A Common Written Greek Source for Mark and Thomas

By John Horman

This book uncovers an early collection of sayings, called N, that are ascribed to Jesus and are similar to those found in the Gospel of Thomas and in Q, a document believed to be a common source, with Mark, for Matthew and Luke. In the process, the book sheds light on the literary methods of Mark and Thomas. A literary comparison of the texts of the sayings of Jesus that appear in both Mark and Thomas shows that each adapted an earlier collection for his own purpose. Neither Mark nor Thomas consistently gives the original or earliest form of the shared sayings; hence, Horman states, each used and adapted an earlier source. Close verbal parallels between the versions in Mark and Thomas show that the source was written in Greek. Horman’s conclusion is that this common source is N.

This proposal is new, and has implications for life of Jesus research. Previous research on sayings attributed to Jesus has treated Thomas in one of two ways: either as an independent stream of Jesus sayings written without knowledge of the New Testament Gospels and or as a later piece of pseudo-Scripture that uses the New Testament as source. This book rejects both views.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781554583430

John Horman

John Horman received his Ph.D. from McMaster University in 1973 and is an independent scholar from Waterloo, ON. He has published in Novum Testamentum, and this is his first book.

Book preview

A COMMON WRITTEN

GREEK SOURCE FOR

MARK & THOMAS

Studies in Christianity and Judaism /

Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme : 20

Studies in Christianity and Judaism / Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme publishes monographs on Christianity and Judaism in the last two centuries before the common era and the first six centuries of the common era, with a special interest in studies of their interrelationship or the cultural and social context in which they developed.

SERIES EDITOR: Terence L. Donaldson, Wycliffe College

Studies in Christianity and Judaism /

Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme : 20

A COMMON WRITTEN

GREEK SOURCE FOR

MARK & THOMAS

John Horman

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Horman, John, 1940–

A common written Greek source for Mark and Thomas / John Horman.

(Studies in Christianity and Judaism series ; 20)

Also issued in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-224-2

1. Bible. N.T. Mark—Criticism, Textual. 2. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel)—Criticism, Textual. 3. Bible. N.T. Mark—Language, style. 4. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel)—Language, style. 5. Jesus Christ—Words. 6. Synoptic problem. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in Christianity and Judaism ; 20

BS2585.52.H66 2011                            226.3′066                            C2010-905623-X

Electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-242-6 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-55458-343-0 (EPUB)

1. Bible. N.T. Mark—Criticism, Textual. 2. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel)—Criticism, Textual. 3. Bible. N.T. Mark—Language, style. 4. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel)—Language, style. 5. Jesus Christ—Words. 6. Synoptic problem. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in Christianity and Judaism ; 20

BS2585.52.H66 2011a                            226.3′066                            C2010-905624-8

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© 2011 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses and Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Cover design by Sandra Friesen. Cover image: Papyrus 1531, verso. Image © The British Library Board. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.

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Printed in Canada

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

N: A NEW GREEK SOURCE

The Scope of N

The Sayings Common to Mark and Thomas

N 2:19 The Bridegroom and the Bridechamber

N 2:21 Old and New

N 3:27 Binding the Strong Person

N 3:28 Speaking against the Holy Spirit

N 3:31 Jesus’s Mother and Brothers

N 4:3 The Sower

N 4:9 Whoever Has Ears

N 4:11 Mystery

N 4:21 A Lamp under a Storage Vessel

N 4:22 What Is Hidden Will Be Revealed

N 4:25 Whoever Has Will Receive

N 4:29 When the Fruit Ripens

N 4:30 A Mustard Seed

N 6:4 A Prophet Is Not Received

N 7:15 What Goes into the Mouth

N 8:27 What Am I Like?

N 8:34 Carry One’s Cross

N 9:1 Tasting Death

N 10:15 Become as a Child

N 10:31 The First and the Last

N 11:23 Moving a Mountain

N 12:1 The Vineyard Owner and the Sharecroppers

N 12:10 The Stone That the Builders Rejected

N 12:13 Taxes to Caesar

N 13:31 Heaven Will Pass Away

N 14:58 I Will Destroy This House

Other Candidates for N

The Setting of N in Early Christianity

Conclusions

EXCURSUS

Excursus 1: Sayings of Jesus and Narrative about Jesus in the Early Church

Excursus 2: Esoteric and Exoteric Sayings and Settings in Mark

Excursus 3: Narrative Frameworks for Sayings in Mark

Excursus 4: Structural Markers Indicating the Use of Sources in Thomas

Excursus 5: Thomas and the Gnostics

Notes

Bibliography

Indexes

Text

Nag Hammadi

Scriptures

Subject

Greek

Coptic

PREFACE

This work could not have been completed without help from a large number of people. First and foremost, I should thank Magdalene Horman, my wife, who has read through the complete manuscript many times to check for spelling and grammatical errors, as well as for redundancy, inconsistency, obscurity, repetition, structural problems, in short, for all of the errors for which I reproach the author of the Gospel of Mark.

Thanks are still in order to E.P. Sanders, G. Vallée, H. Rollmann, and the late R. Huebsch, who read and offered suggestions for the article that lies at the root of this work, as well as to Stevan Davies, who read an earlier version of this work and convinced me that I really did need to prove that Mark did not use Thomas. An informal colloquium that meets approximately monthly in Waterloo has discussed many parts of this work and offered valuable suggestions. In this group I am particularly thankful to Harold Remus, Michel Desjardins, John Van Seters, John Miller, Michèle Daviaux, and Paul Dion. I also thank members of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies at whose meetings I presented other parts of this work; in this group I have received helpful suggestions from, among many, John Kloppenborg, William Arnal, Steve Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers.

I wish to thank the anonymous readers who reviewed two versions of this manuscript for the series Studies in Christianity and Judaism/Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme. The arrangement of this book, and many of its features are the result of the care they have given my manuscript.

Thanks are also in order to the membership of First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo for their interest and encouragement and for providing a religious context in which I could discuss my research freely without having to worry about apologetic interests.

While preparing this work, I became aware of a widespread interest in the life and sayings of Jesus among the general public. This interest is driven in part by certain recent imaginative works about early Christianity, but also, I think, by a genuine interest in exploring Christian origins. Hence, in spite of the technical nature of this work, it is likely that at least some who lack a technical background in early Christian literature will want to read it. Conscious of such an audience, I have tried as much as possible to allow the general reader at least to understand where the argument is going. Such readers are, however, warned that they will find some of the arguments very difficult. This effort should also allow readers with more technical background, including readers whose first language is not English, to see more quickly where my arguments have gone astray.

I have also, wherever possible, provided translations for the Greek and Coptic text. These translations are my own, but I have compared them against other translations for accuracy and context. Readers who read these languages fluently will also benefit, since they will see more quickly where my arguments are based on misunderstandings of the text.

as man. In such a context the correct translation is usually human or person. Occasionally, however, the lack of an obviously gender-neutral personal pronoun in the English language has defeated my efforts. In those cases my compromise favours clarity of language over inclusivity. When referring to the authors of ancient works, I use the pronoun appropriate to the gender of the putative author, even though the actual author could be of the other sex. Hence for the authors of Thomas and Mark I use he, while for the author of the Gospel of Mary I would use she.

INTRODUCTION

In 1979, I proposed that the authors of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Thomas shared a common written Greek source for their respective versions of the illustrative story of the sower,¹ a source apparently represented, at least for this story, more accurately in Thomas. Since Matthew and Luke depend on Mark for their versions of that story, all versions of the story go back to that source. Such a source would have contained not only one story, but also other sayings common to Mark and Thomas. Unfortunately, my circumstances at the time did not permit an expanded work taking these other sayings into account, nor did anyone else adopt the proposal in the intervening years.

Since then, I had some opportunity to investigate the sayings which could be attributed to such a source, beginning with a close comparison between the Greek text of Mark and the Coptic translation of Thomas, taking into account the Greek fragments of Thomas and the Coptic translations of the synoptic gospels. It became apparent that the illustrative story about the sower was no exception, and that other sayings were, when subjected to textual comparison, sufficiently close to either allow or sometimes require a literary relationship. As expected, the longer sayings, especially the illustrative stories, provided the best evidence for relationship. The evidence did not, however, support a simple verdict that Thomas always gave an earlier version that Mark had adapted. To account for the complexities of the evidence, I required a hypothetical source written in the Greek language, which I came to call N.

When I wrote that article, the majority of detailed published works on Thomas held that Thomas was a Gnostic work completely dependent on the New Testament for all sayings of Jesus common to Thomas and the New Testament gospels. Two of these were especially influential. The work of Grant and Freedman,² while very short, argued that the Gospel of Thomas was a product of the Naassene school, and sought to deceive simple Christians by slight Gnostic twists to sayings of Jesus drawn from the New Testament. While Grant and Freedman do not discuss the linguistic peculiarities of our text of Thomas, relying instead on the translation by Schoedel, a somewhat later work by Schrage³ examines the Coptic text in detail, while advancing the difficult hypothesis that the Gospel of Thomas was composed in Coptic and relies for its sayings on the Coptic (Sahidic) translations of the synoptic gospels. There were dissenting voices to both hypotheses, but in most cases they were not backed up by detailed textual analysis, whereas many of those who argued for dependence made close textual comparisons to establish their case. This early consensus is still very influential. While many more recent works treat it as somehow superseded, it is still the viewpoint that prevails in commentaries, introductions, and handbooks. These discussions, however, are founded on premises that do not stand up to scrutiny. Since it would be repetitious to discuss these premises in relation to every saying, I will discuss them in an excursus.⁴

Not all have agreed with this consensus. Since at least 1957, Gilles Quispel has argued from detailed textual analysis that the Gospel of Thomas derives most of its sayings from two sources, the Gospel of the Hebrews, an early Jewish Christian source, and the Gospel of the Egyptians, an Encratite source.⁵ While his analysis of the sources of the Gospel of Thomas has not commanded widespread assent, his search for Syrian and Aramaic roots of the Gospel of Thomas has been very influential.

Since my article was published, two developments have added weight to the view that Thomas, far from being a late Gnostic forgery, contained independent evidence for the sayings of Jesus. The first has been significant new research into the Q document, especially by John Kloppenborg. Q, and especially Q1, provides, as it were, a role model, not just for the Gospel of Thomas itself, but for any hypothetical common source or earlier arrangement of Thomas that might stand as an intermediary between Thomas and one or more of the Synoptics. Thomas, for its part, could be seen as an example of the kind of document that Q might have been.⁶ Research on Q has, however, also created increased burdens for those who wish to advance new source hypotheses. Just as recent research has probed the social and religious milieu of Q, thereby providing a reasonably secure place for Q within the early history of the Christian movement as well as a satisfactory account of the structure and message of Q, so it will be necessary to find a plausible social setting for the source proposed in this present work. My studies suggest that both Q and my proposed common source were examples of a kind of document that was useful for a long time until it became obsolete, probably in the final years of the second century.

Research into Q has provided fresh material for the second development, renewed interest in the teachings of Jesus. Many of these discussions of individual sayings, especially in Foundation and Facets Forum, have also—through detailed analyses of individual texts—shown reason to believe that the Gospel of Thomas often carries earlier versions of the sayings which it shares with the Synoptics. Because most of these writers believed that both Thomas and the authors of the synoptic gospels were drawing on an oral tradition, they did not consider the possibility of a common written source. Because the connection was through an oral tradition, the precise linguistic form of the sayings was relatively unimportant, especially since the sayings did not survive in their original Aramaic version.

These two developments have also, however, as a consequence, drawn attention away from consideration of the sayings common to Mark and Thomas. Q, especially the reconstructed Q1, has much that is compatible with a mid-first-century Galilean setting, and is often thought to be the earliest gospel, even earlier than the Gospel of Mark. Mark, although it was the earliest sequential account of the life of Jesus, was consequently devalued. Since the goal was to excavate the teachings of Jesus, Mark was typically set to one side unless supported by Q. A common written Greek source shared by Mark and Thomas would, however, have an earlier terminus ante quem than Q.

Research into the sayings of Jesus responds to a large public interest while satisfying certain theological goals. Whereas much of the doctrinal structure of Christianity has lost its appeal for many modern thinkers, perhaps an appeal to the historical Jesus would present a form of Christianity that could be considered both more plausible and more congenial.⁷ Unappealing aspects of Christianity could be bypassed if it could be shown that Jesus did not agree. For it is tacitly assumed that Jesus, if understood correctly, was inerrant regarding faith and morals. Errors and unacceptable opinions are projected onto later interpreters, beginning with Paul and the authors of the gospels.

Any sayings with uncomfortable implications are also ascribed to later reworking. While an older generation of scholars saw nothing wrong with using the Pharisees and other Jewish groups as whipping boys whenever they seemed to be in conflict with Jesus, more recent works have avoided such practices. Because of discomfort with earlier attitudes to the Pharisees, they have more easily been able to see that the reports of differences between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries were often the result of later apologetic activity. As long, however, as it is assumed that Jesus was always right, any evidence that Jesus sometimes disagreed with other Jews causes discomfort. As will be seen, a few sayings that I ascribe to the common source are in this category, for example, saying N 7:15, which, at least on the surface, appears to set aside Jewish dietary regulations.⁸

Study of the Gospel of Thomas has both benefited and suffered from this intense interest in the life and teaching of Jesus. It can easily be shown that many of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are closer than the corresponding sayings in the synoptic gospels to the original forms postulated by form critics. Thus, many see Thomas as representing an original stream of orally transmitted teachings of Jesus uncontaminated by the heavy theological agendas of the New Testament gospels. While not necessarily itself always containing the original words of Jesus, it can be used judiciously in close comparison with Q to provide something very close to what Jesus is likely to have said. Therefore if, as Borg says, Jesus trumps the Bible, it should follow that the Gospel of Thomas is religiously more valuable than anything in the New Testament except perhaps for the reconstructed Q.

In order to preserve the Gospel of Thomas as an independent source of sayings of Jesus, as well as to keep it free from suspicions of Gnostic ideology, critics have often assigned it a date in the middle of the first century. For approximately a third of the words attributed to Jesus in Thomas, such a date has much in its favour. If the gospels of the New Testament were written in the period between 65 and 110 CE, as the introductions to the New Testament tell us, and if we can assume, as many do, that they achieved at least a quasi-canonical status in large sections of the early Christian Church from the beginning, then the apparent independence of the Gospel of Thomas can be explained only on the supposition that either it was written before the canonical gospels or it was composed in some location far removed from the Christian mainstream.

There are, however, other sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas that do not agree with such an early date. According to the usual criteria followed by Jesus research, they have either been invented by the author or have been substantially reworked. In at least two cases, which will be discussed below, it is Mark’s version that is closer to a plausible reconstructed early version of the saying.⁹ In other cases, sayings in Thomas engage, however briefly, in speculations that are implausible in the peasant setting usually ascribed to the teachings of Jesus. Either Jesus sometimes indulged in philosophical flights of fancy that Thomas alone found worthy of preservation, or Thomas invented these sayings. This observation, however, is incompatible with the view that the Gospel of Thomas is a naive collection of sayings made by close followers of Jesus in the mid-first century. Consequently, we are not in a position to say that sayings in Thomas are necessarily early. But to sort out which sayings are early, which have been rewritten, and which are later inventions, it is necessary to have some understanding of the literary methods of the author. This I have provided in Excursus 4.¹⁰

If Thomas is not necessarily as early as some have enthusiastically proposed, it does not therefore follow that it is a late fraud. Since its discovery, the Gospel of Thomas has been subjected to very forceful exegesis to unmask it as a late Gnostic forgery, a pseudo-scripture written to deceive unwary and, it must be said, somewhat obtuse ordinary Christians. Because the notion of a Gnostic Thomas has received widespread acceptance, at least some reviewers will want to take me to task for overlooking the Gnostic nature of Thomas. Excursus 5 is written for their benefit.¹¹ While it was discovered in a collection of documents, many of which are usually deemed Gnostic, it will be shown that there is no reason to apply this label to Thomas. Unfortunately, I do not have room in this present work to present a fully rounded picture of the message of the Gospel of Thomas, but I intend to do so in a future work. I do, however, discuss some modern Gnostic interpretations of Thomas’s version of individual sayings shared with Mark.

Much less needs to be said for our present purposes about the Gospel of Mark. When, however, Thomas is dismissed as a late Gnostic work, it is often overlooked that the Gospel of Mark itself is not likely to have achieved scriptural status before at least the mid-second century—in other words, around the latest possible terminus ante quem for Thomas. In Excursus 1, largely following Harnack and Köster, I discuss the evidence for the use of sayings attributed to Jesus, as well as the apparent absence of interest in narrative about Jesus among Christians before 150 CE.¹²

Mark is less easy to date than is commonly supposed since, like Thomas, it betrays little interest in the political events that provide our framework of dates in the Roman Empire. According to most interpretations, it was written after the sack of Jerusalem following the revolt of 66–70 CE, although some have pleaded for an earlier date on the grounds that its description of the fall is less precise than would be expected in the period immediately following that catastrophe. At best we can say that evidently it was written before Matthew, Luke, and the Egerton gospel.

Similarly, when some scholars complain that Thomas has modified some of the sayings of Jesus for his own purposes, they necessarily must come to terms with the fact that Mark has done the same thing. Usually this is done by ascribing Mark’s changes to adaptation from some oral prehistoric stage, while Thomas is deemed to have modified documents already deemed to be scriptural. I argue that Mark was a great deal more creative than is usually supposed, and that he created at least some of his historical narrative in order to provide a setting for some of the sayings that he shares with Thomas. In Excursus 2 and Excursus 3 I discuss Mark’s own literary method.¹³ While the details of these two chapters are, in most respects, not particularly new, they are included because they show how certain literary features of Mark support the conclusion that he has drawn the sayings shared with Thomas from an earlier source. Investigation of the sayings shared by Mark and Thomas suggests that many of the features in Mark commonly ascribed to the oral tradition of the early Church are, in fact, the result of Mark’s own literary activity.

I have, in the course of this book, deliberately avoided speculation about the life and teachings of Jesus. It is true that there is widespread, though not universal, agreement about most of the sayings ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament gospels and other sources, including Thomas. Some of these are, by common consent, agreed to be authentic, while others are assigned to some later writer. In most cases the consensus is plausible, but there are still problems. Given the theological importance that many critics ascribe to the sayings of Jesus, there may in some cases be a temptation to judge authenticity by current theological value. Hence some scholars may find Mk. 7:15 less valuable and therefore secondary because of its implications for the observance of Torah. The very nature of the sayings handed down by both Thomas and the synoptic gospels also poses a problem of interpretation. If, as I allege in Excursus 3, the contexts for the sayings supplied by Mark are completely artificial, and if all other lives of Jesus, including the other three New Testament gospels, go back to Mark’s narrative, then at a fundamental level we really don’t know what Jesus meant by the sayings we may deem authentic. The meanings of illustrative stories and aphorisms are often dependent in part on the contexts in which they are spoken. Evidently some sayings ascribed to Jesus have been understood in more than one way. Perhaps if we knew the rhetorical context in which they were first used, we might know what Jesus meant.

In any case, a search for the authentic teachings of Jesus is at cross purposes with the search for a source. We do not know whether the sayings in N are for the most part authentic until we have isolated the source itself. It may turn out that most of the sayings are authentic, but we cannot prejudge. Later authors, building on this work, may wish to draw conclusions from N about the life and teachings of Jesus. Theirs will be a difficult task, since N and Q, as early collections of sayings attributed to Jesus, give somewhat contrasting viewpoints. Perhaps both collectors, like some modern authors of lives of Jesus, selected evidence congenial to their own point of view in order to have Jesus on their side. We cannot know this unless we allow both Q and N to speak with their own voices.

I have scrupulously refrained from taking sides in any controversies that may have emerged between Jesus or his later followers and any Jews or others who may have been involved in discussions revolving around one or more of these sayings. Was Jesus or some later collector really correct to say that what goes into the mouth does not corrupt? Certainly many—perhaps most—of his Jewish contemporaries had valid cultural and religious reasons to reject the unqualified application of such an aphorism. It may also be, for all we know, that Jesus and his close followers had other reasons that—from their point of view—were sufficiently compelling to trump these reasons. But their quarrel cannot be our quarrel since we do not live in their world. Perhaps remarkably N also, unlike Mark, has nothing to say about controversies between Jesus and other Jews or Jewish groups.

Controversies did, however, eventually arise and became part of the historical process. Our direct evidence of these controversies is remarkably one-sided; most likely the other side did not consider these controversies particularly memorable. To give some flesh to the other side, I use an intentionally vague term that may cause offence to some: observant Judaism. This term is not intended as a name for a new faction. Like E.P. Sanders’s term common Judaism,¹⁴ it is used to describe the widespread agreement that is often masked by polemics between groups. Specifically, it refers to all Jews, regardless of party affiliation, who observed the Law according to the way they understood it, excluding only those Jews who, like the author of Barnabas, thought that the Law was really about something else, or any who had abandoned the Jewish way of life. We have to understand both sides of this controversy, but we do not have to take sides.

In this work I have avoided some of the technical terms used by students of the Bible, not because they are difficult, but because, at least for our present purposes, they can be misleading. For example, I avoid the term redactor to indicate cases where an author has apparently taken a text from another author, but has modified this text to some purpose. A redactor is someone whose goal it is to prepare an accurate critical text from one or more earlier copies.¹⁵ Neither Thomas nor those responsible for the text of the New Testament gospels intended