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…)

The following is a rough draft of a paper in my Gospels as Literature class. Any and all suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Introduction

The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the use of miracle stories in the Canonical and Gnostic gospels. The canonical gospels will be used to represent the Orthodox Christian community in West Asia and the Mediterranean. The Gospels of the Nag Hammadi library and other notable Gnostic texts will be representative of the Gnostic sects with the understanding Gnosticism was not a monolithic tradition, but had many forms.

First, the metaphysical basis of varying approaches to miracle stories will be examined with an emphasis on Hume and Lewis’ positions. Luke will be used as representative of the Canonical Gospel tradition. Each Gnostic gospel will be examined individually with the goal of surveying how each author uses miracles. Finally, the results of the Canonical and Gnostic gospels’ attitudes towards miracles will be compared and contrasted.

I will argue that in the canonical gospels, the miracle stories served a marketing function, drawing in the first and second century readers to the canonical gospels. The immediacy of the miracle stories to the gospel message formed what Hume would later term a “constant conjunction:”(Hume explained cause and effect as a mere constant conjunction between two events. For Hume, this did not necessarily mean that the two events were casually connected, only that the two events were )”: .” This constant conjunction served to link in the readers mind the practicality of the effects of the miracles and the way of life demanded by Jesus’ teachings as recorded in the gospels. The same power that manifested itself in the miracles was behind the teaching. This is the opposite effect that the non-canonical gospels intend to have on their readers. I will argue that the non-canonical gospels, the Gnostic and Docetic texts in particular, use miracles for a different function. The Gnostic texts only employ miracles sparsely, using them to emphasize the divine spark in everyone and the priority of spirit over matter. (more…)