On Thomas and the Gospels

The session on Thomas Among the Gospels at the 2012 SBL Annual Meeting was lively and informative, or at least I found it so.  It has also spurred new thinking on my part about one corner of the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis, so it was even more productive than I expected.



Goodacre and Gathercole explained that they wrote their books more or less simultaneously, but strove to work independently and unaware of each other's arguments until they were finished.  Christopher Tuckett was present, and (appropriately) did not in general contest Goodacre and Gathercole's arguments; Stephen Patterson was also there, and (appropriately) provided a contrary perspective.  Nicola Lewis seemed to strike a more neutral pose, though this was only my impression.  Jeffrey Peterson presided.

I entered the session having perused Gathercole's work but with only a brief look through Goodacre's, as I somehow managed to ask Amazon to deliver my copy to an old address.  (I managed to find the package there after I returned from SBL, sitting atop the apartment building mailbox where it must have been delivered a week earlier.)

After the presentations, the floor was opened to discussion, and I suggested that the case against Thomas as a synoptic source really needed to engage with DeConick's work on Thomas, but Gathercole pointed out (quite correctly) that he did in fact engage with DeConick's thesis (as did Goodacre).  Indeed, DeConick is mentioned in The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas several dozen times!  I really asked the wrong question here.  Gathercole does spend great effort in showing that a Semitic (Syriac/Aramaic) layer of GTh is a questionable proposition, and I apologize to him for not comprehending this during my first look at his book. One reason why is that I did not pay as much attention to the footnoting as I ought to have done, and there is much reference to DeConick there.  However, the more important reason why is that I am not really invested in a Syriac/Aramaic layer for GTh (nor to the question of the orality of the Thomasine tradition, the other argument of DeConick's which Gathercole challenges).  I remain intrigued by Semitisms in GTh, but it would be fine with me if the entire pre-Copic Thomasine tradition were in Greek.

So what was I getting at, you might ask?

What I was really driving at was the multi-layer or "rolling corpus" thesis for the composition of GTh, of which DeConick is perhaps the most noted representative, but by no means the only one, of course.   But Gathercole does confront this issue head-on, outlining it on pp. 62-66.  I had not previously appreciated how closely Gathercole linked his findings of Thomasine dependence on the Synoptics to the layered/rolling corpus theories of Thomasine formation, and I apologize again for my careless oversight.

Goodacre noted that he, too, dealt with De Conick in his book, and that is certainly true, though perhaps not quite as much as I would have wished, and again I did not pay as close attention to his footnoting as I could have.  Nevertheless, he does engage DeConick on specific key sayings, and that is important.  Furthermore Goodacre notes that "Almost all of the Synoptic parallels to Thomas occur in DeConick's 'Kernel Gospel', i.e. at the earliest point in the Gospel's development, and therefore before any exposure to the Synoptic Gospels" (n. 73, pp. 24-25). Goodacre also adds that "DeConick does not see the 'Kernel Gospel' as a source for the Synoptics" (p. 25), and rightly notes that this is highly problematic.

(However, I should point out that in discussion, Goodacre claimed that Kernel GTh was just "triple tradition" GTh, and that is a very different--and quite incorrect--statement.  What Goodacre seemed to be trying to say was what he says in his book: that Kernel GTh consists of Thomasine parallels with one, two, or three of the Synoptics.  I assume that Goodacre simply misspoke in this instance.)

Goodacre does agree that the Greek version is earlier than the Coptic, though like Gathercole, he tries to show that there is Matthean and/or Lukan redaction in GTh. (That is to say, there are phrases in Thomasine/Synoptic parallels are attributed to the Matthean or Lukan author, especially when they are adapting GMk.)  However, as I tried to point out in discussion, everyone agrees that Coptic GTh is late, and thus it could easily feature Synoptic redactional elements.  Patterson saw it as no problem whatsoever that the scribe of Coptic GTh might have included synoptic elements while transcribing Greek GTh--that is, there could be "harmonization to the Synoptics" in Coptic GTh.  I agree entirely, though I think there are few if any traces of this sort of influence in Coptic GTh.  Goodacre does present examples of abbreviation by Coptic GTh of Greek GTh to as counter-evidence for this sort of harmonization, but surely harmonization could occur simultaneously with fatigue, abbreviation, and other sorts of redaction.  No doubt translations from Greek to Coptic included a number of phenomena, even if abbreviation is the predominant feature.  However, again, I find this somewhat unimportant, so it is not really worth pressing the point very far here.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is, there is nothing for it but to examine Goodacre and Gathercole's arguments saying-by-saying, and show how the HSH can easily handle each instance of supposed dependence of GTh on Synoptic tradition.  I do not expect to prove that Goodacre and Gathercole are wrong, but rather only to show that the HSH has, at the very least, the same explanatory power as their arguments do.  This will require, as I have said, a small but important modification to the HSH, and I will present that in my next post.  But thanks to Goodacre/Gathercole et al, for a very thought-provoking session at SBL.  And again, my apologies to them both (and to all presenters and those in the audience) for my somewhat bumbling questions.