Significance of the Gospel of Thomas if the Canonical Gospels are late?

[davidmartin]

In the abstract, I tend to agree. It makes sense for a list of bare sayings to be put on characters' lips and then fleshed out with narrative. I believe something similar has happened with Eugnostos and the Wisdom of Jesus Christ. The bare, raw exposition of Eugnostos was placed upon the lips of gospel characters including Jesus, Philip, Matthew, and Mary; thus was an essay, as it were, turned into a conversation; it does not take much to imagine a conversation being given a context and then turned into a basic narrative, and then on from there we go. In the abstract, going from Thomas to the synoptics is easy peasy; I test out that option every single time I try to trace a trajectory.

Agreed in the Wisdom of Jesus Christ they tried this and fluffed it badly the questions not really matching the answers at all. I'm surprised it got past the gnostic scripture approval committee, would Mary Magdalene have signed it off? would she hell of this mish mash!
Anyway, this text is one of my pieces of evidence gnostics got more gnostic over time. probably it was late 1st century they fired up the myth generator but to begin with it was just ordinary mystical source material. Then there was a fight, who gets to have Mary? Dang if it wasn't the orthodox who got the girl leaving gnostics grumbling about sophia. Now they want her back. Tune in for the next installment after these messages

[mlinssen]

Yes, the topic certainly does hold that potential! I apologize for taking up so much of the thread with it. I have presented what I wanted to present, and am interested in sitting back now and letting you and David and MrMacSon discuss the Coptic angle.

Thank you Ben, I'll get out the laptop and see if I can compile all the nomina sacra stuff and posts from this thread, then start a fresh one on it.
In not entirely unrelated news, I'll pick up the pieces and try to answer the very question of this thread, so we can unravel that further

[mlinssen]

If the canonical (or even just the synoptic gospels) were finalised late, in conjunction with 'Marcion's Gospel' as proposed by Jason BeDuhn, Markus Vinzent, and Matthias Klinghardt (and perhaps other scholars w.r.t. Luke), might that mean extra-canonical texts such as the Gospel of Thomas could have preceded their final extant versions? Might that mean the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas could have come from a historical Jesus?

It is just now that I realise I have revived a dormant thread!

A few comments to the first post then, perhaps

1. The whole layers invention perturbs every analysis, and sometimes I wonder whether that wasn't the whole idea behind it. If you get dragged in there it's a bit like the Israeli-Palestine conflict where each takes turns and it is impossible to determine who started it all.
Every theory of anyone being earlier becomes unbelievable to confirm and / or deny once "layers" get into the equation. It may perhaps enable April to fantasise along, but it is of little use for those who want to get further, move on, towards a destination

Layers merely serve as one big blanket for everyone to cuddle and compromise under, and only lead to impasse, stale mate

2. Presuming that a Jesus existed, any Jesus, we first must agree on which one that is then, I think. That, or we simply state "we accept and embrace the possibility that there was a guy, who came to be known as Jesus (among others, perhaps) and to whom certain sayings and across got ascribed. Then a struggle started because he suddenly was wanted by a great diversity of teams, and he ended up being claimed by dozens if not hundreds of different voices

We therefore realise that we must agree on a single historical Jesus before we can ascribe anything to him, and regrettably can't get around the Catch 22 there

3. That doesn't help much, does it?

[MrMacSon]

If the canonical (or even just the synoptic gospels) were finalised late, in conjunction with 'Marcion's Gospel' as proposed by Jason BeDuhn, Markus Vinzent, and Matthias Klinghardt (and perhaps other scholars w.r.t. Luke), might that mean extra-canonical texts such as the Gospel of Thomas could have preceded their final extant versions? Might that mean the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas could have come from a historical Jesus?

It is just now that I realise I have revived a dormant thread!

A few comments to the first post then, perhaps

1. The whole layers invention perturbs every analysis, and sometimes I wonder whether that wasn't the whole idea behind it (If you get dragged in there it's a bit like the Israeli-Palestine conflict where each takes turns and it is impossible to determine who started it all).

Every theory of anyone being earlier becomes unbelievable to confirm and / or deny once "layers" get into the equation ....

Layers merely serve as one big blanket for everyone to cuddle and compromise under, and only lead to impasse, stale mate
.

(parentheses -( ) - added; some text from mlinssen's post omitted)

There may not, however, be much layering to it all. Jörg Rüpke in his 2018 Pantheon: a History of Roman Religion proposed the literature of Josephus and other first century authors created a demand, a market, for biographical and similar literature in the second century and that texts such the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas, among others, such as the Marcionite Gospel, were popular.

See http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 713#p90713

Markus Vinzent and Matthias Klinghardt propose the canonical gospels were written in very close proximity chronologically and spatially using the Marcionite text as a template. It's feasable the Pauline and Thomasine authors were part of a similar near mid 2nd century theological upsurge.