Here’s one thought I had: All too often it seems that a given individual’s vision of what a “Bible” professor teaches is shaped by their experiences in Sunday school. Many individuals’ previous experiences with “the Bible” relate back to a kind, gray-haired, grandmotherly figure encouraging children to learn their “memory verse” for the week (proudly displayed in King James-era English on the bulletin board). Is this what they envision when I tell them what I do for a living? I wonder, do they also envision me with a flannel-graph, complete with little “Noah and his ark” figures? Perhaps they envision me working with an easel and finger paint as I graphically depict the Garden of Eden? I pose these questions tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to the caricature. An experience with “the Bible,” whether in church or somewhere else, can often create great misconceptions about what Biblical Studies Professors actually do. Also, many do not know how complex our questions are or how much it takes to earn a terminal degree in our discipline.

In order to pass my comprehensive exams I had to show strong competence in Hebrew and Greek, and a working knowledge of Coptic, German, French. Had my emphasis been Hebrew Bible, three or four additional languages would have been required. In a college/university context, Biblical scholars and historians of Judaism and early Christianity are some of the most broadly trained members of any arts & sciences faculty. We must learn to work well with several languages (a skill emphasized in foreign language departments),  know how to read texts closely (a skill they emphasize in language and literature departments), understand historical method (a skill emphasized in history departments), and demonstrate a competence in reading both primary and secondary texts in our own discipline.

I continue to run into people who have no idea what professors of Biblical Studies actually do. Anyone else have a similar anecdote or a suggestion as to why this might be?

(CWS) 7. Are you currently planning to undertake more research on the Gospel of Thomas? If so, what other projects do you currently have planned (or in the works)?

(RU) I am currently working on a project titled “Ritual and Christian Beginnings.” Part of the project is also to analyze the transmission of the Jesus traditions from the perspective of ritual and memory. Materials from Thomas will certainly play a role in the analysis.

(CWS) 8. To your mind, what area(s) of Thomas research is/are in need of further investigation? If you were going to supervise Ph.D. students in this area, what avenues of study would you suggest? (If you are currently supervising doctoral students in Thomasine studies, can you share a little about what these students are pursuing?)

(RU) I would like to list the following three areas/topics:

• Thomas and memory studies

• Thomas in light of the Hellenistic philosophies (I did some comparison with Stoicism in my 2003 book, but much more could be done)

• The social setting of Thomas in light of other “school” settings in early Christianity (e.g., Clement of Alexandria, Valentinian Christianity)

There are some hopes that we could have a doctoral student work on one or some of these topics.

Thanks again to Professor Uro for participating. In the early fall I *hope* to post an interview with Professor Marvin Meyer of Chapman University. He has agreed to be interviewed in this forum but his schedule has not yet opened up enough to participate.

(CWS) 1. I have asked this question of each Thomas scholar I have interviewed thus far. Before I interact with your work on the Gospel of Thomas I would like to begin by asking what got you interested in studying the Gospel of Thomas in the first place?

(RU) I wrote my dissertation on Q and after I had completed my doctoral studies I was invited to Claremont (The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity) by James Robinson, who was gathering a large international research team to produce a Critical Edition of the Q Gospel. During my stay in California, I also took an elementary course in Coptic taught by Dick Smith. In the atmosphere of Claremont it was almost impossible not to get interested and somehow involved in Thomasine studies.  Besides, my curiosity had already been awakened by Stevan Davies’s thought-provoking book I had read earlier (I have told that part of the story in the prologue of my 2003 book on Thomas). In Claremont (where I was two times, in 1989 and in 1992) I made the acquaintance of many scholars (e.g., Jon Asgeirsson, Marv Meyer, and Greg Riley) who were enthusiastic about Thomas and enthusiasm is contagious. After my return to Finland, I met Antti Marjanen, who had studied in Switzerland and learned Coptic there. We translated the Gospel of Thomas into Finnish, applied funding for a larger research project on Thomas (a young promising scholar Ismo Dunderberg had joined us), and—hope this doesn’t sound too arrogant—the rest is history.

(CWS) 2. In your work you have argued that Thomas shows evidence of “secondary orality” (specifically, Thomas shows dependence upon Matthew and Q through oral tradition). Could you briefly explain how you arrived at this conclusion?

(RU) Originally I made this suggestion in a paper that was published in 1993 (Foundations & Facets Forum 9:3-4), one of my earliest works on Thomas. I got interested in orality and literacy studies, which by that time seemed to provide a fresh perspective to the timeworn issue of literary dependence.   Werner Kelber had published a pioneering study on orality and the gospel tradition in 1983.  Kelber’s study was insightful and seminal, but he emphasized the Great Divide view, the idea that there is a deep-going hermeneutic difference between the oral and written modes of transmission.  I wanted to modify Kelber’s ideas toward a model that would allow more interplay and interaction between orality and literacy in the tradition process, a view that actually became a dominant in later scholarship. Also Kelber has admitted that his initial thesis was too much on the side of Great Divide theory.  I picked up the term “secondary orality” from Klyne Snodgrass’ 1989 article, which argued that the author of Thomas drew on free oral traditions and interpretations of the Synoptic Gospels as used in the Gnostic circles. But I never meant that “secondary orality” be taken as a magic bullet that explains the relationship between Thomas and the Synopticts in the whole. The issue is much more complicated than that. For me “secondary orality” was one concrete example of the interplay between orality and textuality, which could possibly be identified in some sayings of Thomas. Recent studies on (social and cognitive) memory and the “sociology of reading” in antiquity have shown that orality and literacy were intertwined with each other in manifold ways. Some impressive steps of progress have been taken with regard to these questions recently. I hope to be able to return to the issue from the perspective of my ritual project in near future.

(CWS) 3. In one essay from your edited volume, Thomas at the Crossroads, you ask the question, “Is Thomas an Encratite Gospel?” Could you share what conclusions you reach on this question and whether or not you regard Thomas as Gnostic?

My argument that Thomas is not really “encratite” was a reaction against the view dominant in the earlier scholarship according to which Thomas represents an extreme form of sexual asceticism. If we consider the gospel in the context of the Christian world at the turn of the second century, there is nothing extreme in Thomas’ relationship to marriage and sexuality.  Ascetic ideals were common in early Christianity and can be found already in Paul and in later first-century writings, such as the Gospel of Luke and Revelation. On the scale of ascetic emphasis, Thomas can be situated somewhere between Luke and the Apocryphal Acts, Thomas the Contender etc.

As to the question of whether Thomas is Gnostic or not, in my 2003 book I argued that Thomas represents a similar cosmological view as the Dialogue of Savior. They both share a view of the divine origin of humanity and fail to give any signs of demiurgical traditions.  If you define Gnosticism so that it must embrace both cosmological views (divine origin of humanity and the Demiurge), Thomas obviously isn’t Gnostic. But this is a matter of how you define Gnostic and Gnosticism. In Finland and perhaps elsewhere in Europe, the terms are not as ideologically-laden as they are in North America, and consequently the stakes in deciding the issue are not as high.

Stay tuned for part two. . . .

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The similarities between 1 Cor 2:9 and Gos. Thom. 17 are evident right away though questions about the sharing of tradition prove difficult to answer. To begin with, the proverb appears to draw upon elements of Isa 52:15, 64:3-4, and/or 65:16, though no part of the saying represents a direct quotation of any OT passage. This was no doubt an important proverb in the early church as different versions appear in 1 Cor 2:9, Gos. Thom. 17, 1 Clem 34:8, 2 Clem 11:7, Dial Sav 57, Acts Thom 36, Acts Pet 39, Protrepticus 10.94.4 (an exhortation of Clement of Alexandria to the Greeks), and the Turfan Fragment M 789. Similarities are also present in 1 John 1:1, though the context and situation addressed by the Johannine epistles may suggest its independence from the tradition shared by these other texts. The widespread appeal of this proverb makes tracing its transmission history a complex endeavor.

If we exclude 1 John 1:1, it is clear that Thomas and Paul represent the two earliest extant versions of this proverb. Therefore the first question to explore is, which version preceded the other? Scholars are split on this question. April DeConick includes Gos. Thom. 17 in her list of earliest Thomas sayings, arguing that it reflects the eschatological views of the earliest Thomasine Christians (see Recovering, 97, 113, 118, 129). Stephen Patterson, who also regards logion 17 as pre-Pauline, offers the following unqualified assertion about Paul:

[I]n 1 Corinthians 2 he uses the wisdom style of these opponents to compose his own ‘wisdom speech’ (2:6-16), only to correct their views with a few well-placed Pauline twists. Interestingly, in the midst of this speech Paul quotes a saying from the Gospel of Thomas. . . .The version of the saying quoted here by Paul is not paralleled word-for-word in Thomas, but reflects the sort of differences one would expect to have resulted from oral transmission (from “Paul and the Jesus Tradition,” Harvard Theological Review 84 [1991] 36-37).

Thinking along the lines of those who argue that the communities of John and Thomas were embroiled in a theological conflict, Plisch suggests that Thomas may have altered the saying in response to 1 John 1:1, which would mean that Thomas’s version is later than Paul’s. Gathercole argues that Gos. Thom. 17 has a number of secondary features, indicating it emerged later than Paul’s version. There seem to be as many opinions on this parallel as there are scholars who take a position.

Several features of Gos. Thom. 17 suggest that it is later than 1 Cor 2:9. First, Thomas includes a reference to “what no hand has touched.” This does not appear in the Pauline version and would seem to be an ‘improvement’ as it provides greater parallelism in the saying. Second, Thomas’s attribution of this saying to Jesus is surely to be regarded as secondary. Most later versions of the proverb preserve it as a saying of the Lord where Paul does not. All of this would suggest Paul’s version is earlier.

It appears that the Thomas logion emerged later than Paul’s version of the proverb, but demonstrating that it is earlier than Paul is not the same as demonstrating its dependence upon Paul. In our next post we will ask the question, “Is there any compelling evidence that Gos. Thom. 17 used 1 Cor 2:9?

(CWS) 4. I know that you regard yourself as more of a Johannine scholar, but do you anticipate any further research on the Gospel of Thomas? If so, could you tell us about it? I also know that you recently had an opportunity to examine Codex Tchacos up close (Gospel of Judas). Did you pursue this research in preparation for a book? Are you planning to do more research into similar ancient Christian texts?

 (ID) I’m not working on Thomas any longer, but I am presently working on the Gospel of Judas. My article on this text and ancient theories of “anger management” was recently published in a collection of articles edited by April DeConick. And I’m presently working on an edition and commentary on the Gospel of Judas. For this purpose, I spent a week in Geneva this past December inspecting some of the pages of Codex Tchachos. I’m sorry to tell I had no great new discoveries; the present edition by Wurst and others seems very accurate!

 As I’m now moving back to New Testament studies “proper” from Thomasine and Valentinian studies, I’m now and then asked to give papers on the reception of New Testament texts in the second century. I haven’t done much of this so far but  it seems I should do more in the future.

(CWS) 5. Another research interest that I have and one that I hope to promote on this blog is the historical Jesus. To your mind, what implications for historical Jesus research does the Gospel of Thomas have (if any)? You argue that there is material in Thomas old enough to be illuminating about the life of the historical Jesus. How do these two research interests coalesce in your own scholarship?

(ID) I haven’t conducted any independent research on the historical Jesus thus far; perhaps I’m too much aware of the problem of circularity which is particularly vexing in this field of study? I think there are sayings in Thomas which may “sound like Jesus,” or may stand closer to him than the synoptic versions, but I hardly have anything original to say about that matter–except that I was surprised to see that the Jesus seminar found so little in the non-synoptic material of Thomas that could go back to Jesus.

(CWS) 6. What scholars pursuing research on the Gospel of Thomas (and/or Christian Origins) have you found most helpful for your own work on the Gospel of Thomas?

(ID) First of all, I should mention my two Finnish colleagues, Antti Marjanen and Risto Uro. Not only have I spent hours and hours with them discussing the Gospel of Thomas, but they have also painstakingly read and commented on everything I’ve written about this topic, and have opened with their own work many important perspectives to it, both in methodological issues and in detailed analysis. Riley and DeConick have been very important discussion partners, of course. I’ve always found Elaine Pagels’ research and discussions with her most inspiring for my work (both on Thomas and Valentinians). I should also mention Stephen Patterson, whose work has prevented me from thinking that Thomas was simply put together from bits and pieces derived from the synoptic gospels; Philip Sellew, whose work always opens new perspectives for understanding Thomas in a broader context of antiquity; and Stevan Davies, who has such a keen eye especially on what binds John and Thomas theologically together and on their background in Jewish wisdom theology. Finally, I should mention Tjitze Baarda, whose detailed presentations at SBL and articles warned against any kind of generalizations and false security as to our conclusions about Thomas.

(CWS) 7. To your mind, what area(s) of Thomas research is/are in need of further investigation? If you were going to supervise Ph.D. students in this area, what avenues of study would you suggest?

(ID) There are of course many areas where further investigation might be necessary. One promising path is the increased interest in how the Gospel of Thomas might have been understood in Egypt in the fourth century. What was it in this text that attracted attention among early Christians of this period? Why was it translated, by whom, and to whom? There’ve been initial attempts to analyze the individual Nag Hammadi codices as collections, and such analyses may shed light on this questions. The demolition of strict boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy”, for which many have argued, may help us see affinities between Thomas and monastic literature more clearly than before.

Another big problem, that still needs further clarification, is the genre of Thomas. It is, of course, a collection of sayings of Jesus, but what are hermeneutical ramifications of this genre? Should we continue to try to find a unified theology in, or behind, it? Or should it be approached as a random collection of oracles, as Davies proposed some years ago?

 Due to my interest in the school of Valentinus, I’ve also developed a fancy for interactions of early Christian texts with philosophical traditions. I’ve been one of the editors of a book dealing with this topic, where there are chapters on gospels, Paul, Sethians, and Valentinians–but strikingly, none on Thomas! Risto Uro made some very promising remarks about this issue in his book Thomas (2003). In light of them, it would be worthwhile to explore more systematically whether the Gospel of Thomas was written (or could be placed) in dialogue with philosophers, like Paul or the author of John may have been.

(CWS) 1. I have posed this question at the outset of each interview I’ve conducted on the Gospel of Thomas. Before I interact with your work on the Gospel of Thomas I would like to begin by asking what got you interested in studying the Gospel of Thomas in the first place?

(ID) As I was writing my dissertation on John and the Synoptics in 1990s, I attended an introductory Coptic course taught by Antti Marjanen. He and Risto Uro were both interested in the Gospel of Thomas, and, after having published the Finnish translation of it in 1992, they started to plan a research project on this text. Because Greg Riley had reopened the question of the relationship between John and Thomas, they wanted to have a Johannine specialist in the team. I happened to be pretty much the only person available, and had some Coptic under my belt, so they invited me to the project, for which we then applied and got funding from the Academy of Finland.

(CWS) 2. Your work on the John-Thomas question represents the first attempt to challenge what I have called “the community-conflict hypothesis.” In fact, your series of articles (which subsequently became the basis for your book, The Beloved Disciple in Conflict) largely served as the impetus for my own work in that area. Could you briefly summarize your views on the relationship between John and Thomas and on the theory that John was written in response to Thomas?

 (ID) Perhaps I should start by saying that although I was invited to the project, I wasn’t asked to defend or rebut any particular view of John and Thomas!

 I agree with Riley and DeConick that John and Thomas are close to each other in spirit, and I find their work important because they brought that issue under discussion. Yet I found problematic the steps they took from the narrative world of John to the social world behind it. The methodological problems seemed similar to what other scholars (e.g., Joachim Kügler whose carefully articulated studies I read when writing my dissertation) had detected Louis Martyn’s reading of John as “a two-level drama.”

 My own view is that John and Thomas both share common ground and disagree on a number of issues but the disagreements aren’t specific enough to show that there was a mutual conflict between them. Different views, yes, a real-life conflict, no. (These are two different things, really.) If John was written to combat the Gospel of Thomas, or more broadly Thomasine traditions, and if this was one of the author’s main objectives, one could easily imagine clearer ways for expressing this than what we now have in John. It doesn’t even seem to me that Thomas is utterly badly treated as a character in John 20, if we compare his figure to the way the other followers of Jesus are depicted in John.

(CWS) 3. In your book, The Beloved Disciple in Conflict, you focused on social and religious issues, specifically looking at the paradigmatic “beloved disciple” figure behind the Gospels of John and Thomas. For readers of my blog who may not be familiar with your work, would you provide a brief description of your thesis.

The basic problem related to the Beloved Disciple is that, among the New Testament gospels, he is only mentioned in John, yet in John he appears in stories which have parallels in other gospels. From this, most scholars reason that the Beloved Disciple was a leader of the Johannine community who was secondarily inserted into the gospel story. I argue, against the usual consensus, that we have little evidence–much less than you would imagine in reading scholarly literature!–for the Beloved Disciple’s leadership in the Johannine community.

I also point out that similar figures gradually emerge in other early Christian texts to lend them authenticity. Hence my suggestion that the Beloved Disciple was invented for the same purpose. The crucial difference I saw (but many disagree) between John and other early Christian texts featuring beloved disciples is that the Beloved Disciple in John isn’t characterized as being the most perceptive of all disciples.

I also argued that one special reason to introduce the Beloved Disciple in John was to offer a replacement for the brothers of Jesus (cf. John 19:25-27), who in John 7 are portrayed as unbelievers.

 More to come. . . .