‘Even before’ the gospel of John? John is the last to be written of the NT gospels, and most historical scholars do not believe its sources are older than those of the synoptics (increasingly, scholars believe John used many of the same sources as the synoptics, and may have read one or several of the synoptics, but felt free to change the material to his own liking).
‘Original material’ is a bit misleading, since obviously all the material we have was written decades after Jesus’ death, and it’s unlikely any of it was written by eyewitnesses to his life. Paul is the closest thing to an eyewitness we have, and he never met Jesus in the flesh. (Met his brother James, though. Mary’s second son.)
The gospel of Thomas is considered by many to be an early Gnostic text, expressing many of the same ideas as that loose-knit movement within Christianity. It was almost certainly written after the synoptics and John, and therefore was not a source for any of them, but some of it may come from earlier sayings gospels.
“These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.” First words of the Gospel of Thomas. I do not find in them the claim that Thomas wrote the gospel — just that whoever did write the gospel knows that these are the secret sayings of Jesus that Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.
Suppose that there was an early book of sayings and that it was circulating in Damascus during Paul’s time there (and in Arabia nearby). That this book might have contained “This is my body; this is my blood.” is no more preposterous than many of the other sayings recorded in the actual, admittedly later, Gospel of Thomas. Knowledge of this book, coupled with a mystical experience, may have led Paul to “receive from the Lord” the information that literally or metaphorically Jesus said that the wine was his blood. Matthew, Mark, and Luke read 1 Corinthians and, voila!
(Editing now because of a point I saw on another forum) On second thought, if Paul had “received” the body and blood figure prior to meeting with Cephas, it would have been likely that they would have had an issue over that. So perhaps he had the experience a little later, maybe in Cilicia.
Man, you really have a bee in your bonnet about this, don’t you? A veritable twist of the knickers. 😀
I’ve only read one book by him, “Jesus: A Very Short Introduction”. That’s part of a long series from Oxford University Press, covering basically every academic subject imaginable, and it’s quite prestigious to be picked to write one, which proves in itself that he’s highly regarded in his field.
And I could tell, very soon after starting, that he’s a conservative Christian, looking for some way to hold to his beliefs, even when the scholarship undercuts them That’s his problem. He remains an excellent scholar, knows a thousand times more than everybody on this forum combined (that’s probably an understatement) but you have to allow for his bias. He needs to believe that Jesus was God, even though as a scholar, it’s his job to talk about Jesus as a man.
When are you going to allow for your bias? He wants to believe Jesus was God, you want to believe Jesus is a Roman hoax, and neither is the truth. But at least he makes his arguments based on genuine knowledge, while you make them on the basis of fabricated nonsense. I’ll take biased scholarship over pseudo-scholarship, any day. We’re all biased to some extent, but we should at least agree on the ground rules. You want to make up the rules as you go, because in the field of genuine scholarship, nobody would ever take you seriously. Nor should they.
I am no expert, but my understanding is that Thomas relies on the Diatessaron as the source for canonical sayings. While it is possible that Thomas has an early source for noncanonical sayings, it does raise doubts. If he had such a source why did he not use it for canonical sayings also?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert