And you arrived at that assessment how?
Scholarly discussion about changes in biblical texts
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Longfellow
Well-Known Member
From reading what Funk and some of the participants said about it.
talib-al-kalim
Well-Known Member
I've written in my introductory chapter to my gospel edition:
The “Gospel of Thomas”
All but the four Gospel accounts have been graded “apocryphal”, meaning that their origin is not known. This would correspond to the weak grade. There among are not many scriptures that are considered to possibly contain true relation.The Gospel of Thomas (also Gospel according to Thomas, short: Th) is a collection of 114 logia (proverbs) and short dialogues. In its form, it is very similar to a small collection of Islamic Hadith. However, it lacks information about the chain of transmission and we have no information about who wrote it and when it was written. It is attributed to the Apostle Thomas in the header of the book.
Th 0 |
| These are the sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. |
The Coptic text has the title “Gospel of Thomas” in subscript.
The remainder of the comparison indicates that the Coptic version is not a translation of the Greek version found in Oxyrhynchos. However, the differences do not demonstrate any additions or alterations that would suggest an adaptation to Gnostic teachings. This is significant, as the Oxyrhynchos fragments represent only a small portion of the collection (fragments 1-7, 26-33, 36-37, 39) with numerous lacunae. As a result, we are effectively compelled to rely on the Coptic manuscript for our understanding.
It was never part of the Christian canon and was lost until it was discovered in the 20th century. The full text of this collection exists in a Coptic version written around 350 AD. This text was discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945, among a group of books known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Three Greek fragments (P. Oxy. IV 654, IV 655 and I 1) written around 200 AD, which had been found before in Oxyrhynchos, were subsequently identified as part of this collection. The writing was rejected as apocryphal by the Orthodox Churches and was found in an entirely Gnostic collection. Consequently, many authors have included it among the Gnostic literature. However, it does not contain any of the Gnostic teachings (see below) and is probably an earlier text than the Gnostic sect. The Oxyrhynchos papyri were not a library but a paper dump that contained mostly commercial and administrative writings. Only a small proportion of the fragments are literary, philosophical and theological in nature. The theological writings in this dump are almost entirely mainstream Christian writings, with only two out of more than two hundred Christian writings being Gnostic (not counting fragments, but writings).
Clement of Alexandria writes in Stromateis II,9:45: “So also in the Gospel to the Hebrews it is written, ‘He that wonders shall reign, and he that has reigned shall rest’.”, and he quotes a longer version without citing the source in Stromateis V,14:96: “He, who seeks, will not stop till he find; and having found, he will wonder; and wondering, he will reign; and reigning, he will rest.”, which is evidently the pericope Th 2. There are three possible explanations:
- Clement wrongly attributed the saying to the Hebrew Gospel he knew, rather than to the Gospel of Thomas, which he also knew.
- Clement had a copy of a Hebrew Gospel which contains the same saying but is different from the Gospel of Thomas. This Hebrew Gospel is the source of some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, or they both come from the same oral tradition.
- Clement had a copy of the Gospel of Thomas without the attribution to Thomas, which was said to be a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic (Clement was a pagan convert to Christianity living in Alexandria, so that he was probably unable to read Hebrew or Aramaic).
It certainly comes from a purely oral tradition. Some authors suggest that it dates from as early as 50 CE, before the larger compilations were written, some suggest that the parallels with other Gospels come from an oral tradition derived from other written Gospels, and suggest a date of composition as late as 120 CE. It is unlikely that the author had any of the four canonical Gospel accounts in his hands. The deviations are too many, the choice is to small, and the sayings that have a parallel to one or more of the canonical Gospels are arbitrarily spread over the entire collection.
The attribution of Th 2 to “the” Hebrew Gospel by Clement of Alexandria, the attribution of the Gospel to Thomas, who is said to have been a missionary in the East, the reverence to James in Th 12, who was an Elder of Jerusalem for about 25 years and some observations in the Coptic text which point to a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic independent of the parallel passages in the canonical Gospel accounts, argue in favour of a Hebrew or Aramaic original that has been composed in a place near or in Judea.
As mentioned above, it seems that the author of this Gospel account collected the content from oral traditions. We will call him “Coll” for “collector”. There is no other information about him except what can be inferred from the writing itself:
- Coll was a purist. He never added any explanations from his teachers or his own thoughts to the traditions. His intention was certainly to avoid introducing any bias that would alter the words and deeds of Jesus, instead encouraging his readers to think about them for themselves. He even transmits some sayings in an isolated way that cannot be understood without further information.
- He sometimes transmits two hadiths with the same root but different wording. He is a serious hadith collector who does not want to withhold any information. Furthermore, he collected information from more than one reference person.
- He didn’t intend to publish under Thomas's name because he refers to him in the third person. Forgers usually use the first person to support their false claim to authorship.
- His collection is rather small and the narratives are short. Sometimes, we find two or three traditions combined that Luke and/or Ed report separately. Had he had access to direct witnesses, he would have had much more information.
- Although the author seems eager to avoid introducing bias to his collection, it does have a scholarly tendency. He is certainly at least third in the chain of transmission (with one intermediary between the eyewitness and himself), but he is probably fourth, as traces of a school of thought can be found.
The text's accuracy also suffers from multiple translations: What we read has been translated from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to Coptic and from Coptic to English (the translators sometimes differ in their interpretation of the Coptic text).
I think 'probably' might be too strong? Half the sayings have Synoptic parallels, and the rule-of-thumb that the shorter saying is probably the more original is not guaranteed, nor undisputed ... It seems the best we can say is 'may be, maybe not', because to state probability either way places a burden of proof on the proposition, and the age or originality of Thomas simply cannot be proved.
talib-al-kalim
Well-Known Member
That's similar with the traditions Luke and the author of Matthews didn't read from Mark.
I didn't say that.
What I said was that the author evidently did not know the written accounts. We must also consider that there was no copy machine and no internet; all writings had to be copied by hand, so that it took a long while to spread out. Christian authors often overestimate the importance of written material; it was mostly not available and the oral tradition was the predominant source for most people. It's much more likely that the logia he wrote down were taken from a chain of oral traditions rather than that somebody read the other accounts and forwarded them. It cannot be fully excluded though.
There is no proof for very many things in history. We have sources, and we can try to derive more likely or less likely scenarios from it.
We can only guess; my guess is late 1st century because both orthodox and grostic scriptures from the 2nd century are much different in style and content.