Two Thomas-related links

Andrew Bernhard has posted an interview that he and Mike Grondin conducted with Christopher Skinner about his new book John and Thomas: Gospels in Conflict? (Wipf & Stock, 2009) on his gospels.net site. I’ve read the interview, but not the book – one of the downsides of doing graduate study part time is that you have to choose what you read and none of the texts that I’m looking at for my research appear in John. The interview, not surprisingly, concentrates on the relationship between the two gospels, something on which I have no considered opinion. Skinner’s response to the first question in the interview, however, makes a great deal of sense. The question is:

You point out in your book that questions about the Gospel of Thomas’s date of origin, relationship to the canonical gospels, and theology seem to have been inextricably linked in modern scholarship (either the text is treated as early, literarily independent, and non-gnostic OR late, literarily dependent, and gnostic). However, you clearly indicate your dissatisfaction with this situation by writing, “an awareness of this trend in previous scholarship points to the present need for careful examination of each question on its own terms.” Why do you feel it’s so important to treat each of these questions individually? And do you think that’s realistic?

The answer you can read on Andrew’s site.

In the interview that Skinner interacts reasonably significantly with the work of April DeConick, Elaine Pagels and Gregory Riley. April has posted a clarification of her position on her Forbidden Gospels site.

Two further notes about this book:

• Discussion about the book with Dr. Skinner is ongoing on the Gospel of Thomas e-list, and all are invited to participate. You will need to join the list in order to do so and you will be requested to give a reason for wanting to join. An interest in the discussion would be deemed an appropriate reason.
• Wipf & Stock have agreed to give a 40% discount to on-line purchasers who have visited Andrew’s site, so if this is an area of interest to you and you’re in the market for a copy of the book, head right over and find out what you need to do.

Update

Christopher Skinner has now responded to April’s response on his Peje Iesous blog.

 

Dynamic equivalence and inclusive language

In response to my previous post on dynamic equivalence, Mike Grondin asked some questions about my approach to inclusive language on the Gospel of Thomas email list. In particular he asked

1. why I think that “kingdom” excludes women since women can be both subjects and rulers?
2. why worry about the word “kingdom” when Coptic Thomas talks about the “kingdom of the Father”?

Seeing I am sure that not all readers of this blog also belong to the email list and I thought these were very good questions that made me think further about the issue, here are my responses in a somewhat more considered form than my response on-list:

Re Question 1:

I don’t think that the notion of  kingdom actually excludes women.  It simply makes them into second class citizens. Growing up as a woman in a British Commonwealth country, I have known ever since I was quite small that a kingdom is a place where men are privileged above women in the leadership stakes. We’ve had a queen for as long as I have been alive, but only because Elizabeth had no brothers. Although Princess Anne was her second child, as soon as her younger brothers were born, she was moved down the list of those in line to the throne to third and then fourth. While the wife of a king is a queen, the husband of a queen who is ruling in her own right is only a prince. A king or queen can have twenty daughters and their succession to the throne is in birth order, but as soon as a son is born, he gets shunted straight to the top of the line. This is why England has only had six queens in modern history – two Elizabeths, two Marys, an Ann and a Victoria. To give you some sense of how few this is, Elizabeth II’s father was George VI and his father was Edward VIII, then there were at least 8 Henrys, 4 Williams and quite a few James and Charles.

Because Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies, we all learn this stuff at school. It is quite clear to us that a kingdom is a place where a male is in charge unless there is no male available.  A woman in charge is always the last resort and the choice is based on chromosomes, not ability. Of course, it doesn’t work like this in all countries and in the US, I suspect that this kind of gendered hierarchy is not so deeply engrained and obvious.

In addition, if Crum is to be believed, Coptic speakers didn’t have the option of an alternative to MeNTERO to talk about the concept that we name “kingdom”, so the writer of Gos Thom didn’t deliberately choose a term which has masculine overtones – that was the only option available to express the desired concept.

Re Question 2

The term “Father” is the title, or  one of the titles,  of the current ruler. It doesn’t say anything about who’s allowed to be ruler, just who is currently in charge. The fact that the author of  Gos Thom has chosen to use  “Father” rather than “God” is at least as likely to be because the term “Father” emphasises the relational aspect of the divine as that the divine is conceptualised in masculine terms. I think the use of Father lines up with the notion that we are reading the secret sayings of Jesus that only those “in the know” get to hear.  Surely the readers of this kind of thing would be encouraged to think about the divine in the closer “Father” terms rather than the more distant “God” terms?

Comments, anyone?

 

gospels.net relaunch

Andrew Bernhard relaunched his gospels.net site this week.  It has a new look and in his words:

It is now “an online resource dedicated to the Gospel of Thomas and other early Christian gospels” … The design is straightforward. It includes a blog, which will focus on providing the latest news relevant to the study of early Christian gospels not included in the New Testament.

It also includes three web pages, which I have labeled “resource centers.”

Each resource center provides extensive lists of helpful online and offline resources. These lists aren’t intended to be exhaustive. Instead, I want to focus on highlighting top-quality websites, blogs, books, and articles that deal with the pertinent gospels and related subjects. I will ultimately be providing a summary of the nature of each offline resource, effectively creating a select annotated bibliography for each of the different gospels (but this will take some time since I’ve already got nearly 100 bibliographic entries posted).

The Thomas material is already linked in the blogroll from this blog, but I expect that some readers are also interested in the other non-canonical gospels. Andrew currently has material on the Gospels of Judas, Mary, Peter, Ebionites, Nazarean, Hebrews, Secret Mark, Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James, The Unknown Gospel: Egerton Papyrus 2 and Oxyrhynchus Parchment 840.

 

Dynamic equivalence in translation

I finally found time to have a look at Jim Getz’s Biblical Studies Carnival XLII, which contains links to some interesting posts and also has a Hitchhiker’s theme, so is doubly awesome. On it, I found links to AKMA’s series on exegesis.  The first post made me to think  about the whole issue of translation, how biblical scholars approach it, and why we approach it that way.

As I type, the SheepWorld glasses case that my daughter brought back for me from her student exchange to Germany is sitting on my desk. It says “ohne Mama is alles doof” and it has cartoon pictures of a range of things that are “doof” without Mama.  Now LEO, my favourite on-line German dictionary, tells me that doof can mean: daft; ditzy(Amer.); dopey; dumb; foolish; gormless (Brit.); or silly. The two big paper dictionaries we own say similar things and my daughter’s school German text-book translates it as “dumb”, so she is hesistant about adopting my contemporary Australian translation: “Without Mum, everything’s lame”, despite the facts that this is so much closer to the way she normally speaks than “everything’s dumb” and she only ever calls me Mama when she’s speaking German. I would argue that my translation gives your average Aussie a better feel for the intent of the words, even though the dictionary doesn’t give “lame” as an option for “doof” – clearly an example of dynamic equivalence. Dare I suggest that it also  displays a more sophisticated grasp of the relationship between the two languages?

Recently, I read a blog post where  someone was lamenting the fact that Bible translations are often wooden and unpleasant to read, unlike a good translation of some of the classic authors of antiquity. My response was “well, yes, but it doesn’t matter if they lose something in the translation – no-one is going to start a war over the way Pliny is interpreted.” All this has set me wondering about my own approach to translating Scripture and to translating Thomas and whether they’re different.

I know that when I translate both the Christian canon and Gospel of Thomas, I lean much further towards formal equivalence than I do when translating the words on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts. The genres are, of course, entirely different and my translation goals are different, too. The text on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts is generally only trying to convey one idea, although sometimes you simply can’t get it across in translation. Even my monolingual husband can hear that “Ich habe zehn Zehen, aber du kannst sie nicht sehen” loses something in the English  “I have ten toes but you can’t see them.” And I’m sure this is not nearly as amusing if you haven’t been part of the community of my daughter’s year at school where “I have toes” is the standard response when someone doesn’t want to answer a question.  As in: “Have you started that assignment yet?” “Um…I have toes?” Or a random comment to break an awkward silence. Or… but I guess you just had to be there.

It wasn’t until I started studying theology that I had any real sense that the writers of the Bible deliberately used various sorts of word play, including double and triple meanings, to convey ideas that we simply can’t get across in English translation without clumsy circumlocutions or footnotes.  It’s quite possible that they also used “in jokes” that we’re simply not aware of because we’re not part of the community out of which the text arose. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be funny bits in the Bible, which, after all is “inspired by God” and therefore “holy”, whatever you might understand by those terms.

So, what I am trying to do when I translate the texts I work with? When I work with the Canon for teaching and preaching purposes, I want a gender-inclusive text because I believe that we have sufficient evidence to believe that Jesus/God intended us to have a gender-inclusive community. I get cross when people insist on translating anthropos as “men”, thus taking an inclusive Greek word and making it into an exclusive English one. OTOH, I tend to lean towards “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did no master it” for John 1: 5 because, despite its masculine overtones,  “master” is the only English word I know that picks up the sense of the Greek katelaben – both understood and overcome are possible translations and I think this is intentional.  (I need to add that this is not an original thought – Prof Nigel Watson suggested it when he was teaching John’s gospel at the United Faculty of Theology – my theological alma mater). My other solution is to say “the darkness neither understood nor overcame it.” Here, I am using dynamic equivalence to get the idea behind the word across, whilst maintaining the inclusivity of the text. And, of course, I am making a judgement call in saying that I think that the author of John’s gospel was deliberately using a word that conveyed both those meanings.

When I started work on my PhD, I had as a working title “The parables of the Realm in the Gospel of Thomas and their parallels in the canonical Synoptic Gospels”. This arose out of my commitment to inclusive language translations and one of the academics who attended my preliminary presentation seminar suggested that this wasn’t a good enough reason to drop the word “kingdom”. I now talk about the “parables of the Reign in the Gospel of Thomas” because in Thomas it is quite clear that although the term MeNTERO (from eReRO – king) is used, the emphasis is clearly on the act of reigning rather than on the sphere in which the reigning is taking place. The fact that it also satisfies my desire for inclusivity is a definite bonus. It does mean, however, that I often have to say reign/kingdom because people tend not to make the link between reign and kingdom as readily as they do between realm and kingdom.

The problem, of course, with dynamic equivalence is that it sometimes makes it more difficult to get behind the translation to the original text, so if I am wrong in my assumptions about what the author was trying to convey, my reader has less chance of working out for her- or himself what the author (or God?) really intended. I am leading him or her up my personal theological garden path, which may get them into trouble. But then, unless my reader has a fairly good facility in the original language of the text, s/he is quite capable of making wrong assumptions anyway. I can’t remember any specific example off the top of my head, but I have a number of times listened to a preacher interpreting a piece of Scripture based on English synonyms, syntax or idiom and thought “but you can’t do that in Greek”.

I am far less worried about the possibility of making wrong assumptions about the mind of God in my research than in my preaching. I think this is partly because, as I said above, people are not going to start a war or make life-changing judgements about themselves or others on the basis of what I say in my thesis/dissertation. I don’t have that kind of authority in the sphere of academia. They are probably not going to start a war on the basis of my preaching, either, but could easily make wrong judgement calls. The fact that I am ordained means that people will often pay more attention to me than they do to lay people. It is also partly because just about everyone who is going to read the results of my research has a sufficiently high level of biblical and linguistic sophistication to understand the limitations of what I am saying whereas most of those who listen to my preaching don’t.

AKMA expresses dissatisfaction that his students tend to express their exegetical views as questions of the “could it be this?” type, rather than as assertions, and I understand both why he wants this and why the students don’t feel confident to do it. The more I work in the field, however, the more I am inclined to make assertions such as “on the balance of probability, it seems that X is true because Y” rather than “as you can see, X is clearly true.” And I guess that part of this is trying to steer the middle road between dynamic and formal equivalence in my translation.

 

Oh, oops!!

It has just been pointed out to me that my blogroll does not contain Michael Grondin’s website The Coptic Gospel of Thomas in Context. This site contains a number of very useful resources for the study of the Coptic text, including a Coptic-English interlinear version of the Gospel of Thomas and a transliteration scheme for Coptic.

Definitely worth a visit.

 

New Gospel of Thomas site

Last week, Mark Goodacre drew our attention to a Wayback Machine version of an on-line Gospel of Thomas bibliography which was maintained by Sytze van der Laan, a student of Tjitze Baarda, and which disappeared early this century.  I was just about to add the link to this page when Sytze himself posted to the Gospel of  Thomas email list that he is in the process of resurrecting the site. The new site contains an extensive bibliography of Gos Thom works, althought it doesn’t currently include any recent works. the bibliography is currently listed alphabetically by author’s family name, but he hopes to make it interactive.

The site also has the Greek text and translation of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments and he plans to add the Coptic text and translation in the future.  Well worth visiting and bookmarking

 

Is it just me…

…or is it somewhat odd that Review of Biblical Literature would publish a review in German of the English translation of a German commentary on the Gospel of Thomas (or any other book)?

The book in question is Uwe-Karsten Plisch’s The Gospel of Thomas: Original Text with Commentary translated by Gesine Schenke Robinson. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008 and the review is written by Tobias Nicklas from Regensburg University.

The description from the RBL website (I assume this is the publisher’s blurb) says:

This edition presents the texts in the classical languages and provides an English translation and a readily readable commentary. It includes: an introduction to the Gospel of Thomas; the complete Coptic text; the text of the Greek fragments and a Greek retranslation of all logia with parallel texts from the canonic gospels; an English translation; an extensive commentary; illustrations of the Coptic manuscript; an appendix with an index and bibliography. The introduction and commentary do not assume knowledge of the classical languages, making The Gospel of Thomas accessible to a broad audience.

Nicklas’ review is positive and it contains several passages from the English text which give a feel for Plisch’s writing style.  His concluding paragraph says (in my English translation):

The result is clear: U-K Plisch has produced an extremely interesting, important volume, which not only offers the necessary tools for beginners who are engaged in [studying] the fascinating text of  Gos Thom, but will also be consulted with some profit by the expert.

This is clearly a book that I need to own and I’ve already placed an order.  Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly cheap book (given that it’s paperback) and although the Australian dollar is looking significantly better on the world exchange market than it was a couple of weeks ago, it’s going to cost me AUD91.53 by the time I have it shipped to me.   Readers in the US will be able to buy it much more cheaply through Amazon.com, where it qualifies for their free shipping deal.

And is this a potential gym reading project? Well,  making an informed analysis of the translation of the Coptic text won’t be possible – although the sight of my trying to juggle the commentary and my hardcover copy of Crum on the very small platform on the exercise bike might amuse other gym users. It may well be possible to get an overview of the line of argument though, seeing I won’t need to have a separate copy of the text, and  I should have finished Schottroff by the time this book arrives.

Update

I am impressed! I ordered this book on 30 March from Amazon, using the standard international shipping rate which predicts 18-32 days to delivery.  It arrived on 15 April ie less than the predicted minimum time.  Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to take more than a cursory glance at it.   It also turns out that the book is hardcover, which makes the price much more reasonable.

 

Thomas, Gnosticism and WordPress Polls

OK.  So you can do polls in WordPress, and I have worked out how they worked, thanks to 35 people who voted in mine.  I am not sure, however, why one might bother.

I can say quite categorically that of the 35 people who voted in my poll, only 11 think that it is a gnostic text and one of those admits that this is not a personal opinion, but something s/he read somewhere. The other 24, together with Mike and Paul, who wrote comments, think it is something else.  Given the nature of this blog, it is probably reasonable to suggest that at least some of the voters are familiar with the debate, but who knows who voted and therefore whether this is a reasonable representation of current thinking in the field or not? WordPress polls only allow you to ask one question per poll, so you can’t get demographics to go with the answers.

In addition, as was pointed out to me in an email, who knows what definition of gnostic the respondents were using?  I personally warm to Birger Pearson’s as found in Ancient Gnosticism Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. (This book is currently sitting on my desk at home, so I can’t replicate it here, but it’s a much tighter definition than the one Michael Williams rejects in Rethinking “Gnosticism”:  An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. paperback ed. Vol. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.)

So, probably no more polls on this blog.

 

Is Thomas gnostic?

It appears that it is now possible to add polls to WordPress blogs (assuming one is able to deal with the tech bits), so I thought I’d do a slightly more serious one than I’ve seen on other blogs in the last day or so. When I tell people I’m doing a PhD on the Gospel of Thomas, many nod sagely and say “Oh, yes, the Gnostic gospel.” I actually don’t think it’s Gnostic but I’m wondering what other readers of this blog think. You will be pleased to see that there is an option where you can write in your own answer in case you don’t like any of mine. There is probably a character limit for the write-in box. If you find out what it is, please let me know.

Update
It appears that the comments in “other” don’t show up when you check the votes, so I will paste them here. So far, there are three:

• Wisdom literature with gnostic overtones
• It’s eclectic – wisdom traditions, mystic traditions, gnostic traditions, synoptic
• Gnostic, but only because that’s what I read somewhere.

Update 2
And a fourth:

• Wisdom open to gnostic interpretation

Update 3

The results say there are now five comments, but I can only find four.  I may have accidentally deleted it when I pressed ctrl-W instead of shift-W If your comment hasn’t been included, you might like to post a comment or email me at jredman2 at une dot edu dot au and I’ll put it up anonymously.

 

On asking the right questions

In the last few days, I’ve been participating in a couple of discussions on the Gospel of Thomas email list – one about Nicholas Perrin’s Thomas and Tatian and another about different ways of understand the term “son of man”.  My most recent response to one caused me to make a link between the paper I presented at SBL Auckland on eyewitness testimony and a post I wrote on this blog while I was in Texas last year about using the right tools.

One of the things that was highlighted for me in my reading of the psychological research about eyewitness testimony was the important of what questions are asked if you want to retain the integrity of your data.  So, if you line up half a dozen people and ask an eyewitness to a crime “which of these people did it?” you are more likely to get a positive identification, even if none of them was there, than you are if you ask “did any of these people do it?” If you ask someone “how fast was the car going?” you are likely to get higher speed estimates than if you ask “how slowly was the car going?”, and so on.

My lawyer friend refers to these as “leading questions” and she gets very frustrated when her husband doesn’t respond correctly to her leading questions in social situations. “You remember Judy, don’t you, R?” is supposed to be met with the response “Hello, Judy, how are you” or “Hmm, yes, your face is familiar but I can’t remember where we met” rather than “No, darling, I don’t remember ever seeing her before in my life”.

I think it is possible for biblical scholars (and other researchers) to ask leading questions which cause their analysis of the data of their research to be tainted.  So, if you approach Thomas asking “what evidence can I find that Thomas is dependent on the synoptic material?” you will potentially reach different conclusions to the ones you will reach if you ask “are there any passages in Thomas that are similar to and/or the same as those in the synoptics and if so, what might that mean?” The answer you give, especially to the first question will be further influenced by whether or not you have anything invested in the outcome.  That is, if you want the answer to be “lots of evidence” you are more likely to include tenuous evidence.  If you want it to be “none at all”, then you will discard anything that could reasonably be considered tenuous.

I think its actually quite difficult to resist the temptation to read into ancient Christian texts what we expect to see in them, especially if, like me, you’ve been trained as a Christian minister and listened to years and years of preaching on them.  I find it helps if I start with my Thomas text rather than one of the synoptic parallels, because the Thomas text is almost invariably different to the text I’m used to, so it shakes me out of my complacency and encourages me to question my comfortable understandings of the meaning of the parable in question.  I still want to ask, though, “what is Jesus saying here?” rather than “what is the text saying and how might its readers understand it?”  I guess the guiding principle ought to be that if you begin your research with questions you already know the answers to, you are asking the wrong questions.