I was mulling over the Egerton Gospel, as I do from time to time, trying to think of where it might fit into the HSH. I had become particularly interested in its mixture of Johannine and Synoptic elements (which were always triple-tradition elements). I'd never been able to fit it into the diagram before, but what if it were a kind of proto-John? The "Johannine-only" elements would then have been taken from the Signs Gospel; the synoptic triple-tradition elements from the original Gospel of Mark, i.e. Secret Mark.
This would have been a slightly complex idea, however, because I would then need a reason why the canonical Johannine redactor either edited out or heavily rewrote the synoptic elements. This wasn't an impossible idea, but I didn't see anything in those elements (the questioning of Jesus by his opponents, and the healing of a leper) that seemed to require special treatment by a Johannine author. So this remains an intriguing idea, but I don't think it's the best one.
I then turned to the Q side of the diagram to reconsider placing it there.
I realized that it might just make sense as a part of GPet. H. I. Bell originally dismissed an identification of the Egerton Gospel (or GEgn) with GPet, but his reasons are weak ("Fragments of an Unknown Gospel", British Museum Quarterly 9 v. 3, pp. 71-73). He writes that GPet is "in part written in the first person", and GEgn is not, but the entire passion-resurrection narrative of GPet is not written in the first person, either. If the final lines of the Akhmim manuscript (GPet) had been discovered separately from the rest of it, Bell would have come to the conclusion that the two pieces were written by different authors; but this would have been wrong. His claim that GPet "shows a tendency to the Docetic heresy" is bizarre and obviously wrong (being informed only by Serapion of Antioch's ambiguous comments about a "Gospel of Peter") and his claim that the "style and general tone" differs from GPet has, I have discovered, been shown to be wrong by the scholar David Wright in two articles, "Papyrus Egerton 2 (The Unknown Gospel) Part of the Gospel of Peter?" (originally Second Century 5, pp. 129-150, but also in The Historical Jesus, ed. Craig Evans) and "Apocryphal Gospels (Pap. Egerton 2) and the Gospel of Peter" in (Gospel Perspectives 5: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels, ed. D. Wenham pp. 207-32). Wright makes a detailed case for an identification of GEgn (or what he calls the "Unknown Gospel", UG), and I refer the reader to his articles. We can now add GEgn to the diagram.
(ETA: Here is the new version of this diagram.)
As you can see, I've also figured out the placement of Syriac GTh with respect to Greek GTh. It falls prior to it, and in fact is the original version of GTh. I refer to ch. 1 of Nicholas Perrin's Thomas and Taitian (pp. 19-49) for the argument that various puzzling phrases in the Coptic GTh point to a Syriac source. But it turns out that the (admittedly few) Greek examples we have of the sayings Perrin discusses display the same problems; therefore his arguments apply equally well to the Greek GTh as to the Coptic GTh. A Syriac souce must have lain behind both of them.
Perrin discusses two Thomasine logia that we have in Greek as well as in Coptic: L.27 and L.30. (He also discusses L.33, but it's unclear if his analysis is correct.) For L.27, Perrin cites Antoine Guillamont, "NHSTEYEIN TON KOSMON (P. Oxy. 1, verso, 1.5-6)" (Bulletin de l'institut franxais d'archéologie orientale 61, pp. 15-23), in noting that the Greek version (found in P. Oxy. 1) reads "If you do not fast the world (TON KOSMON)", an accusative that Perrin calls "unprecendented" (Perrin, p. 37-8). Guillamont proposed a Syriac original to explain both the Greek and the Coptic versions (the Coptic reads "If you do not fast from the world"), the Syriac meaning more directly "If you do not fast with respect to the world". Perrin also cites Aelred Baker, "Fasting to the World" (JBL 84, pp. 291-94) as coming to the same conclusion, and also cites Joseph Fitzmeyer ("The Oxyrhynchus Logoi of Jesus and the Coptic Gospel acording to Thomas", rev. in Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament, 355-433) as saying that Guillamont and Baker "have shown that in Syriac there are two forms of an expression which...may underlie both the Greek...and the Coptic" (Perrin, p. 38, n. 56).
For L.30, Perrin cites Guillamont again, ("Semitismes dan les logia de Jesus retrouves a Nag-Hamadi", Journal Asiatique 246, 113-23) and Benedict Englezakis ("Thomas Logion 30", NTS 25, 262-72), in explaining that "gods" likely refers to the Semitic "elohim" meaning in this context "judges" (Perrin, p. 37). But the Greek version of L.30 (found in P. Oxy. 1) exhibits the same vocabulary ([Wh]ere there are[three g]o[ds, they ar]e gods), so it must derive from the Semitic original.
All of this goes to show that GTh was originally a Syriac document, and likely was still in Syriac when the original Markan author wrote it. The later Greek edition, on the other hand, was what the Q-author used to create the Q gospel. But it's Syriac GTh that contains the earliest stratum of sayings; hence, if there is any document that comes closest to the "original sayings of Jesus" (a somewhat complicated concept, as I will eventually suggest in a later post), it's Syriac GTh.
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