Stuart wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 10:05 am
mlinssen wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 9:51 pm
Stuart wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 2:59 pm
I kind of lost you when I realized Thomas was written at least 100 years after the Marcionite gospel.
How did your realise that, Stuart?
Thomas is dependent upon all four gospels.
But perhaps you are saying there was a source before that, upon which it was written.
Certainly, the inscription and the 13th saying are late additions, since "Didymos Judas Thomas" is post fourth gospel concept, and the fourth gospel is dependent upon Matthew and the Marcionite gospels, as those are the theologies it directly refutes. This means it started untitled. Further the 21st and 116th sayings draw from the Mariology that arose as a result of the infancy gospel tradition we find in Matthew and Luke. And tied to those two sayings is also the Simon Peter tradition.
There are many others which only make sense if the reader is already aware of the gospel narrative; for example, sayings 21, 78, 79, 99 and 100 all require that gospel context to make any sense. There are several others, but the level of contention could rise. Note, your case weakens if you counter that the gospel influenced the sayings in the current form, leading the originals in the Thomas collection to be modified.
But let's ask another question, after removing the most troublesome elements as later additions influenced by other traditions we can identify as having gospel origins, what was the purpose of the collection? From whence did it arise? And what purpose did it serve that it deserved replication and circulation in the pre-evangelical Christian movement? I refer to these fundamental questions as the "half a wing" problem.
Mind you we are not even getting into the counter narrative of specific Sethian and even some Cainite type Gnosticism displayed in this Thomas document. Theologies that are derivative, not primary. All of which point to a long post gospel, and most likely 3rd century origin.
So far you've brought to the fore opinions alone, but I'm curious after arguments.
There are only 115 sayings by the way, I I presume you mean the last - which is a devilish one in which Mariham wins the prize over all the others, but that's another story
To answer your question, allow me to paste some from my bio; they'll be some slack there but you'll get the full picture:
It is my top priority to disclose the intricacies of Thomas and the beautiful insights in it. In essence, he teaches what today is known as radical non-duality, only 2 millennia earlier.
His World is how we view the world, his 'house' is how we view ourselves - the mental models we created for ourselves to live in, inhabited by the two that we made when we were One: the Ego and the Self. We are neither.
The World must burn, and the house overturned - then the slaveowner (Ego) and the Self (slave) will make way for our real, original self: the living father.
IS, who is also living, is a mere helping hand on our way to that salvation: a concept, and it all is created by the alleged Thomas, the author - who very likely was known as Judas at first
Coptic Thomas is the original, which I date to 30 BCE - ??? CE; post quem is Roman occupation of Egypt, ante quem theoretically is 70 CE, going by Josephus alone - assuming that Thomas was written in Egypt against a contemporary background: Roman tax and Pharisees is all that we can go on.
And while I fully rely on historical records for the Roman tax, I doubt that I can fully rely on Josephus for the Pharisees - or most anything else, for that matter
Regarding the order and direction of texts:
Thomas writes his text about self salvation: the kingdom is of your inside and of your eye - make the two one!
It's not about any Jesus we know, not about Christianity, not even about Chrestianity: Thomas precedes all that
John takes that into a narrative, fully breathing the spirituality of Thomas: John has almost double the occurrences of "Father" when compared to the Synoptics combined (Matthew 45, Mark 6, Luke 23, John 123);
Marcion takes John and adds some 50+ logia from Thomas, and some really fierce anti-Judaism, among others the Transfiguration (cf. Christi Thora) and the patch (which he changes from old to new, explicitly separating his new religion from Judaism)
Mark counters Marcion by inverting the anti-Judaism into pro-Judaism by fusing Jesus with the Tanakh. Mark catches two birds with one stone: he redirects the anti-Judaism to the Pharisees and also invents the resurrection, blaming the women (from the Chrestian tradition) for the fact that no one had ever heard of that (he ends at 16:8). Mark turns the anti-Judaic Jesus into a true Messiah as much as he can, and is the first "Christian" gospel
Chrestianity still persists and after Mark an even bolder move is made: Marcion's *Ev gets redacted into Luke - by Matthew, who is writing his own gospel on the side. And the Thomas material in Mark gets doubled that way: 35 logia become 70, 6 parables become 13 - and the one parable that Mark made up himself acquires 14 siblings, all of which stand in stark contrast with the typical Thomasine parables
After that, the Septuagint gets composed: deliberate mistranslations of the Tanakh in order to substantiate the bogus prophecies and fake claims that the NT created in order to fuse Chrestianity with Judaism and vice versa. There are only scraps of Greek Tanakh prior to 4th/5th CE, and none of those contain the typical scribal signs that run like a red thread through the NHL and any and all Greek Christian MS: ï, ü, apostrophe and superlinear replacing line-ending Nu - all of which are present in Thomas as well
There's no historicity of anyone, the characters all are figments of the imagination, invented by Thomas and everyone who came after him: one will look in vain for XS or XRS in Thomas; there is no Chrest or Christ in his text, only an IS and IHS. Yet all the names in his text are in the NT
