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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Gathercole on the composition of Thomas (5)

Chapter 5 is entitled Responses to Arguments for Independence and contains a discussion of the weaknesses that Gathercole perceives in the arguments for Thomas being independent of the Synoptics. I find a number of the things he says in it puzzling or surprising and often wish that he had provided examples to back up his [...]

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Gathercole on the composition of Thomas (4)

Chapter 4 is entitled “Positive evidence for a Greek-language origin” and in it, Gathercole addresses six areas: The material evidence of the manuscripts: Here, Gathercole says that we have no manuscript evidence of a Semitic version of Thomas but there are three fragments of  Greek copies. Although he notes that an argument from silence needs [...]

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Gathercole on the composition of Thomas (3)

In Chapter 3, Gathercole works through 77 areas in the Coptic text of Thomas that have been proposed by various authors as Semitisms. He looks at those identified by Quispel and Guillaumont and listed by DeConick in her The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation but adds a number of others presented elsewhere in the [...]

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Gathercole on the composition of Thomas (2)

The first section in Gathercole’s book deals with the original language of Thomas and consists of four chapters. This post will deal with the first two. In chapter 1, which is very short, he outlines the various theories that have been advanced about the language in which Thomas was originally written. When Puech announced the [...]

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Robert McIver – Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels

Last year, SBL published Robert McIver’s book Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels. I ordered it immediately but it sat on my shelf for several months before I had time to look at it. McIver is a fellow Australian and I met him at the SBL international conference in Auckland, New Zealand in 2008.  He [...]

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More on commentaries – Kasser

Back in January, I began a series of reviews of commentaries on GosThom and managed to do two.  Here is a third and I hope to do the rest over the next few weeks. Rodolphe Kasser’s L’Evangile selon Thomas Rodolphe Kasser, L’Evangile selon Thomas: présentation et commentaire théologique: Bibliothèque théologique; (Neuchatel: Editions Delachaux & Niestlé, [...]

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More on commentaries – DeConick

The second post in my series on commentaries on GosThom focuses on: April DeConick’s The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation DECONICK, A. D. 2006. The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation, With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel, London, T & T Clark (hardcover) and DECONICK, A. D. (2007). The [...]

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