Synoptic Problem Poll

I am a little concerned with some of what I'm reading across the blogworld tonight regarding the results of the Synoptic Problem Poll on Novum Testamentum. Although it is fun to see what the blogging world thinks about this, it would be completely inaccurate to interpret the results of the poll to mean that the Two/Four-Source Hypothesis is losing ground in the Academy, or that the Academy is flirting with the Augustinian model, or that it has found the Farrer hypothesis convincing. Although this might be happening in the blogging world, it is not happening in the Academy. Quelle still reigns there.

New Testament Manuscripts

I'm wondering if it bothers anyone else that as historians (in order to illuminate the first and second centuries of Christianity) we are using an eclectic version of our manuscripts of the New Testament created by a modern committee?

The Nestle-Aland text not only doesn't exist in manuscript form, it certainly does not represent any version of NT texts from the first or second centuries. If you think about it, according to the manuscripts we do possess, a Christian living in Alexandria will have knowledge of different version of the texts from those Christians living in Syria, Asia Minor, Rome, or Gaul.

What does this mean for historians studying early Christianity and using the eclectic text as our foundation? Are we operating under false impressions? - that we know exactly what the Gospel of Mark read in the first century, and that this was the same everywhere geographically?

Certainly there is the critical apparatus to consult. But this doesn't give us an actual reading of the Alexandrian text, for instance.

What I'm asking is this, shouldn't we create a synopsis of our manuscript families, so that we can read the Alexandrian text side-by-side with the Western text, and so forth? I know that we still won't be able to know what the manuscript tradition actually looked like in the first century, but at least we can begin to talk about the text basis for variant forms of Christianity in different geographical locations.

If you know of a synopsis like this that already exists, please share that information with me. I am ignorant on this subject.

If not, are there any textual scholars among us who might be interested in producing such a synopsis? I think it would revolutionize our field.

Thanks to Michael Bird and Nicholas Perrin

I wish to thank Michael Bird for hosting Nicholas Perrin, and to Perrin for his responses (#1 and #2) to my cautions about his portrayal of my own work in his new book, Thomas, The Other Gospel.

I want to reiterate that I do not regard my cautions (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5) as a review of his work, which will be taken up in formal published peer reviews (although Mark Goodacre has begun this review process already on his own blog, presenting a very detailed and thoughtful comment on Perrin's book). My only intent in my own postings was to safeguard the integrity of my work and its argument, so that the misunderstandings surfacing in Perrin's work are not appropriated into the secondary literature as my actual positions.

I want to also mention that I just discovered that Nicholas Perrin is publishing a two-part bibliographical article on Gospel of Thomas studies between the years 1991-2006. The first part of the series ("Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research [1991-2006]: Part I, The Historical Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels") has just been published by Currents in Biblical Research 5.2 (2007) pages 183-206. I believe the second part will be published in the next volume of CBR.

The Thirteenth Apostle available for pre-orders on UK Amazon

My book on the Gospel of Judas is now posted on UK Amazon. It is called The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.

Synopsis
In 2006, National Geographic released the first English translation of the "Gospel of Judas", a second-century text discovered in Egypt in the 1970s. The translation caused a sensation because it seemed to overturn the popular image of Judas the betrayer and instead presented a benevolent Judas who was a friend of Jesus. In "The Thirteenth Apostle", April DeConick offers a new translation of the "Gospel of Judas" which seriously challenges the National Geographic interpretation of a good Judas. Inspired by the efforts of the National Geographic team to piece together this ancient manuscript, DeConick sought out the original Coptic text and began her own translation. "I didn't find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise." DeConick contends that the "Gospel of Judas" is not about a "good" Judas, or even a "poor old" Judas. It is a gospel parody about a "demon" Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize "mainstream" or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples. Professor DeConick provides her English translation and interpretation of this newly recovered gospel within the previously overlooked context of a Christianity in the second century that was sectarian and conflicted. The first book to challenge the National Geographic version of the Gospel of Judas, "The Thirteenth Apostle" is sure to inspire to fresh debate around this most infamous of biblical figures.

The Apostolic Tradition as "living literature"

I love it when I come across the work of scholars in entirely different areas that intersect with my own. That has happened today as I am beginning an intensive period studying Valentinian practices in order to prepare a paper for the International Theological Conference on the Orthodox Teaching on Sacraments to be convened by the Russian Orthodox Church to take place on November 13-16th, 2007 in Moscow.

I have come across the work of Marcel Metzger on The Apostolic Tradition. He develops an idea put forward earlier by Jean Magne and by Alexandre Faivre that this ancient church order is not only not authored by Hippolyptus, but that it is not the work of a single author or editor. Rather it is a piece of "living literature." Why? Its lack of unity, its lack of logical progression, the presence of many incoherences, doublets, and contradictions. The work is a composite work according to Metzger and later Paul Bradshaw, a collection of community rules from different traditions, probably not even representing a single Christian community. The only way to really understand the text is to examine the various individual elements and layers of which the text is made up.

Well, here we are, back to the type of model that I have been promoting for the composition of the Gospel of Thomas. I love the phrase "living literature" and wish I had known about it when I wrote Recovering, for surely I would have used it!

By the way, being invited to present a paper on gnostic ritual by the Russian Orthodox Church is very much an honor for me. I am delighted that there is enough interest in the Orthodox Church about these old gnostic traditions that an invitation was even sent to me in the first place. Since I can't be in San Diego at SBL/AAR and Russia at the same time, my paper will be distributed in my absence. But I hope to show in that paper how important gnostic witnesses are to ancient Christian ritual patterns and practices.

Article Note: "The Transmission of early Christian thought: Toward a cognitive psychological model" (István Czachesz)

In the mail this morning, I received a copy of volume 36:1 (2007) of Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses and was delighted to see one of Czachesz's articles on cognitive psychology among the others articles. (Update: Wade Greiner has posted a link to a pre-publication version of this article).

Czachesz does a fine job introducing the reader to some of the current major theories in cognitive psychology as they may pertain to the study of Christian Origins, including ritual theories, memory research, and studies in orality and transmission.

One question that immediately occurred to me while reading was how much the language of cognitive science is going to burden and/or offput scholars of religion? For instance, the transmission of ideas is called the "epidemic of beliefs" (p. 68).

I particularly was appreciative for the distinctions Czachesz drew between how one understands the transmission of traditions from a cognitive approach and the form-critical (pp. 66-68). Like my own analysis of the Gospel of Thomas, Czachesz highlights the fact that the ancient world of the early Christians was not purely oral, but included various degrees of literacy, and all of this acted together to create the environment in which our texts arose. This is what I and others call "rhetorical culture," a term that I did not notice Czachesz using. In rhetorical cultures, even though orality dominates the scene in terms of transmission and consciousness, the written word is also present, and oral text and written text interact in lively fashions.

Czachesz thinks that cognitive psychology can help us understand why early Christian tradition developed in the ways it did. He considers reasons beyond the daily needs of the congregrations, beyond the social or economic motivations. He says that their success is due to their universal appeal to the human mind - that is, "certain ideas especially appeal to us because our minds can work with them in particularly efficient ways...Religious ideas survive only if they adapt themselves to the structure of the human mind" (p. 68).

Since I am not a cognitive psychologist and am not yet familiar with the studies he references (Atran 2002; Barrett 2004; Boyer 2001; Pyysiäinen 2003), I'm not sure what specific items within the Christian tradition Czachesz sees as appealing to the structures of our minds, or how we would differentiate these from those that are/were unappealing (and therefore not transmitted?). I would like to know more though, and hope that he will address this type of question in future publications.

Hector Avalos on the End of Biblical Studies

Professor Avalos is publishing a new book due out in July, The End of Biblical Studies. I have already pre-ordered Professor Avalos' book. I will post a report on it after I have had a chance to read it and digest his opinions.

The description of it appears to follow his tough critique of our society and biblical studies in general. There are many points on which I agree with him (and am very glad to hear him voicing these points in the SBL open forum), and some which I do not (i.e., I do not see our work as necessarily elitist, completely irrelevant, nor do I think that none of us in the discipline is concerned for the poor - my husband in fact is a poverty lawyer).

The one point that continues to resound for me, however, is his statement,

"The fact is that biblical studies is still functioning as a handmaiden to theology and faith communities rather than as a discipline relevant to those outside of faith communities."

This is a point that I myself have been very concerned about in the past, and continue to be so. I am not sure how the field of biblical studies can ever be a serious field of historical study as long as it remains tied to and controlled by faith communities and their needs.

I think that the first step in the creation and survival of the discipline as a historical discipline in the humanities is to develop an uncompromising and unapologetic historical methodology (see sidebar for past posts on this topic). I don't think we have successfully done this yet because too many in our field are too concerned about the theological consequences of our findings. But theology has to be separated from historical studies. These are two separate disciplines, period.

The second thing we have to do is change the name of our discipline. We should not be a discipline that studies Biblical Literature. We should be a discipline that studies Religion in Antiquity (subsets including: Ancient Israel, Early Judaism, Early Christianity, and so on). We have been chained to the canon, and its preservation, because of faith concerns, not historical ones. It is time to make the change.

How different would our association look if we were to rename ourselves the Society for the Study of Religion in Antiquity or some comparable name? If so named, we would have to take seriously critical historical scholarship, and stop worrying about being caretakers of the Bible and the contemporary faith traditions that rely on it.

Monday Call For Theses

If you have finished an M.A., Ph.D., or Th.D. thesis recently and would like some exposure, reply to this post in the comments with:

Name
Name of Thesis
Date of Acceptance or Defense
University Affiliation
Advisor(s)
Brief Abstract (500 words)
Personal Comment (if any)

For postings of earlier theses, see sidebar.

Codex Judas Congress funded by Rice Faculty Initiative Grant

Rice University just announced that it will fund the Codex Judas Congress, a colloquium to be held in March 2008. I will post more details as the event is organized over the summer. But here is the grant announcement and description which I copy below too.

I want to say that I am extremely appreciative of the support that Rice University has shown to me and to Religious Studies with this very generous award, one that will allow me to bring twenty scholars to campus for the event.

From Rice News:

DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies, will use her funding to gather 20 of the world's leading experts on early Christianity and Gnosticism at Rice for The Codex Judas Congress.

The two-day conference will examine the newly discovered ancient Christian papyrus book known as the Tchacos Codex or the Judas Codex. The book includes the Gospel of Judas, which was first made public in 2006.

"It is extremely important for scholars to come together as a community and share their insights and training, to examine this ‘new’ ancient book collectively. This congress will give us an opportunity to do so and move forward the study of early Christianity and Gnosticism," DeConick said. "It is one of those events that puts Rice on the cutting edge of research in early Christianity."

Urgent! Bill 2265 to Help Iraqi Immigrants including Mandaeans

It has come to my attention that Bill 2265 which would confer immigration status to the U.S. for many religious minorities in Iraq, including Mandaeans, is going to the House of Representatives soon for a vote. This is the time (ASAP) to send a(nother) letter to our legislators urging them to vote in favor of 2265. Let's swamp them with letters and e-mails!

The following is a possible letter which you can use or alter as you see fit. For addresses, see my previous post.

Dear _______________________:

I would like to alert you to the suffering of the Iraqi Mandaeans, who desperately need immigrant status in western nations, and urge you to vote for bill 2265.

The Mandaeans, or Sabian-Mandaeans, are an ethnic group whose monotheistic religion is one of the oldest in the Middle East. They are followers of John the Baptist. Baptism is their main form of religious activity. The Mandaean religion began at the time of Jesus and has historical connections to ancient Gnostic movements.

The traditional homeland of the Mandaeans is in Iraq and Iran, but recent persecutions have greatly decreased their numbers in those areas. The precise total number of Mandaeans worldwide is not known but approximates 70,000. But at present only five to seven thousand
remain in Iraq, with many having fled to Syria, Jordan, and Sweden as well as other countries. Mandaeans in Iraq are targeted for killing, kidnapping, and confiscation of property.

Unlike other victims of sectarian violence in Iraq, Mandaeans cannot flee to a protective enclave within the country, nor can they defend themselves with their own militia. Their religion being strictly pacifist, Mandaeans carry no weapons. The spread of extremist ideology has resulted in the targeting of "infidels" and especially the defenseless, pacifist group the Mandaeans. The police often refuse to intervene. Since Mandaeans have no voice in the Iraqi parliament and no direct connection to any member of government, the government has taken little action to protect them.

Although many Mandaeans have taken refuge in Syria and Jordan, these countries are not able to accommodate the huge influx of Iraqi refugees on a permanent basis. Normally, a refugee from Iraq is granted a three-month visa with an extension of up to six months in certain cases, after which time they are living in the country illegally if they continue to stay, even though a Mandaean's returning to Iraq is fraught with danger.

Please see the Mandaean Human Rights report for 2007:
http://www.mandaeanunion.org/HMRG/Sabian%20Mandaeans%20in%20Iraq%20Face%20Annihilation_2007%20MHRG%20report.pdf
Thank you very much for your attention to this urgent matter.

Sincerely,

Book Note: The Earliest Christian Artifacts (Larry Hurtado)

Professor Larry Hurtado has written a helpful guide to the manuscript tradition in early Christianity. The book is called The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. He gives an outline of our earliest manuscripts in chapter one. Then he discusses the rise of the Codex and its desirability among Christians. He asks why the Codex became an early Christian convention. He suggests that one of the main reasons was its portability, that modest-sized codices may have been attractive and serviceable for itinerant Christian teachers and evangelists, perhaps even as early as the first century. But that this factor becomes less of an issue in the second and third centuries when Hurtado argues that books were being prepared for Christians in residence (p. 67). He includes chapters on the Nomina Sacra and the Staurogram, subjects which he has explored in earlier publications and presentations. His final chapter describes other scribal features such as Codex size, use of columns, margins, lines per page, reader's aids, and corrections.

His work is highly interpretative, since one of the main goals of the work appears to me to understand why the Christian scribes used the Codex, why they used the abbreviations they did, what the size of the manuscript means, and so forth. His conclusions suggest that these can tell us something significant about their faith and its performance, that the specific nature of the manuscript is an artifact of early Christian usage and religious life (p. 189).

Public High School Bible Classes in Texas

The Houston Chronicle reported today that the Texas Senate "easily passed and sent to the governor" a bill to teach Bible classes to high school students. The claim is that young people need to know about the Bible. This class is supposed to provide a forum for students to discuss religion's role in history. The class will be taught if 15 students want it taught.

This makes me very concerned because we all know that there is no one trained in our secondary educational system to teach these courses from a religious studies or historical perspective. When untrained people think about 'Bible' classes, they think this means 'Bible Study' and further that this means 'Christian Bible Study,' which at best is comparable to 'adult education' on sunday mornings at church, at worse a prayer circle. I know this from years of experience teaching the Introduction to the Bible courses at various universities. I agree that it is a crying shame how illiterate Americans are when it comes to religious education, but I do not trust for a moment our secondary educational system to consistently provide non-faith-based religious education.

I am afraid that this bill is nothing more than another attempt to get bible study into the public curriculum. The language is more sophisticated, and given the aura of "historical" study, but what this means is let's teach our kids in the public schools that the bible is history. We are on the edge of the slippery slope.

Academic Rankings

Yesterday, my husband came across this rankings system for academic graduate programs. I'm wondering if any of you are familiar with it? I wasn't aware of it before now, but it appears to be a new rankings system. Here are the top ten graduate programs in Religious Studies in alphabetical order according to Academic Analytics. The highlighting is mine.

Religious Studies & Theology

Duke University

Emory University

Harvard University

Marquette University

New York University

Rice University

Union Theological Seminary - New York

Vanderbilt University

Westminster Theological Seminary

Yale University

Update 5-25-07: Patrick McCullough sent this information and links to other articles about this ranking system.

"But here I see that it measures these schools on the Academic output of its faculty (they call it the "Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index"). Here's a Chronicle article about their method and how they came to be."

Cautionary Note 5: DeConick on Methodology

In Perrin's chapter on my work, there is one criticism lodged by Perrin that raises a good question (pp. 65-66). Have I inconsistently applied my methodology in terms of sayings that contain characteristic vocabulary since there is language in the accretions that I don't identify as characteristic?

The goal of my method was to identify later material (accretions) that entered the Gospel of Thomas and worked to reinterpret older sayings. Here are two older posts about this. Post 1 and Post 2.

It is accurate that there is language in the accretions that I didn't (and don't) identify as characteristic. And for good reason. If we were to identify all language as characteristic, then we would reduce our argument to nonsense - words like "the" and "and" would have to be identified. This is why I use the word "characteristic" to the Gospel of Thomas, excluding plain language or overly general ideas.

Moreover, the presence of the word or phrase in the accretion is not enough to identify it as characteristic. To identify characteristic terminology on this basis would be nothing more than parallelmania. The terms and phrases that I identified were done so with explicit reference to the pattern of there usage (Recovering pp. 72-77). For instance the word petonh ("the one who is living") is understood as characteristic vocabulary when it is used as a Name of God or as a cognate designation for the believer. The word alone can never be enough, because meanings for words vary depending upon context and community hermeneutics. We must always be conscious of this.

For these reasons, I did not (and would not) identify as characteristic the terms that Perrin himself suggests. Let me take each one in turn.

Perrin: Inside/outside contrast (Gos. Thom. 3.3, 22.4, 89.2). Not only are these words common words but their usage across these sayings is not the same, and the terminology in Coptic is not the same in all three cases identified by Perrin. 3.3 (sempetenhoun auo sempetenbal) speaks of the Kingdom being inside and outside a person. 22.4 (psa nhoun enthe empsa nbol) talks about making the exterior person like the interior person. 89.2 (empsa nhoun...empsa nbol) addresses the purity laws in terms of the inside of the cup and the outside of the cup. According to Jesus, the inside of the utensil determined the purity standards of the whole cup (against the Pharisaic position of the school of Shammai who argued that the vessel should be immersed to remove any contaminants prior to use).

Perrin: "one and the same" (Gos. Thom. 4.1, 22.5 and 23.2) are accretions. "But this makes it hard to explain why the only other use of the phrase (Gos. Thom. 4.3) occurs in Stage 1 [Perrin's word for my Kernel designation]" (Perrin, p. 65). On this point Perrin errors completely since indeed I have clearly designated this phrase as an accretion, not a Kernel saying (as Perrin states) (Recovering pp. 70-71). I have also clearly identified this portion of the saying as 4.4 in order to include in the numbering system 3.3 from the Greek papyrus "and the last will be first."

Perrin: "There will be days" (79.3, 38.2). This was (and is) taken by me to be plain language. Its usage does not suggest anything that would qualify it as "characteristic" to the Gospel of Thomas. If Perrin wishes this to be so, then he needs to make a case for it.

Perrin: "entering the kingdom" (22.5, 3, 114.3=accretions). What about 39.2, 99.3 and 64.12, Perrin asks? First, the sayings he identified do not contain this expression. Saying 3 does not contain the phrase "entering the kingdom," at all in the Coptic, and only in a lacunae in the Greek does it have "will enter it." 22.7 has "will enter the Kingdom" where Kingdom is in the lacunae; 22.3 has "Will we enter the Kingdom as little babies?". 114.2 has "will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Second, 64.12 is also an accretion, and it too does not have the expression "entering the Kingdom", but "entering the places of my Father." 39.2 is in the Kernel but does not have the expression "entering the Kingdom." In fact the word Kingdom never even occurs in this saying. Here Perrin's memory of the Matthean version appears to be bleeding over into the Thomasine. 99.3 contains the expression "will enter the Kingdom of my Father." In my opinion, there is no characteristic phrase to identify across the sayings Perrin lays out. If we were to argue it on terms of a characteristic theme, I think here we would falter as well since the idea of "entering the Kingdom" is so common to early Christian literature generally it would be hard to maintain an argument that it represents secondary development in the Gospel of Thomas.

Perrin: "The poetic 'taste death' occupies two separate stages of composition (Gos. Thom. 18.3=Stage 3; Gos. Thom. 1.1, 19.4, 85.2=Stage 4)" (p. 66). Both of Perrin's "Stages" are accretions. So there is no inconsistency. 18.3 may be our earliest accretion of the lot Perrin identifies, but this doesn't mean that I have applied my methodology inconsistently. Certainly we would expect characteristic vocabulary to accrue gradually over time in this gospel. It is not at all clear to me why Perrin demands that all sayings with similar vocabulary must enter the gospel at exactly the same moment. According to my hypothesis, this is a document being preserved by particular Christians with particular theology and language that accumulates in an ongoing fashion.

Perrin: "as does the typically Syrian metaphor 'bridal chamber' (Gos. Thom. 104.3=Stage 1; Gos. Thom. 75.1=Stage 4)" (p. 66). The usage of the metaphor, however, is not consistent in these two sayings. 104.3 (Kernel) uses the metaphor to refer to the Jewish custom that weddings are days of feasting, not fasting. Jesus may have been identified as the bridegroom who leaves the bridal chamber (= the world); in Jesus' absence Christians now fast. 75.1 (Accretion) says that the celibate person is the one who will enter the bridal chamber (=Kingdom).

Perrin: there are marcarisms in both Kernel and the accretions. True. But again this appears to me to be such common language attributed to Jesus in early Christianity, it would be impossible to maintain that it represents secondary development in the Gospel of Thomas.

Perrin: the language of "worth" and "being worthy" (Gos. Thom. 56.2, 85.1, 114.1=accretions), but also in Gos. Thom. 55.2 and 62.1=Kernel. Perrin's remark misses entirely the actual phrase I identified which is "the world does not deserve" (or "the world is not worthy"), a phrase that does not occur in 55.2 and 62.1 (Recovering pp. 72-73).

Perrin: as for Perrin's statement that the "rest" sayings were split between the Kernel (86.2, 90.1, 61.1) and the accretions (50.3, 51.1, 60.6). First, the sayings that Perrin identifies do not use consistent terminology in the Coptic to refer to "rest" which is the English translation. Nor do these sayings understand the concept consistently. In 61.1 and 86.2 emton is used to indicate being satisfied, relieved, at ease, perhaps even drifting off to sleep. In 90.2 (Perrin wrongly has 90.1) anapausis is used to indicate relaxation from labor. It is only in the accretions 50.3, 51.1, and 60.6 that anapausis is found and used in a Hermetic sense, although 50.3 speaks of this rest in cosmic terms while 60.6 in interiorized personal terms. 51.1 is problematic because anapausis probably was not the original word at all, but more likely anastasis (=resurrection). Scribal error may have been responsible for the slight change in word. At any rate, for these reasons, I did not identify anapausis as "characteristic" nor use it as a factor to determine the accretions. It is interesting, however, if I had done this, the accretions that I had already identified would be the ones that contain anapausis with a Hermetic usage of that word!

The long and short of this is that I was very consistent in my application of method. I did not, as Perrin accuses me, lead us where I wanted us to go (p. 66). I had no idea where the method was going to go. Once I was finished I was as surprised as anyone given the Koester-Robinson model, that the earliest sayings in the Gospel of Thomas were apocalyptic and imminently eschatological with a Jerusalem orientation, while the accretions represented a form of mystical and encratic Christianity common to Syria in the second century. Quite honestly, I was hoping that the mystical form was our earliest Thomas, given my prior work on Thomas. But once I worked consistently through the text identifying the secondary material, this turned out to be wrong. Although there was an early mystical dimension to Jesus' teaching, the early apocalypticism in Thomas did not focus on it, but instead on the eschatological and the coming of the Kingdom and judgment. It only shifted to the mystical later, once the Kingdom didn't come as expected.

Cautionary Note 4: DeConick on Accretions

Perrin (p. 55): "At the end of the day, DeConick shows us four stages (for lack of a better term)." He then assigns certain sayings to Stages 1, 2, 3, and 4, apparently referencing my chart on pages 97-98 but with no citation.

Perrin's description is not the model I have argued for. My chart is labeled "The Gradual Accrual of Logia," not stages or layers (words which I consciously avoided). In fact I wrote in the paragraph immediately proceeding the chart (Recovering, p. 97):

"The first [chart] outlines the approximate dates for the accrual of the accretions in the gospel between the years 50 and 120 CE. The chart should not be read as representing three stages of 'redaction' (literary or oral) of Thomas. Such a reading would represent a complete misunderstanding of my argument. The accrual occurred mainly within the field of oral performance and was gradual."

I think that the creation of the Gospel of Thomas was a complex, organic and gradual process, and I do not want my hypothesis to be rewritten by my critics into the exact type of model I am trying to replace, and then criticized on these terms.

The method I put into place was to identify later material from earlier material, and then to offer an explanation for how and why the later material came into the Gospel. It is not an explanation that involves redactionary layering or stages or phases. It is a hypothesis that sees later material accruing within older material in order to shift the meaning and provide a new hermeneutic once the older material became a liability or required a new interpretation. This is why I use the image "rolling corpus." The three overlapping time periods that I offer for the accrual of the later material is my best estimate based on what we know about similar material and ideas in other early Christian texts which we date to these times.

Cautionary Note 3: DeConick on the Historical Jesus

Perrin (p. 57): "DeConick believes that as long as Jesus was present in spirit among his first followers, they felt little compulsion to inquire after the facts of his life." I do not believe this nor have I written this. I wrote (Recovering, p. 249) that the Thomasine Christians understood the historical Jesus to be the charismatic Jesus who lived in their presence. I have said nothing about whether or not they asked after the facts of his life. I am confident that they did, but am also confident that they made no distinction between that person and the one who lived in their presence, just as most practicing Christians today make no such distinction.

Perrin (p. 57): "She [DeConick] sees the life and ministry of Jesus as having no measurable relevance to Christian beginnings." This is Perrin's voice, not mine. He misappropriates a quotation from my book (Recovering p. 247; Perrin, 57-58) in order to state that I do not think that Jesus of Nazareth mattered. This is Perrin's agenda, and I wish to distance myself from it as far as I possibly can. I, in fact, use the expression "remembering" Jesus to indicate that there was an historical figure whom the Christians were remembering. How accurate those memories were and their later interpretations is another question altogether. It is a given to me that early Christianity is not a religion based on a Jesus Myth, but a real person who said things and did things. I wrote (and Perrin misappropriated) (Recovering, pp. 244-248) that the quest for Christian origins in terms of spontaneous initial diversity is not maintainable from the evidence. Rather Christianity began in Jerusalem and quickly diversified given indigenous conditions. However, I do not find one event or idea as the moment Christianity crystallized. Rather a complex of forces including the teachings of Jesus as they were remembered, the impulse to give meaning to Jesus' death, and religious experience.

Perrin (p. 66) writes about "DeConick's proposal that Jesus' followers, precisely in their interest as a philosophical school to remain faithful to Jesus, thought up sayings and in good conscience attributed them to Jesus." No citation provided. This is not my position. I never refer to the Thomasine Christians, or any other Christians, as a philosophical school. Nor do I say that they "thought up sayings" to attribute to Jesus. My understanding of the Thomasine Christians is that of a body of faithful Christians living in Edessa, who add to their collection words of the living Jesus whom they believed spoke to them through revelation.

Perrin (pp. 67-68) offers a hypothetical Lenin analogy as a way to show his readers my understanding of the development of the Jesus traditions. This analogy disregards what interdisciplinary studies have demonstrated to us, and lacks understanding of my argument. When we are dealing with charismatic communities, today's revelation of something Jesus says has no less authority or authenticity than yesterday's or the day before that. There is no disjuncture between Jesus the Prophet and the living presence of his spirit. There is no disregard for what Jesus actually said, as Perrin appears to want his readers to believe is my position.

Cautionary Note 2: DeConick on Orality and Literacy

Yesterday, I posted a caution about the misrepresentation of my work in Nicholas Perrin's new book, Thomas, The Other Gospel. I have already been asked why I think Perrin has done this. I do not know. It may be an honest misreading of my work. I remember a scholar-friend a long time ago telling me that her worst fear in publication was that her work who be misunderstood by others. I never really understood this fear on a personal level until I read Perrin's chapter.

So my comments here have nothing to do with reviewing his book. I leave that to the journals. My purpose in my next three or four posts is to clear up his errors about my position before they become assumed into the secondary literature.

My first post will deal with my understanding of orality and literacy, which has been misunderstood by Perrin.

Perrin (p. 62) states that I understand the composition of the Gospel of Thomas entirely in terms of orality, leaving no room for written sources to enter the text especially at later dates. These are his words, not mine, and there is no citation. I write entirely the opposite (Recovering p. 64):

"The agglutinative process through which the Gospel of Thomas evolved was a process within the oral registry. The traditions were not mainly developed by a redactor with a pen in hand. Rather, oral and written traditions which they collected were gathered and adapted mainly in the process of the oral performance and recreation of the words of Jesus over the entire life of the community."

Perrin (p. 63): "Our author's [DeConick's] position that the earliest post-Easter community had little more use for scrolls than they did for doorstops in the end seems to rely rather heavily on unsubstantiated and largely theoretical assumptions." This is Perrin's hyperbole, his own language, and his own conclusion which he attributes to me without citation. This is exactly the opposite the position I lay out in Recovering, where I describe the ancient Christian world in terms of a rhetorical culture, one engaged in writing but priviledged by an oral consciousness (Recovering, pp. 24-37). I write (pp. 31-32):

"The writing down of traditions in cultures dominated by orality is of enormous significance because it marks either the point of loss of the 'communicative memory,' the 'eyewitness' or 'living' memory, through the death of the actual people involved in the formation and emergence of the group, or a moment of historical crisis or upheaval. Under these conditions, communities relying heavily on oral consciousness are confronted with the potential loss of their memories. So they will turn to writing as a way to ensure the survival of the traditions and to provide meaning to their past, reconnecting with it amidst drastically changing historical circumstances...In the formative years of early Christianity, there was great fluidity between oral performances and texts so that traditions moved in and out of these contexts while always being subject to the effects of oral consciousness...The model we should be operating from is that of an oral-literatecontinuum where there is a great interaction between orality and literacy."

Perrin (p. 65): "according to DeConick, the Thomas community orally perpetuated its memory of Jesus for a century or so" but no citation. This is not my position which is clearly laid out several times in Recovering. So I will state it again. Thomas began as a written Kernel, a notebook of speeches. This text was used by orators to preach and instruct, and so it moved into the oral environment where it was adapted each time it was performed. It was a text that moved in and out of oral and written environments. I write (pp. 62-63):

"We can imagine that the developing traditions were rescribed at crucial moments in the history of the community when members feared the loss of their traditions or when pressure within the group demanded significant reinterpretation." This process lasted for 60 to 70 years.

Perrin (p. 59) misappropriates a quotation from Recovering (p. 57). In reference to Papias and Luke, I suggest that the Christians were more confident relying on their own memories than copying written sources because they could ask questions of the witnesses (such as we do today in a court of law). Perrin says that I mean by this that Christians who never came within a hundred feet of Jesus were oblivious to the weight of eyewitness testimony (Perrin, pp. 59-60). These are not my words, nor are they my meaning. What I write is that Papias and Luke knew other written sources, but make a point that they prefer oral testimony from people they know for veracity's sake.

Perrin (p. 61): DeConick has reduced "the Jesus tradition into catechetical speeches" and this "necessitates the assumption that those who preserved Jesus' memory, while duly impressed with at least some of his words, found nothing about his life or actions worth remembering. And if it is really the case that the memory of Jesus was preserved only in speeches, if remains for DeConick to explain why the Thomas community only preserved the words of Jesus but the canonical gospel writers attributed to Jesus both words and actions." Perrin offers no citation to my work, This not a position I ever entertain let alone maintain. Recovering is an investigation of the Gospel of Thomas, which suggests that this text started as a speech collection. I never state that the early Christians were only interested in the sayings of Jesus. In fact, I think that the narrative tradition is just as early, and this is one of the reasons in my methodology chapter that I include a discussion of the referential horizon (pp. 8-10). The sayings, when orated, would have evoked a bigger story or narrative complex for the audience.

Perrin (p. 61): "She [DeConick] does not clarify how and why such speeches eventually gave rise to the narrative gospels." I cannot clarify something that I do not address in my book. Recovering is not a book about how speech gospels became narrative gospels. It is a book attempting to understand a particular case - the compositional history of the Gospel of Thomas. For what it might be worth, in fact, I don't think that speech gospels turned into narrative gospels at all. I think that speech gospels rose alongside oral narrative cycles, cycles that evidently led to Mark. Speech gospels like the Kernel or Q later were incorporated into the narrative gospels, as is the case with Matthew and Luke. But the speech gospel did not generate the narrative gospel as Perrin leads his readers to think is my position.

Tomorrow I will post on my position about the historical Jesus.

Cautionary Note 1: Nick Perrin, Thomas, The Other Gospel

Over on Euangelion, Michael Bird posted on Nick Perrin's new book, Thomas, The Other Gospel. I too have seen this book, and since my work is one of the main books that Perrin interacts with, I send out a caution to those who read his book.

My work (Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas) has been grossly misappropriated and misrepresented by Perrin. His descriptions of what I say are not accurate or trustworthy. I wish to distance myself as much as I possibly can from his complete disregard for my actual speech. I have never before found myself in the awkward position of reading someone's else's work and wondering why the author found it necessary to so thoroughly misrepresent my actual speech, putting words and positions into my mouth that I have never and would never hold.

I do know that my compositional hypothesis makes his (dependence on Tatian) untenable, as do Stephen Patterson's and Elaine Pagel's own hypotheses which he also critiques. But I find highly unusual and unprofessional the way in which Perrin attempts to critique my work, by critiquing his own caricature of my work rather than the work itself.

I am considering, over the next few days, posting all details, because I want to immediately set the record straight and provide some distance between his bizarre rhetoric and my actual positions.

Update: see now
Nick Perrin's response
Mark Goodacre's review

Friends of Near Eastern Studies Lecture

I am in Michigan today with my son Alexander. We flew into Detroit yesterday. Margorie Fisher invited me to give a lecture on the Gospel of Judas as a benefit for the Near Eastern Studies department at the University of Michigan. Since this is the program from which I graduated, I was enthusiastic to take part. The lecture was followed by a wonderful dinner hosted by Dr. Fisher. Thank you to all who helped make this evening so memorable.

Expository Times producing an important series of books

Paul Foster just mentioned to me that last year's articles on the apostolic fathers published in Expository Times 117, have been put into a book. It is available for under $30 from Continuum. This is fantastic, especially for purposes of teaching.

He also mentioned that it is possible that the other gospel articles from Expository Times 118 (I mentioned them in yesterday's post) will be collected into a similar volume with a few extra entries. What a great idea!

Here is the table of contents for the apostolic fathers edition:

Apostolic Fathers and the Struggle for Christian Identity (Helmut Koester)
The Didache (Jonathon Draper)
1 Clement (Andrew Gregory)
2 Clement (Paul Parvis)
Fragments of Papias (Charles Hill)
The Apology of Quadratus (Paul Foster)
The Shepherd of Hermas (Joseph Verheyden)
The Epistle of Barnabas (James Carleton Paget)
The Epistles of Ignatius (Paul Foster)
The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (Michael Holmes)
The Martyrdom of Polycarp (Sara Parvis)
The Epistle to Diognetus (Paul Foster)