Women in movies and the Bible

Yes, I know this is totally off topic,  for what I’ve been blogging lately and doesn’t have much to do with the gospel of Thomas, but it is my blog… Akma has posted a link to a Youtube video on the Bechdel test for women in movies. It encourages the viewer to ask three questions: [...]

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Consequences of multiple tellings of stories

Ben Byerly and Mark Goodacre have made comments on this post which have caused me to give some more thought to how the tradition might have been effected by the extreme likelihood that Jesus told at least some of his stories more than once. I think there are two issues. 1. Development of separate tracks [...]

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An overview of Perrin’s “Thomas, the Other Gospel”

I recognise that I have started to talk about Nicholas Perrin’s Thomas, the Other Gospel (SPCK, 2007)in a rather piecemeal fashion, which gives a very skewed idea of his subject matter. Since I probably wouldn’t appreciate it if someone did that with my writing, I offer an overview, which probably should have been done first. [...]

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Dr Who as a test case for human memory?

I am not sure whether I am just verbose, but I started to respond to comments by Mark (Goodacre) and James (McGrath) to this post and it got very long, so I’ve moved it again. Mark said: McIver and Carroll appear to assume that the writing-up of a short-term memory of a single text in [...]

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Perrin on context of Jesus’ speeches

Much to my delight,  Mike Bird has posted a guest post by Nick Perrin over at Euangelion which further explains his position on the importance of context for Jesus’ speeches (Nick’s, not Mike’s). He says: If the historical Jesus is to be understood in a Jewish context (which now just about every Jesus scholar writing [...]

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Speeches of Jesus (3) – human memory experiments

Again, I am  moving a comment up to a post of its own. Mark Goodacre says, referring to April DeConick, “Human Memory and the Sayings of Jesus” in Tom Thatcher (ed.), Jesus, the Voice and the Text: Beyond The Oral and Written Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008): 135-80 and Robert K. McIver and Marie [...]

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Speeches of Jesus (2)

Doug Chaplin over at Clayboy has responded to my previoius post on Speeches of Jesus, adding two cautions. My response to his response is also too long to go in the comments.  He says: First, in the canonical gospels there are incidents which are quite differently narrated, such as the story of the woman who [...]

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Speeches of Jesus & the Canon – Perrin on Thomas (2)

In the next chapter of Nicholas Perrin’s Thomas, the Other Gospel, I find myself surprised again, this time by a comment about April DeConick’s work. He says on p 61 that either she must develop a very complicated explanation of how the early church took “these Jesus speeches” and cut them up and recombined them [...]

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Belief in Jesus? – Perrin on Thomas

I am currently reading Nicholas Perrin’s  Thomas, the Other Gospel (London: SPCK, 2007). It’s been on my shelf for ages but something else has always pushed itself to the fore until now. He begins by outlining his project – the quest for the historical Gospel of Thomas, then outlines the work of Stephen J Patterson, [...]

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Typing Coptic – 2

Some months ago, I posted some information about typing Coptic on a PC (using Unicode fonts) but recently Andy Finke has done some further investigation and has been posting his results in the comments section of that post. This post pulls out the relevant information about  getting a functional Coptic keyboard in whatever version of [...]

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