Back to commentaries – Pokorný

Returning to my series on commentaries on GosThom, I want to look at:

Petr Pokorný’s A Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas

Pokorný, Petr, Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas: From interpretations to the interpreted.  T&T Clark Jewish and Christians Texts Series. New York: T&T Clark Ltd, 2009 (hardcover) and 2011 (paperback).

Pokorný is Professor of New Testament exegesis at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.  He is a former president of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, fellow of several Learned Societies. A festschrift in honour of his 70th birthday was published in 2004, so he has a long track record in the field. He is the author of 12 German monographs, textbooks and commentaries, some of which have been translated into English.  This commentary was, however, written in English. It uses the English translation of the Berliner Arbeitskreis für Koptisch-Gnosticsche Schriften as the text of Thomas.

The format of the commentary is fairly traditional – general information about the text followed by detailed comment on each saying. Each of the individual commentaries is divided into two parts. Part A looks at individual features and part B provides a more general overview. The comment sections are generally followed by a short list of relevant literature.

Assessment of Thomas

Seeing I found Skinner’s formulation of the three major issues for Thomas scholarship today helpful, I thought I would use them as the structure for this section, but found this somewhat difficult at times. When he addresses an issue, Pokorný has a tendency to present the arguments of various scholars and outline the consequences of each of them. Unfortunately, however, because of the way he uses tenses and sentence structure, it is not always clear (at least not to me) when he is saying “if you take this position, then you must necessarily believe X and not believe Y” and when he is saying “my position is X and not Y”.

When was it written?

Pokorný contends that Thomas originated later than the Synoptics and that the version we have “represents a theolgical stream that originated in the early second century” (p 19) and “originated at a time when some of the earlier Gospels had already attained canonical status” (p 13).  He thus rejects the idea that Thomas is one of the earliest documents of Christian literature (p 15). However, he also identifies five different versions that have existed, including the one represented by Hippolytus’ quotation of saying 3, which he suggests is a later version than NHII,2 (pp 20-25).

What is its relationship to the canonical gospels?

Pokorný states that the fact that has been named “The Gospel of Thomas”  despite its genre (see below) indicates that at the point where the title was added (the third version) the “text claimed canonical authority”. I would suggest that it was the editor who claimed canonical authority on its behalf, but the point is well made. He further suggests that it was used as a liturgical text in place of the canonical gospels (p 22). This is not, however, the issue that is raised by Skinner in posing this question and Pokorný spends several pages on Skinner’s issue – examining the relationship between Thomas and John and then between Thomas and the Synoptics.

He notes that there a number of similarities between the theologies of John and Thomas, which he says is understandable because both have links with Syria. He does not reject the idea that John is a reaction to Thomas, but says how much John was influenced by Thomas is unknown. He suggests that the Thomas group seem to have gained ground in Syria after the Johannine group left for Asia Minor (pp 16-17).

With respect to the relationship between Thomas and the Synoptics, he rejects both of the black and white models – ie that Thomas is totally derived from the Synoptics and that it is totally independent – in favour of a development in several stages that involves the use of some material that either comes directly from the Synoptic tradition or from a shared source, as well as some independent tradition. He thus appears to be saying that, although it is not early, it can still provide us with useful information about Jesus and his teachings, or at least how the early church received them.

What is its genre and theological outlook?

Pokorný states that Thomas is not the same literary genre as the canonical gospels – it is not a biography. From a purely literary perspective, it belongs to the same genre as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Pseudo-Phyocydes or the New Testament letter of James – a collection of wise sayings. It is, however, different from a simple collection of proverbs in that it is a collection of dominical sayings and as such it belongs to a genre represented by Q,  by the small collections of sayings of Jesus that are included in the Gospels  eg the parables from Mark 4 and by the special source of Luke and other early collections (pp 7-8).

He holds that to say that the Gospel of Thomas is Gnostic is anachronistic. Even though it was used by Gnostics, all that can be found in it is a theology influenced by the Platonic ideas that were popular at the time of its writing and were used by Gnostics – although  Hippolytus’ version of Saying 3 shows a much stronger Gnostic influence. It seems that the subheading on p 27 of the section on the theology of Thomas reflects his position: that it sits “between Gnosticism and mainstream Christianity”.

Other items of note

In four separate places, Pokorný states as though it were a given that putting Jesus’ sayings in the context of an account of his life resulted in their being (better) preserved (emphasis added by me in each case).

Admittedly, the pieces of tradition that have been embedded in the canonical Gospels are preserved in an interpreted form; but after they have been written and used in liturgy, they underwent only minor changes. By linking them with Jesus’ deeds, with descriptions of his attitudes, and by placing them within the contingent past of Jesus’ life, they have indeed been preserved. (p 10)

Christian proclamation, which originally was considered to be a kind of sermon on biblical texts, became now liturgical text itself. The tradition about Jesus has been preserved and protected from falsification because it was framed by the life story of the earthly Jesus. (p 11)

We have to suppose that from the very beginning fragments of memories circulated among Jesus’ adherents, and the fact that from a speech of Jesus some of the hearers recalled only individual sayings that seemed to them memorable is understandable and probable. The narrrative frame protected the sayings from transformation better than the genre of a collection of sentences, but the free circulation still did not stop immediately. (p 18)

and finally

Finally, the method of conserving Jesus’ teaching in individual sayings as in the wisdom traditions and prophetic proclamation is obviously more ancient than the method of setting his teaching in a biographical frame, as invented by Mark. All the same, the biographic frame conserved the ancient layer of the Jesus tradition more effectively than collections of his sayings. (p 158)

He appears to be arguing that the fact that Jesus sayings were preserved in the canon in the context of Jesus’ life is some kind of guarantee that they were better preserved. Although the first two quotes also mention use in a liturgical context, he maintains elsewhere that Thomas was used instead of the Synoptics in the liturgies of the Thomas community (p 22). Perhaps a reader can help here?

Positive Aspects

• the layout is clear and easy to follow.
• Pokorný pays particular attention to the relationship between each saying and any canonical parallels
• he builds on the work of others and draws on his own research to develop some fresh and interesting ideas about the various texts. My reaction on reading the introductory material was that it is different, unexpected, although I cannot quite articulate how. In the comment on saying 8 he suggests that the big fish represents the human soul, as do the large branch in the mustard seed parable and the big sheep in the lost sheep parable. I am not aware of this having been suggested elsewhere in the literature (although perhaps I am suffering from memory lapse?)

Negative Aspects

• part of the part B of the comment on saying 8 (the parable of the net) actually belongs with the comment on saying 9, the parable of the sower.
• the decision to transliterate djandja as č and kyima as q makes perfect sense to speakers of Slavic languages, but not to the average English speaker
• most importantly, as I have indicated above, there are many places where the English is not smooth, times where it is ambiguous or difficult to follow and one or two places where what he is trying to communicate is quite unclear. It would have benefitted from more effective editing.

And finally

For the Thomas scholar, this commentary provides interesting insights into the text and comment on the work of other scholars and is certainly worth reading. I would probably not recommend it as an introduction to the text, however – it assumes too much background knowledge.

A little plug here for T&T Clark/Continuum – again they have released a paperback edition not too long after the publication of the hardcover. I bought the hardcover but my paperback copy of De Conick’s Recovering the Original Gospel of  Thomas is perfect bound (ie stitched in sections), rather than having the cut binding (pages just glued individually into the cover) of many cheaper paperbacks. I assume that this is their standard paperback binding method, so I would definitely be inclined to buy the paperback version rather than the hardcover.

This and that

First, I have been re-reading some of my earlier posts and have been doing a little editing and tagging. I am not sure if this has resulted in the posts popping up again for those who subscribe to this blog by RSS etc. If you have been getting notices about new posts and seen that you’ve read them before, this is the reason why.

Second, Chris Skinner has just started blogging about Simon Gathercole’s new book on Thomas over at Peje Iesous. I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

Third, the reason I was going back through old posts was to see how far I had got through my series of notes on commentaries on Thomas. (The answer is not far – I have done DeConick, Nordsieck and Kasser and a bit of an outline of Uwe-Karsten Plisch’s book in the initial post about commentaries). The reason for this is that I am in the process of reading Petr Pokorny’s A Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas: From Interpretations to the Interpreted (T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series: New York, 2009). There don’t seem to be terribly many reviews of it in journals and I find it interesting, so am planning on posting on it in the next little while.

Faith, biblical studies and teaching in ‘sectarian’ universities

Over the past few days, one of the hot issues in the blogosphere has been the sacking of Anthony Le Donne from Lincoln Christian University because the understandings expressed in his writing do not line up with the university’s confession of faith (see for example Larry Hurtado, Jim West, Chris Skinner, Ben Witherington III and James McGrath). It sounds as though the university has done a really bad job of dealing with the issue and I am very sad for Le Donne and his family and also sympathetic to his colleagues.

I haven’t read the book in question (although I’ve just ordered a copy from the library) but I have read his 2007 “Theological Memory Distortion in the Jesus Tradition: a Study in Social Memory Theory” in S. C. Barton, L. T. Stuckenbruck & B. G. Wold (Eds.), Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (pp. 163-177), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, which I found helpful in my article on eyewitness testimony. I can see, however, how the average conservative evangelical Christian would have issues with comments like “memory is distortion. This is so regardless of any claims to veracity” (p. 168) although he explains that this is because it is not possible to view an object from every perspective or to recall an event without emphasizing some details.

Much though we might like it to be otherwise, the reality is that an awful lot of biblical scholars teach in institutions that prepare people for ordination in particular christian churches and this has always been the case. They are therefore not doing their teaching and research in a vacuum. Not only that, a significant proportion of biblical scholars are confessing Christians and maybe some keep their research and their faith in two separate compartments in their lives, but most don’t. This stuff doesn’t make you lose your faith!! If, however, my theological training institution was anything to go on (and I’m sure it was), very little time is actually spent on trying to help students preparing for ordination to make sense of what they are being taught in terms of their faith, so they are left to their own devices to work out how to communicate what biblical scholarship teaches about Scripture and many, fearing the same kind of reaction from their congregations as Le Donne has had from his university’s board, say nothing. Others just view it as a hoop they need to jump through in order to be ordained and forget everything they’ve learned as soon as they pass their exams. In either case, they don’t share what they’ve learned with their congregations.

Helping them isn’t all that hard, either. Last year I presented my work on human memory and eyewitness testimony to a local lay preachers’ course. I told them basically what Le Donne says – human memory is simply not accurate. You can’t rely on eyewitness testimony to be “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”, especially 30 years down the track. The student from one of the very conservative congregations in our region came up to me afterwards and said that she had thought that she was going to really hate what I was saying, but instead had found it incredibly helpful. This is because I went on to talk about what I believe this means for our use of Scripture (that we can’t reasonably preach a sermon that turns on one or two words in a biblical text) and about the role of our faith in God in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of Scripture. Really, all that our research on human memory, social memory and eyewitness testimony is demonstrating is that we are not ever going to be able to produce empirical evidence that the Bible is true. We are just saying “we can’t prove this”, not “this isn’t true”. Why is that such a big deal? People of faith have been dealing with that for a couple of millennia. And furthermore, being able to provide very convincing empirical evidence for something does not mean that people will believe it, anyway. Look at the evidence for climate change. Psychological research also demonstrates that people are very good at believing what they want to believe and ignoring evidence that conflicts with their world view, except under specific circumstances (and I don’t have the research readily available and can’t remember what the circumstances are).

I don’t think people in the field of academic biblical scholarship have actually helped, either. I think there is a big difference between allowing the particular teachings of your faith group to shape what you see and say during your research and reflecting on what the consequences of your research are for Christian faith. It seems to me that Lincoln wants Le Donne to do the former and he clearly can’t and maintain either his academic or personal integrity. I believe, however, that if you are being funded by a christian body to teach and do research, you have a responsibility to do the latter, and not just in your own mind. So often, however, when people in biblical discussion forums try to do this, they are howled down for being ‘confessional’. But where else but in a group of people who are also specialists in the field can you work out where the holes are in your thinking before you present a case to those who are not educated in the area? Surely, we owe it to the people who donate from their wages and savings the money that pays our stipends to show them how you can know these things and still remain Christian? So often when I do share it, I am greeted by relief that what people had suspected but were afraid to ask is true, often swiftly followed by anger that no-one had told them about it years ago.

And maybe, if more of us (both ministers and biblical scholars) had been doing this for longer, Le Donne would not have been sacked for telling the truth?

 

Skinner: What are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas?

My copy of Chris Skinner’s new book What are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas (New York, Paulist Press, 2012) finally arrived earlier this week. Apparently the Book Depository was selling the US edition which wasn’t due to be published until 1 May, whereas Amazon had ordered the UK (?) edition, which was published a month earlier.

Anyway, it arrived, I’ve read it and I’m impressed. The aim of this series is to provide a summary of the current/recent scholarly literature in the particular field which is accessible to the ordinary reader and I think that Skinner has done an admirable job.

After a short introduction to the history of the text, he identifies the three crucial questions that are still being debated some fifty-five years after the text of Thomas became reasonably easily accessible to interested scholars:

• when was it written?
• what is its relationship to the canonical gospels?
• what is its genre and theological outlook?

Skinner devotes a chapter to each question, in which he lays out the various positions held by scholars, who the main proponents of each one are and (briefly) why they hold their particular positions. While the particular scholars may well think that he has missed some of the nuances of their arguments (due to summarising whole books in a few paragraphs), I think he has done an excellent job of summaraising the main points of the various positions, where they fit in and how they interrelate. The final chapter (unless you count a one-page conclusion as a chapter) looks at the debate about the role of Thomas in the quest for the historical Jesus, summarising the positions of John Paul Meier, the Jesus Seminar and John Dominic Crossan.

Skinner has done an admirable job of identifying the main players and the main issues in the field. As well as the three crucial questions and the issue of the role of Jesus in the quest for the historical Jesus, he also highlights a number of other important issues. He points out, for example, how intertwined these four issues are – so those who hold that Thomas is Gnostic and dependent on the canon will not be arguing for an early dating or that it is important in the quest for the historical Jesus. He notes the general divide between North American and European scholars on the issues of dating and independence, and the movement in the idea of theological outlook that has resulted from the debate about the definition of Gnosticism in the past decade or two.

As is always the case in the area of biblical studies, there are quite a few pages of notes that don’t quite belong in the main text but are nevertheless useful. Paulist, like most book publishers, prints endnotes at the end of the book and, as usual, this annoyed me as I flipped backwards and forwards between text and note. These are followed by a select bibliography which Skinner has divided into a number of sections: English translations; Thomas within early Christianity; Commentaries; Thomas and early Christian literature; Surveys of Thomas reserach; Important related reading: and Helpful online resources. This last is annotated, the rest are not, but there is a rating system that indicates which books are: accessible to the nonspecialist; written at an academic level but accessible to an educated nonspecialist; an intended for those with background knowledge of early Christian literature and the requisite reserach languages.

As the reader has no doubt gathered, I am very positive about this book. I found the structure that Skinner offers a helpful way of conceptualising the field of Thomas scholarship at the moment. He does a good job of presenting the various positions in an even-handed way. I discovered that Hedrick’s 2010 commentary on Thomas had slipped under my radar and have ordered a copy, which was particularly useful to me. My one disappointment was in the bibliography. David Gowler’s WATSA the Parables has a fully annotated bibliography, whereas in WATSA the Gospel of Thomas one has to search the text for a summary of the various positions of the authors. While there is an index, some of the more prolific authors are mentioned a number of times and an overview of the positions in each major publication would have been helpful.

In general, though, I think that Skinner has done what he set out to do and written a book that will provide a useful way into Thomas scholarship for the interested general reader and the student. I am certainly going to recommend that it be added to the reading list of the subject I taught when I was based at the University of New England.

Relationship between Thomas and the Synoptics

In the comments Mike K says:

I take it you view Thomas as largely independent of the Synoptics so that there similarities and differences may be explained as a result of different processes of oral transmission from the original eyewitnesses? I was just reading Andrew Gregory’s “The Reception of Luke and Acts in the Period before Ireneaus” and he is very cautious about accepting any literary dependence as demonstrable unless it meets Koester’s criteria of whether the redaction is present, but he too finds evidence of Lukan redaction in the Greek fragments of Thomas (so difficult to blame on later scribal harmonization in the Coptic version). So I was wondering if you think it may be possible that whoever put together this compilation of sayings in the 2nd century was familiar with the Synoptics in some way, yet perhaps many of the sayings still reached the author independently from oral tradition?

This is too big to answer in the comments, so I am bringing it up to a post of its own.

I don’t know that I want to be that definite, but that’s certainly the way I am leaning, yes. As a person of faith, I believe that Jesus really existed, that there were many eyewitnesses to the various parts of his ministry and that they shared their stories of their encounters with Jesus with friends, family, colleagues. I would also like to believe that the early Christians were, in general, people of good will and integrity who told others what they genuinely believed to be true and accurate accounts of what they saw, heard and experienced, rather than deliberately reshaping material to convince others to their way of thinking. A lot of the redaction criticism theory sounds too cold and calculating to me: author X took author Y’s version and edited it so that it fitted in with his theology sounds like a very deliberate thing to me.

I think that the level of verbatim correspondence between some parts of the Synoptics are long enough for us to be pretty sure either that one version was copied from the other or that there was some common source with which both authors were familiar. If what scholars beginning with Gerhardsson suggest is correct, it may well be that this source was oral material learned verbatim, rather than necessarily a written copy but I suspect that alterations were made because the version that was available did not line up with the author’s memory of the event (or the account that s/he had heard from an(other) eyewitness), rather than something more deliberate. How we understand an event andwhat we remember of an event are strongly shaped by what we believe about the world, so our memories do tend to line up with our beliefs and therefore theologies but mostly this shaping is unconscious. McIver summarises the evidence here quite well (see my review of his Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels) although I don’t agree with the conclusions he draws about what it means for reliability.

Another possible explanation, however, of how there are different versions of what appears to be the same story in circulation is that Jesus actually told basically the same story several times with slightly different details because he was telling them to a different audience in different settings. In other words, it is possible that the reason that Matthew, Mark and Luke have parallel stories in different settings is not that they wrote their gospels to achieve particular theological purposes that worked best if they put them in different orders, combinations and settings and but because Jesus actually used them in different orders, combinations and settings and the ones that fitted best with a particular eyewitness’s theological emphasis were the ones that were remembered by that person. Quite a few of the changes that we see that are named as ‘redaction’ could equally be the result of people retelling a story in their own words and it doesn’t matter whether the story is one they have read somewhere or one they have heard somewhere. My article  ”How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research.” Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 1 (2010): 177-97 summarises the literature on both eyewitness testimony and human memory.

So, in short, yes, I think what you suggest is possible, Mike, but because we are working with Greek text of the Synoptics and largely Coptic text of Thomas and some of the Greek text we do have puts the sayings in a different order to the Coptic text, I don’t think we canbe at all certain about which of the various theories is correct. I think that on the basis of the evidence we have, it is perfectly possible that Thomas was written in total isolation from the Synoptics, on the basis of teaching that he learned verbatim from Jesus. That he used the sayings he used because they were the ones that he remembered best over the years because they were the ones that helped him to make sense of his world and his life.  I think it is exceedingly unlikely that the author picked up texts of the Synoptics, selected his/her favourite bits, changed them so that they would produce the spin he wanted and made up a whole pile of other stuff so that he could convince a group of gullible people of the veracity of his/her particular theological system (whatever that is). What we need in order to make a more definitive statement about which of the various theories of composition is most likely is an early copy of a full Greek text. Even then, however, if you accept that Jesus tried to get his disciples to learn his sayings verbatim, you don’t need to have a theory of textual dependence even with really significant verbatim sections.

Gathercole on the composition of Thomas (6)

I have finally finished the book and propose to deal with the remaining 8 chapters in one post. The other option would be to look at each chapter in detail and that would take too long.

Chapter 6  is entitled Thomas and the Synoptics: A Method for Assessing Influence and proposes 6 stages in a method for assessing the influence of the Synoptics on Thomas. Gathercole outlines it as follows:

1. Influence from the Synotpics on Thomas will be evident where Thomas reproduces redactional material.
2. Where there is influence, taking the direction of that influence to be Synoptics –> Thomas (rather than Thomas –> Synoptics) can be justified on various grounds.
3. The influence from the Synoptics can only reliably be seen in Thomas’s reception of Matthean and Lukan redaction of Mark.
4. The sample of Thomas sayings to be analysed is thus restricted to places where there are parallels with Mark and at least one of the other Synoptics.
5. Various options are discussed for how influence might take place, including combinations of oral and literary factors.
6. Finally, the quesiton is raised of when in Thomas‘s compositional and transmission history any influence of the Synoptics might have been exerted (p 145).

On the basis of point 4, Gathercole only looks at 20 sayings – those that have a parallel in both Mark and at least one of Matthew or Luke.

Having amplified the six points, he then applies the method in chapters 7 & 8, Matthew in the Gospel of Thomas and Luke and the Gospel of Thomas. In doing this, he picks up Elaine Pagels’ suggestion that GTh 13.3 (where Jesus asks the disciples what they think he is and Matthew answers that he is a wise philosopher) is a reference to the content of Matthew’s gospel, although he rejects the notion that Peter’s comment about Jesus being like a righteous angel does not need to be a reference to either Mark or Gospel of Peter, because Peter is an unsurprising interlocuter, whereas Matthew is not. The notion that GTh 13.3 is a reference to Matthew’s gospel appears to be a key piece of evidence because he mentions it quite frequently. On the basis of his methodology, 11 of the 20 sayings are examples of Thomas‘s reception of Matthean or Lukan redaction of Mark.

Section II ends with chapter 9, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas, in which Gathercole surveys the previous chapters and concludes that:

attempts to exclude the influence of the Synoptics from the Gospel of Thomas are unsuccessful. There is in Thomas what one might term ‘significant’ influence indentifiable from Matthew and Luke. The influence is significant not because the redactional elements … which appear in Thomas are remarkably extensive in any particular places, but rather because these redactional traces appear in eleven out of twenty sayings in which they might be identified ( p 223).

He notes that it is not possible to know by what method this influence was exerted – whether it was oral, literary or “secondary orality”, but it is clear from the foregoing and succeeding parts of the book that his definite preference is that it is literary influence.

I find his arguments significantly less convincing than he does, especially for literary influence. He continually uses words such as ‘significant’ and ‘striking’ for extremely short strings of correspondence, similar wording that is not the same and the occasional shared use of an unusual word. Research on human memory has demonstrated that even members of highly writing-dependent cultures can reproduce strings of 15 words or more verbatim from memory and people living in oral and verbomotor cultures can do significantly better than this, so strings of 6-7 words, even with one of 13, are not convincing evidence of literary influence. While it is, of course, possible that the author of Thomas was familiar with written versions of both Matthew and Luke but chose to change the wording to suit his own ends, the evidence provided is not enough to rule out: oral transmission; a common source, either oral or written; or transmission of traditions that sprang from two different eyewitnesses to Jesus’ teaching. Gathercole dismisses the first two of these and does not address the third. Indeed, it appears that he has done very little reading in the area of oral transmission and none at all in human memory and eyewitness testimony. The latter two are, at least in my opinion, very important given that we hold that the gospels are, in general, eyewitness accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus which were transmitted orally in Christian communities for several decades before they were recorded in written form.

Part III looks at Thomas and other early Christian literature. Chapter 10 examines two passages in Romans and one in 1 Corinthians and concludes that Paul influences Thomas.  Chapter 11 looks at the phrase ‘the world is not worthy’ in the Epistle to the Hebrews and GTh 56, 80 and 111 and concludes that Thomas was influenced by the Epistle to the Hebrews. It seems to me that the argument he provides and dismisses for the expression simply being a pre-existing multilingual Jewish expression is stronger. Chapter 12 is entitled A note on the “two wys” tradition and GTh 25 and in it he concludes that Thomas should be included in the group of texts influenced by a hypothetical re-existing “two ways” source.

In summary, Gathercole finds that Thomas was originally written in Greek, is dependent on both Luke and Matthew as well as some of the Pauline corpus and the Epistle to the Hebrews (and probably other sources as well). Gathercole makes it clear that he is not arguing that the author of Thomas sat down with the texts of the Synoptics, Paul and Hebrews in front of him and copied and pasted as he saw fit, but it is also clear that he prefers the notion that there is literary rather than oral dependence of Thomas on the Synoptics. What this actually means, though, is rather unclear. The book would have benefitted from a careful definition of dependence (as would most works addressing this issue). Sometimes he suggests that this might be as vague as once having heard them read and remembering them, at other times, the reader gets the impression that he thinks that the author may have read them. In the latter chapters, he tends to use ‘influence’ rather than dependence, and this seems to be a better way of talking about what he is claiming. I think that  he succeeds in making it obvious that we simply do not have sufficient evidence to be able to be dogmatic about any theory of  composition of Thomas and that theories about source, dating, original language etc are all intertwined, but I do not find his arguments for his position nearly as compelling as he does.

Thomas as script consultant? (a temporary diversion from Gathercole)

What would a stageplay of the Gospel of Matthew look like if they used the author of the Gospel of Thomas as script consultant? An awful lot like Godspell, I suspect. We watched it yesterday because it was Easter Day, so the local TV stations were running some vaguely Christian programming. As I watched, I kept thinking two things:

• If I didn’t already know about the life and death of Jesus, this would make very little sense
• This reminds me very much of the Gospel of Thomas

Like Thomas, Godspell provides the audience with very little context. A man appears. He blows a shofar and people who are unhappy with their lives follow him. He baptises Jesus (dressed as a sad clown) in the local fountain and they go off to a secluded place where Jesus says things, fairly much a propos of nothing. Strange and probably fairly incomprehensible things if you don’t have the back story. We have no idea of the timeframe in which the teaching happens, no context from within which to understand any of the sayings, no miracles, no narrative at all. All very Thomasine.

I could make reasonable sense of it all because I knew the stories behind the sayings, but otherwise it would have been quite mystifying, I think. This reminded me of Thomas. Like the people in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century (Godspell’s implied audience), Thomas’ implied readers knew the backstory and therefore had no need of it to make sense of the sayings and anyone who didn’t needed to seek until they found it – not the author’s problem, really.  I don’t think this stripped down characteristic helps with the dating of Thomas, despite what a number of scholars want to suggest.

Of course, Godspell then moves out of  ‘sayings collection’ mode so that Jesus can be betrayed – in Godspell the movie, by the John the Baptist character – and die and be carried away, but no resurrection here, either. Jesus is simply presented as a teacher – as someone who could be described as the righteous messenger and wise philospher that Peter and Matthew proclaim him to be in GTh 13.  The screenplay is much closer to the gospel account than is Jesus Christ Superstar (no tapdancing Herod singing “prove to me that you’re divine – change my water into wine”, no disciples singing “then when we retire, we can write the gospels and they’ll still talk about us when we’ve died”), but it still moves the temptations to the night of Jesus’ betrayal and death and has a number of the people around Jesus saying words that the gospels put on Jesus’ lips. It also adds some material that’s only found in Luke. At the time when Superstar and Godspell were box office stage plays, the churches preferred Godspell because it was closer to the Bible, but they condemned both as not presenting the Gospel fully or accurately. Again, a lot like Thomas and the church fathers, really. And maybe, like the writers of Superstar and Godspell, the author of Thomas wasn’t trying to provide a full, accurate account of Jesus.