Resistance within and by the Edessan Christian community 150-250 CE

Introduction

The apothegm, “Dead men don’t tell tales,” is especially relevant in the study of vanished peoples. The purpose of this paper is to construct a method to uncover the lived religion in the everyday lives of a people-group located in the past, specifically, the people-group behind both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas. One only knows this group from the text that was left behind. However, this in and of itself is a lucky break. The text at least alerts us about this group. Otherwise, their voices would be completely lost. A surface-level, or prime facie analysis of the text only reveals the beliefs and ideas utilized by the groups, or more specifically, about the leader or teacher’s beliefs and ideas. One cannot imagine that the texts were built with the consensus of the community as a whole. They are what James C. Scott called “official transcripts” of the community.

I am approaching this people-group and texts from a great distance, spatially, temporally, and culturally. Without further inquiry and qualification, the risk of importing my culture and beliefs onto the texts and as an extension, the people-group, is insurmountable. In the absence of intimate or first-hand knowledge of their culture, one must take great pains to reconstruct it from the ground up before analyzing the texts. It is also paramount to note that every people-group is located in a specific space at a specific time, even if the people-group persists through the before mentioned spaces and times. At every moment, their culture is being negotiated and transformed. Each text represents one such attempt at negotiation of the group’s values, beliefs practices, morale, and so forth. Thus, while a text can tell us about an instance of the negotiation process and as an extension, the phases before and after the text, one cannot assume that the text merely represents a static reconstruction of the community. It is also a record of an instance of the creative process of culture formation. It is with this attitude that texts will be approached.

Both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas originated from the same community, Edessa, located in ancient Syria. (Klijn, p. 70) (Bernard, p. 161) The Gospel of Thomas date from the second half of the second century and the Acts of Thomas originate around 60-100 years later. Because of their proximity in both space and time, the two texts provide an excellent opportunity to look at snapshots of the same community in two periods of time. However, the question still remains of how to go about analyzing these texts. I will draw heavily on the theory of James C. Scott and the method of Burton Mack with the hope of obtaining an accurate comparative look at each community in their specific time period.

The paper will begin with an opening discussion of the theory of James C. Scott, moving on to an evaluation of Burton Mack’s attempt to reconstruct a lost community. Then a brief background on the historical record of the Christian Church at Edessa during the first two hundred and fifty years will be given. Both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas will be analyzed in search of their hidden and public transcripts. The two sets of transcripts will then be compared to see the choices each community faced and the path they ended up taking. I will show how the Edessan Christian community not only created a space for itself in opposition to the surrounding culture, but also institutionalized rapidly. This created room for a hidden transcript within their hidden transcript that were protests against the institutionalization. (more…)

It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts.¹

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek.² It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…”³ This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look - Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions.⁴ The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy.⁵

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. ⁶

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories:⁷

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem.⁸

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

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