Category Archive

Mike Grondin has added some new features to his Gospel of Thomas in Context website. You can now access the Gospel of Thomas saying by saying using a split screen format that gives you access to Mike’s interlinear Coptic/English version with notes in one part of the screen, together with the English translations by:

• Thomas O. Lambdin in Robinson, ed., 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library
• Beate Blatz, as in Schneemelcher, 1991. New Testament Aprocrypha
• Stephen Patterson & James Robinson, 1998, in The Fifth Gospel

in the other screen. Mike has added to his interlinear version the Jesus Seminar voting on the likely authenticity of the saying in question found in Robert Funk and Roy Hoover’s The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary. New York, Toronto: Macmillan, 1993 and April DeConick’s categorisation of the saying as Kernel or group one or group two accretion as found in her bookRecovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

Well worth a visit!!

PS - please excuse the funny formatting of the dates, above. If I put them in parentheses, it appears that browsers will read the html wrongly and produce emoticons!!

The person who found this page because they did a keyword search for “Snodgrass gospel Thomas” is almost certainly looking for:

Snodgrass, Klyne. “The Gospel of Thomas: a Secondary Gospel.” Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 1 (1989-1990): 19-38.

No idea where you might find it electronically, mind you, but it’s the only thing I’m aware of that Snodgrass has written on the Gospel of Thomas, although he does mention Gos Thom in his new book on parables whenever it’s relevant.

If we go by the secular calendar, this time last year, I was making final preparations to fly to Houston to spend five weeks at Rice University with April DeConick. If we go by the church calendar, this time last year, I had been in Houston five days and attended Maundy Thursday and Good Friday worship at the Rice Catholic Student Centre with my wonderful hosts, Judy and David Schubert.

I reflected on this as I sat in the Good Friday service in my home church this morning. There, I was surrounded by people I knew, even though my husband was home nursing a cold. The liturgy, although not actually predictable, was familiar, as was the venue. In Houston, I had been among strangers and the liturgy was in some aspects probably more predictable than the Uniting Church one and in others quite alien. Kissing the crucifix is not a part of the Uniting Church Good Friday ritual!

Christmas is a part of the church calendar that stays the same each year and fits quite nicely into the secular calendar of “Christian” countries. Although the story of Jesus birth is a bit odd, it doesn’t cause major problems for the average secular member of society.

Easter moves around - doesn’t fit neatly into the secular calendar at all. This year it is so early that the uni isn’t starting the mid-semester non-teaching period with Easter as it usually does - we’re just having four days off and then it’s business as usual for several more weeks before the break. The Easter message is also much more difficult for those who don’t practise Christianity to deal with. An interesting parallel, I think.

As our pastor led us in an affirmation of faith based on 1 Cor 1: 18-25 (the foolishness to the Gentiles and scandal to the Jews bit) and talked about the coming celebration of the resurrection, I thought about the Gospel of Thomas. If ⲡⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲡⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲑⲱⲙⲁⲥ (ie the gospel according to Thomas) is an early title for the text, the Thomas community must surely have had a very different theology of what constitutes ‘good news’ to that of the more orthodox Christian communities of the time.

A gospel that doesn’t contain an account of the (crucifixion and) resurrection must consider some other thing than Christ’s triumph over the power of death to be the important part of the gospel message, because the resurrection doesn’t get a guernsey in Thomas. It has, however, been extremely important in the understanding of “mainstream” Christians for nearly two thousand years, if the creeds of the early church are anything to go on.

Deciding exactly what was the heart of the gospel for Thomas Christians is beyond me at the moment. Maybe I’ll think about it later, but just at the moment I am trying to get to the end of my reading on eyewitness testimony in the psychological literature.

A little later

Bother.  Now I’m confused.  On Good Friday last year, I went with David to a marvellous, justice-focussed Stations of the Cross in the Exxon Plaza in downtown Houston, followed by a lunch at a restaurant on the way home.  That wasn’t an alien liturgy.  I’ve done Stations many times before, beginning at Theological Hall (seminary).  I know I went to a Maundy Thursday service at the Student Centre, but I’m pretty sure I went to a Good Friday one, as well.  Maybe in the evening?  Or maybe not?

I do know that on Easter Day, I was very pleased to be at a United Methodist service at St Paul’s, also near Rice, with Judy’s brother and his wife.  The very large church was very, very full and the liturgy was in some ways very like a Catholic one, except that we didn’t kneel (Judy’s brother, who had grown up Catholic, commented on this).  In many other ways, though, it wasn’t and I felt much more at home.

However, my lack of clarity twelve months on about exactly what I did last Easter lines up very closely with the reading I’m doing about eyewitness memory.   I just checked the two emails I sent home on Good Friday and Easter Day and discovered that I did go to church at the Catholic Student Centre on Good Friday - in the evening.  The gist of my recollections was correct, but the detail was a bit fuzzy and without the emails, I really wouldn’t have been sure.  I was very much inclined to think that maybe we’d been offered the option of kissing the crucifix on Maundy Thursday, even though that didn’t make sense liturgically.

This is actually very interesting.  Might be useful for my Auckland SBL paper.

April DeConick on The Forbidden Gospels Blog provides a link to Thomas Paterson Brown’s hypertext Gospel of Thomas on the Ecumenical Coptic project. This is an interlinear Coptic-English version of the Gospel of Thomas based on Guillamont, Puech, Quispel and Till’s version of the Coptic text, together with Michael Grondin’s interlinear. Underneath each Coptic word there are also links to relevant sections in Plumley’s Coptic Grammar and Crumm’s Coptic Dictionary. It provides, therefore, some helpful tools for understanding the Coptic text and the thinking behind the translation. Not, of course, a substitute for learning Coptic if you’re wanting to make a scholarly analysis of the text, but helpful. :-)  The Metalogos site has some really cool tools for study of the three Nag Hammadi gospel.

At the moment, however, it displays somewhat strangely in Firefox, which I use as my default browser. There are strange artifacts in some of the text on some pages - rectangular boxes that serve no useful purpose. It displays just fine in Internet Explorer 7. I’ve emailed Paterson Brown about this.

I was recently taken by something that R McLean Wilson wrote in his very early Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (A R Mowbray and Co, London, 1960). He introduces his consideration of the Gnostic element in Thomas by saying:

In the study of an ancient document much depends upon the pre-suppositions with which we begin, on the questions with which we approach the examination of the text.(p 14)

He goes on to say that if you concentrate on details and isolate passages from one another, while you may produce useful information, you may also miss the “range and sweep” of the document. General impressions acquired by looking at the text as a whole, however, may be misleading if not combined with a detailed examination. As Wilson so rightly states, if you start with the assumption that Thomas is dependent on the Synoptics, you can find evidence for dependence, and if you start with the assumption that it’s independent, many of the same things will provide evidence for that, so your initial assumptions are important.

I think Wilson’s comment is sound advice for all studies of ancient text. The challenge is to approach texts with a reasonably open mind and to look at the problematic elements and ask “What sorts of things might cause/explain this? Which of these is most likely and why? What are the minimum conditions that need to apply in order for explanation A to be true? And explanation B? And C, if there is a C? If it doesn’t fulfill either/any of the minimum conditions, what have I missed?”

I try to use this methodology on all occasions and hope that I am usually successful.

Jim Deardorff asks in the comments section of my last post

Where do heavily redacted eye-witness accounts fit into this? Are they considered non-eye-witness accounts?

I’ve moved this out of the comments section to respond to it, because I think it’s moved away from the purpose of the original post.

This is an interesting question although I think I’d pose it slightly differently and ask how heavily an eye-witness account needs to be redacted before we stop regarding it as an eyewitness account. I would suggest that once it gets to the point where none of the people present at the original event would recognise it as something they witnessed, you no longer have an eyewitness account. Of course, we have no way of determining this because of the distance between the events and now.

It’s possible that when we have accounts in several gospels of which we ask “is this the same story?”, we have several heavily redacted pieces of eyewitness material. We might, however, equally have accounts of several different events. For example, in the various accounts of a woman washing/annointing Jesus’ feet (John 12: 1-11; Matt 26: 6-13; Mark 14: 3-9) I think it’s quite likely that we have material that is so heavily redacted (by John) that it has almost moved to the stage where it can no longer be called “eyewitness” because I think it’s fairly unlikely that this kind of event happened more than once. When we’re dealing with different versions of parables, however, I think it’s equally likely that we have examples of Jesus using the same basic illustration but with different twists to illustrate slightly different points on different occasions. An example of this would be the Treasure parable in Matt 13:44 and Thomas 109.

How you deal with this question depends, of course on what you understand the canonical and non-canonical texts to be. At one end of the spectrum, you get an approach that accepts that Jesus was a real, historical figure and treats the canonical gospels as virtually minutes of Jesus’ life and ministry and the non-canonical texts are heretical documents written to draw people away from the One True Faith. At the other end are people who believe that Jesus was not a real historical figure and that the various canonical and non-canonical texts were written by people who were either attempting to illustrate what they considered were spiritual truths or to trick the gullible into doing what they wanted, depending on how charitable the person is feeling towards the early Christians.

Somewhere in the middle you get those who, like me, believe that Jesus was a real, historical figure but do not consider the early Christian documents as minutes of Jesus’ ministry. Rather, they are accounts written by early Christians whose lives had been changed by an encounter with God to help others to understand how God was working in their lives. Some people in this group believe that all the canonical gospel material is based on eyewitness accounts of contact with the historical Jesus, while others believe that some has a basis in fact and some is myth, written to illustrate Truth.

I don’t happen to think that picking up eyewitness accounts from several different times and putting them together for the purposes of furthering a theological argument renders the individual pieces of material “non-eyewitness”, even though the longer theological passage cannot be viewed as eyewitness.

April DeConick is the August biblioblogger of the month. In the interview, she talks at length about her views on the way the word Gnosticism is used and also about her takes on the Gospels of Thomas and Judas. Well worth a read.

April DeConick poses this question on her blog and I thought, as someone who is studying a non-canonical text, I might have a go at answering it.

Several people have suggested that one of the reasons that the non-canonical texts make us uneasy is because there isn’t a centuries-long history of interpretation for us to fall back on, so we don’t know what they mean. I guess this may be true, but for me it’s an opportunity to look at text without any major preconceived ideas about its meaning. Of course, we don’t have available to us a huge range of other people’s interpretations, just the occasional writing of a Church Father indicating that the author has got it wrong in a big way. If you are among the earliest scholars of the text, you don’t know ahead of time which people you’re aligning yourself with and who you’re disagreeing with. This could make you very uneasy, because some of our colleagues are not exactly gracious when they disagree with you.

One thing that makes me uneasy about drawing conclusions from the extra-canonical texts is that we have so few copies of them. When you look at the number of copies of the canonical texts that are in existence and the differences between them, you realise just how difficult it is to make any definitive statements about a text when there are only one or two or a handful of copies in existence. You might have a very accurate version of the original text, or you might have a wild corruption and you have no way of knowing.

I think, however, that the primary reason that non-canonical texts make us uneasy (or at least those of us who have grown up in a Christian church, no matter what we believe now) is that they have generally been labelled “heresy” by the mainstream church. Heresy, as we all know, is devised by Satan to lead the faithful away from the one true faith and into eternal damnation, so these texts are dangerous.

In fact, this is not how I conceptualise heresy at an intellectual level, but the indoctrination of decades dwells deep within my psyche and looking at “heresy” makes me uneasy (although it clearly doesn’t stop me). Coming to non-canonical texts with an open mind means that you might end up being convinced by what they say and thus end up outside orthodoxy. Which is uncomfortable. You might even end up believing that you should try to convey your new understandings to the orthodox church, which has the potential to be very uncomfortable indeed.

This, I think, is why there was (and still is to a certain extent) such an interest in looking at whether or not Thomas is dependent on the synoptics, and in using dependent/independent language in the first place, rather than talking about whether Thomas might have used one of the synoptics as a source, as we do when talking about the relationship between Mark, Matthew and Luke. If we can show “dependency”, then we feel that we are in a stronger position to argue that it is safe to ignore anything in Thomas that comes into conflict with orthodox Christian doctrine. If it’s not dependent, then we may have “authentic words of Jesus”, which makes us uneasy, because we may have to think about changing long-accepted doctrine/theology.

Today, April DeConick announced the launch of her new professional website aprildeconick.com, which she is using to move many of the resources she provided on her blog to a new, permanent home. It contains a Gospel of Thomas page which, at the moment, summarises her main conclusions about GThom and includes an FAQ. For those who are interested in Gnosticism, there is also a Gospel of Judas page which contains a summary of her findings about GJudas, together with a useful bibliography, plus information about the Mandaeans, the last living Gnostics. The site also includes information about the Codex Judas Congress which will be held at Rice in March 13-16, 2008 and be attended by an exciting range of scholars.

The page also has information about her teaching and the programmes available at Rice. It’s well worth a visit, especially if you are interested in pursuing studies in the area.

Just in case there are people who read this blog who do not also read April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog, today she has posted a review of Alistair Logan’s book The Gnostics. This book is on my “to read” list, but unfortunately, that also means it has to be on my “to buy, probably from outside Australia” list, so it won’t happen in the next week or two. It is a response to the North American critique and rejection of the category “Gnostics” and I am really looking forward to reading what he has to say.

I find characterising Thomas with respect to gnosticism challenging. On the one hand, knowing and understanding are important for salvation in Thomas, so it fulfils the characterisation of ‘gnostic’ that I was taught in my theological education (which, of course, would not have been simplistic, would it????). On the other hand, there is no evidence of a worldview where demiurges and other divine or semi-divine beings are involved in the creation and ruling of the earth and the heavens which I only learned about post-theological education.

I thus find Michael Williams’ and Karen King’s critiques of the use of the term helpful, because when people use it, especially in relation to Thomas, I wonder exactly what they mean by “Gnostic” (and usually make myself unpopular by asking). Thomas certainly doesn’t fit into Williams’ “biblical demiurgy” category, but it does place more emphasis on knowing and understanding than do the canonical gospels or orthodox modern characterisations of Christianity.

I am hoping that Logan will shed more light on the issue.

Thanks to Mark Goodacre for alerting me to the return of Peter Kirby’s online Gospel of Thomas commentary which has been unavailable for quite a few months and is now in a new place. Peter says about the site:

This site explores modern interpretations of the Gospel according to Thomas, an ancient text preserved in a Coptic translation at Nag Hammadi and Greek fragments at Oxyrhynchus. With no particular slant, this commentary gathers together quotations from various scholars in order to elucidate the meaning of the sayings, many of which are rightly described as “obscure.”

This massive effort at getting scholarly commentary together provides helpful insights into the sayings and Kirby also provides a bibliography with links to the Amazon.com site’s pages for most books. Two caveats -

1. Amazon isn’t always the best place to buy books of this kind - I would always try Eisenbrauns and, for secondhand books Abebooks, and compare prices.
2. It doesn’t (yet?) include DeConick’s commentary, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (T&T Clark-Continuum, London/New York, 2006) which offers new translations and an extension of the parallels provided by Funk. This commentary will soon be available in paperback, also through Continuum.

Mark also has a page of Gospel of Thomas links and one of more general links about non-canonical Christian texts.

As I was driving to the university this morning, it occurred to me that my response to the notion of Thomas from a Christian theological perspective was just a tad too cavalier. (I am blaming this on jet lag, because I can. ).

I am very dubious about our ability to recover the exact words that Jesus spoke. I am more confident that we can recover authentic Jesus content in terms of ideas and teachings, but not necessarily as Jesus said it. What we have available is manuscripts that give us some idea of how various early Christian communities understood Jesus’ teachings. How relevant they are for the Christian church today depends to a large extent on the framework in which they were understood at the time. How close was the framework to that which the Church currently understands as orthodox?

Michael Williams calls into question the usefulness of the term Gnosticism, as does Karen King. Williams suggests that there was a group of people who

1. accepted the biblical demiurgical proposition that the cosmos was not created as a result of the initiative of the highest God,
2. were intensely interested in speculation about the true nature of divinity and the supracosmic realms
3. were focussed on the soul’s eventual transcendence of the created order and on patterns of spirituality that would contribute to this goal
4. saw nothing un-Christian in these views. (Rethinking Gnosticism Princeton University Press, 1999, 261-262)

He calls this position “biblical demiurgical”. Orthodox Christianity clearly does see something un-Christian in these views and non-canonical manuscripts that come out of this framework are not of much use to the Christian theologian, but I don’t see Thomas as fitting into this category because I don’t see evidence of 1. or 2. in the text. So, if it is not biblical demiurgical/gnostic, is early and is likely to contain authentic Jesus tradition, I think that the Church needs at least to ask questions like: What if the councils of the early Church got it wrong? How different would our practice of the faith look if we added Thomas to our mix of Scripture? Thomas was condemned as heresy by some of the early Fathers, but is there a problem with the text itself or was it with how the communities who held it to be authoritative used it? How important is the tradition of the Church in determining what we believe and how we live today? (Of course, different branches of the Church will answer this last quite differently.)

I recently received an email which asked me what I think the implications of assuming an early dating for Gospel of Thomas might be on our understanding of the canon, given that one would assume that an early manuscript would (likely) contain significant amounts of authentic Jesus tradition. I found this a very interesting question and thought I might share my musings about it on this blog. This is what I think at the moment. I make no promises that I will still hold this position in six months’ time and am very happy for readers to disagree with me.

I don’t think that this is a question that has been addressed in any systematic way by scholars, although it is the logical question to ask about material that has been named as early and independent of the canon. My feeling is that the original Thomas scholarship was largely done by Christian Biblical scholars who really, really, really hoped that they would not need to revise two milennia of Christian scholarship, so they began with the hope that they could show that Thomas was not “more authentic” (whatever that might mean) than the canonical material and they breathed a huge sigh of relief when they decided that it was dependent on one or more of the synoptics and/or clearly gnostic. Since then, there has been a lot of debate about whether or not Thomas is “dependent” on the canonical gospels (although I don’t see people suggesting that Matthew and Luke are “dependent” on Mark) but I don’t recollect any of those people who have argued that Thomas is independent suggesting that this might have any effect on how we view the canon.

I think before we answer the question, though, we need to ask what we think an “authentic Jesus tradition” actually is and what it signifies.

I think that Christians in general tend to read the canon and gain the impression that Jesus only ever taught any of his teaching or told any of his parables once, so there is only one authentic original version of Jesus’ teachings. I don’t, however, think that this is particularly likely. Given that Jesus was an itinerant preacher/teacher/miracle worker who was trying to convince the Jewish people of his day that they’d strayed quite a distance from God’s desired path for them, it seems far more likely to me that he had a core of teachings that he used in most places, complete with a set of illustrations that went with them, but that he would have made adjustments to how he told them according to the audience he was talking to. So, he told his agricultural illustrations somewhat differently to a group of farmers to the way he did to a group of town-dwellers etc and he may have used different illustrations to make the same point depending on his audience. Thus, different audiences would have heard somewhat different versions of the same stories - same general thrust but different details. In other words, there could well have been several authentic versions of at least some of Jesus’ parables and sayings and we have no way of deciding which, if any of them, is the “best”, most “authentic” version. If we don’t accept this, then what do we do with the parallel versions of parables and sayings within the synoptic tradition?

In addition, as Bauckham points out in his book, the way that eyewitnesses retell stories varies. If you ask a group of people who have witnessed an event to tell you what happened, you’ll get a range of different accounts because of things like vantage points, personal situations and interest etc. So, four different people going away from hearing Jesus and telling their friends/family/local community about it, would result in four different accounts, even if the people were doing their best to give an accurate account of what they witnessed/heard. There is no guarantee that anyone was trying to produce an accurate, unbiased account of what they witnessed/heard because they didn’t see themselves as being witnesses in a court of law. Rather, they were bearing witness to a significant experience which they may or may not have discerned as being an experience of God.

So, if we accept that the Gospel of Thomas was early, it tells us that there were other versions of Jesus’ teachings in circulation in the early church and that some of the early Christians were happy to treat them as authoritative - otherwise they would not have given them the title “gospel”. Even taking into account the fact that Thomas is in Coptic and the canonical gospels are in Greek, Thomas has very little of the verbatim repetition of material that you see between Mark and Matthew and Luke, so I think it’s pretty unlikely that Thomas used one of the canonical gospels as a source ie Thomas is not dependent on the canonical gospels. However, that doesn’t mean that some communities a little later on did not have access to Thomas and one or more of the other gospels.

I don’t think that the dating of the various gospels alone tells us much about what might or might not be authentic Jesus tradition, but I suspect that the differences between parallels in different gospels are less due to deliberate redaction and more to oral transmission and Jesus having taught the same things slightly differently in different places than many scholars have suggested in the past. That is, I think that more than one of the variants we have available could be “authentic Jesus tradition”.

So, what implication does Thomas being early and potentially containing authentic Jesus tradition have for our understanding of the canon?

I think that what you finally conclude about Thomas and the canon depends to a significant extent on whether you are working from inside or outside the Church and therefore what weight you are prepared to give to the work of the Spirit in guiding the Church to select material for the canon. Those working within a secular framework tend to talk about what ended up in the canon in terms of political winners and losers, whereas those working within a Church framework tend to be somewhat more hopeful that the Councils of the Church actually tried to listen to the leading of the Spirit and even did a halfway reasonable job of hearing God (which requires a belief that there is a Spirit to do the leading in the first place, of course). I belong to a denomination that tries to take very seriously the notion that consensus decision-making in the councils of the Church should be in response to the Spirit and I have seen some radical changes in opinion and attitude taking place in church meetings as we listen to one another, so I tend to be more hopeful that the development of the canon involved more than politics, but that’s a faith stance rather than one for which I can produce empirical historical evidence. And there are times in church meetings when I wonder…

However, when I read the canon through the eyes of a Christian theologian/preacher/teacher, I am asking the question “in the light of what this says, how should I and other Christians live our daily lives?” My faith stance says that I do not need to take Thomas into account when I answer this question, or at least do not need to give it anywhere near the weight that I do those texts that the Church has declared to be canon.

When I look at Thomas in connection with my doctoral research, though, I am asking a different question. I am asking “what does this tell me about how early Christians understood the Christ event and what it meant for their daily lives?” My faith stance is irrelevant when I try to answer this question because I am not looking at Christians now, but at Christians then and I am not starting with the assumption that I need to be able to harmonise the teachings in all of them, but rather working on the assumption that the people who held these texts to be authoritative quite probably didn’t have access to the others so didn’t try to harmonise the teachings in them. It doesn’t matter what I think about the authenticity of the Jesus tradition contained in each of “my” texts, because the people who wrote and used them held them to be authentic and acted upon that belief.

I think that the fact that we are dealing with written records of orally transmitted eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ ministry and teaching means that we have no accurate way of making empirical decisions about what is and isn’t authentic Jesus tradition, but I don’t think it actually matters. We are not, in the end, going to be able to prove Christianity (or any other religious belief system) - it will always require some level of faith commitment. While I think that Christianity is far more logical than a requirement to “believe five impossible things before breakfast”, it isn’t science, either. Historians of early Christianity will choose a different standard for evaluating the reliability of different versions of Jesus’ teaching than does the Church, but they are using the texts for a different purpose, so that, I think, is OK. The problem comes when Christian theologians want to use their standard for evaluation as a yardstick to measure history and historians want to use their standard to judge theology.

Please note that I am not saying that it is perfectly OK for Christians to believe any bizarre thing that takes their fancy and justify it as a “faith” stance, nor for historians to totally disregard what a body of believers have thought over the course of two thousand years - there needs to be some overlap between standards.

I am currently reading Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006) and need to stop and think about his statements about eyewitness testimony. I have thought for quite some time that the earlier dates for all the gospels would not preclude the possibility that at least one of the sources that the authors had to draw on would be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry and death, but what I’ve read of Bauckham’s book so far (the beginning, bits of the middle and the end) leaves me with questions.

The book builds on the work of Samuel Byrskog (Story as History - History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History. Leiden: Brill, 2002) and in his first chapter he tells us that Warren Carter critiques the fact that Byrskog provides little in the way of criteria either for identifying eyewitnesses or for identifying eyewitness testimony in the tradition. (11) Bauckham says he will attempt to do this in the following chapters. I recognise that this is a big ask, but I haven’t found the criteria for identifying eyewitness testimony yet (even by cheating and reading the last chapter). This is disappointing, since I’ve had a gut feeling that Thomas is potentially closer to eyewitness accounts than the canonicals and a nice, neat list of critera for testing this would have been really great! Bauckham does, however, spend quite some time on identifying the eyewitnesses.

Bauckham says in the first chapter that we need to recover the sense in which the Gospels are testimony and contends that testimony is a valid form of history and that it “should not be treated as credible only to the extent to which it can be verified. “(5) He also says “Testimony offers us . . . both a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as history, and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.” (5)

In talking about testimony, Bauckham stresses the kind of testimony that comes from a court of law. At least in British, Australian and North American courts, this kind of testimony is fairly objective. Witnesses are generally not permitted to pass on hearsay, or to speculate much on the significance of what they have experienced or witnessed. They just recount their memories of what actually happened.

My problem with testimony outside a court setting is that it normally involves significant amounts of interpretation and Bauckham seems not to deal with this aspect. Modern Christian testimony tends to begin “Let me tell you how God has been working in my life this week . . .” and while it will tell you facts as perceived by the person speaking, it will also attribute explanations to those facts that come out of a particular world view - one in which God is very actively involved in the lives of human beings. Thus testimony will tell you that when person X was running late for an important appointment she prayed that God would guide her and someone drove out of a parking space right outside the place where she needed to be just as she got there, so she was able to arrive at the appointment right on time. This, then, is proof that God hears and answers prayer and/or that God wanted her to make it to the appointment on time.

In many circumstances, there is no reason to doubt that the parking space event really happened, but we might not want to accept the intepretation that goes with the story. On the other hand, when someone else in the local Christian community hears the story and decides to write it down as part of a set of examples about how God answers prayer, we may be more cautious about believing even the story itself, depending on what we see as the motivation behind the retelling.

In church over Easter I found myself reflecting on John’s account of the crucifixion. (Someone thought it would be cool to present chs 18 & 19 in plainsong chant with choir and soloists, which took over 20 mins, so there was plenty of opportunity for reflection.) I got stuck on 19:22-24:

²³ When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. ²⁴ So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says,“They divided my clothes among themselves,
and for my clothing they cast lots.” (NRSV)

I have no idea what translation they sang, but it actually said “They did this to fulfill what the scripture says . . .” I remember thinking “Sure they did - four Roman soldiers decided to cast lots for Jesus’ robe so they could fulfill Hebrew Scripture!” The NRSV is not quite so problematic, but it certainly fits into the category of testimony that involves interpretation from a faith perspective, which in turn makes me wonder about how likely it is that this kind of material is close to an eyewitness account and how much it might have been re-remembered over time to fit the notion that Jesus came in fulfillment of Scripture.

Bauckham includes a very helpful chapter on Eyewitness Memory, which looks at recent research on the nature and reliability of eyewitness accounts, but it raises for me the question of why it is important whether or not we have eyewitness accounts.

He contrasts the heavily embroidered and largely fictional account that Rossini gave in later life of his youthful attempt at meeting with Beethoven with the very reliable account of an 85 year old man of an event that happened when he was ten years old. This highlights for me the patchy nature of eyewitnesses - the fact that we have an eyewitness account means very little without significant evidence that it is the account of a reliable eyewitness. An eyewitness account from a Rossini type would be of significantly less value than something that had been passed through several layers of oral transmission within a community like the one described by Kenneth Bailey (”Middle Eastern Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels.” Expository Times 106 (1995): 363-67), where the audience saw themselves in the role of custodians of accuracy, reminding the teller when s/he left something out or got important details wrong.

So, while I did not take much convincing that the gospels could easily be quite close to eyewitness accounts (especially Thomas), I haven’t found any criteria for making this judgement and I am not sure that I really see why this is so important. In the end, most of us are making (non?)faith-based/religious judgments about whether or not the gospels are reliable, trustworthy documents and I don’t see that this is likely to hinge on how close they are to eyewitness accounts.

Maybe I’m just being slow, or maybe I should have waited until I’d finished it before blogging? Constructive comment would be most welcome.

Hmmm. Two posts in one day - so much for my hiatus!

On 9 February, Phil S posted a comment to April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog in response to her “Reading History out of Theology” in which he said “I am suspicious of [the hermeneutic of suspicion] because, while it has yielded useful historical results, it is also a distortion because we assume that the authors are simply not able to give a truthful narrative about anything.”

I was surprised that this was how he understood the concept, although perhaps it isn’t surprising when you consider that it’s associated in many people’s minds with feminist theological polemic such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s statement that “a feminist critical hermeneutics of suspicion places a warning label on all biblical texts: Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival” (in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, Letty Russell (ed) (Westminster Press, 1985)). More recently, she has spoken about it in less emotive and more academic terms as:

A deconstructive practice of enquiry that denaturalises and demystifies linguistic - cultural practices of domination ….. It has the task of disentangling the ideological functions of kyriocentric text and commentary. (Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation, (Orbis, 2001) p 176)

Schussler Fiorenza is, of course, talking about a feminist hermeneutic of suspicion. In more general use, I think the term suggests that we need to recognise that all eye-witness accounts of events are told from a particular perspective and that all interpretations of those accounts are coloured by the perspective of the interpreter. We need to keep this in mind in our dealings with the accounts and their interpretation.

This is not saying that the person telling the story or the person interpreting the story are not telling the truth. It simply says that we should be wary of assuming that we are hearing everything that happened at the time. Different people notice different things about the same events, which is why eye-witness accounts of accidents vary. People also notice different things if they are looking or reading for a particular purpose.

Early scholarship on Thomas was, I think, coloured by the fact that most scholars were Christian biblical scholars looking for evidence about whether or not the discovery of Thomas was going to require radical revision of orthodox Christian theology. Certainly much of what I have read of comparisons of the parables that appear both in Thomas and one or more of the synoptics makes comments about whether or not the Thomas version is more or less ‘authentic’ than the synoptic version. I find that I don’t always agree with the conclusions they draw but the observations they make in the course of reaching these conclusions are often important in developing an understanding of what the Thomas community might have believed. I would suggest that in reading their work in this way, I am employing a hermeneutic of suspicion, but I am certainly not suggesting that they are not telling the truth.

Sometimes, also, we see what we expect to see and don’t necessarily notice something different immediately, or at all. One of the parables that I am working on is the parable of the treasure (Thomas 109; Matthew 13: 44). Christian scholars are used to Matthew’s version, in which the Realm/Kingdom is like a treasure, buried in a field and found by someone who then sells all he has to buy the field. One of the significant differences between Matthew and Thomas is that in the Thomas version, the Realm/Kingdom is like a person in whose field there is a buried treasure about which the person knows nothing. All of the interpretation of Thomas that I have read so far talks about this parable as though the Realm/Kingdom is being compared to the treasure, even when the writer of the interpretative comment has indicated that the subject of the parable is the person, not the treasure!

The parable is much easier to understand if the Realm/Kingdom is the treasure - something valuable from which you can only benefit if you find it. In the Thomasine parable, three people own the field, but only one finds the treasure and uses it. Whether or not you see GTh as a gnostic text, it is quite clear that the writer is interested in knowledge, so if the Realm/Kingdom is the treasure, then we have a story about knowing and not knowing about the Realm/Kingdom. Perhaps this is the way the parable should be understood. Perhaps an error has been made in the copying or an adjustment has been made to suit the purposes of an editor, but the fact remains that this is not what the text says.

The writer of Thomas clearly views the Realm/Kingdom differently to the writer of Matthew, the only synoptic that has a significant number of Realm/Kingdom parables. I haven’t done enough detailed work on the rest of these parables to enable me to decide whether this parable as it stands lines up with the rest of what GTh says about the Realm/Kingdom or whether the easy interpretation is the one that makes most sense, but again I am employing a hermeneutic of suspicion - this time about both the text that we have in front of us and the way that it has been interpreted by scholars who are expecting to see the Matthean version of this story. Again, I am not trying to suggest that anyone is not telling the truth - simply that they haven’t seen everything there is to see.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog is April DeConick’s new blog, which looks at a range of texts from early Christianity that fall outside the New Testament canon. April is Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University and author of a number of books on the Gospel of Thomas, the most recent being her commentary, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation. In the first post in her blog, she says:

What impedes our examination of early Christianity is not the limitations of historical criticism as some in the Academy would like to lead us to believe. The impediment is the fact that the majority of biblical scholars still have not dislodged themselves from their own faith perspectives. As long as this is the case, historical inquiry is impossible because the historical-critical perspective cannot be used uncompromisingly. Although I recognize that there can be no “objective” history recovered or written, this doesn’t mean to me that all subjective inquiries are the same. The theological inquiry is not the same as the historical.

This is certainly something I find challenging in my work on Thomas. I am a Uniting Church minister, trained to exegete Scripture for the benefit of the faithful. I find looking at Thomas in some senses liberating - I don’t need to ask the “how then shall I live?” question of it - but there are times when I find myself “stuck” in orthodox theology. I love doing textual analysis, but sometimes it’s a little difficult, given that I am working with familiar parables, to really concentrate on what the writer is saying, rather than bringing with me the baggage of two millenia of traditional interpretation.

I’m really looking forward to my five weeks at Rice later this year!