The Tommentary

Robert M. Price

Description

Previous commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas have tended mainly to make this intriguing text less understandable to the general reader, not less. Choking on their authors' methodology, these commentaries are more about them than the text. Robert M. Price brings striking clarity to a fascinating text, bridging the dusty centuries. Price draws on the learning of his predecessors while providing many new interpretations. Does Thomas use the canonical gospels? Or was it written earlier? Why was it excluded from the canon? Is it Gnostic? Watch out! Thomas may become your favorite gospel!

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Other English Translations
• Philosophie et théologie
• Text
• Christian
• Bible

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456601706
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Tommentary
Interpreting the Gospel of Thomas
 
by
Robert M. Price
 
Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0170-6
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

 
 
 
Dedication:
To T.E.D. Klein and the Reverend Father Pistachio,
great students of the Thomas Gospel
 
 

Table of Contents
Introduction: The Thomas Gospel
 
The ensuing commentary presupposes certain information about the composition of the gospels and the make-up of early Christianity. Though this material will be familiar to readers who are conversant with critical New Testament scholarship, others may find the following summary useful in understanding the commentary.
 
Gospel Sources
Anyone who has read the four canonical gospels has no doubt noticed a large degree of overlap, even of verbal repetition, between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Most scholars adopt the following explanation of this phenomenon. 1 It seems that the two earliest surviving sources of information about Jesus, collections of his sayings and stories about him, were the Gospel of Mark written in Greek some time after 70 CE (I would date it some three decades later), and a list of sayings that scholars have dubbed “Q,” for the German Quelle , “source.” It was compiled and written in Aramaic, perhaps in more than one draft, around 50 CE as some think 2 (I would place it contemporary with Mark, maybe a bit earlier if we think he used it in a few instances). 3 Some years or decades later, Matthew, a catechist in the bi-lingual, bi-ethnic church at Antioch, decided to prepare his own expanded, clarified, and corrected edition of Mark. Since he was striving for a definitive book about Jesus he decided to use most of the sayings of Jesus recorded in Q, which he translated and interspersed at various points in Mark’s narrative. He used some other material from a third source, which we call “M.” denoting “special Matthean material” found nowhere else. This M material may have come from oral tradition (what people were repeating, rightly or wrongly, as sayings of Jesus), or from other documents unknown to us—or, as I think most likely, from Matthew’s own sanctified imagination.
Independently of Matthew, Luke also decided to improve on Mark. Though he used somewhat less of Mark’s text than Matthew did (about 65% compared to Matthew’s 95%), he, too, used Mark as the basis for his enlarged version. He also used his own (or at least a different) translation of Q. He, too, had special material which we denominate as “L.” Again, some or all of the L material seems to come from Luke’s own creative pen, but some may have come from floating oral tradition. Things are probably a bit more complicated than this with Luke. There is some reason to think he may have written a first, now lost, edition (“Proto-Luke”) 4 that supplemented Q with L. Then someone showed Luke a copy of Mark’s gospel, and he decided it was too good to ignore, so he went back to the drawing board, combining Proto-Luke with Mark to create our canonical Gospel of Luke. Others think this gospel began with what is called “Ur-Lukas,” the Gospel of Marcion. This theory eliminates Q and holds that this evangelist compiled something answering more or less to Proto-Luke but with some so-called “M” material to boot. According to this theory, 5 Matthew used both Mark and the Ur-Lukas. So did “Luke,” the redactor (editor) of our canonical Third Gospel. In fact, there is good reason for thinking this Lukan redactor was Polycarp of Smyrna. 6 He would have omitted some of the Ur-Lukas material that Matthew did include, and he would have added a good deal more material, including the Nativity story we find in Luke 1-2. And there are other theories besides, but they will not concern us here.
How is the reader to determine which sayings and stories in Matthew and Luke come from Q, Mark, M, or L? Of course we can compare the two finished gospels Luke and Mathew with Mark, but no copy of Q survives (if there was a Q!). Yet we are not left with a great mystery. Whatever material is found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark represents the other common source of Matthew and Luke: Q. And obviously whatever is only in Luke is L material. If it is only in Matthew it is by definition M material.
The fourth gospel, John, written, as most think, about 100 CE (I say fifty years later), looks quite different from the other three. The others, because of the shared perspective, are called the Synoptic (“seeing together”) gospels. Many scholars (me included) think John had read the Synoptics but did not copy material directly out of the texts as Matthew and Luke did from Mark. Others, like C.H. Dodd, make a good case that John had never laid eyes on the Synoptics. Rather, he would have made his own fresh selection from the Jesus-traditions current in his own circles, perhaps in Asia Minor. He would have filtered this material through his own theological lens, much of it in his own words, or the distinctive lingo of his sect. 7
The issue at stake in John meets us everywhere in the critical study of the gospels: the evangelists were not reporters. Most likely, none was an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus (much less of his nativity or the temptation!), and there is really no telling whether Jesus actually did or said what any gospel ascribes to him at any point. The gospel writers (evangelists) seem to have attributed their own ideas to Jesus, “updating” him for new generations of disciples, so to speak. And the long chain of unknowns who transmitted the oral tradition (whether under the watchful eye of the apostles or completely outside their jurisdiction) may have, must have, made their own contributions. There must have been prophets who felt impelled to speak with the voice of the risen Christ (“Verily I say unto you…!”). 8 What in the gospel, then, did Jesus say or do? For faith this ought to be irrelevant: all the stories and sayings (if you’ll forgive a subjective judgment) seem to breathe much the same prophetic spirit even when they contradict one another or feature anachronisms. Nonetheless, contradictions and anachronisms do pose puzzles for the historian to solve, and we might as well try to solve them. But why should the post-Jesus authorship of any Jesus saying make it any less worthy? Do we discount the teaching of the epistles because Jesus didn’t write them?
Where, you may be asking, does Thomas fit into all of this? Some scholars maintain that the Gospel of Thomas drew on two or more of the Synoptics, 9 but many others think Thomas is like Q, an independent collection of oral tradition 10 (though not necessarily without new creations by the evangelist). Where Thomas’ sayings parallel or overlap with canonical sayings, these scholars deem Thomas’ more primitive (original) in form. 11 I believe that Thomas would not read as it does if its evangelist/redactor were simply working from copies of Matthew and Luke, etc. Yet I also believe I detect stubborn instances where Thomas does seem to reflect either a harmonization of two canonical gospels’ versions of a saying or the unique redactional perspective of one of the canonical evangelists.
These factors lead me to propose a compromise solution: I suggest that Thomas does indeed draw independently on oral tradition, hence this gospel’s possible occasional preservation of earlier, simpler versions of sayings also found in the canonical gospels. But Thomas also compiled his gospel after the canonical gospels (at least after the Synoptics) yet without direct access to them. Matthew and Luke each had copies of Mark to work from, open on his scriptorium. Thomas did not. He remembered sayings as best he could from having heard them read in church; or else, other people quoting the gospel texts without direct access to them caused the sayings to re-enter the stream of oral tradition after pausing in stable, written form for a while. Memory quotations of the gospels have fed back into the oral tradition, as if a stream should branch off a river for a while, gather fertile silt along the way, and then later rejoin the river downstream. Thus Thomas presents some sayings which had survived in oral tradition independent of their written canonical versions, alongside others which preserve Matthew or Luke’s redactional coloring, though not word for word, because they had come to circulate orally anew, quoted from memory from hearing them in church. 12
Another reason I think it less likely that, e.g., the parable of the Rich Fool or of the Wheat and the Tares survives independently in Thomas is that, for various reasons, the L and M versions seem to be cut from the redactional cloth of each evangelist. In other words, from studying them in the contexts of Mathew and Luke, I think they make good sense as redactional creations originating in these gospels. I think most of the M and L material had no pre-textual existence in oral tradition at all. Or, they first entered the stream of oral tradition once people began loosely repeating them by word of mouth with no direct availability of the texts from which they were derived.
The most exciting thing about the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas is the possibility that it contains hitherto-unknown (or, better, hitherto-forgotten) sayings of the historical Jesus. Does it? My comments on individual sayings will treat the question of historical genuineness, but at the outset I may say that Thomas’ case is little different from those of Matthew, Luke, or John. That is, we can often detect material created by the evangelist himself by its stylistic or theological distinctiveness. If a par