GRGR: Gospel of Thomas p. 537 WAS Re: M&D - Tyburn Tree 'resurrections'

Doug Millison doug at dougmillison.com
Fri Sep 17 20:47:39 CDT 1999


At 7:37 AM +1100 9/18/99, rj wrote:
>[snip]the classified oxyrhyncus
>papyrus fragment from the "extracanonical" Gospel of Thomas on p. 537 of
>*GR*, the texts in their entirety etc.)

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the so-called "Sayings Gospels", i.e., a
collection of "sayings attributed to Jesus, listed serially, and presented
using simple stock phrases such as 'Jesus said.' It thus has virtually no
narrative element, a characteristic which distinguishes it from the better
known canonical examples of early Christian gospel literature, Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John. As such, it does not purport to give an account or
interpretation of Jesus' life, but focuses instead on Jesus' words, his
preaching" according to _The Complete Gospels_, Robert J. Miller, ed.
Among other lacunae, no passion/resurrection narrative in this or the rest
of the Sayings Gospels.

It may be worth noting that this quote, GR p. 537, might be seen -- as at
least one particularly insightful Pynchon scholar has noted -- to put TRP
in company with Dante, mapping out Hell and peopling it.
>
>Orthodox Christianity doesn't permit such heretical unorthodoxies
>(including the Apocrypha, or reading the Bible as history); which is why
>(heretic) pastors (the status and fate Wicks posits for himself) were
>being hanged at Tyburn Tree in the first place.

Not quite sure what "Orthodox Christianity" includes in this instance
(doesn't appear to mean, as this appellation usually does, the Greek or
Eastern Orthodox Church), but contemporary Christianity is a very large
tent, big enough to include the likes of Crossan and the other historical
Jesus scholars, for example, as well as a very wide range of feminist,
queer, postcolonialist, and postmodern thinkers and writers. It is true
that some conservative elements in some of the major  Christian religious
organizations do make the sorts of exclusions that rj notes above.

For sheer delight in textual analysis, and trying to understand what the
authors of early Christian texts might have been trying to do with their
texts (their intentions, in other words, a term that has started more than
one fight right here on Pynchon-L, by the way), how those texts might have
served or been perceived within their contemporary cultural contexts, it
would be hard to beat the scholarship centered on early Christianity of the
past 30 years or so. Crossan's book, in particular, (_The Birth of
Christianity_) is, to my taste, fascinating.  Almost as much fun as trying
to figure out who Pynchon "really" is and what he's "really" up to in his
writing, and how TRP's writing is received and perceived today.






d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.dougmillison.com
http://www.online-journalist.com



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