In my imaginative reconstruction Judas Thomas
>(or somebody) within a community on one occasion wrote down
>what several people came up with as Jesus' sayings. Because
>they are in a community they share certain points of view and
>so there is a rather vague Thomas-point-of-view in Thomas. But
>the intention is not to push the point of view per se but to get
>sayings on parchment. People remember various things and
>speak them aloud to the scribe who writes them down. The compiler
>of the text had no or virtually no input. The variousness of the
>inauthentic sayings has to do with various people remembering
>different things. The "catchwords" result from e.g. a "light"
>saying prompting in memory another "light" saying and so forth.
>The clustering of the doublets in Thomas toward the end
>indicates that the folks were running out of new sayings.
>
>Steve
>
Is #102 among those you consider to be inauthentic?  JS made this black as it is considered to be one of Aesop's fables which was current at that time.  Could not the saying have come from Jesus and then used by whoever put together the collection of Aesop's fables?