The Hidden Text (Editorial, NYRSF 310)

Well, we did get the May issue out on time, and then promptly followed it with this, the latest issue so far. This failure is completely down to me; I had several opportunities to get the issue done in a timely manner and, overwhelmed by circumstances or just inertia I allowed it to fall to the side.

Next issue is going to be a close call; July has always been a very difficult month for us. One weekend is absorbed by Independence Day; then another by Readercon, which almost everyone on staff is attending. I myself am not, because the Monday immediately following Readercon is my departure day for a week-long vacation in Detroit. The three of us will first visit Bernadette’s family in Ann Arbor, and then we are delighted to be, as a family, the fannish co-Guests of Honor for DetCon1, the 2014 NASFiC. I hope that we will see many of you there; it looks like great fun.

Anyway, so I’m going work very hard the last week of July to get issue 311 out before the end of the month. We have a lot of great material queued up--though we’re always hungry for more, so keep those articles rolling in.

So. On the principal of “this is my editorial and I get to talk about what’s bouncing around in my mind,” I’m going to talk about historical criticism of the gospels. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, about 15 years ago I developed an interest in the composition of the Bible, particularly in the composition of the canonical Gospels. I was raised Catholic, but this aspect of church history was never part of my instruction.

(For the sake of clarity, when I just say “the gospels,” I mean the four canonical gospels that almost every modern Christian denomination accepts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

The gospels fall into two broad categories—John and all of the rest, the Synoptics (from the Greek “seen together”). Even a casual reading of the Synoptics reveals that they have a lot of text in common with each other, often verbatim or nearly so, while the content of John is very different. From the evidence of these similarities, scholars in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century developed a hypothesis that these three gospels were primarily drawn from two sources. One of the sources was the Gospel of Mark itself, either as it is known now or a very similar version; the other was a document that came to be called “Q” or even “The Q Gospel.” Q comprises the material common to Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. Matthew and Luke also each contain some material not in any other source, most notably the completely non-overlapping birth narratives. Mark is a very narrative work; Q, in contrast, largely consists of sayings, short speeches, and a handful of anecdotes; it’s often called a “sayings gospel” (or logia), distinct from the gospel narrative of Mark. The Two-Source Hypothesis posits that the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently took these two main documents, rewrote them together, and added other stories and teachings to form what they each expected to be the definitive treatments of the life and teaching of Jesus the Galilean. Meanwhile (or much later, depending on who you agree with), the author of John wrote down a completely separate work—a distinct narrative gospel, itself incorporating long digressive prayers and speeches that seem copied from various sources.

Now, here’s where things get (to my eye) really cool. When Weisse, Schleiermacher, Holtzmann and the others settled on the Two-Source Hypothesis in the 1820s through the 1860s, they were completely fabricating the idea of a sayings gospel. Working from the word “logia” in a few early writings, they described something unlike any other early Christian work that was known to actually exist. And then in 1897, one turned up. The Gospel of Thomas, the shining spark of the archeological discoveries at Oxyrhynchus, matches the sayings gospel form of Q fairly closely. (A fuller version of Thomas was found 50 years later in a sealed jar buried outside Nag Hammadi.) The description of Q was a prediction that other logia existed at the birth of Christianity, and the finding of Thomas in a trash heap in Egypt fulfilled that prediction like a prophet.

Foremost among the features of a good explanation is that it is applicable outside of its immediate circumstances. This is true regardless of the subject matter, and the pleasure of seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place is one of the great joys of study.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors.

An earlier version of this essay implied that the earliest discovery of Thomas was at Nag Hammadi; we regret the error.

Comments

[Eugene R.]

There is still some dispute over the question of 'Q' actually existing and being a Christian foundational document. The mystery of its disappearance and lack of mention in lists of early Christian texts is puzzling. On the other codex, the Jesus Seminar published their historical exegesis as "The Five Gospels" with Thomas included.

Small historical quibble: The Nag Hammadi library in which Thomas turned up was discovered in 1945. Comparison of that copy of Thomas with the fragments from Oxyrhynchus found in 1896 confirmed that those earlier discovered parchment pieces were part of a fuller text.