Excursus: Mark and the Gospel of Thomas
Introduction
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Jesus said, The Father's kingdom is like a person who wanted to kill someone powerful. While still at home he drew his sword and thrust it into the wall to find out whether his hand would go in. Then he killed the powerful one. -- Gospel of Thomas |
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. Parts of Greek versions of the Gospel of Thomas were discovered in an ancient garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt late in the 19th century. In 1945 a complete version in Coptic, an Egyptian language that adapted an alphabet from Greek, was found at Nag Hammadi. Peter Kirby (ECW) writes:
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The Gospel of Thomas is extant in three Greek fragments and one Coptic manuscript. The Greek fragments are P. Oxy. 654, which corresponds to the prologue and sayings 1-7 of the Gospel of Thomas; P. Oxy. 1, which correponds to the Gospel of Thomas 26-30, 77.2, 31-33; and P. Oxy. 655, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 24 and 36-39. P. Oxy 1 is dated shortly after 200 CE for paleographical reasons, and the other two Greek fragments are estimated to have been written in the mid third century. The Coptic text was written shortly before the year 350 CE. |
The actual dating of the Gospel of Thomas itself is highly controversial. Some scholars, generally liberals, regard Thomas as predating the Gospels and ancestral to them. Others, generally conservatives and apologists, regard Thomas as derivative and postdating them. Estimates fall anywhere between 60 CE and 200 CE, when our earliest copies are dated.
The issues raised by the Gospel of Thomas can be dramatically shown with a simple comparison between Mk 12:1-12 and Logion (saying) 65 and Logion 66 from the Gospel of Thomas.
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Mark 12:1-12
(RSV) |
Gospel of Thomas
Logion 65 and Logion 66
(Patterson & Meyer)
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| 1: And he began to speak to them in parables. "A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. 2: When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3: And they took him and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. 4: Again he sent to them another servant, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. 5: And he sent another, and him they killed; and so with many others, some they beat and some they killed. 6: He had still one other, a beloved son; finally he sent him to them, saying, `They will respect my son.' 7: But those tenants said to one another, `This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' 8: And they took him and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard. 9: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others. 10: Have you not read this scripture: `The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; 11: this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'?" 12: And they tried to arrest him, but feared the multitude, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them; so they left him and went away. |
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65 He said, A [...] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard's crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master. His master said, "Perhaps he didn't know them." He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, "Perhaps they'll show my son some respect." Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!
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66 Jesus said, "Show me the stone that the builders rejected: that is the keystone."
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Note that Thomas has the material in bold, but does not have the material in italics. In general, the sayings in Thomas are shorter than those in the Gospels, and are shorn of any interpretive or allegorical context. For example, Logion 65 above does not contain the citation from Isaiah that begins the Markan version of this saying. Similarly, Logion 66 above repeats only half the citation of Psalm 118, two verses of which are given in the Markan version. Depending on their tastes, scholars view the shorter versions in Thomas as either more primitive, or more condensed. This pattern is repeated for all the Gospels, for all of them have material that is repeated in Thomas, though none of them have all the material in Thomas, and some Thomas sayings are found in no canonical gospel. Here are many of the sayings in Thomas that appear to overlap those of the Gospel of Mark (from Davies' Gospel of Thomas Website):
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Mark 2:18-20 //Logion 104 Bridgroom saying
Mark 2:21-22 //Logion 47c Old wine/new wine, patch
Mark 3:27 //Logion 35 Strong man must be bound
Mark 3:28-29 //Logion 44 Never blaspheme against Holy Spirit
Mark 3:31-34 //Logion 99 My real family
Mark 4:3-9 //Logion 9 Parable of the Sower
Mark 4:9 //Logion 21 (whoever has ears, many places in both)
Mark 4:11 //Logion 62a Those who are worthy can hear my mysteries
Mark 4:21 //Logion 33b Hiding a lamp
Mark 4:22 //Logion 6b Nothing hidden will not be manifest
Mark 4: 26-29 //Logion 21d Ripened grain is harvested
Mark 4:30-32 //Logion 20 Mustard Seed
Mark 6:4 //Logion 31 No prophet accepted in own home
Mark 7:15-20 //Logion 14c What comes out defiles
Mark 8:27-30 //Logion 13 "Who am I" - themed saying
Mark 8:34 //Logion 55 Must hate family
Mark 10:14-15 //Logion 22a Must be child to enter Kingdom
Mark 10:31 //Logion 4b Last shall be first
Mark 11:22-23 //Logion 48 Faith moves mountains
Mark 12:1-8 //Logion 65 Parable of Tenants
Mark 12:10-11 //Logion 66 Cornerstone saying
Mark 12:13-17 //Logion 100 Render unto Caesar
Mark 12:31 //Logion 25 Love your brother like yourself
Mark 13:17 //Logion 79 Breasts with no milk
Mark 13:21 //Logion 113 Watch for the Kingdom
Mark 13:31 //Logion 111a They will not taste death
Mark 14:58 //Logion 71 Tear and rebuild this house |
Several other sayings with affinities to Mark in Thomas may also be observed, such as "Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father" which seems to relate to Mark 11:15-19, while some of those identified as similar to Mark are arguable at best. However, the cumulative weight of these parallels makes it difficult to imagine that these two gospels are independent of each other. But which way does dependence run?
Scholars who argue that Mark depends on Thomas generally cite several arguments. (1) They point out that the order of the sayings in Thomas does not appear to reflect the order of the sayings in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). (2) They argue that the brevity of the Thomasine versions of the Synoptic sayings indicates that they are more primitive. (3) They point out that none of the sayings in Thomas contains any stylistic elements from the writers of the canonical gospels. They bolster this with the argument that in order to recover the source of the saying from the Markan additions, the writer of Thomas would have needed the tools of a modern redaction critic. (4) Allegory is a later addition to the source by the Gospel writers. Stevan Davies and Kevin Johnson (1996) argue:
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"It does not seem possible that Thomas could have had the form-critical expertise necessary to excise allegorical elements from a synoptic passage so as to construct a version of a parable that is quite similar to the probable original version. Much more probably, the version we find in Thomas is the more original and it was taken from oral tradition. The synoptic versions are highly allegorized later adaptations." |
None of these arguments will stand up to serious scrutiny. The argument from order is particularly interesting. If Mark depends on Thomas, we simply see the mirror image of the problem of order: now we must account for why Mark mixed up the Thomasine order. The argument from order doesn't disappear by reversing dependence.
Argument (2) is an unfounded assumptive argument. "Shorter" simply means "shorter." It does not speak to primitivity in any way. For a precedent, Proverbs 17-24 is based on a longer Egyptian text, which also consists of pithy directives. Proverbs, though later, makes them even shorter.
The most potent argument, on its face, is (3), the lack of the hand of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John, in Thomas. It depends, however, on the assumption that the ancients were somehow dumber than moderns, and I am always uneasy postulating that. The ancients were skilled literary critics and had no trouble creating, spotting, and extracting parallels and sayings. Moreoever, they were working in Greek, a language that was a living language which they spoke and thought in. Further, some of the sayings in Thomas go back to the Old Testament (such as the citation of Psalm 118 to be discussed below) and thus would have been easy for a literate compiler to pluck out of their Gospel context -- and hence to discover the habits of Gospel writers in assembling stories from OT citations. Note too that Thomas-first proponents have to argue that the writer of Mark was smart enough to strip off the Thomasine formulae at the beginning and end of sayings, but the compiler of Thomas was too dumb to spot the hand of Mark at the beginning and end of sayings. How's that again? Clearly the necessary skills existed in antiquity.
Argument 4, that allegory comes later and parable first, is assumptive -- it assumes that the parables go back in the tradition, which is precisely what one is trying to prove. In sum, no argument for the priority of Thomas based on order and style will hold. They are either irrelevant, subjective, or assumptive.
Mark 12:1-12 and Thomas Logion 65 and 66
The topic under dispute here comprises two passages, one a parable used by the writer of Mark as an allegory on the death of Jesus, the other a citation of Psalm 118. Both of these appear in Mark and Thomas.
Stevan Davies and Kevin Johnson (1996) make an argument for the dependence of Mark 12:1-12 on Thomas Logion 65-66:
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But what then of the fact that in Mark (and the two other synoptics) and in Thomas we find the passage from Psalm 118, verse 22, immediately following the parable? In Mark (et al.) the passage from the psalm is intended to be read as a concluding scriptural comment on the foregoing passage, a comment that implies the vindication of Jesus after his death. But the passage is not really appropriate for that purpose as the whole allegorical apparatus of the parable (vineyard, tenants, servants, master) is replaced with another allegorical apparatus (builders, cornerstone). Unless one is told that the Psalm citation comments on the parable, as one is told in the synoptics, one would hardly be expected to think that either of the two has anything to do with the other.
And indeed, in Thomas the two do not have anything to do with each other. They just occur in sequence, and sequencing in Thomas rarely implies that the succeeding saying comments on the preceding saying. In this case, saying 65, the parable, is separated from saying 66, the Psalm citation, by two separate Thomasine literary devices. First, the parable's conclusion is emphasized by the tag line: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," which signifies that the parable has been brought to completion, and second, by the device of beginning saying 66 with "Jesus said." It is on the basis of an introductory "Jesus said" that modern scholars separate most of Thomas's sayings into individual units.
Furthermore, saying 66 can only serve as an interpretation of saying 65 if it has already been established that 65 is an allegory referring to the rejection of Jesus. And Thomas does not offer saying 65 as an allegory of Jesus in any way. But Mark does and Mark sees 66 as a comment upon that allegory even though the terms of the allegories are completely unrelated. Mark makes of two unrelated traditional sayings one complex discourse.
Rather than hypothesizing the highly unlikely process of the author of Thomas carefully and critically removing allegorical elements from both the synoptic version of the parable and the Psalm citation, I think it is much more reasonable to conclude that Mark found the juxtaposition of the parable of the Wicked Tenants parable and the psalm citation in Thomas. He then constructed the allegory we find in his gospel from that original and used the Psalm citation as a concluding climactic proof-text to support his allegory all of which he presents as a narrative, an argument within the Jerusalem Temple between Jesus and various priests and elders.
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At first glance this looks like a strong set of arguments. Davies and Johson say that Psalm 118:22 makes an inappropriate climax to the allegory of the Parable of the Tenants. They point out that this implies that the two have nothing to do with each other. Sure enough, we see that in Thomas the two are separated by taglines and formulaic introductions, though in the same order as in Mark. Davies and Johnson then go on to note that 66 can only interpret 65 if the writer has already established that 65 is an allegory of Jesus' death, but Thomas does not do that. It is the writer of Mark, not the compiler of Thomas, argue Davies and Johnson, who yoked these two unrelated sayings together to form one "complex discourse."
This argument, however, fails to understand the usage of Psalm 118 in Mark, and further, fails to take into account the structural features of Mark 11-12 that preclude Mark's dependence on Thomas and instead demonstrate that the compiler of Thomas, for whatever reason and by whatever route, has lifted these passages from Mark. Let's take a look at 12:1-12, starting with Psalm 118.
Psalm 118 is one of the Hallel Psalms (113-118) that celebrate the entrance of Simon Maccabaeus into the city of Jerusalem a couple of centuries before the time of Jesus. The writer of Mark cites it twice in Mark 11-12. The first time comes in Mk 11:9 where he cites 118:26 (117:25 LXX):
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Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the LORD we bless you. (NIV) |
Mark 12:10 is the second citation of Psalm 118. The first comes in a very appropriate place -- as Jesus is entering Jerusalem in Mark 11. It makes an implicit comparison between Simon Maccabaeus' entry into Jerusalem and Jesus' own, casting Jesus as Simon. The historical comparison is apt, as Simon would later become High Priest as well as King, just as Jesus does. He would also wrest independence for the Jews from the Seleucids and found the Hasmonean Dynasty.
The second citation of Psalm 118 is the one in Mk 12:10:
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Mk12:10: Have you not read this scripture: `The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; 11: this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'?" |
That makes two instances in which the writer of Mark has linked Jesus to Simon. Yet there is still one more to come, the citation of Psalm 110 further on, in Mk 12:36. That citation is traditionally seen by exegetes as a later invention to explain away the "fact" that Jesus was not of the line of David, but it is almost certainly from the hand of the writer, for it too is an allusion to Simon Maccabaeus. Though traditionally attributed to David, Psalm 110 was written during Maccabean times, as it refers to Simon through the use of an acrostic of his name formed by its first several lines. In other words, Simon Maccabaeus' name is pointed to by a Psalm that appears in a set of verses that discusses Jesus' role as Davidic Messiah. This is the third link of Jesus to Simon since Mark 11:1. In each of the three times in this section that Simon's name has cropped up in this sequence, it has been linked to Jesus' triple role as King, Son, and Messiah.
Clearly the writer of Mark is not pulling this citation of Psalm out of Thomas. Rather, he has a definite program of linking Simon Maccabaeus and Jesus, which he does three times in the comparatively short space of 11:1 to 12:36-7, including an entrance into Jerusalem that offers people praising Jesus and laying branches at his feet, which might well be taken to be a fourth and separate reference to Simon (to 1 Macc 13:51). One reference might well be a coincidence. Four allusions constitute a program, and that program does not belong to the compiler of Thomas. One might also note two other allusions that link Jesus to Simon: there are five sons in his family (just as there were five Maccabees), and some of them bear the same names as the Maccabee sibs. Clearly this program goes back a long way in Mark.
Recall that Davies and Johnson's first argument was that Psalm 118:26 is inappropriate to interpret the Parable of the Tenants. Actually, as we have seen, it is a perfect capstone for the Parable, for it alludes to a series of events in which a King and High Priest, Simon Maccabaeus, comes to Jerusalem to cast out the Seleucids and take back Israel, just as Jesus will cast out the Wicked Tenants and take back the Vineyard. The writer of Mark was depending on the reader to go back to Psalm 118 and reflect on the history. One might add the additional parallel that Jesus, like Simon, would be cast as High Priest even though he was not of the tribe of Levi.
An additional problem is that in Mark the reason the Heir is killed is explained, while in Thomas, the Heir is simply killed:
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Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him. |
But why should they kill him because he is the Heir? Thomas almost appears to presume Mark's explanation.
Davies and Johnson also claimed that the writer of Mark allegorized the sayings and parables he found in Thomas. But this calls for a rather strange sequence of events on the part of the writer of Mark. First, he must realize that Psalm 118 relates to Simon Maccabaeus. Then he must incorporate into his gospel. And then he must create a whole program off of it and insert that into his gospel as well. But then we run into other problems. If that is true, then we must accept that the writer then created the scene of the entrance into Jerusalem and the argument about Christ and David in Mk 12:36 because he found the saying from Psalm 118 in Thomas. In other words, that the discovery of this citation spawned Mark's four-point Simon/Jesus program. But as we have seen, the entrance in Jerusalem is structured by the Elijah-Elisha cycle, while the details are taken from 1 Sam 10. Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem has an utterly different basis that has nothing to do with Psalm 118. The writer of Mark has simply intertwined his Simon/Jesus comparison into that story.
Alternatively, one could argue that the writer had already placed the first citation of Psalm 118 in 11:9, and then the third allusion to Simon in 12:36, and went and looked at Thomas and lo and behold! There was another citation of Psalm 118 that he could use in his Simon/Jesus program! What luck! It's almost as if someone had compiled Thomas with the writer's needs in mind.
As we have seen, however, the structuring of the Elijah-Elisha Cycle continues throughout this sequence and all the way into Mark 14:1-11. Mark 12:1-12 parallels Jehu's killing of the son's of Ahab and taking their kingdom, while Mark 12:42-44 parallels 2 Kings 12:5-17. The Simon/Jesus comparison is a contrapuntal theme snaking through all this. In other words, Psalm 118 cannot be dictating structure as the writer already has another program in mind, one that he has been playing out since the beginning of the Gospel.
But there is another interesting feature of the citation of Psalm 118 in Mark 12:10: it contains a bit of wordplay that is right up the writer's alley. The Hebrew for stone is eben, for son, it's ben. A pun on cornerstone for son! What a coincidence, eh? Finding a cite from Psalm 118 in Thomas that exactly fits his program of casting Jesus as Son, King, and Messiah, as well as his tricksy sense of humor. It's almost as if Thomas was written with Mark in mind, or something.
Finally, Psalm 118 and Psalm 110 form another very important part of Mark 12 that is difficult to believe is not from the hand of Mark. For more on the importance of that pair of Psalm citations, please see the Excursus on whether Mark Knew Paul.
In light of all these swirling allusions that link Simon Maccabaeus and Jesus in a short space, we must ask ourselves: is it more reasonable to conclude that the writer of Mark found this Psalm citation in Thomas and then created a whole program out of it, or is it more reasonable to assume that the compiler of Thomas, like so many later interpreters of Mark, including those possesed of superior form-critical skills, missed the significance of the citation of Psalm 118 in the larger program of the Gospel of Mark, and pulled it from its context? I submit that the latter is more reasonable.
Mark 12:1-12 and the Lack of Critical Tools in Antiquity
1. The Parable of the Tenants
Davies and Johnson (1996) expresse a thought found in the minds of many exegetes:
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"It does not seem possible that Thomas could have had the form- critical expertise necessary to excise allegorical elements from a synoptic passage so as to construct a version of a parable that is quite similar to the probable original version. Much more probably, the version we find in Thomas is the more original and it was taken from oral tradition. The synoptic versions are highly allegorized later adaptations." |
Let's take another look at our side-by-side comparison of the two parables:
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Mark 12:1-12
(RSV) |
Gospel of Thomas
Logion 65 and Logion 66
(Patterson & Meyer)
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| 1: And he began to speak to them in parables. "A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. 2: When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3: And they took him and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. 4: Again he sent to them another servant, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. 5: And he sent another, and him they killed; and so with many others, some they beat and some they killed. 6: He had still one other, a beloved son; finally he sent him to them, saying, `They will respect my son.' 7: But those tenants said to one another, `This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' 8: And they took him and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard. 9: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others. 10: Have you not read this scripture: `The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; 11: this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'?" 12: And they tried to arrest him, but feared the multitude, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them; so they left him and went away. |
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65 He said, A [...] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard's crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master. His master said, "Perhaps he didn't know them." He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, "Perhaps they'll show my son some respect." Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!
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66 Jesus said, "Show me the stone that the builders rejected: that is the keystone."
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To reduce this allegory the Gospel of Mark to a parable in Thomas, the compiler had to prune the following.
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1: And he began to speak to them in parables. "A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country.
9: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others.
10: Have you not read this scripture: `
11: this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'?"
12: And they tried to arrest him, but feared the multitude, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them; so they left him and went away. |
Verse 1 is a citation from Isaiah and easily recognized by anyone familiar with the Old Testament. Verse 11 is also from Psalm 118 and is also instantly identifiable to anyone who has read the OT. In case our ancient form critic suffered a brain glitch and didn't recognize that, the writer of Mark has helpfully alerted the reader that this comes from the OT with the comment "Have you not read this scripture...." There is nothing particularly difficult about excising this dross; short opening formulae appear in Thomas and the idea would have been familiar to the compiler. That leaves:
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9: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others.
12: And they tried to arrest him, but feared the multitude, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them; so they left him and went away.
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One truly wonders how difficult it would have been for our out-of-time form critic to have removed verse 12. Anyone who had read the Gospel of Mark would be cognizant of the Markan focus on the Bad Guys associated with the power structure in Jerusalem. But in case our thumb-fingered Ancient Critic missed the fact that the writer has appended that to the end of the parable by way of explanation, the writer has helpfully supplied a strong hint that the parable has terminated with the phrase for they perceived that he had told the parable against them which could hardly be true unless he had finished the parable!
This leaves only verse 9, which contains a summary explanation of the parable's meaning. There are many sayings in Thomas, but few explanations. All the compiler had to do was recognize this as a superfluous explanation and excise it in accordance with his usual habit. Again the writer of Mark has supplied the helpful hint with the question in v9a: What will the owner of the vineyard do? which clearly indicates that the meaning of the parable is about to explained.
Obviously rendering this fleshy allegory down for its parabolic fat would not have been difficult at all. The argument from a lack of "form-critical expertise" is a twofold error: not only is very little "expertise" required to reduce this Markan giant to a Thomasine midget, but the argument from a lack of form-critical expertise also assumes what it sets out to prove; namely, that the writer of Mark is working off of a source. Thomasine priority is a function of one's assumptions about the relationship between the writer of Mark and his sources that has nothing to do with where the evidence points.
Burton Mack (1991) summarizes the serious problems with the view that Thomas represents an unallegorized parable:
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"The Tenants. Most scholars agree that the story in Mark bears literary allusions to the Septuagint of Isa 5:1-5. Since that, plus the citation of Ps 118:22-23 in Mark 12:10-11, betray the signs of literary activity, several scholars have made the attempt to reconstruct an earlier, less allegorical form of the story. Crossan especially, In Parables, 86-96, argues strongly on the basis of the variant in GThom 93:1-18 that the story was originally not allegorical, either with respect to Israel's destiny, or with respect to Jesus' destiny, and that it was authentic, 'a deliberately shocking story of successful murder' (p. 96). Crossan does not go on to explain the 'parabolic effect' this might have created, except to say it may have been a commentary upon the times. To follow Crossan in this attempt to retrieve the parable for Jesus, one has to imagine a situation in which listeners would not have been tempted to pick up on allusive suggetions to other stories and histories at all. The tightly constructed story, however, with its motifs of 'sending,' 'servants,' in series, to 'tenants' of a 'vineyard' for its 'produce,' to say nothing of the negative fates of the servants, that the tenants knew who the servants were, that the last one sent is different (the son), and that he was killed, is literally packed with invitations to think of Israel's epic history from a Christian point of view. Images and narrative schemes that come immediately to mind include the vineyard as a traditional metaphor for Israel (even if the literary allusion to Isaiah in Mark 12:1 is deleted), the sending of the prophets, the rejection and killing of the prophets, and perhaps wisdom's envoys (Wis 7:27). The parable betrays a reflection on Israel and the negative fate of the prophets that is greatly advanced over Q. Because the special status and destiny of the last emissary is both emphatic and climactic, the story is surely a product, not of the historical Jesus, but of a much later Christian claim. The story fits best just in Mark's milieu where Jesus traditions, including Q, were combined with meditations upon Jesus' death as a crucial event. Mark's additions merely explicate the allegorical significance contained within the story itself." (p168-169, n24) |
2. The Parable of the Sower
Also found in the Gospel of Thomas is the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20) , Logion 9 in Thomas:
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Mark 4:1-20
(RSV) |
Gospel of Thomas
Logion 9
(Patterson & Meyer)
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1: Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea; and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2: And he taught them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4: And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. 5: Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; 6: and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. 7: Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8: And other seeds fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold." 9: And he said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." 10: And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. 11: And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outsideeverything is in parables; 12: so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven." 13: And he said to them, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? 14: The sower sows the word. 15: And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown; when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word which is sown in them. 16: And these in like manner are the ones sown upon rocky ground, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; 17: and they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. 18: And others are the ones sown among thorns; they are those who hear the word, 19: but the cares of the world, and the delight in riches, and the desire for other things, enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.20: But those that were sown upon the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold."
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Jesus said, Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them). Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure. |
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Once again, a glance at this shows how empty the argument from the lack of critical tools in antiquity is. To excise this parable, the compiler of Thomas had to get rid of the following:
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1: Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea; and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2: And he taught them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them:
9: And he said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." 10: And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. 11: And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outsideeverything is in parables; 12: so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven." 13: And he said to them, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? 14: The sower sows the word. 15: And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown; when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word which is sown in them. 16: And these in like manner are the ones sown upon rocky ground, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; 17: and they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. 18: And others are the ones sown among thorns; they are those who hear the word, 19: but the cares of the world, and the delight in riches, and the desire for other things, enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.20: But those that were sown upon the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold."
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How difficult would this have been? Anyone familiar with the Old Testament would have had no trouble doing it. The writer of Mark has helpfully supplied us with clues, such as v2: And he taught them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: which clearly announces that Jesus is going to say something important. Sure enough, the very next word is Listen! which one finds in innumerable similar contexts in the OT. For example, in Genesis 37:9 and Genesis 42:21 meaningful dreams are announced with the word. In Judges 9:7 Jotham delivers a parable from Mt. Gerizim with the command to listen:
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7: When Jotham was told about this, he climbed up on the top of Mount Gerizim and shouted to them, "Listen to me, citizens of Shechem, so that God may listen to you." (NIV) |
Clearly anyone familiar with the Scriptures could see that Listen!, prefaced by in his teaching he said to them, and could hardly fail to conclude that important words are about to be spoken at that point in the text.
In Mark the parable runs from v3-8. Verse 9 cites another OT formula And he said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" found in many places in the OT, including Psalm 135:17, Proverbs 20:12, Isaiah 30:21, and Isaiah 32:3. Again, no one familiar with the OT could fail to recognize this formula, and realize that the parable had terminated (it appears also in Thomas). But in case our would-be ancient form critic suffered a massive brain glitch about where the parable had ended, the writer of Mark has helpfully followed the clarion call of v9 with a change of scene in 10A: And when he was alone, and inquiry from his followers about what the parable might mean: those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables, neither of which could hardly be happening if the parable were still ongoing.
But even after all this, if our ham-handed ancient exegete was still unable to get a grip on the parable, the writer of Mark then gives us v11-12, the famous citation of Isaiah 6:9-10, which anyone familiar with the OT could hardly fail to recognize. After that comes an explanation of the parable. Surely our critic would not have confused the explanation of the parable with the parable itself.
In sum, the entire argument that Mark must depend on Thomas because there was a lack of critical tools in antiquity is founded on a completely unsupportable claim. As this detailed look has shown, it must be utterly rejected.
Thomas and the Cleansing of the Temple
The Gospel of Thomas appears to allude to Jesus' Cleansing of the Temple in a couple of places, most clearly in Logion 64b:
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Businessmen and merchants will not enter the places of my Father. |
Davies and Johnson (1996) discuss why this must be a Markan expansion of a Thomasine saying:
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"I will briefly survey the elements of Mark's passage: "On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there." [This is a summary statement defining what happened.] "He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts." [This is a narrative expansion of the previous sentence, unnecessary, strictly speaking, but appropriate to do, if one is writing a narrative, which Mark is doing.] "And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: "`My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it `a den of robbers.'" [The scriptural pastiche (Isaiah 56:7, Jeremiah 7:11) serves to justify the activity that has been narrated. A similar pastiche of scriptural passages is used by Mark in revision of GTh 65-66 (Mk 12:1-12).] "The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching." [Passages such as this are common in Markan controversy-redaction, where Judean leaders plot against Jesus and "crowds" are foils for his teaching and usually support him.]"
The whole Markan pericope is summed up at the beginning "Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there," which appears to be a narrativization of Thomas 64b "businessmen and merchants will not enter the places of my Father." The controversy conclusion and scriptural pastiche probably derives from Mark. Whatever "places of my Father" may have meant to the compiler of Thomas, the applicability of the phrase to the Jerusalem Temple seems obvious.
The idea that the Markan story originated from Mark's narrativization of a saying is not new."
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This analysis is faulty on many levels, and once again we will confront the problem of a saying without context in Thomas that in Mark is intimately related to a set of allusions and further, to structural features in the Gospel that preclude Markan borrowing of an extant saying.
The analysis of Davies and Johnson goes wrong almost immediately. They write of Mark 11:15-16:
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"On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there." [This is a summary statement defining what happened.] "He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts." [This is a narrative expansion of the previous sentence, unnecessary, strictly speaking, but appropriate to do, if one is writing a narrative, which Mark is doing.] |
On their reading, Mark 11:15 is simply a statement of an event that occurred, while Mark 11:16 is unnecessary. However, as we saw in the notes and commentary to Mark 11:15-19, these two verses are not statements of history, but relate to Nehemiah and a similar Temple Cleansing in the Old Testament. The argument of Davies and Johnson depends on the writer of Mark having no alternative OT source for his story, for they have already conceded that "...the scriptural pastiche probably derives from Mark." Unfortunately for their case, Mark 11:15-6 is also "scriptural pastiche," for the details here are taken from Nehemiah:
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8 I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah's household goods out of the room. 9 I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God, with the grain offerings and the incense. (NIV) |
Their analysis is correct in one respect: it was taken from an older source. The source is not Thomas, however, but the OT.
Note too that in addition to verses from the OT cropping out in Mark, the larger issue of businessmen and merchants in the Temple is also OT in origin. Earl Doherty (1999) has identified at least three possible sources:
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Malachi 3:1
"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.(NIV)
Hosea 9: 15
"Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal, I hated them there. Because of their sinful deeds, I will drive them out of my house. I will no longer love them; all their leaders are rebellious. (NIV)
Zechariah 14:21
...And on that day there will no longer be a merchant in the house of the LORD Almighty. (NIV)[some manuscripts read "Canaanite" for "merchant."] |
The writer of Mark is aware of Malachi 3:1, for he cited it in Mark 1:2. Similarly, Zechariah 14:21 takes us to Zech 14:4, one of the most famous messianic verses of the period, which apparently lies behind Jesus' location on the Mount Olives when he begins his final essay into Jerusalem.
"Narrativization" of Thomas will not hold for another reason. As we saw in the commentary to Mark 11:15-19, the Temple Cleansing is the climax to the writer's use of the Elijah-Elisha Cycle in creating Jesus' activities in Palestine. The Thomas saying cannot have been narrativized to create a Temple Cleansing because that was already in the writer's program from long before. Thomas Brodie (1998, p92) explains. At the climax of the two legend cycles, the Temple is cleansed (Jesus drives out the moneychangers, Jehu kills the priests of Ba'al). Both are annointed (2 Kings 9), accession with cloaks on the ground (2 Kings 9), waiting before taking over (2 Kings 9:12-13, Mark 11:11), challenge the authorities (2 Kings 9:22-10:27), Mark 11:11 - 12:12), and money is given to the Temple (2 Kings 12:5-17, Mark 12:41-44). As Brodie puts it (p93), ..."the basic point is clear: Mark's long passion narrative, while using distinctive Christian sources, coincides significantly both in form and content with the long Temple-centered sequence at the end of the Elijah-Elisha narrative."
Finally, the problem of narrativization must confront the way the writer constructed the gospel by relying on the Old Testament for its details and intermediate structures. Davies and Johnson cite Maurice Goguel:
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"At the outset the record must have been a great deal simpler than it is now. Originally it would have said that Jesus protested against the presence of the sellers of merchandise and money-changers in the Temple. Quite naturally the saying of Jesus was transformed into an incident, and, at the third stage of development, the saying and the story to which it had given rise were combined." |
This position is indefensible. No evidence suggests that "the record must have been simpler." There is no record of this incident prior to Mark. The claim that "the record must have been simpler" is an assumption of source criticism, not a historical judgment (based on what evidence?). Goguel claims that Quite naturally the saying of Jesus was transformed into an incident although the opposite would be just as natural (aren't the various references to the Temple's destruction in the NT and Thomas an example of a "historical" event becoming a saying?). Then the quote talks about the "third stage" even though no evidence suggests there was a second, let alone a first.
The reality is that the writer of Mark had certain habits of creation that suggest the opposite case. The author created the Temple Cleansing using his standard operating procedure of grabbing structures and stories from the OT. Recall that Mark 11:1-11 is based on 2 Sam 9-10 while the first fig tree pericope seems taken from Micah 7:1. Davies, Johnson, and Goguel are in essence arguing that the writer of Mark relied on 2 Sam 9-10 for Mark 11:1-11 (annointing), then the writer picked up Micah 7:1 for Mark 11:12-14 (fig tree cursing), then he rolls into the Temple and suddenly veers into Thomas for one saying, 11:15a, then it is back to Nehemiah for 11:15b and 11:16. The writer of Mark simply doesn't work that way. If you attribute 11:15a to one of the three possible OT sources, there's no need for Thomas at all. Instead, we get the usual Markan picture of creativity off of the OT at all levels. In this case I would argue that 11:15a is based on Zech 14, which he has used elsewhere. Zech 14:4 is one of the most famous verses of messianic legend, and the whole passage is about how the nations of the world will worship in the Jerusalem Temple on the day of the lord, after terrible destruction. It is a textbook example of Mark's hypertextual focus on the Temple.
In other words, on every level, the format and details of this pericope show unmistakeable signs of Markan style. As we have seen, the Temple Cleansing is most likely an invention of the author of Mark. There is nothing in there from Thomas.
Finally, we should point out that against the argument from order, there are three sayings in order in Thomas, Logion 64B, 65, and 66. These are the Temple Cleansing, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, and the Cornerstone Saying, in the same order one finds them in Mark. But in Mark that order is controlled by the events in 2 Kings. Hence, either Thomas has copied Mark, and retained Mark's order, or it's probably just another one of those coincidences....
Paul, Mark, and Thomas
Before I close out this excursus, I'd like to highlight one other issue from the point of view of priority. In Mark 8:17-18 we find:
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17: And being aware of it, Jesus said to them, "Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18: Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? |
In the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 17 similarly gives us:
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Jesus said, "I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart." |
While Paul in 1 Cor 2:9 observes:
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But as it is written, "Things which an eye didn't see, and an ear didn't hear, which didn't enter into the heart of man, these God has prepared for those who love him." |
Deuteronomy 29:2-4 says:
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2 Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them: Your eyes have seen all that the LORD did in Egypt to
Pharaoh, to all his officials and to all his land. 3 With your own eyes you saw those great trials, those
miraculous signs and great wonders. 4 But to this day the LORD has not given you a mind that understands or
eyes that see or ears that hear. |
The Gospel of Mark apparently alludes to 1 Corinthians several times. Looking at the above sayings, it seems we must conclude that the compiler of Thomas had the same affection for the OT that Mark does, and the same affinities for 1 Cor. Eerie, isn't it?
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