Irish1975 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 9:09 am
mlinssen wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 11:26 pm
You will find that order of books to radically change, and there will be a new addition to them
Up front
I'm familiar with your position, mlinssen, that gThomas stands first in the Gospel tradition. And I am open to the argument that Matthew and Luke used gThomas for logia material.
But how do you address the fact that gThomas is entirely non-narrative, and in that respect does not conform to the general idea of a Jesus story? Isn't it more in the tradition of "oracles of the Lord," thus having more in common (in form, not in substance) with the Papias traditions, and the so-called Apostolic Fathers? Perhaps also the epistle of James (common logia material); maybe even the Odes of Solomon?
Everything changes in the historical record of the 2nd century when stories
about a Jesus are brought together.
I hear you, and agree
Thomas is not about IS.
Nor about Chrestianity.
Certainly not about Christianity - the entire text doesn't even contain XS or XPS
Thomas solely and entirely is a vehemently anti-religious text about self-salvation, and it is especially anti-Judaic.
Yet it is very cryptic and easily misunderstood, and to the casual observer it is about a leader and his disciples (who get continuously trashed)
It is John who takes it into a narrative, and we can see how John contains as many occurrences of father as the Synoptics combined - and how the woman at the well betrays the Samaritan blood of John, and his shared hate towards the Judeans that Thomas also has.
I have no idea at this point in time why and how John (mis)understood Thomas, but I simply fail to make a business case for including John in the NT, most of all with everybody asserting that such happened at a late point in time
John doesn't belong in the gospels, simple as that - the only reason for including him is that he couldn't be excluded, and the highly likely reason for that is that he started it all, which is supported by the amount of texts found, and the fact that Tertullian names him so very, very often: 19 times, that's 2 more than Matthew and Mark together
.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9804&p=141655&hilit ... hn#p141655
So there's your narrative Irish - Thomas really is the unwilling and unwitting silent witness to all of this, he has nothing to do with it and would have killed himself a thousand times had he known what his work would lead to
And yes, that's an incredibly hard sell, but it is what it is. I have thought for a while that Marcion took Thomas "straight up" but that simply is too much in one go, even though in theory he added only a narrative.
Why did John strip almost all of Thomas and just went with the context and themes? Isn't it ludicrous that Marcion adds so much from Thomas to John?
Honestly, yes - but why does Mark take only 35 logia and 6 parables from Thomas, and allow MatthewLuke to double those?
I'm not there yet Irish, such is for sure...