(1) First, the invitation to participate in this book came with no assumptions about the individual authors and their specific views on empire criticism. In fact, the proposal basically said, (I’m paraphrasing), “investigate this and then write what you see.” In other words, there was no proviso which specified, “You must disagree with empire studies.”

(2) My essay on the Fourth Gospel renders what is essentially a negative judgment on the prospects of finding much of Rome in the text. I don’t think my conclusions are particularly scandalous, and I would go so far as to say that I am probably in the majority when it comes to my conclusions about Rome vis-a-vis the Gospel of John. Even in the realm of empire studies, the Gospel of John has almost been overlooked. As I recall, an essay on the Fourth Gospel was not even a part of the original book proposal. The Fourth Gospel simply hasn’t been a big player on the scene of empire studies (especially when one considers how much has been written about the role Rome plays in the writings of Paul, Revelation, and Matthew’s Gospel).

(3) As I commented on Nijay Gupta’s blog just a few days ago, I don’t want my negative conclusions in a book that is characterized by negative conclusions about empire criticism to make me “guilty by association.” In fact, I find it quite helpful to discuss Rome when introducing my students to Paul’s letters and the Apocalypse. Every semester I teach a New Testament Introduction in which I deal with the Roman context of the NT. I don’t deny Rome’s presence throughout the NT, but I don’t find much value in claims that Rome is a major point of emphasis for John. As I say in the essay, “[in John] Rome is present mostly in signs and shadows, not on a neon billboard (p. 122).”

In the end, I am glad to be a part of the conversation and I hope the book causes those on all sides to pay much greater attention to the nuances of debate.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John: Reflections on the Status Quaestionis – Christopher W. Skinner

Part One: Methods and Models for Reading Johannine Character

2. A Narrative Critical Approach to the Fourth Gospel – James L. Resseguie

3. The Weave of the Tapestry: Character and Theme in John – R. Alan Culpepper

4. A Comprehensive Approach to Understanding Character in the Gospel of John – Cornelis Bennema

5. Eyewitness Testimony and the Characters in the Fourth Gospel – Judith Christine Single Redman

6. ‘Who Are You?’ Comparison/Contrast and Fourth Gospel Characterization – Raymond F. Collins

7. Three Ambiguities: Historical Context, Implied Reader, and the Nature of Faith – Susan E. Hylen

8. Misunderstanding, Christology, and Johannine Characterization: Reading John’s Characters Through the Lens of the Prologue – Christopher W. Skinner

Part Two: Johannine Character Studies

9. The Fourth Gospel’s Characterization of God: A Rhetorical Perspective – Stan Harstine

10. John the Baptist: Witness and Embodiment of the Prologue in the Gospel of John – Sherri Brown

11. Theological Complexity and the Characterization of Nicodemus in John’s Gospel – Craig R. Koester

12. The Woman of Samaria: Her Characterization, Narrative and Theological Significance – Mary L. Coloe

13. Martha and Mary: Levels of Characterization in Luke and John – Dorothy A. Lee

14. ‘Whom Jesus Loved’: Anonymity and Identity. Belief and Witness in the Fourth Gospel – David R. Beck

15. The Character of Pilate in the Gospel of John – Cornelis Bennema

I think that’s a pretty good lineup (if I do say so myself).

(CWS) 4. Awhile back on your blog, you provided a list from your index of the most cited scholars in your book. You also indicated that the frequency of a given scholar’s appearance in the book is unrelated to your extent of agreement with him/her. What scholars have you found to be the most helpful for your own Thomas research and why?

(MG) I really like the work of Stephen Patterson.  He is a clear thinker and a clear writer. Although I disagree with many of his conclusions, he analyzes the evidence with fairness and clarity. And in general I like scholars who lay out their case clearly. I am less keen on what I think of as “shifting sands” scholarship, where you simply cannot be sure how the case overall is panning out. You shouldn’t have to re-read a scholar’s work multiple times in order to work out what they are saying.

For my case on Thomas’s familiarity with the Synoptics, I found myself frequently in agreement with Christopher Tuckett and Klyne Snodgrass, both of whom write with clarity and force. Given that I had disagreed with Tuckett in my Q book, it was nice on this occasion to be joining him in battle. And now too I find that I agree with Simon Gathercole’s views on Thomas to a major extent. Although we wrote our books independently of one another, like Matthew and Luke on the Two-Source Theory, it turns out that we agree on most of the issues.

(CWS) 5. I know you have a forthcoming article in which you discuss the Nag Hammadi discoveries. Other than that, are you planning any future projects on the Gospel of Thomas?

(MG) The Nag Hammadi article arose out of my research on Thomas. I wanted to write about the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices but when I researched the topic, I found that there is not one version of the story but several. And the more I looked at the different versions, the more worried I became about how much we can really know about the circumstances of the discovery.  The article, “How reliable is the story of the Nag Hammadi discovery?” should come out later this year in JSNT.

I don’t have anything else currently planned on the Gospel of Thomas but I have a piece on the Gospel of Peter that I hope to get published before too long, and I am also doing some work on the Gospel of Mary and related texts.

(CWS) 6. You are one of the most outspoken opponents of the “Q” hypothesis. Many scholars see “Q” and Thomas as early examples of the wisdom genre applied to Jesus’ sayings. Obviously, since you reject the notion of Q, you would also reject this line of thinking. To your mind, what theological outlook do we find in the Gospel of Thomas and why?

(MG) I think the comparison between Q and Thomas has been pretty damaging and in several ways it has thrown us off the scent. The comparison is largely an accident of our own social location.  Q was one of the biggest and most successful hypotheses in twentieth century research on Christian origins, but its hypothetical nature always caused scholars some residual anxiety. One way of dealing with the anxiety was to align the hypothetical Q with the newly discovered Thomas. Coptic Thomas was discovered in 1945, but only began to seep into scholarly consciousness in the seventies and eighties, at the same time that Q was taking on a life of its own.

The difficulty for those who want to align Q and Thomas is that these works are only superficially comparable. Anyone who has done any actual research on either realizes that the differences are far more striking than the similarities. I have argued that reflection on the differences helps us to see how the true Sayings Gospel (Thomas) differs from the hybrid scholarly reconstruction (Q).  The latter makes much better sense as a scholarly extraction of parallel material from Matthew and Luke, not as a discrete work.

Moreover, and to get to the heart of your question, Thomas’s theological outlook could hardly be more different than Q’s. To take two really obvious examples, Thomas differs from Q on the Old Testament and on eschatology.  Thomas disdains the Old Testament – it only refers to Adam, it never explicitly quotes the Old Testament, and it thinks of the prophets as “the dead”. Q, on the other hand, loves the Old Testament, cites its heroes, and quotes many key texts.  Similarly, Thomas and Q differ on eschatology. Thomas has a protology rather than an eschatology, and is looking to get back to Eden, to the singular human being before the fall. But Q is driven-through with eschatology at every turn, and repeatedly talks about the kingdom, the future, and the Son of Man.

I do not, of course, accept the existence of Q, but I point out these contrasts in order to show how some of the clear problems with making them representatives of the same trajectory in early Christianity.  To put it another way, Thomas is a “sayings gospel” because it really believes that salvation lies in interpreting Jesus’s words, whereas Q is only a “sayings gospel” insofar as it represents scholarly efforts to extract and over-emphasize some of the sayings material in the Synoptics.

(CWS) 7. Another interest that I have, and one that I hope to promote on this blog, is research on the historical Jesus. In your opinion, is there anything in the Gospel of Thomas that goes back to the historical Jesus? If yes, what? If no, explain why not.

(MG) I share your interest in the Historical Jesus and I suppose to some extent this also comes back to your first question about one’s initial interest in Thomas. I began by hoping that perhaps it could provide us with some extra material on the historical Jesus, and I was disappointed when I found otherwise. I do think that there are likely to be historical Jesus traditions in Thomas, but I think that they are found in the Synoptic parallels that make up half of Thomas rather than the new material that makes up the other half of Thomas. I don’t rule out the possibility that historical Jesus traditions occur in the newer, unparalleled materials, but I find it unlikely. Bear in mind that even the Jesus Seminar, which tended to favour Thomas as a source for historical Jesus research, struggled to find much historical Jesus material in the unique material. Broadly speaking, they were using Thomas as a means of corroborating parallel Synoptic traditions about Jesus.

My reading of the earliest materials persuades me that the Historical Jesus is likely to have been a Jewish eschatological prophet who valued the Hebrew Scriptures, quite unlike the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, who disdains eschatology and the Hebrew Bible.

Many thanks to Prof. Goodacre for taking the time to answer our questions!

(CWS) 1. I have asked this question of every scholar I have interviewed on this blog: What initially sparked your interest in studying the Gospel of Thomas?

(MG) Well, I have always been really interested in the Synoptic Problem and I have spent a lot of time investigating the double tradition and the hypothetical “Q” source.  My skepticism over the existence of Q often led people to ask the question, “But what about the Gospel of Thomas?”  After all, scholars have often paired Q and Thomas, making them early witnesses to a trajectory within early Christianity that specially emphasized Jesus’ sayings, and which was not very interested in Jesus’ death.  So my interest in Thomas proceeded in part from my interest in Q.

I found also that there are many fascinating Synoptic-type questions to be explored in the study of Thomas. Indeed, quite often Thomas has been discussed in ignorance of detailed knowledge of the Synopsis and the Synoptic Problem.  I suppose that I felt that I could see a few things that others were missing when they were looking at Thomas.

Having begun there, I then found that I greatly enjoyed where Thomas was taking me – into the world of second and third century Gospels with which I had been unfamiliar.  I used to fall victim to canonical bias in my teaching and focused almost exclusively on the New Testament.  Now I find that some of my favourite teaching is in Non-canonical Gospels, including Thomas but also many other works.

(CWS) 2. I have had an opportunity to work through your recent book, Thomas and the Gospels. In the book you make a sustained (and quite compelling) case for Thomas’s familiarity with the Synoptic tradition.  Can you provide here a sketch of your view(s) on Thomas’s relationship to the Synoptic Gospels?

(MG) The case begins by asking a key question that is almost universally missed in studies of Thomas’s relationship to the Synoptics:  how similar are they?  Is there sufficient verbatim agreement between Thomas and the Synoptics to suggest that there is a direct link?  I argue that the verbatim agreement in several parallels between the Synoptics and Thomas is so striking as to make a direct link highly likely.

Where one has this kind of agreement, one next needs to ask whether the characteristic features of one work show up in the other.  I call these “diagnostic shards”, borrowing a term from archaeology, and I suggest that there are good, strong cases of Matthew’s and Luke’s redaction that show up in Thomas.  The Gospel of Thomas, for example, uses Matthew’s favourite term “kingdom of the heavens”.  And it has parallels to places where Matthew and Luke are clearly redacting Mark.  On one occasion (Thomas 79), Thomas has such clear parallels to Luke’s distinctive setting, language, imagery and theology, that it becomes unlikely that Thomas is not using Luke.

(CWS) 3. As you know, some scholars have written at length about the supposed relationship between Thomas and the Gospel of John. (This question is of particular interest to me, since I wrote an entire dissertation on the subject!). To your mind, what, if any, is the connection between John and Thomas? Please explain.

(MG) I must admit to feeling a little guilty about writing a book called Thomas and the Gospels and then dealing so little with John!  As it happens, I think it’s one of the most fascinating things about Thomas that it has at times a kind of Johannine feel, with Johannine echoes, and yet it does not feature the same kind of verbatim agreement that you see between Thomas and the Synoptics.  I think it is possible that Thomas knows John but it is difficult to establish.  I wonder whether it is in part a question of timing.  If I am right about the date of Thomas (I argue for a date in the 130s, Chapter 9), then John may not yet have the same degree of authority as the Synoptics have, and so its author is less inclined to look to its sayings to lend the account legitimacy.

I have very much enjoyed the work of several scholars, including yourself, on the relationship between John and Thomas.  I always introduce students to Elaine Pagels’s and Gregory Riley’s work on the relationship, not least because it provides such good intellectual stimulation on these important early Christian texts.  It’s an issue I want to think about some more in due course.

The three stages are as follows:

Stage 1: Traditions from the Ministry of Jesus (Traditions stemming from the historical ministry of Jesus in the late 20s CE)

Stage 2: Post-Resurrectional Preaching of the Disciples (Religious convictions that arose about Jesus after his death)

Stage 3: The Writing of the Gospels by the Four Evangelists (Texts and traditions about Jesus that developed during the writing of the gospel narratives; what is often referred to as the evangelist’s Sitz im Leben)

Much contemporary research on the Gospels is rooted in this paradigm, and in the interests of full disclosure, I have taught this model approvingly for the better part of a decade now. My recent readings in historical Jesus research have caused me to think more deeply about some of the “assured results” of modern Gospels scholarship. For decades now the criteria (embarrassment, multiple attestation, dissimilarity, etc.)–which are rooted in form critical assumptions–have been used to establish the historicity of given sayings and events in the life of Jesus. However, with the growing skepticism about the value of those criteria can we really establish with a high degree of certainty “traditions from the ministry of Jesus”? To say it another way, since we have more reason to be skeptical about the prospect of discovering authentic Jesus material, how reliable is Stage 1 as a starting point? And, if Stage 1 is somewhat “up for grabs,” then how reliable is the rest of the model?