The Nomina Sacra of the Gospel of Thomas and Their Numbers (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Within the relevant literature there have been different (often conflicting) approaches to the issue of the sources of the Gospel of Thomas. This topic is connected to the relationship between Th and the Synoptics (and other early Christian texts)—hence, to the vexata quaestio of Th’s “dependence”/“independence.” The article begins with some methodological considerations on the composition and sources of Th, also trying to provide a list of the sources that have been proposed for this gospel. The second part examines the possibility of a relationship between Th and the Pauline epistles, a theme which is emerging with new perspectives in the research on Th’s sources and parallels: some of Th’s logia seem to have connections with certain Pauline trajectories and texts. The final part focuses on Th 17 and 1 Cor 2:9, also exploring their relationship with some parallel texts (e.g. 1 Clem. 34.8, Turfan M 789, and 1 John 1:1), in order to investigate the possible sources of Th 17.
The Nomina Sacra in the Marcan Portion of Codex Vaticanus: A Note on the Scribal Habits
Biblische Notizen, 2017
The following study seeks to trace the fifteen main nomina sacra in the Marcan portion of Vaticanus with a particular focus on scribal behaviour. The Marcan data will be compared with the data of the entire New Testament portion of Vaticanus in order to test the local results against broader patterns of the manuscript. In closing, we shall discuss resulting implications for our understanding of the hand B of Vaticanus and indeed of the manuscript itself.
A.2. P.Lond.Lit. 207 and the origin of the nomina sacra: a tentative proposal
Studia Humaniora Tartuensia
The origin and development of the nomina sacra (sacred names written in an abbreviated form) found in early Christian texts is much debated in scholarly circles and no agreement has been reached. However the use of the nomina sacra in P.Lond.Lit. 207 may help to resolve some of the questions that surround the puzzle of their origin. P.Lond.Lit. 207 is a portion of papyrus that has broken off from a roll (24.5 X 25.7 cm), covering Psalms 11(12):7 to 14(15):4. The scribe of P.Lond.Lit. 207 has consistently written Kurios in an abbreviated form (nomen sacrum), giving only the first and last letters, and a supralinear bar drawn above the abbreviation. On the other hand, Theos is always written uncontracted. This is quite unusual given that Theos in Christian texts is always written as a nomen sacrum. Could the reason for this practice in P.Lond.Lit. 207 be found in the Semitic custom of contracting personal names to the first and last letter? Is Kurios abbreviated in this Semitic fashio...
Minding the Margins: "Scholia" in the text of the Gospel of Thomas
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2021
The following article aims to contribute to the scholarly discussion of both the development and the uses of the text of the Gospel of Thomas, now extant only in a single, fourth-century Coptic manuscript, with very fragmentary attestation of a few sayings among the Oxyrhynchus papyri as well. Here the concern is with post-compositional changes to the (Coptic) text, as opposed to redactional and pre-redactional literary developments. Specifically, the article examines in some detail four of the sayings (G. Thom. 111, 45, 29, and 61) identified by Uwe-Karsten Plisch as interpretive glosses, concluding, on the basis of mainly internal evidence, that in at least three of these cases, there are good arguments to be made that the form of the saying in our Coptic manuscript has been embellished by interpretive comments, perhaps originating as marginalia. The article also aims to link this phenomenon of interpretive glosses “getting into” copies of the text to the scholarly culture of antiquity, finding analogues for this kind of textual change not only in the NT texts, but also and especially in school- and study-oriented classical texts such as Homer and Isocrates.
Tracking Thomas: a text-critical look at the transmission of the Gospel of Thomas
2009
Wallace for his initial thoughts on the transmission of the Gospel of Thomas that pushed me to take up this subject in the first place, his guidance through the initial stages of the formulation of the argument of the paper, and his consistent availability in pursuing the project through its completion. Additionally, many thanks go to Stazsek Bialecki, Adam Messer, Philip Miller, and Matt Morgan, my σύνδουλοι, without whose thoughts, criticisms, and encouragement I would be in the tall grass. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely fiancée Angel, who has put up with many cancelled evenings through the completion of this work. 1 Technically speaking, this statement is untrue: though the Coptic manuscript was discovered approximately 60 years ago, Thomas has been known to scholars in one form or another since the late 19 th century.
A Hebrew Demonstration of the Gospel of Thomas via Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654
After uploading a few earlier articles to academia.edu, arguing for a Hebrew original behind the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, it was asked, “But what about the Greek?” This text will address the Greek of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654, covering logia 1–7 with lacuna, to show that its readings not only agree with a Hebrew vorlage hypothesis, but that it provides independent papyrological support for a first-century Simonian syncretic eisegesis. This short presentation demonstrates three lines of the reconstructed fragment to be dubious by criteria of line length and letter count (line 9 anomalously being the shortest reconstructed line with no more than 18 letters, line 23 lacking a word of the Coptic but with comfortable room for inclusion, and line 26 as potentially longest with a total of 34 letters), theoretical liabilities which have previously gone unnoticed. It is followed by a complete retrotranslation of the Greek and Coptic into Hebrew and Syriac with parallel interlinear key to show just how negligibly small the differences between the Greek and Coptic are when viewed from the standpoint of a Hebrew original. The result is as close to the Hebrew vorlage and the original Greek of the papyrus as hitherto seen, a proof by equitable resolution of the texts themselves.