Gospel seeds

I've always been a lover (and collector) of aphorisms. The pithy one-liner is my favorite literary form. I sowed my Seednet before i even dreamed of writing a book. So when it came to choosing an exemplar of scripture for that book, the Gospel of Thomas was a natural choice, being made up almost entirely of seed-sayings well worth pondering.

The great advantage of an aphorism is its portability. Its compact length makes it easy to remember, re-use and recycle in varying situations, without having to carry a book around. Every new context adds breadth to its meaning, though the context of living experience is the primal source of its depth. It behooves the reader of such a scripture to learn something about the cultural context in which it originated—not so much to recover the ‘original meaning’ of the text, but to split and recombine the atoms of meaning, as it were, to reveal the continuity of the semiosis articulated by the text.

I have therefore been looking into the cultural milieu which produced the Gospel of Thomas, using the resources listed on my Sourcenet page. The most recently acquired of these is The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation, by April D. DeConick, who has stirred things up somewhat in this field of scholarship with her work on Thomas and with The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. I won't go into detail about these here, but instead recommend her Forbidden Gospels blog and the links you will find there.

One point she makes about G. Thomas puts the aphoristic nature of it in a new perspective (for me anyway). If she is right about its development process, this ‘book’ circulated orally long before it was written down. It follows that unlike a text written before circulation, the ‘original’ Gospel of Thomas probably included variant versions of the sayings included in it, and there is no way to specify an ‘original’ version with the kind of precision we expect of a book composed in writing. Jesus himself was not a writer, and out of all the things he might have said, it was only the most memorable and meaningful that lasted long enough to be written down. And by that time, those who had been using them to ‘reach’ others would remember the sayings which had most often proved useful for that purpose, and the form in which they remembered them would vary somewhat to suit this variety of uses. Lacking an authoritative text to consult, they would also be likely to add some new sayings and forget some old ones. DeConick identifies some sayings as belonging to the oldest ‘kernel’ of the gospel, and others (about half) as later ‘accretions’.

When this (or any) gospel came to be written down, it would naturally take the form that the writer found most appropriate for the situation(s) in which the book was intended to be used. The Coptic version of G. Thomas found in the Nag Hammadi library—the only complete copy we have—is probably a translation of a Greek translation of a Syriac translation of an Aramaic ‘original’ which only existed in people's memories. All of the Gospels are reconstructions in that respect. It seems likely that G. Thomas gives the sayings that circulated among first-century Christians in the most concentrated form available to us; but we also have to assume that the specific form of this gospel—what it includes, what it leaves out, and the terms it uses—made sense in the specific situation of whoever wrote it down. If you are looking to find out what Jesus actually said, you won't get an authoritative answer from this book or any other, including the canonical gospels. But what's the difference? The bottom line, for you, is what you mean by this (or any) scripture.