Reddit mentions of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

This isn't a theory but my own collection of several independent sources. Books I would recommend include The Orthodox Corruption of Sciprture and various gnostic texts available online.

For the purposes of dating Thomas, it doesn't matter if there was a Q document or not. The point is that Thomas shows a lack of knowledge of some of the double tradition material and while it contains many sayings which are similar to sayings found in the Synoptic Gospels, especially Mark, it words them differently and does not show dependency on them^1. There are a number of scholars (e.g. Stevan Davies, JD Crossan, Helmut Koester)who argue strongly that Thomas is independent from the Synoptics or even that Mark used Thomas.^2



In a number of cases, scholars think that Thomas appears to be more primitive or sometimes more "difficult" than the synoptics. For example, Th.71:

>Jesus said, "I shall destroy this house, and no one will be able to build it.


There is no qualifier that he will rebuild it. So the question is, why would someone remove that to make the saying more radical? Is it more likely that a scribe would add a qualifier or remove one. Bear in mind that as a general rule of thumb, scribes were far more likely to add material than to remove it in any case^3 and this is a case where the addition of a softening or theological qualifier by one writer is far less difficult to explain than the removal of such a qualifier.

With regards to the Q sayings (it doesn't matter if you think there was a Q gospel or not because we are tautologically defining "Q" only as that material common to Matthew and Luke), Thomas does not show any awareness of the apocalyptic sayings, which further indicates independence from the Synoptics.

So if Thomas is not dependent on the Synoptics, and sometimes shows more primitive development that the synoptics, then it cannot be proved to be later than the Synoptics.

However, Thomas does not appear to have been written all at once but to have been a compilation of sayings added to cumulatively over time,^4, so the question of when it is "dated" can't be limited to a single date, It had a period of composition, not a date of composition and that period can be strongly argued to have begun independently of and possibly even prior to the Synoptics.

An argument can also be made that the Gospel of John shows knowledge of and is specifically responding to at least some parts the Gospel of Thomas^5, which would delimit at least those parts of the GTh to the first Century.

Q is a whole different argument, but I have to say that your dismissal of the theory really mischaracterizes it and expresses no actual knowledge about it. I notice you have also offered no alternative explanation for the double tradition, but the choices are limited. Matthew and Luke contain a large amount of material which is word for word the same in Greek but which is not found in Mark (their other shared source). So either one of them copied the other, or both were using a shared source. If you are rejecting the latter hypothesis (and you seem to be doing so only on the basis of a lack of extant manuscripts, which is hardly persuasive), then you have to be claiming that one of them copied the other. I would ask you who you think copied the other, but it really doesn't matter, my only real question is this. If A copied B, then where did A get the material? If A had a source then there was a Q by definition. If A did not have a source, then he was making it up himself and Jesus is not really the source of the core ethical teachings attributed to him.

So who do you think composed the Sermon on the Mount/Plain? Matthew or Luke.


^1 Stevan Davies Statistical Correlation Analysis of the Order of the Sayings
in Thomas and in the Synoptics.

^2 Stevan Davies Mark's Use of the Gospel of Thomas

^3 Bart Ehrman The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

^4 John D. Crossan The Birth of Christianity pg. 247

^5 Gregory J. Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy

http://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Corruption-Scripture-Christological-Controversies/dp/0199739781

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

I have read most of Bart Ehrman's books, which are very good. I missed this one but I think it probably includes what you're looking for:

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

He also wrote a book called Lost Christianities, which is about early splinter groups. That's a fascinating book too.

>I came away with the idea that his version of Christianity was simply one of the losing sides

I didn't realize that you would find that explantion fulfilling.

>I have to ask though, how do we know that the current version hasn't been severely edited as well?

For starters, Marcion threw out all of Matthew, Mark and John. We still have those in today's NT. So right off the bat any editing the orthodoxy did was not going to be as severe as what Marcion did. On the other hand, some scholars, such as Bart Ehrman, do argue that the NT we have has been purposely edited for ideological reasons.

No, we can't. Even Bart Ehrman, who passionately believes there was a Jesus, admits that. The earliest surviving documents are from the fourth century. What the originals may have said we can not know. Read "Misquoting Jesus or The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

To answer your question:

>where you have loads of biblical texts that are pretty much identical to what we have today

Actually some were. Others aren't. Here's a quote from the DSS wiki page.

>While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.[121]

Also, there is clear evidence of manuscript corruption in the New Testament. Bart Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture goes into it in detail.