Loading...As some/many/all? of you know, we are getting ready to relaunch the blog with a completely new rebuild that Steven Ray, my able and talented assistant for all these years, has designed — after he had come up with the original one eight years ago. He has been keeping the old one going with bailing wire and duct tape. The new one looks *great*. We hope to roll it out soon. And I’ll explain it all to you even sooner, before it happens. I think you’re going to agree, it is terrific.
Before we can do it, I have to have some of my old posts reclassified into a few of the new categories that I have devised (to supplement the old ones). I need a volunteer to do it. It will take some hours. No clue how many. If I have several volunteers, even better. I won’t go into all the details here: simple story, it will involve looking at an old post, seeing what it’s about (you wouldn’t need to read the entire thing!), and assigning it to the right category. The vast majority of posts are already fine and won’t require a thing to be done. Others will need to be categorized.
Are you interested in looking into the possibility? That is, would you like to hear more about what it entails, *before* committing to anything? If it’s an option for you, let me know. Not here, as a comment, but in a private email. [email protected]
Many thanks! We’re looking forward to the roll out!
Hey, Bart, this is an unrelated post (I seem to find myself doing this often as questions arise for me and I this seems to be the fastest way to get a response 🙂 ). I’m interested in the fact that the Gospel of Thomas presents a form of the Golden Rule that is also present in the synoptics. However, the one in Thomas is presented in a negative form and the other one with positive language.
I’ve seen it argued before that Thomas might retain more primitive forms of what may have been the words of Jesus. In this matter, I’m interested in knowing your opinion. Would you consider the negative Thomas form as the older one or maybe the one dating to an earlier oral tradition? Or can it be the case that the one that we have in the synoptics is closer to the original (whatever one means by “the” original).
This is a super minor issue, I guess it doesn’t go a long into theology or that stuff, but it’s a genuine question that’s been stuck in my head.
I think it’s unlikely that it’s the older form; it’s more likely an alteration to make Jesus’ wording more like the more commonly known form. Lots of cultures have a negative form of the Golden Rule; Jesus expressed it differenlty, in the positive form; Thomas has reverted it to the common form. IMO.
Why are you persuaded to say that Jesus expressed it differently? That Thomas could have reverted it to an original positive form is perfectly reasonable, but how do you get the positive form as a starting point?
Two reasons: a) the negative form is not attested in our oldest sources closer to the event and, related, b) as sayings get transmitted from one person to the next, they almost always take on the more familiar form that the people passing along the saying are already accustomed to.