Confessional vs. historical-critical? The problem with labels

Over on the Forbidden Gospels blog, April DeConick has a characteristically interesting post on The Never Ending Confusion about Perspective. As someone who approaches the New Testament and Christian Origins as a historian, there is plenty that I agree with in April's post, but I can't say that I am too keen on the label "confessional scholarship", especially where it is used as a contrast with "historical-critical scholarship".

The difficulty is that many of those scholars who are also people of faith work with a historical-critical approach. Indeed, the historical-critical approach is something that developed out of discussion within Christianity, and among Christian scholars. It is profoundly indebted to the Reformation and most of the pioneering historical work on the New Testament and Christian Origins was done by Protestants who combined a critical, questioning perspective on their faith with an interest in the historical roots of that faith. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, was a "confessing scholar" at the same time as being a pioneer of the most robust kind of "historical-critical scholarship". Indeed, as a member of the Confessing Church, one might say that his historical-critical scholarship cohered with his Christian stance against the Nazi regime. And I can think of many, many scholars today who are sophisticated, critical historians of early Christianity who at the same time remain within Christianity.

One of my concerns about labels like this, especially where they are played off against one another as polar-opposites, is they can distort the picture of contemporary scholarship and play into the hands of those who misrepresent our field. April's earlier post on Robert Eisenman is a case in point. April criticizes Eisenman for incorrectly characterizing her as a "conservative" on the grounds of her views on the Gospel of Judas. I quite agree with April's concern about Eisenman's ill-informed article, but it may show that ultimately these silly labels do more harm than good. James Crossley has often experienced the same kind of thing -- labelled as a conservative because of his apparently conservative views on the dating of Mark's Gospel.

I am not, of course, suggesting that April herself would use terms like "confessional scholar" in an indiscriminate fashion, but I want to suggest some caution about our adopting terms that could play into the agendas of those with whom we disagree.

Biblioblogging Gender Gap and what can be done

Remember this cartoon? No? All will become clear in a bit. The occasion to dig it out is the recent, welcome resumption of the discussion about gender issues in biblioblogging.

I am delighted to see April DeConick, over on the Forbidden Gospels Blog, raising the issue of the disproportionately high ratio of men to women bloggers, in a lively post entitled What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap? This issue is one that many of us have been concerned about for some time. Back in 2005, it was one of the hot topics on the blogs, and it was one of the major discussion points at the SBL session on biblioblogging at the Philadelphia meeting in November 2005, not least because there were nine men -- and not a single woman -- on the panel. (I take responsibility; I chose the panel and could not find a single female biblioblogger to invite). Paul Nikkel and Yasmin Finch problematized this, and the subsequent discussion was fascinating, if inconclusive (See, among many other posts, Identity, Schmidentity @ Deinde; Death of the Biblioblog?; Stop obsessing about biblioblogging; and a great round-up on Hypotyposeis, Sans-biblioblogue). One of the more amusing things to come out of it was Tyler William's satirical cartoon above, over on Codex: Blogspot (where the image has since vanished), though the discussion was serious. Several of us were concerned, in particular, that we were seen not only as the symptom of the problem, but also its cause, that we were actively excluding women bibliobloggers from joining a club that we had created.

As time went on, a particular aspect of the issue began to bother me. The discussion about the lack of women bibliobloggers was taking place almost exclusively among men, and it was not reflecting well on us. When asked about it by Jim West, I wrote:

Of course we are right to be concerned about the lack of women bloggers in our area, but I am not sure that the issue is fruitfully dealt with by our obsessing about it. To problematize the phenomenon actually runs the risk of making it more difficult for changes to happen because we draw too much attention to the current situation, unduly isolating current and potential women bloggers. In other words, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the current lack of women bloggers is a situation not well served by a bunch of men sitting around frowning about it.

I suspect that that was not the ideal response and, if so, I repent of it. But I was genuinely unsure about how to try to change the situation for good, and I suspected that our discussions were only making things worse.

Looking back on it, and on other related episodes (e.g. see Pat McCullough's comments on kata ta biblia), what we needed was exactly what we now have: someone like April DeConick to take things forward. I, for one, appreciate her rallying cry, and hope that it will encourage more women to join the blogging fray. In other words, I like the fact that it's less a matter of soul-searching ("Enough of this nonsense and rationalizations") and more a matter of encouraging women to take action.

If I have a concern about April's recent post, I think I would be inclined to caution against the idea that there is some kind of conspiracy by men to marginalize women's blogs in the area, e.g. it seems clear to me that the person behind Biblioblog Top 50 is part of the solution and not the problem; we are lucky to have someone so well attuned politically running that chart (Anyone who quotes Sugi favourably is a friend of mine). But he may be Wrong and I may be wrong. Sometimes, the way that these things work is subtle, hidden, unconscious, and we are too dense to see it. I doubt that April will be able to find 270 women bibliobloggers who have been ignored and marginalized, but it would be fantastic if it turns out there are so many.

In relation to this, April quotes an interesting comment from Julia O'Brien to the following effect,

But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

This is an excellent question. One suggestion here would be not only to ask the male bibliobloggers to link more and to engage more with female bibliobloggers, but also to advise female bibliobloggers who feel themselves to be invisible to engage more with others on the scene, to link, to discuss. In other words, it is quite possible that male bibliobloggers are a cause as well as a symptom of the problem, but it is also worth considering the possibility that those, like me, who would like to call themselves feminists, may also be part of the solution.

Contemporary Memory Experiments and Jesus Traditions

April DeConick makes two fresh contributions to the ongoing discussion of the use of contemporary studies on memory and their use in shedding light on antiquity, human memory is THE factor and I was surprised too. I have been waiting for the book in which her article appears to arrive at Duke before adding another comment in this discussion, hence the gap since my last contribution on this topic.

The new article is April DeConick, "Human Memory and the Sayings of Jesus" in Tom Thatcher (ed.), Jesus, the Voice and the Text: Beyond The Oral and Written Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008): 135-80. The article is similar in several respects to the earlier piece Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll: "Experiments to Develop Criteria for Determining the Existence of Written Sources, and Their Potential Implications for the Synoptic Problem," JBL 121 (2002): 667-87 though it improves on that one in avoiding some of its logical errors (for which see John Poirier, "Memory, Written Sources and the Synoptic Problem: A Response to Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll", JBL 123/2 (2004): 315–322) and in the extent of its realization that "the synoptic problem is mainly a problem of literary dependence" (178-9). McIver and Carroll appeared strangely lukewarm on this issue (especially 683; cf. Poirier 316), though in the end they list several passages that they regard as establishing some kind of literary dependence. DeConick* adds several more (179), though she does not reflect on the fact that the passages she gives are different in nature on her preferred (Two-Source) Theory, direct borrowing (Matt // Mark and Mark // Luke) versus mutual dependence on a third document (Matt // Luke double tradition), an issue that is important because of the high verbatim agreement in these passages (cf. Poirier 317; cf. my blog post on the degree of verbatim agreement in Q).

But the discussion of the Synoptic Problem is peripheral in DeConick's article, where the main focus is on pre-Synoptic traditions, and in particular the question of how memory might have functioned in the transmission of those traditions. So is it possible for experiments with contemporary students' memories to shed light on the memories of the bearers of early Christian traditions about Jesus? I am sceptical about the experiments for the following reasons:

(1) The difficulties of transferring the data. Like McIver and Carroll, DeConick is sanguine about her ability to transfer the results from the experiments to the ancient world. In the conclusion to her article (entitled "What does it all mean?"), for example, the new experimental data is used in order to refute Rudolf Bultmann -- "In this case, the data says that Rudolf Bultmann's form-critical theory about orality was incorrect because his assumptions were wrong" (177). I admire this confidence, but I do not share it. The ways in which the memories of contemporary students are formed and trained are so different from the ways in which the ancients' memories were formed and trained that we simply cannot read off the results from one onto the other. We do not do it when we conceptualize ancient compositional practices and we should avoid it too when we conceptualize ancient memory.

(2) The difficulties of setting up the experiments. There is a related problem. It is not just that we have direct access to the modern mind and only indirect access to the ancient mind through the literary deposits, but it is also that we don't know how to replicate the conditions in which the ancients in general or the evangelists in particular worked. In one of their experiments, McIver and Carroll provided financial incentives for their subjects to repeat a joke word for word (674) and DeConick directed those in her experiments to repeat the materials "as accurately as possible" (142-3). But how far and in what way does this replicate the way in which early Christian tradents worked? Were they attempting to remember and retell what they heard "as accurately as possible", whatever we might mean by that?

(3). The text-based nature of the experiments. DeConick's experiments appear to work with a very text-based model. As far as I can tell from the descriptions of the set up of the experiments (e.g. 142-3), specific, fixed texts were always involved. The students either listened to the text on a tape, or they read it. Unless one thinks that early Christian tradents were at all times performing from a fixed text, what we are dealing with here is therefore quite different from early Christian tradition. Our best guess about the transmission of tradition in the pre-Synoptic period is that the process was a dynamic one in which material was communicated, not read aloud. It is important, in other words, to distinguish between memory of communicated tradition and memory of a text that has been read aloud.

(4). The use of unfamiliar material. DeConick's experiments used texts that would be unfamiliar to the students, a version of Thomas 75, a version of Thomas 97 and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas 10.1-2. The choice of these texts is understandable -- DeConick wishes to avoid contamination from previous memory (143). The difficulty with these choices, though, is that it sets up an experiment in which the students are immediately operating at a distance from the material that is being conveyed to them. In the transmission of early Christian traditions, this experience may have obtained at least once for every hearer, but that one off experience would be replaced subsequently by repeated hearings of the same, now increasingly familiar material. DeConick rightly discusses both short term memory and long term memory, but does not discuss the progress from unfamiliarity to familiarity, in interaction, repetition and creative re-interpretation. In other words, the students' brief exposure to unfamiliar texts is unlikely to replicate the early Christian tradents' encounters with the traditions they subsequently carried.

(5) Composition and creativity. The experiments' focus on memory, and the instruction to the students to attempt to engage in accurate reproduction, means that there is no room to factor in parallels to the creative, compositional work of the evangelists and, for that matter, of the tradents before them. The same difficulty obtains in McIver and Carroll's article -- distance from the source text is measured largely in terms of memory distortion with little attention to attempting to replicate the evangelists' own creativity. (See further Poirier, especially 318 and 322).

Lest I appear too sceptical, too harsh on what are, after all, innovative and interesting studies, let me finish with a positive word. The ancient historian's constant battle is the attempt to understand and describe a world that is so very different from ours. One of the weapons in that battle is the well chosen, contemporary analogy. Sometimes, in our bid to describe and analyze what is distant, we need good analogies. The experimental data on contemporary students' memories might well provide the kind of analogies that aid our attempts to do ancient history. They can help us to craft good questions, to make clear contrasts and to remind us where our evidence of the ancient world is wanting. It is important, though, to remind ourselves that contemporary analogies are always partial, often limited and sometimes misleading.

* I am employing what I take to be academic convention in talking about April DeConick's published work using her surname, where the emerging blogging convention is to use first names when talking about blog posts. I mention this lest anyone thinks that I have developed some unwelcome frostiness!

Problems with studying memory in antiquity

On The Forbidden Gospels blog, April DeConick follows up her earlier post (discussed here, More SBL Dating Discussions) with a fresh post entitled SBL Memories 3: Become More Scientific. The first half of the post appears to be aimed at a kind of fundamentalist view according to which Jesus' words were recorded with verbatim accuracy in the Gospels, a view in which (of course) I have no stake or interest, so I will pass over it. About half-way in to the post, though, April turns to the section of my paper on the "missing middle" in Thomasine parallels with the Synoptics, drawing special attention to Thomas 57, the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. April's disagreement with me here is based in part on a critique of an imagined model that I do not work with and which I regard as untenable:

What is the evidence that writers who have a literary document in front of them from which they are copying ever leave out the middle because they are rushed? Just based on logic, I would think that literary copying would be otherwise. That the copyist would be more careful to preserve the material he is using, that he is working slowly, that he can stop and go back and double check, and that he can erase and correct. Such is not the case, however, when an author is relying on human memory, when he cannot double check a written source.

Few writers who think that Thomas is familiar with the Synoptics are using a model of scribal copying, whereby the author of Thomas has a literary document in front of him. (Perrin may be an exception here, but see my comments on his work). The way I imagine the process is of familiarity with the Synoptics by means of memory through regular reading aloud (by himself or others).

April goes on to make several interesting observations about studying memory, and it is here that the real interest in the post lies. I will withhold any lengthy discussion until I have had the chance to read April's new article on the topic (I have the book in which it appears on order), but I will make a comment about the classic she mentions, F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; original ed., 1932). Bartlett's fascinating experiments with memory bear on the topic, not least given that one of his examples (72-3) features a "missing middle" similar to the one I have been illustrating in Thomas. It is worth mentioning that Bartlett was testing his subjects' memory of a written text. He gave his subjects a text called "The War of the Ghosts" and asked them to read the text a couple of times, and then he tested them for recall of the piece after selected periods of time, with interesting results, including a good example of an individual retelling the story without its middle section (in his first retelling, 20 hours after his reading of the text). I might claim that this coheres with my own view on Thomas's knowledge of the Synoptics, but alas, I have to confess that I can't help thinking that it does not recreate anything like the conditions that may be in view in antiquity, with communal texts read aloud by the literate to the community over a period of time, not a single unfamiliar text read by a modern individual and then recalled. Given my curmudgeonly scepticism on the transference of such studies to investigations into memory in antiquity, I am loathe to make anything of Bartlett's studies for our studies of issues like Thomas's familiarity with the Synoptics, even though they would help me, but I will concede one important point. Analysis of the way that moderns attempt to recall texts can at least stimulate our reflections on antiquity, even if that reflection ends up being about contrast more than comparison.

More SBL Dating Discussion

April DeConick responded to my paper, Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity (Handout; Blog Series on Dating), at this year's SBL Annual Meeting, in the second meeting of a new consultation on Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity, and now she offers some useful reflections on that response on her Forbidden Gospels blog, SBL Memories 2: Dating Our Sources. One of the things I like about April DeConick's writing is that she often gets me thinking -- she has a great way of approaching subjects from a distinctive angle.

In the current post, April speaks of division in the academy and I think the implication is that we are on different sides of that divide. One side uses "older models" that are now "being seriously questioned" while April emphasizes "three major shifts in the field" that "must be taken very seriously" (though she goes on to enumerate four). In spite of the talk about division, there are actually several areas here where we are in agreement. In each of the four categories, I will begin with our agreement and then make clear where we differ. Let me add a quick word too on "older models", to use April's term. I too am in favour of questioning older models, though they are not always the same ones that April wishes to question; sometimes April works with some older models that I wish to question. And sometimes, of course, the old wine is good.

(1). As April mentioned at the session, she agrees with my post-70 dating for Mark and so too for Matthew, Luke and John. This is an important agreement because it establishes a working model for dating the crucial works, Paul well before 70, the Gospels after. April's sketch, however, expands to inclusion of hypothetical sources and earlier versions of documents, which I avoided in favour of discussing the materials to which our texts bear witness. Unlike me, April is conservative on the existence of Q, and even speaks of different versions of the text, and their provenance. I am also sceptical about the existence of kernel Thomas. I have not done enough work on James and the Didache to express a firm opinion on whether or not they post-date 70. So April's pre-70 block is much more richly populated than mine. I would love to be able to share her confidence in that area, but I remain sceptical about the survival of key materials from the earliest period.

A further difference is that the model I discussed in the paper was a genealogical one. Where April organizes documents into groups, I attempted to sketch sequence, Galatians post-dating 1 Corinthians, Matthew post-dating Mark, Luke post-dating Matthew, John post-dating the Synoptics and so on. The reason that this kind of work might be helpful is that it can map the evolution and development of ideas from one literary work to another. Working on relative dating in this way is tough because we simply have to get our hands dirty engaging in study that a lot of us would rather avoid, Synoptic Problem, Pauline chronology, John's relationship to the Synoptics and so on. But the potential pay off is major and the work is worthwhile.

(2). April's second point, about textual criticism, echoes my own warnings on this subject, which I am happy to repeat:

It is easy to engage in this kind of discussion without thinking through the broader issues of what it means to talk about “texts” and “literary works” in antiquity. It is a somewhat hackneyed to point out the obvious facts that none of the autographs have survived and that there were no printing presses, but textual critics rightly remind us to behave like we actually know that that is the case. Too often, we lapse into treating our scholarly constructs as if they are the actual artefacts that they can only aspire to be. At the very least, we need to keep reminding ourselves in discussions like this that we are not dealing with fixed points and known entities but with reconstructions and approximations. (3)

Nevertheless, with the appropriate cautions in place, it is also worth reminding ourselves that the texts are all we have. The situation is no different here than it is for any other set of ancient texts. We are dealing with manuscript witnesses. Indeed, in many respects the situation is a great deal better for scholars of early Christianity because of the relative earliness of the textual evidence as well as the richness of the manuscript deposit. We have to work with what we have, and what we have is pretty good.

April offers a valuable caution against "basing our conclusions on 'same' words here and there", but as I mentioned in the session in response, this is why we should also look at patterns of agreement and disagreement, tracing parallels in structure, order, theme, motif and imagery as well as the more minor parallels in wording. My own caution in this area, previously expressed in discussions of the Synoptic Problem, and especially of the Minor Agreements, is that one should be wary of appealing to conjectural emendation as a means of resisting texts that are difficult for one's theory, not least given the fact that absent textual evidence is as likely to have caused further problems for one's preferred theory as it is to have provided solutions.

(3)-(4): I will take these together since they are closely related. I sympathize with the desire for memory experiments but I am highly sceptical of our ability to recreate the necessary conditions for providing useful information on the way that memory worked in the first century. As I mentioned in the session, one of my favourite television programmes is Doctor Who, and in a recent episode, the doctor and Donna went to Pompei in 79. I would have loved to have joined them and to conduct some experiments there. But as I also mentioned in the session, there are indeed useful experiments that we can do, using the texts that we have. As some of my readers will know, I have been an advocate for developing tests on Synoptic (and other related) theories with a view to seeing whether they work or not. Given our current state of knowledge, and tools available, serious work on the ancient texts we have is preferable to experiments on our contemporaries.

Orality and Literacy II: Clarifying the Critique of Dunn

One of the benefits of writing a blog is that one is able to clarify earlier posts in the light of listening to the way that they have been read. Before beginning my series on Orality and Literacy, I was aware of the dangers of being misread, and in my first post I attempted to lay down a few markers, in particular aiming to make clear that I was not issuing any kind of challenge to the essential contrast between our literate culture and the oral culture of antiquity. It is, of course, in the nature of such posts that readers are tempted to skip over the position markers and infer a perspective more radical than the one the author actually holds. It is also important to bear in mind the sketch-like nature of blog posts, what I called "snapshots" of my thinking at a given moment.

There is actually little I disagree with in April DeConick's post on The Forbidden Gospels Blog, What is Orality? and, as always, I am grateful to April for taking the time to write with her characteristic fervour. As I wrote in comments over on her blog, though, the point of my post was to talk about the way in which we are inclined to caricature our own literate culture, to exaggerate the contrasts for rhetorical effect. I am in part being playful here, looking at how Dunn's conceptualization of our culture is in fact falling short -- I have not in this initial post even begun to deal with the ancient world. (April does not mention Dunn in her response but instead implies that my comments were targeted more broadly as an attempt to challenge contemporary work on orality in the ancient world.) It may take a few more posts in my series before my thinking on this is as clearly articulated as I would like, but let me mention here one element that I hope to return to, that we need to take seriously "secondary orality" in our culture (the term is, of course, Walter Ong's; cf. Loren Rosson's anticipation of the topic on The Busybody).

Where Dunn uses the interesting analogy of the computer's "default setting", he gives examples from word-processing, an important part of that heavily literate academic sub-culture that many of us live and breathe. But the computer could also provide a means of illustrating elements of secondary orality. The computer is now a telephone, a radio, a television and more. One of the most exciting challenges to us as early twenty-first scholars of antiquity is the exploration of comparisons and contrasts with the primary orality of the period we are studying.

April DeConick's New York Times article causes a stir

April DeConick's Gospel Truth, published in The New York Times earlier this week is a model of how to write a clear, informative op-ed piece on a controversial academic subject. It is no surprise, as the T and T Clark Blog mentions today, that it is "causing something of a stir in the blog world". The backlash begins today, though, with robust responses from Marvin Meyer and Terry Garcia in letters to the New York Times, The Gospel of Judas: A Word from the Translators.

On Luke's use of sources

I have enjoyed reading some of April DeConick's questions and reflections on Luke and History in The Forbidden Gospels Blog. In particular, a post headed Is Luke a Trustworthy Historian? asks:

Why is Acts written off today as a Lukan myth with little or no historical value? Why do scholars who wish to argue for the historicity of elements of Acts have to go through an inordinate amount of justification before doing so?

and there are a series of interesting points that focus the question, and I would like to comment on these points, even though doing so takes me off at tangents from April's main points.

1. When Luke uses Mark, he does not rework Mark as much as Matthew.

I did a double take when I first read this, thinking that perhaps April had joined us in the Q sceptical camp, but then I realized that I was reading it incorrectly! It is "he does not rework Mark as much as Matthew (reworks Mark)" and not "he does not rework Mark as much as (he reworks) Matthew". Nevertheless, I think the comment is debatable and for several reasons. First, Matthew features much more of Mark than Luke does; or, to put it another way, Luke omits much more of Mark than Matthew does. Second, the perception that Luke generally retains Mark's order more carefully than Matthew does is problematic. Matthew's rearrangement of Mark is primarily limited to Matt. 8-12. After Matthew 13 // Mark 4, Matthew follows Mark's order very closely. Luke is radical in some of his treatment of Mark, especially drawing forward the Rejection at Nazareth (Luke 4.16-30) from a much later point in Mark, and drawing forward the Anointing (Luke 7.36-50) from a later point still. (I have more on this in The Case Against Q, 86-90). Third, I would draw special attention to the Passion Narratives in the three Synoptics. Luke departs far more from Mark here than does Matthew. It is worth reminding ourselves that B. H. Streeter and Vincent Taylor conceived the Proto-Luke theory on the basis of Luke's massive departures from Mark in material like that.

2. When Luke uses Q, Q-scholars tell us that he retains Q better in terms of verbage and order than Matthew. In fact, our reconstructed Q is versed according to Luke.

From my reading of Q scholarship, I think this overstates the standard view. It is consensus in Q scholarship that Luke retains the order of Q better than does Matthew, but opinions are divided on how far Matthew and how far Luke retains Q's wording and there is no real tendency in either direction, at least if we are to go on the work of the IQP. With respect to the Lucan chapter and verses getting used for referring to Q, a practice I have criticized (e.g. in Case Against Q, 8), it is important to note that it has always been said that this is done for convenience and without prejudice to decisions about whether or not the order of a given pericope is better reflected in Luke or Matthew.

3. Luke tells us in the beginning of his gospel that he relied on older sources to rewrite the Christian narrative which we apparently trust given our hypothesis that Luke is a second edition of Mark.
4. If we think that Luke used Mark and Q as literary sources, wouldn't the best assumption be that he also used older traditional sources for the composition of Acts?
5. If 4 is valid, then shouldn't we be trying to figure out what those older traditions are and what they tell us about Christianity earlier than Luke?

These are interesting points. One thing that is worth taking seriously is to find out what we can about Luke's compositional and redactional habits from an analysis of his Gospel sources Mark and (I would say) Matthew and to learn from them in working out how he is writing in Acts. I argued on this blog a while ago (A Chronological Clue in Acts 9.25, The Jerusalem Council: Gal. 2.1-10 = Acts 15 and The Jerusalem Council: Gal. 2.1-10 = Acts 15: Response to Critics) and one day I will publish on this, that where Luke has Paul visiting Jerusalem in Acts 9, clearly out of sequence when we look at Galatians 1, he has brought the account forward in his narrative from its natural location three years later, just as he draws forward the Rejection at Nazareth in his Gospel from its Marcan location later in the ministry. My own feeling is that the more familiar one gets with Luke from studying his use of sources in the Gospel, the more light it sheds on the way he behaves in Acts, where we have Paul's letters as a useful point of comparison.

Kernel Thomas

On her ever stimulating Forbidden Gospels blog, April DeConick reflects briefly on a key element in her research on the Gospel of Thomas, asking What is the Kernel Thomas?. It is a post that reminds me of some interesting discussion we had on DeConick's work in our graduate course on the Gospel of Thomas here at Duke this semester. Here is the summary from the current post:

The Kernel Thomas is a name that I use to indicate the earliest material in the Gospel of Thomas. I suggest that this early material was an early collection of sayings in a speech format and that it was used by the Thomasine Christians as a storage cite [sic] for Jesus' sayings. Preachers and teachers used it as a platform for their orations.

One of the questions that this raises for me is: In what way is "Kernel Thomas" appropriately labelled Kernel Thomas? In other words, what is it about this hypothetical collection of sayings that makes it Thomasine? The character Thomas appears in the Incipit and Logion 13, but both of these are among DeConick's accretions. Looking at the character of the accretions, it is also clear that Kernel Thomas is a different kind of entity from the Gospel of Thomas, which focuses the question further. How do we know that the author or community producing the Gospel of Thomas was directly continuous with the author or community who used Kernel Thomas as their storage site for Jesus' sayings? Could it be that the Gospel of Thomas author or community had no direct relationship with the author or community behind Kernel Thomas? Is Kernel Thomas the core of the Gospel of Thomas in the same way that the Gospel of Mark is the core of the Gospel of Matthew? Or to put it another way, would we be content with thinking of the Gospel of Mark as "Kernel Matthew"? (These are intended as open, exploratory questions and not as rhetorical questions).

Books on the Gospel of Judas

April DeConick has recently finished a book on the Gospel of Judas called The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. In a recent post, Bibliography for the Gospel of Judas (in English), DeConick lists the several studies that have already appeared on Judas, or that are currently in print. A commenter adds another, and I can add one more:

Simon Gathercole, The Gospel of Judas: Rewriting Early Christianity (Oxford: OUP, Estimated publication date November 2007)

I have read the book in manuscript and am happy to say that is outstanding.

Jewish Jesus and the Third Quest

Continuing her series of interesting posts on the Historical Jesus, April DeConick today posts on Why the Jewish Jesus is Essential (and Dangerous). One element in it underlines the problems over the use of the term "the third quest" on which I commented in my post on abandoning the terminology of "the third quest". DeConick writes:

As I look back over the long history of the Jesus quest (and its popularized sidekick, Jesus in cinema), I continued to be struck (and I admit ashamed) that Jesus rarely appears as a Jew. There have been occasional voices over the last century that have demanded we remember that Jesus was Jewish, but these have been occasional and against the communal representations of Jesus that were developing in those eras.

And sadly this includes the Third Quest which largely has been trying to get around the fact that Jesus was Jewish by creating categories for Jesus as a Hellenized person living in Palestine or Galilee, but a person that doesn't look like any other Jew we know of who lived in Palestine or Galilee.

I am puzzled by this characterization of recent research. If there is one thing that the term "the third quest" has been associated with, I would say that that is stress on the fact that Jesus was a Jew. The pioneering works of the third quest, Vermes's Jesus the Jew and E. P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism make this their major contribution to the extent that "Jew" and "Judaism" appears in the title. As Tom Wright characterizes "the third quest" (his term), he places Jesus as Jew as its defining element. I realize that DeConick is using the term "third quest" somewhat differently, and applying it to those like Crossan and Funk who are actually excluded from "the third quest" by Wright, but I think this further underlines the problem I was trying to bring forward the other day, that the term is becoming useless, or worse, confusing.

Abandoning "the third quest" of the Historical Jesus

On her always stimulating Forbidden Gospels Blog, April DeConick asks the question whether there is now a Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus?. She sees the third quest as "dominated by the work of Crossan, Borg, Patterson, Funk, Mack, Downing and the Jesus Seminar, but also including Horsley, Kaylor, Witherington, Meier, and so forth". She feels that the "fourth quest" reacts to this and "pushes several items to the forefront" including Jesus as a Jew, the apocalyptic dimension to Jesus' teaching, problems with dissimilarity, stress on orality and so on. This fourth quest is populated by Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, A.J. Levine, Jimmy Dunn and Gerd Theissen, and also N. T. Wright, though his work is "too apologetic for me". Well, if the terminology of the fourth quest takes off, remember where you heard it first.

I am not convinced, though, about the need for a new term. Indeed, I think the entire business of categorizing periods of the quest has now run into confusion and impasse and it should be abandoned. Briefly, these are what I see as the key points:

(1) The term "the third quest" was coined by N. T. Wright in 1986. He used it to describe the wave of scholarship that he felt had superseded the “new quest”. For Wright, the key players in this third quest were Geza Vermes and Ed Sanders alongside Ben Meyer, Anthony Harvey and Marcus Borg. If one is being a purist about the term "third quest", its originator has a quite different view of it from those who used it after him.

(2) The term came back to haunt Wright because the quest developed in all sorts of unexpected (to him) ways in the late eighties and nineties. Wright therefore attempted a new inventory ten years later in 1996, when he himself makes his major contribution to the quest in Jesus and the Victory of God, and he calls the newly emergent movement typified by the work of Crossan, Funk and the Jesus Seminar as "the renewed new quest". (And now Wright also moves Borg from the third quest to the renewed new quest). Although Crossan saw Wright's categorizing as somewhat condescending, Wright was actually echoing the characterization of the Jesus Seminar's work by Robert Funk, who was not keen on the third quest, and who saw himself in continuity with Bultmann, and who spoke of a renewed quest.

(3) Recently the situation has become more chaotic because many are simply describing all contemporary Jesus research as “the third quest”, whether the research is undertaken by Sanders, Wright, Crossan or Borg, e.g. the recent Biblica article by John P. Meier. As a result, some now mean one thing by "the third quest" and some mean something else. It is has therefore ceased to be a useful descriptor.

(4) The taxonomy of the Jesus research into these three distinct quests was in any case dubious from the start. Key to the notion of "the new quest" begun by Käsemann in the 1950s, and continued by others of Bultmann's students in the 1950s and 60s, was the idea that there has been a period of "no quest" from Schweitzer through to Käsemann. But this idea is highly dubious, as Dale Allison demonstrates in Resurrecting Jesus. There was in fact no such period of "no quest". Indeed several of the most famous works of historical Jesus scholarship emerge in this period, T. W. Manson, C. H. Dodd, Joachim Jeremias among them.

There is now good reason to abandon the unhelpful language of "the third quest". When I began my Historical Jesus course earlier this semester, I had a dilemma about how to characterize the history of research. In the end, I decided to introduce these terms, new quest, third quest, etc., but then to explain why I thought that they were inadequate.

How was Thomas Written?

On The Forbidden Gospels Blog, April DeConick offers her thoughts on How was the Gospel of Thomas Written?, partly in response to recent discussion on the Gospel of Thomas E-List (see the thread beginning Why Was Thomas Written?, a thread to which I have contributed myself). Although the Thomas list thread has focused on issues focused more generally around the issue of the purpose of the Gospel of Thomas, DeConick's post focuses specially on the vexed question of literary dependence or independence, and I would like to make some of my own comments on her post here. Let me begin by saying that DeConick is a giant in Thomas studies, with several major publications, including the two recent key monographs published back to back. I have a huge respect for her scholarship, and studies of Thomas are all the richer for her contributions. By contrast, I am a mere beginner, having come to Thomas in the first place because of my interest in Q (e.g. see chapters seven and nine in The Case Against Q). Any comments I make on DeConick's current post, therefore, do not come from the same degree of rich research and expertise.

DeConick asks first "Why does the literary dependence appeal NOT work?" and lists several reasons for rejecting appeals to literary dependence. I am partly in agreement here in that I am pretty wary of the term "literary dependence" in relation to Thomas and the Synoptics. The phrase can be taken to suggest that Thomas is a fundamentally derivative Gospel, and that the most important thing about it is its relation to the Synoptic Gospels. Given that only about half of Thomas has parallels with the Synoptics, we need to hold open the possibility that the most important thing about Thomas is not the Synoptic parallel material but the non-Synoptic material. Perhaps it is in that 50% that we will learn most about Thomas. My preference, therefore, is to move the terminology away from "dependence" or "independence" and instead to talk about "familiarity" or otherwise. The term "familiarity" allows us to ask the question whether Thomas knows the Synoptic Gospels without prejudging the extent of their influence on his thinking.

Now, in relation to those parallels, of course the existence of those parallels in themselves demonstrates nothing about familiarity or otherwise (DeConick's first subheading). The key question is whether or not the parallels in question show evidence of Synoptic redaction (DeConick's second subheading). Here, DeConick comments on the proposition "Thomas contains parallels that have Synoptic 'redactional traces'" with the following:

This assumes that our sources (Quelle, Matthew, Luke, Mark) were fixed texts, and that they are the same copies that we have reconstructed as our eclectic Greek manuscript (NTG) from our late physical witnesses, none of which agree. This position does not allow for source variation and a lengthy complicated process of development of our sources, and scribing of our sources. Are we sure that the "redactional trace" is from Matthew or Luke? Or is it from a source(s) relied upon by Matthew or Luke? Or is it from an orator who reperformed the saying in light of his memory of a Synoptic version? Or is it from the hand of a later scribe harmonizing an older version of the saying to his memory of the Synoptic version?

Of course all these possibilities need to be taken into consideration for Thomas / Synoptic relationships, but I don't think the situation is substantially different here than it is with the intra-Synoptic relationships, where we always bear such possibilities in mind, but do not appeal to them for every decision. Further, one of the values of a redaction-critical approach to the Synoptics is that it can often help us to see where a given evangelist is himself shaping the entirety of a particular passage, where there are clusters of characteristic themes, imagery, language and style. Where passages are like that, ones that are effectively generated by a given evangelist, and which then appear in Thomas, we have a good case for Thomasine familiarity. I have given one example recently, Luke 11.27-28 // Thomas 79.1-2, where the Lucan language, imagery, style and content is so strongly marked that that Thomas must be familiar with it from Luke. In other words, I am keen that we do not focus solely on so-called "redactional traces" (emphasis added) and move the discussion instead to pervasive presence of clusters of redactional features.

DeConick's third point is that:

The entire compositional process of a Thomasine author sitting down one day with canonical texts and cutting and pasting a word here and a word there into his own gospel of sayings does NOT fit what we know about ancient compositional practices.

(and see her further comments). This point is well taken; we can do without weak appeals to cut-and-paste models of the way that Thomas, or, for that matter, any of the evangelists worked. I have criticized Synoptic Problem scholarship, and especially Q scholarship, on this very point. On the other hand, I think we have to be careful about excessive appeals to "orality as social location" (Robbins), or to "an essentially oral state of mind" (Kelber). I am not persuaded that Thomas exhibits "orality as social location" so much as Sayings Gospel as generic preference. A sayings book, as a generic necessity, has "an essentially oral state of mind," both in the ancient world and today. This claim will take a little teasing out and I will develop it in due course.

DeConick's fourth point is:

The literary dependence appeal has never been able to account for the differences in the versions of Thomas' sayings and the Synoptics.

This is also important. As with the study of intra-Synoptic relationships, accounting for similarities and differences is the name of the game. In developing the point, DeConick asks,

I mean this seriously. We have spent so much time looking for "same" words, have we really looked at the differences and tried to account for them? Has anyone noticed (other than me) that the exact verbal agreement, lengthy sequences of words, and secondary features shared between the Triple Tradition and the Quelle versions FAR exceeds anything we find paralleled between the Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptics?

I would say "Yes" but I may be misunderstanding the point. There is consensus that the Synoptic Problem is a problem of literary inter-relationships among the Synoptics, that there is such substantial verbatim agreement that there has to be some kind of literary relationship there. The reason that there is no consensus on this with respect to Thomas and the Synoptics is that the degree of agreement here is nothing like as strong as it is between the Synoptics.

DeConick goes on to give a shorter section on the difficulties with the "independence" model and I agree with most of this, though I would add more examples of "redactional activity traceable to Synoptic hands", including good Matthean examples as well as Lucan ones. I also dispute the premise of the second point:

2. The Thomas parables are not allegorized like their Synoptic counterparts.

There is at least one parable that is allegorized and several more interpreted. There is plenty of secondary material in the Gospel of Thomas, old sayings rewritten in new interpretative contexts.

This works on the form-critical premise of the secondary nature of allegory, a premise with which I disagree in the light of the work of Michael Goulder and John Drury in particular, and on which I will have more to say in due course.

In the final section of the post, DeConick asks "Where does this leave us?" and answers:

I hope it dislodges us from continuing to argue for direct literary dependence OR complete independence. If we keep slogging away at these same appeals, we will keep answering them with the same objections, and we will stay in the box.

I have some sympathy with this answer, and would for that reason push for the use of the term "familiarity with" rather than "direct literary dependence on" the Synoptics. I think the reference to "secondary orality" here is helpful and I regard it as possible that that is the manner of Thomas's familiarity with the Synoptics.

More fundamentally, though, I think we need to think much more seriously about the half of Thomas that does not have parallels with the Synoptics, and I think it is high time we started paying serious attention to the way that the Gospel of Thomas conceives of itself, viz. as "the secret sayings of the living Jesus, which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down" (Incipit). The obsessive focus in so much Thomas scholarship with Synoptic parallel material, whether among "dependence" or "independence" people, tends to focus attention on reconstructions of the Gospel's evolution and development, sometimes at the expense of working on the text as we have it, and building from there.

Response to DeConick

Yesterday I posted a draft of my paper Luke 11.27-28 // Thom. 79a: A Case of Thomasine Dependence and April DeConick responds on her blog in Is the Gospel of Thomas Dependent on the Synoptics? The response is a general one, reacting more to arguments about dependence in general (Schrage, Schürmann) than to the specific case I make. Since I make observations here that have not been made before, I am not sure that the general appeal to earlier literature on Thomas, which I mention in the article, really addresses the specific argument made here, which focuses on pervasive and distinctive Lucan features that point to the saying's genesis in Luke's mind. In fact I agree with Prof. DeConick's dissatisfaction with some of the traditional arguments for dependence, which tend to focus on a word here and a word there. As she notes, "The arguments [for dependence] in all cases are based on the presence of words that some scholars regard as traditionally redactional, that is words that are thought to be from the Lukan hand." What I am keen to do in this specific example is to point not just to the odd, isolated word but to the presence of markedly Lucan language, theme, setting and imagery. By attempting to the move the argument away from solely focusing on isolated words, I am hoping to show that the case for Thomas's familiarity with Luke is stronger than it is usually perceived to be.

On this particular pericope, let me attempt to put my argument in a nutshell lest it is thought that I am arguing along the same lines as those like Schrage. I am arguing that this saying, as we have it, comes from Luke's mind and that there is nothing un-Lucan about it. Its presence in Thomas, where it is anomalous, is therefore an indication of Thomas's familiarity with Luke's Gospel.

This, of course, raises some fresh questions, for example: (1) Are there other examples like this? (2) If Thomas is familiar with the Synoptics, how does he hear them and appropriate them? My answer to question (1) is Yes, and perhaps I'll blog those too in due course, if there is sufficient interest. My answer to (2) is that the issues raised by Prof. DeConick briefly in her recent post and at length in her recent books are important ones that need addressing. I think that too much time has been spent in the past on discussing whether Thomas knew the Synoptics and not enough time has been spent in discussing how Thomas used them. More anon on that too.

Luke 11.27-28 // Thom. 79a: Thomas's dependence on Luke

I recently posted a temporary draft of an article I have written on the Gospel of Thomas's dependence on Luke 11.27-28. If you are interested in looking at the piece, I would be grateful for any feedback. It is at:

Luke 11.27-28 // Thom. 79a: A Case of Thomasine Dependence

Note: this is only going to be available on-line temporarily (latest update today at lunchtime). I am currently revising it in the light of feedback I am receiving ahead of sending it off for publication. I mentioned this on the Gospel of Thomas e-list just the other day and Mike Grondin asked April DeConick for her opinion. She kindly posts her response on her blog in a post entitled Is the Gospel of Thomas Dependent on the Synoptics. I will respond later.

April DeConick's Forbidden Gospels Blog

I'd like to join others who have welcomed April DeConick to the blogosphere:

The Forbidden Gospels Blog

Prof. DeConick begins with a kind of prospectus focusing on canonical bias in the academy, Beyond the New Testament Canon, and continues with an interesting post on What does the Gospel of Judas REALLY say? in which she joins with those who are voicing their concerns about the National Geographic team's translation and interpretation of the Gospel:

. . . My examination of the Coptic transcription has led me to think that certain translational errors and one mistaken reconstruction of a Coptic line led the team to the erroneous conclusion that Judas is a saint destined to join the holy generation of the Gnostics. The result is that certain claims have been made by National Geographic that the Gospel of Judas says things it just does NOT say: Judas is the perfect enlightened Gnostic; Judas ascends to the holy generation; Jesus wants Judas to betray him; Jesus wants to escape the material world; Judas performs a righteous act, serving Jesus by “betraying” him; Judas will be able to enter the divine realm as symbolized by his vision of the great house; as the thirteenth, Judas surpasses the twelve disciple, and is lucky and blessed by this number.

I have been speaking to audiences about this situation in a public lecture series I started this semester, The Forbidden Gospels, and I am writing a book for general audiences (What Does the Gospel of Judas REALLY Say?) as quickly as I can. It will include a corrected translation and interpretation, one in which Judas is as evil as ever.

Well, I am looking forward to both the blog and the book. I have April DeConick's recent books on the Gospel of Thomas in front of me (it was published in the series I edit) and they are important contributions to Thomas studies.