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Rhetorical Composition and Sources in the Gospel of Thomas
Vernon K. Robbins For many scholars, the advent of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (Gos. Thom.) in New Testament interpretation has substantively changed their view of the emergence and development of early Christian tradition.1The substantive reason is the unusual status of gospel tradition in this text. On the one hand, over half of the sayings in Gos. Thom. are like sayings in the canonical gospels. On the other hand, in no case are versions of a pericope in the Gos. Thom. and any of the canonical gospels exactly alike. For some scholars, the existence of the Gos. Thom. has only added a little supplemental information to our knowledge of early Christianity. For them, nothing substantive has changed. The Gos. Thom., in their view, is the result of an alternative approach to the gospels by some Christians during the second century. Some of these scholars think this alternative approach was primarily a result of Jewish Christian influence, while others consider it to be an orientation toward revealed knowledge that is best called Gnosticism. These scholars are agreed, however, that the Gos. Thom. is a later, secondary and derivative gospel. There is, then, nothing substantively new here. Whether the Gos. Thom. is the result of a dramatically deconstructive use of the synoptic gospels (e.g., Grant and Freedman) or a collector of sayings from Jewish Christian and/or Gnostic gospels (Gärtner), the canonical gospels alone reveal the manner in which first century Christian tradition emerged, and the Gos. Thom. reveals what some Christians did with gospel tradition during the second century.
For other scholars, knowledge of the nature of gospel tradition in the Gos. Thom. has substantively changed their view of the emergence and development of first century Christian tradition. After early studies by Oscar Cullmann (1962a, 1962b) and R. McL. Wilson (1960) that suggested the need for a different way of conceptualizing the process that produced the tradition in the Gos. Thom., studies by Hugh Montefiore (1960/61) and Claus Hunno Hunziger (1960a, 1960b) created the context for a dramatically alternative approach. Montefiore observed that the parables in Gos. Thom. do not contain aspects of the same tradition-historical development (like allegorization and addition of generalized comment at the end) as the synoptic gospels. Instead, the parables in Gos. Thom. contain the same "kind" of tradition-historical development, but with different results (Patterson 1992: 67).
1I am deeply grateful to the following people for contributing to this paper, sometimes in ways they might not have known: Laurie Patton, Gordon D. Newby, Jon Ma Asgeirsson, J. D. H. Amador, James D. Hester, Bernard Combrink, L. Gregory Bloomquist, Anders Eriksson, Duane F. Watson, and David deSilva. Back
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