While I was doing my Masters’ Qualifying in the 1990s, the library of my institution got its first electronic index. This was burned on a CD-ROM and posted to the library. I think it came out once a month, and apparently it was very expensive. The chief librarian watched over it and its users like a hawk and mere students were absolutely not allowed to touch the actual CD, but it did speed up the searching.

Now, I can log into the library databases from my office or home study to do searches to find out what has been published that might be relevant to my work and usually my search will also tell me if my library has it available. I can then develop a list of items that I want to borrow, print them out and take them with me. I can find out which items someone else has the temerity to have out when I want them without having to go to the bother of checking the shelves. I can put a hold on these items and I’ll get an email when they come in. I can do interlibrary loan requests on line and I will also get an email when these arrive.  I can also use Google Scholar and WorldCat. So much information is literally at my fingertips.

The upside of this is that it’s so much quicker and easier to find out what has been written that is relevant to your research, which is stimulating and exciting. It also makes it much easier to ensure that your research is well grounded.

The downside is that you are therefore expected to find the relevant material, read it and comment on it. And because plagiariasm is such a big deal it’s essential that you make as sure as you possibly can that you have found everything. If the idea that popped into your head has already been pubished by someone else (because it is, after all, a logical conclusion to draw from the facts) in a language that you can reasonably be expected to understand, and you don’t acknowledge this and explain why your formulation of it is superior or at least how it confirms the previous research, you could be putting your career on the line. This makes most researchers I know not a little uneasy, so they search as meticulously as they can.

It would be interesting to see whether it has had any effect on how long it takes for ideas to reach publication (although I have no idea how you’d design this particular piece of research, seeing I doubt that there are any “before-the-internet” statistics available)! A casual glance at the material in my personal library suggests that it has resulted in more citations per journal article or book than was common several decades ago. It would be easier to design research to confirm this, but not something I currently have the time or inclination to do. And maybe someone else has already done it?

As an aside, I remain perplexed by the number of scholars who seem to think that the aim of writing is to sound erudite, rather than to communicate ideas – or maybe it’s because in this ‘publish or perish’ academic climate, people don’t have the time to polish their work for readability.

I first read about this in a digg post by James McGrath, linking to his longer post on Exploring our Matrix.

1. If your manuscript comes back from the reviewers with recommendations for change, bear in mind that someone needs to check that you have actually addressed them effectively, so it is really helpful if you include a note with the new manuscript that indicates how you think you have done what they asked. List each recommendation and then say how you have dealt with it. If you are not going to do what has been suggested, (and this is your right – reviewers are not infallible) it is crucial that you justify this. I personally would not bother prefacing this note with “the author(s) thank(s) the reviewers for their helpful comments” because (a) you probably don’t, since many of them are not tactfully phrased even if they’re correct and (b) in most cases, the reviewers probably aren’t going to be the people who check the revised manuscript unless perhaps the person who is checking it thinks you have done a really bad job of addressing the recommendations and one of the recommendations is that the paper only be accepted if it is radically reworked.
2. Reviewers don’t always make sensible comments. One comment I read suggested that the paper would be better if it stopped trying to stretch itself to be relevant to distance education and confined itself to topic X. This was, in fact, true, but seeing the conference at which it is to be presented was on distance education, what s/he should have recommended was that the authors articulated more clearly how the  model they were advocating was (particularly) relevant to teaching by distance.  Reviewers may say that the paper would be much better if A was expanded, and this may well be true, but if the paper is already up to the word limit and you have already edited it very tightly to get it that short, you won’t be able to expand A unless you drop something else. An alternative is to flag A as something that would be worthy of being dealt with further in another publication.
3. Reviewers don’t always agree and you sometimes have to read between the lines of their comments. You may be presented with one set of comments that says that the paper would be much better if it omitted all reference to X and another that says that the best bit of it was the section about X which needs to be expanded. Since you obviously can’t do both, you need to decide which reviewer to go with, but bear in mind, if you decide to expand the material about X, that you probably haven’t articulated clearly enough how X is relevant to the rest of the paper if the other reviewer thinks it can be cut out completely. See if you can make the links clearer.
4. Remember that while you will probably never know who your reviewers are, they may well make a point of reading the final version of your paper when it is published, or of attending your conference presentation. They have expertise in your field or they would not have been asked to review it in the first place, so keeping them on side if possible is not a bad idea. Try to take as much of their advice into account as you can, or indicate subtly why you haven’t (eg “Some might suggest that A, but in view of X & Y, it seems more likely that B”). In particular, if they suggest that you might find a particular article or author’s work useful, include it in your revised version if at all possible. The published version of the paper is the right place to put your little note about thanking the reviers, if they did indeed make helpful suggestions.
5. Once you have completed your revisions, check the manuscript very carefully – not just for typos and oddities of expression; also check the references very carefully. The editors will pick up your typos, but not incorrect references, and it is possible that in moving text around you have left some or all of the relevant citions in the wrong place, or removed a point without removing the relevant citations. This is particularly likely if you have initially said something like “Many sources demonstrate that A and B are important” and you then change the sentence to say “Many sources demonstrate that A is important”. You need to check that none of the citations are only relevant to B, which you have now removed. If what you have written is of any interest in your field, people will check those references because they want to read more about your subject matter (or because you have cited them and they want to see what you’re saying abou their work) and you will end up looking careless or silly.
6. When you have what you believe to be the final version of the text, remove the bibliographic software codes and make sure that the formatting complies with the style guide. If the conference, journal or organisation provides a template you would ideally have been using it from the outset, because applying template styles to your headings, bullets etc is much faster than manually formatting each of them every time you use them, but it is still not too late to attach it to your text. Be a little wary about conference proceedings templates and style guides, though. If they have been adjusted from some well-recognised format, they may not be free of error because the adjustments may have been done in a hurry by a member of the organising committee whose primary expertise is in another area. I have recently been working on a paper for a conference, the template for which does not apply the level 3 header formatting prescribed in the style guide. The style guide is also fun. It says that references should be formatted to comply to APA 5, which I did. I then read it a bit more carefully and discovered that what they really wanted was APA 5 with modifications to the way electronic articles are cited. I agree that their method is more user-friendly but if they’d said up-front that they wanted a modified form of APA 5, I would have read the formatting examples more carefully the first time round.

What you are aiming to do with all this is to make your paper as easy to publish as possible. If you are not a Big Name in your field, you want to create a good impression with the editor(s) as someone whose work doesn’t take huge amounts of staff time and effort to get into publishable form. Even if you are a Big Name, I would argue that it is a courtesy to the people who are putting the publication together to prepare you paper well, but if you’re an early career researcher (aka beginner) being a pleasure to work with cannot do you any harm at all in the publishing stakes. Especially since many of the people involved are doing their editing work on top of their other academic workload as part of their service to the academic community.

I have been editing theses/dissertations for quite a few years, and in the latter part of my undermployment, I was paid to check whether the revised versions of papers submitted as peer reviewed articles for a conference proceedings had satisfactorily addressed the reviewers’ comments and then to edit them for inclusion in a book. This was an eye-opening experience, not the least because by no means all the authors of problematic manuscripts were students!!

It does not matter how brilliant your argument material is, if it is presented with poor formatting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax or general written expression, it is less likely to make a favourable impression.  As a result, I offer the following for students who are preparing articles/papers for peer review and theses/dissertations for examination:

1. Even if the style guide being used by the publication is, IYNSHO, an abomination unto the Lord (like APA 5 or 6), you still have to follow it if you want to see your paper in print. If you are submitting for a conference and they are desperate for papers, the organisers/editors might send your paper out for review in the wrong format, but they will not reformat it for you for publication and in particular they will not transform your beloved footnote referencing system into in-text references or vice versa. Or even transform your Harvard references into APA. This is at least partly because your paper in its current format does not contain the information they need to do this quickly and they certainly don’t have the time to go looking for it. I would recommend putting all your references into a good bibliographic software program (eg Endnote or Zotero) because you can change referencing styles quickly, easily and far more accurately than you can manually.
2. Having a PhD, even in Education, does not guarantee that a person has a good grasp of grammar, syntax, punctuation or general good written expression – just that they know a lot about a particular area. It is also not your supervisor’s/advisor’s role to proofread and edit your work, unless his/her name is going on the paper. Even then, s/he may not have good proofreading skills. Thus, the fact that s/he has read it and said it is OK does not mean that it is ready for publication, just that it contains no major errors or idiocies.
3. If you are enrolled in a good educational institution, they will provide guides on spelling, punctuation and common grammatical mistakes. Read them. If anything in them surprises you, check your manuscript to see that what you have written complies with the information in the guide. If you are writing in English, pay particular attention to how you should use (and not use) “however”, “which” and “that”, commas and apostrophes. If you are writing in another language, there will be equivalent common mistakes.
4. Note particularly that usage varies between different English speaking countries. If the publication wants you to use American spelling, it will also want you to comply with American grammatical and syntactical conventions. If you did not grow up in the US, this means that some of the things you were taught at school will be considered wrong.  One of my friends did her PhD in the US and she said that for the first six months, she would submit written work to her advisor who would want her to change the grammar and syntax from what she believed to be correct to incorrect usage. It was only when she got a US style manual to replace her Australian one that she realised that she was being asked to change from correct Australian English to correct US and things settled down. If the publication uses British conventions, you are fairly safe if you grew up in Australia and New Zealand (although there are some differences), but if you grew up with US conventions, you will be asked to do things that you were taught were incorrect.
5. If you grew up in a country that uses English as the lingua franca although it is no-one’s first language, there will be some conventions of usage that are not considered correct in the standard English used by any publications outside your home country, and some vocabulary that has been adopted from the traditional language(s) of your country which will need either to be translated into standard English or explained. This is why Word allows you to select from such a wide variety of versions of English. A proofreader from outside your home country will be able to point these out to you, or you can select the desired version of English from the Word menu, but the latter is not without risks.
6. Be very careful about using a thesaurus to provide variety in your text if you are not writing in a language in which you are very fluent – you may select an option that is wrong in the context in which you are using it even though it is listed as a synonym.
7. If you are writing in a language in which you are not extremely proficient, you should try to find someone who speaks it as their first language to proofread your document. Correction: you should try to find someone who speaks it as their first language and has a good track record of writing academic papers in it. If the student in the next room to yours offers to proofread for you, it would be good to find out, tactfully if possible, whether s/he gets consistently high grades or merely passes. If the latter, then your grasp of the grammatical rules of the language is probably better than hers/his.
8. Remember that the way you speak a particular language or use it to write emails is not necessarily appropriate for publication in an academic forum. Unless you are transcribing the content of an interview, you should avoid colloquialisms and contractions. As one of my early supervisors said, “you can’t use ‘gut feeling’ in an academic paper, even if you have put it in inverted commas”. The academy is currently undergoing a shift in opinion about how appropriate it is to use the first person (ie “I”, “me”, “my”) and active rather than passive voice (“I have shown that” or “the author has shown that” rather than “it has been shown that”). Read material written the last 5 years to get a feel for what is being done in your language and your field. If you are preparing something for a journal, read recent editions of the journal you are targetting. Talk about it with your supervisor/advisor.
9. The previous point reminds me that one of the differences in convention between British-based and US-based punctuation is how you use single and double inverted commas (quotation marks). I have switched between the two so often now that I can no longer remember which belongs where and I always check the style manual for the publication.
10. While it is probably wise to remove the bibliographic software codes from your manuscript before you send it off for review (so that there is no risk of the file throwing a hissy fit on another computer and transforming all your citations into field codes eg #239, rather than the author and publication details) you should only do this as the last step, after making sure that you have saved a copy of the file with the codes still intact.

Because this is now a very long post, I will put the points about dealing with reviewers’ comments in another post.

The second is by John N Collins – “Re-thinking ‘Eyewitnesses’ in the Light of ‘Servants of the Word’ (Luke 1:2)” (Expository Times 2010 121: 447). It is just the kind of thing I enjoy most. The first part sets Bauckham’s work in the context of Catholic scholarship over the past half century or so; the second takes a close look at translation issues and how they affect our understanding of theological concepts and as an added bonus John writes really well. Lest this sound condescending, I need to say that I’ve spent the last two days at work struggling with an abominably written report so John’s smooth prose was a delight. (Tanzim, writing in his second language produced a significantly more readable result than this report.)

In the first section of the paper, John traces the approach of the Catholic church to biblical scholarship from pre-Vatican II rejection of Bultmann through the 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission’s The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church which states the importance of the place of the Historical Critical Method to the point where Pope Benedict XVI, writing as Joseph Ratzinger, expresses reservations about the historical method in his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth. Collins suggest that Richard Bauckham “has arrived at the same conundrum as Benedict but after travelling in the opposite direction” (449). I think it is helpful to be reminded that there are times when Catholic biblical scholarship comes at issues from a somewhat different direction- something I was conscious of during my theological training at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.

Having established the differences and similarities between Bauckham and Benedict, Collins goes on to look at how the term ‘eyewitnesses’ (autoptai) is used at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. He argues that Luke’s autoptai are not the oral tradents that Bauckham suggests, but those who are working with a literary tradition; and that their role as “guarantors of the tradition” began siginficantly later than Bauckham’s argument would require. I can’t reproduce his reasoning here, but I would recommend the paper.

As I read through Collins’ paper, I was reminded again of why Bauckham’s thesis is so attractive to Christian biblical scholars. Those of us who grew up in a church community just assumed that the gospels were eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ ministry and our first encounter with twentieth-century biblical scholarship required a significant mental gear-change. At some level, I suspect we all want to be convinced that the gospels are historically accurate, because faith would be so much easier if we could prove this. Unfortunately, I don’t think this can be done without the aid of a time machine, but Bauckham’s work has certainly prompted a significant number of people to think in new ways about the gospels, which can’t be a bad thing.

And I am really angry that some of them do see but don’t think it matters. I am tired of the patronising comments that women need to toughen up, not be so sensitive, learn how to take a joke.

I find it encouraging that I see Christian men making this kind of statement on a reasonably regular basis now – very different to the situation two decades ago, when I first started mixing in church leadership circles where it was left to women to point out the problems.

Dave’s post, however, is particularly eloquent. Its timing is also good – coming so soon after the Catholic church’s re-affirmation of ordination of women as a serious crime against canon law (but not, it hastens to add, at the same level as sexual abuse of minors by priests, even though the two things were affirmed as crimes against church law in the same document).

It causes me to wonder what kinds of things make people leave churches. Why do women stay in that kind of situation? I left my local Presbyterian congregation because I didn’t want to have to run their youth group and didn’t like the minister’s take that a pastoral visit to a hospital patient who turned out not to be Presbyterian was a waste of his time. I stayed away because of their increasingly narrow understanding of the place of women in leadership.

The Presbyterian Church of Australia, which I grew up in, ordained its first women ministers in the mid 1960s. Most of it then united with the Methodist and Congregational churches in 1977 to form the Uniting Church, but I remained Presbyterian because my local congregation did. A few years before that, when it agreed to have women elders, my home congregation joyously ordained (no, this is not a mistake – elders are also ordained in the Presbyerian church, at least in Australia) the 40 women who had been functioning as elders anyway. I moved and found that continuing Presbyterianism was much narrower in other parts of the country. When I felt called to ministry, the minister of my home congregation offered to arrange for me to be supported through the Presbyterian system if I wanted to, but advised me against it because he had already sensed the changing attitude and I chose to remain with the Uniting Church.

As time has gone on, the Presbyterian church has become more and more narrow on the issue of women in leadership. It no longer ordains women to ministry and in some states, it no longer ordains women as elders either. Because ordination is for life, they can’t “unordain” people, so they still have one woman minister in active ministry, but I do not understand why she stays. She has been treated abominably by many people in the denomination, although at the moment she is the senior minister in a congregation where her husband is assistant because that’s the way the congregation issued their call, so there are still pockets of resistance!!

But why is this important? Well, I like Dave’s explanation at the end of his blog piece:

In the beginning God made men and women. Both were equally an expression of his image, character and love. Men and women were commissioned together  for both child rearing and ruling. Then the fall happened and what was meant to be together got broken. The world has been crying ever since. Men and women were supposed to be together- equally. We still need to be together if we are to fully represent God, understand His will and live His ways. Male dominated leadership cannot do this. Strict gender based roles cannot do this. And when we belittle, marginalise, overlook and make life harder for women not only do we fail to represent God faithfully, we also destroy a little bit of  His image in one of his very loved children.

Maybe over the weekend I’ll return to blogging on Thomas or eyewitness testimony, but maybe not – I have a job application to write.

You were saying that:

From this he argues (p 94) that since Patterson says that gaps in catchwords = no intentional editing, no gaps in catchwords must necessarily mean that editing has taken place

(my emphasis).

Perrin does not argue that it “must necessarily mean” that, he simply says “the evidence suggests the conscious design of an editor”.

In fact, what Perrin says is:

Patterson considers the dilemma: catchwords could point in the direction either of editorial design or of more spontaneous oral traditioning.  He chooses the latter and he does so because he finds occasional gaps in catchwording, that is, he finds that some saying in Thomas are isolated. But if Thomas was written in Syriac and if, as at least my reconstruction suggests, a Syriac Thomas has no gaps at all, then by the same logic Patterson would have to agree that the evidence suggests the conscious design of an editor (my emphasis). (p 94)

The context of this statement is that Perrin is arguing that Thomas was originally written in Syriac and brought together in the one place at the one time.  By this stage of the book he is confident that he has provided sufficient proof  for a Syriac original that the onus is on others to show that this is not so and he begins this section by saying that “another inference almost ineluctably follows, namely that the Gospel of Thomas … was a carefully worked piece of literature, brought together at one place and at one time by an industirous Syriac-speaking editor” (p 93).  I agree that he doesn’t say quite as baldly as I suggested that the unbroken catchword connections in his Syriac retroversion must necessarily “prove” the work of an editor, but it seems to me that this is exactly the message that the reader is expected to take from this section.

John then says:

Also, when you say:

As I indicated earlier and as Patterson points out, catchwords were important tools for oral tradents who needed to be able to remember long pieces of oral text.

you fail to mention what he has to say exactly about that (it’s on the same page, in the next paragraph!). Here it is:

“A second reason for inferring editorial activity on the part of Thomas, as opposed to envisaging one who merely assembled stray oral traditions, is the complexity of catchword associations. [...], a number of sayings have multiple catchword connections sprouting out in two directions at once”. Then he refers to Heim and Weeks, who argue about Proverbs, against the “aid for memory” explanation, based on the complexity of the catchwords (they argue that “the editor(s) wanted to create some kind of textual coherence”).

I have no problem, as I say here, with the notion that the complexity of the chain of catchwords in Perrin’s retroversion demonstrates some form of editorial work that was not done in the course of oral transmission. What I have difficulty with is the notion that this necessarily indicates that the editorial work happened all at once, rather than over time as the document moved between oral and written form.

And John says again:

You also say that:

It seems to me that the careful chain of catchwords and the rather random order rather better fits the notion of a corpus of sayings that was designed to be communicated orally

Perrin objects to your ” rather random order” comment. He says (p. 95):

“At points the Gospel of Thomas does follow the order of both the synoptics and the Diatessaron: Gos. Thom. 8-9, 32-33, 42/43-44, 47, 65-66, 68-69, 92-93 and 93-94.”

And he gives the example of GT 44-45, where part of Matthew fits and part of Luke fits, but a much better fit is the harmonization of Mat and Luke in the Diatessaron.

Further on the order (on p. 97), Perrin says the author was “much more concerned with thematic groupings and above all with linking sayings together by catchwords”.

I think that in these situations, Perrin is referring to the fact that where there are parallels in Thomas to the Synoptics and the Diatessaron, the order in which these parallels appear is the same as it is in the Synoptics and/or the Diatessaron. It is on this kind of evidence that he bases his contention that the Diatessaron is the primary source for Thomas. I have no argument with the fact that Thomas follows the order of the Synoptics/the Diatessaron at these points, but they don’t constitute a particularly large part of the text and this is not what I was referring to, when I talked about rather random order.

The section you quote from p 97 begins by saying that on the whole the author of Thomas has little interest in following the order of the sources, but is “much more concerned with thematic groupings and above all with linking sayings together by catchwords.” One of the oddities of Thomas is that there are a number of sayings which appear twice in slightly different form.

In addition, Thomas contains a number of parables of the Kingdom. All but two of them have synoptic parallels. They are:

As you can see, the only synoptic that is particularly concerned with parables of the Kingdom is Matthew, where all but one of the Kingdom parables appear in a block in chapter 13. The Thomasine Kingdom parables are spread out throughout the text, and if we were to add in the other sayings about the Kingdom, we would find an even broader scattering, which is hardly a thematic grouping.

I don’t think that Perrin’s thesis explains either of these things satsifactorily, for two reasons.

1. It seems to me that if the author of Thomas was putting time and careful attention to developing something with literary coherence and using catchwords as part of that, s/he would not have repeated so many sayings with minor variations, especially if s/he were modelling her/his work on the Diatessaron in which Tatian set out to produce a harmonisation of the different versions of stories and sayings found in the various gospels.
2. The concept of the Kingdom is introduced in S3, where we are told to be careful about people who try to tell us that the kingdom is in the sky or the sea, so it seems like a fairly important theme for the gospel. If the editor was really concerned about thematic groupings, I would imagine that this is one that would be grouped, rather than spread out. It is also quite clear that Thomas does not follow the Synoptic ordering for these parables – not only do they not appear in one block, they are also in a different order to that in which they appear in the Matthean block.

While I think that Perrin’s work provides quite good evidence that NHC II,2 is based on a Syriac original, I think the second part of his thesis – that it was written all at once using Tatian’s Diatessaron as its primary source -  is on shakier ground. I am also not quite sure what we do about the evidence we have from the POxy fragments that the sayings that we have in NHC II,2 were not always transmitted in the order in which they appear there (or in quite the same wording). It would be really nice if someone discovered a few more complete manuscripts, or even some more, slightly larger fragments. In the meantime I don’t think that any of the theories put forward provides a complete, bulletproof explanation of its origins and I’m afraid I don’t have anything new and startling to offer, nor do I plan to have.

I have often heard it said that catchwords may be signs of oral transmission, but is there any evidence for this? Or is it just what we imagine may be the case?

Lots of authors say this, but most don’t give concrete examples.

I’ve just been re-reading the chapter on formulae in Alfred Lord’s Singer of Songs and what he describes for the oral epic singers of Yugoslavia that he and Milman Parry studied is rather different to that of the catchwords in Perrin’s Syriac retroversion of GosThom. From early childhood the Yugoslav poets absorbed the rhythm patterns of the traditional epic poems and a whole lot of stock ways of describing things and in effect they re-compose their poems every time they perform them. As Patterson suggests and Perrin emphasises, their poems don’t have careful, consistent catchword linkages between each line, because they don’t memorise their epics – they put them together on the spot from a remembered story-line and a series of stock language patterns that fit the rhythms of their form. Lord doesn’t use the term “catchword” but there are words that link lines together, although it’s unclear exactly how much of the repetition is about linkage and how much it is because of the need to keep the rhythm patterns consistent – something that isn’t necessary in the transmission of prose.

I think, however, that Perrin is probably correct in saying that a consistent chain of catchwords, such as those in his Syriac retroversion, that link both to the saying behind and the saying ahead is not a mark of unbroken oral transmission from composition to transcription.  It would seem to me, as I think Perrin suggests, that catchwords that go both forward and backward from the saying in question must have been carefully crafted, rather than coming out of the more impromptu process described by Parry, Lord etc. It also seems to me, though, that this does not rule out the interaction between orality and literacy suggested by DeConick in ch 1 of Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas (see eg p 32).

Jacob Neusner in The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees Before 70: The masters (1971) Brill, p 165, quotes Louis Finkelstein’s theory that catchwords were used by rabbis to remind them of how the oral Torah was remembered, suggesting that there may have even been a written record of the catchwords before the rest of the Torah was transcribed. The catchwords described by Perrin could have had this kind of function, but I haven’t followed up the reference.

I don’t have anything on the Greek rhetorical methods on my shelves, but this would be another place to look for methods used at the time for preparation of material for oral presentation. Young men were given lessons in how to speak with authority, which required preparation. Simply repeating a speech learned by heart wasn’t going to be convincing and as far as I am aware, there was no ancient Greek equivalent of the modern debater’s palm cards, but rehearsing a skeleton of your argument was, I believe, encouraged by teachers.

So, in answer to Mark’s question (which may have been rhetorical), I don’t have any definitive proof, just places to look when/if I have a bit of spare time.

He was one of the earlier scholars who wrote on GosThom. I have three items by him (other than two book reviews) in my collection:

Wilson, Robert McLachlan (1960a), Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (London: Mowbray).

— (1960b), ‘Thomas and the Growth of the Gospels.’, Harvard Theological Review, 53 (10), 231-50.

— (1960c), ‘Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels’, Expository Times, 72 (11), 36-39.

He wrote lucidly and coherently and I enjoyed reading his work. Rest in Peace

I have no Syriac, so I won’t attempt to make any comment on that part of his work, although I would take issue with this comment:

While there is inevitably some guesswork in reconstructing the Syriac, thankfully I was able to make use of some controls. When Thomas parallelled the NT scriptures, I supplied the word-for-word equivalent of the oldest extant Syriac copy of those scriptures. (Other Gospel, 86)

It seems to me that this would only be a valid methodology in  passages where there is verbatim correspondence between Coptic Thomas and the Greek Canon. Except where we have the Oxyrhynchus passages, reconstructing the Greek text is not an exact science, and it seems to me that there are very few passages where Coptic Thomas is exactly the same as one of the Greek canonical gospels. Thus assuming that any hypothetical Syriac Thomas would be exactly the same as the Syriac canonical gospels seems problematic to me. I would see using a word-for-word equivalent of the Syriac scriptures as having more potential to introduce bias rather than control, but perhaps I have misunderstood what Perrin actually did? If he simply means that when translating, for example, the parable of the mustard seed, when faced with several possible Syriac words, he chose the one that appeared in the Syriac Scriptures, I have fewer concerns.

It would certainly seem that being able to nearly double the number of catchwords and create links that don’t exist between sayings in Coptic or Greek by translating back into Syriac provides some quite strong evidence for a Syriac original rather than a Greek one, even allowing for some bias in the retroversion.

The step that surprises me in Perrin’s argument about catchwords, however, is this:

First, the consistency of the catchword pattern indicates a literary as opposed to an oral background. Even for Bultmann, who was loath to attribute synoptic material to the editorial activity of the gospel writers, long chains of sayings indicated the presence of an editor who worked hard to put those saying together. (p 93, quoting Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition, New York, Harper and Row, 1963/1921, 322)

Unfortunately, I don’t have immediate access to Bultmann’s book, but it seems to me rather unlikely that he was comparing oral versus literary transmission when he said this. While catchwords can certainly be used as a literary device, they are also used by oral tradents as a means of remembering the ordering of complex oral material and if we are prepared to talk about “oral texts” then this kind of work is the oral equivalent of editing.

Perrin then quotes Stephen Patterson (The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, Sonoma, Polebridge Press, 1993, 102):

The significance of such a pattern in Thomas may be assessed variously. For example, an editor might have organized the collection in this way to facilitate its memorization. The utility of this for the street preacher, who would compose his or her speeches ad hoc in the busy colonnades of the agora, is obvious.  Alternatively, one could well imagine an editor assembling these sayings simply as he or she remembered them, cacthwords triggering the recollection of each new saying. In this case the catchwords will not have been part of any conscious design on the part of the editor, but simply the result of his or her own process of remembering. The occasional gaps where no catchwords are to be Found suggest the latter. (Italics added by Perrin)

From this he argues (p 94) that since Patterson says that gaps in catchwords = no intentional editing, no gaps in catchwords must necessarily mean that editing has taken place, so the fact that his Syriac retroversion has no gaps in catchword links means that Patterson must conclude that there has been editing. This may not be the case, because I think that the issue is more complex than this. I don’t think, however, that demonstrating that there has been intentional editing necessarily makes a watertight case for the document having been written all at one time by the person who transcribed the text.

As I indicated earlier and as Patterson points out, catchwords were important tools for oral tradents who needed to be able to remember long pieces of oral text. I think that this would have been particularly important for someone who was trying to memorize the material in GosThom because it doesn’t contain any narrative that would help the tradent to keep it in order in his or her mind. Most of the studies on oral transmission of long pieces of text are on narratives about the careers and mighty deeds of heroes, where there is a particular sequence of events that makes memorization easier. GosThom is simply a series of sayings of Jesus, so a chain of catchwords would have been particularly important if an oral tradent was to remember all of it. Thus, it seems to me that a careful chain of catchwords is just as likely to support the argument made by DeConick and others that GosThom moved in and out of oral transmission stages during the course of an extended composition as it does Perrin’s theory that the text was composed late and all at once. It seems to me that the careful chain of catchwords and the rather random order rather better fits the notion of a corpus of sayings that was designed to be communicated orally than it does the carefully crafted work of someone who was producing a written text. If an editor was going to go to all that trouble, why not also try to knock the sayings into a more logical order for the reader? If this is the case, then I think that Quispel’s theory of a shared source explains the commonalities between GosThom and the Diatessaron at least as well as does Perrin’s that GosThom is dependent on the Diatessaron, given the dating issues that Perrin points out on p 97.

In other words, I don’t think I’m convinced, but I am not prepared to be admant about it, either.