I thought it might be a bit of fun, in the lead up to the publication of my Thomas and the Gospels, to post some excerpts. And where to begin? Well, as the King said to the White Rabbit, why not begin at the beginning? Here’s the first page or so:
via NT Blog: Thomas and the Gospels – excerpt from chapter 1.
Fantastic!
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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And the Cheshire Cat asked, is this “pro John, Irenaeus, clergy, and the establishment (the historical winners)”? If the early church fathers weren’t such avid “gospel” burners, maybe we’d have more data to analyze. Seeing if Thomas, or Matthew and Luke came first seems to be near impossible to tell for sure, only based upon their comparisons. Like telling if the chicken or egg came first. If it wasn’t such a great threat, the early clergy wouldn’t have been so good at burning it. Having grown up in the 60′s, I like anti-establishment movements. I liked Pagel’s book. I’ll wait till this book hits the library.
Pagel is okay, but she, in my opinion, isn’t that ground. What Goodacre is going to do is to show that Thomas comes much later and makes use of Mark, Matthew and Luke.
Is my opinion, Mark came first and all others developed from him. Or at least, that will be my book!