PhilosopherJay wrote:
Hi TedM,
The very first word in the "wife" papyrus seems to be Jesus.
There are mulitiple fragments/manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas. That one of them should also begin with the word Jesus is not that unusual. About 90 of the 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas starts with the words "Jesus said."
Of the four sayings that Watson points to, three of them begin with the phrase Jesus said:
(30) Jesus said, "Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him."
(45) (45) Jesus said, "Grapes are not harvested from thorns, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they do not produce fruit. A good man brings forth good from his storehouse; an evil man brings forth evil things from his evil storehouse, which is in his heart, and says evil things. For out of the abundance of the heart he brings forth evil things."
(101) <Jesus said,> "Whoever does not hate his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not love his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. For my mother [...], but my true mother gave me life."
(114) Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."
The fact that the "wife" manuscript has the word "my" at the end of the first line, and the Gospel of Thomas saying #101 has it at the end of the second line is meaningless. The word "my" appears about 30 times in the Gospel of Thomas. Since there are less than 10 words per line, and the word "my" appears 30 times, the odds are that it will appear in 3 lines in the text at the end of a line. Since most of the sayings are "Jesus said" sayings, and are only about three lines long, the odds are pretty good that you would find the word "my" at the end of line 1, 2, or 3 of a saying beginning with "Jesus said." Watson was unlucky in that the word "my" does not appear on the same line with the word "Jesus." Instead, he has to wreck his parallel and suggest that the second line of saying 101 ends in "my," while the first line in the "wife" papyrus ends in "my".
Using the logic of Watson we can say that all four gospels must have been copied from the Gospel of Thomas because they all contain the phrase "Jesus" at the beginning of a line and all contain the word "my" somewhere in the next three lines afterwards.
I am not sure if I have interpreted Watson's points correctly, but if I haven not, it is only because they are presented in such an absurdly vague manner as to make them incomprehensible and worthless. This kind of incoherent argument may mean something to apologists, but it doesn't mean anything outside that world.
Instead of doubling down on his wrong bet, now that the scientific evidence is in, Watson should apologize to the scholars whose reputations he has impugned.
Warmly,
Jay Raskin
TedM wrote:From the article in question, we have the following:
..the text has been constructed out of small pieces–words or phrases–culled from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (GTh), especially Sayings 30, 45, 101 and 114, and set in new ontexts...The author has used a kind of “collage” technique to assemble the items selected from Thomas into a new composition. While this is a very unlikely way for an ancient author to compose a text, it’s what might be expected of a modern forger with limited facility in the Coptic language.4I do not see anything in Dr King’s response to cause me to retract that last sentence.Furthermore, I pointed out that the very first line of the fragment begins in the middle of a word, at exactly the same place as in the equivalent passagei n the one surviving Gospel of Thomas manuscript. And line 1 ends with the same ending as the following line in Thomas.This is quite a coincidence, and it suggests that the author f[the Jesus’ wife fragment]may have drawn his Thomas material from a modern printed edition
If the part in italics is correct, IMO this text is almost certainly a forgery, and there is no need for experts to weigh in. All that is needed is some common sense.