Hi Michael-

Your suggestion that the "purpose" of the Gospel of Thomas was to meet some
proselytizing requirement puts you in the company of lots of other folks.
Inevitably, when questions about the "purpose of the Gospel of Thomas" is
asked, answers similar to yours are the conventional responses. Leaving
aside the matter of whether or not this majority response is correct, I can
only say that the question I am trying to ask is more related to form, not
to function. Of course that question itself is subject to multiple
qualifiers: **if** there exists in CGth some formal structure (such as NBX,
WBX or something else) can we identify that structure? **If** we can
identify such structures, can we infer some motive on the part of the CGth
composer for arranging the text in a particular way?

As an aside, and as a kind of preliminary report, I'll just mention that so
far I have found in CGth about 413 instances of 3 letter words that are
candidates for the "middle term" in a chiastic structure such as the one
that Mike has identified in the incipit. However, lest excitement build too
quickly, no more than 37 of those occurrences seem (at least preliminarily)
to qualify as analogies to the pattern in the prologue (based on a
preliminary examination of the words that precede each of the candidates).
I'll need to do a bit more analysis to see if any of the remaining 37
"middle terms" are surrounded by a series of words that exhibit the
structure of the chiasm at the beginning of the text. I should also say that
even if this particular analysis does not demonstrate the pattern we are
looking for, there remains the possibility of other chiastic elements being
present around middle terms of 4, 5 or even 6 letters. Determining that will
of course take considerable time to accomplish.

Rick Hubbard



||-----Original Message-----
||From: gthomas@yahoogroups.com [mailto:gthomas@yahoogroups.com] On
||Behalf Of Michael Mozina
||Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 2:56 PM
||To: gthomas@yahoogroups.com
||Subject: RE: [GTh] NBX, WBX, ETC
||
||
||
||RH>>I'm not sure exactly when Mike first began to talk about certain
||> signals of systematic arrangement that he has identified in CGth,
||> but I confess that I was initially skeptical about the whole
||> business. Eventually I conceded that, yes, perhaps there **is**
||> some evidence of an orderly compositional structure in the text.
||> At that time I hypothesized that **if** the text **was** assembled
||> according to some preconceived design concept, that perhaps the
||> text was used for ceremonial purposes by some particular community.
||
||IMO you might consider the idea that this "purpose" might have be related
to
||the idea of early evangelism where disciples went far and wide to "spread
||the good news". It would have been rather handy to have such a list if one
||was "on the road" as an evangelist, and there are stories of Jesus sending
||his disciples to teach in various villages. Of course this might even
||suggest that if it is a very early document, it could even be "original
||material" which predates the formalized Gospels of various communities.
||It's a fairly radical idea perhaps, but it seems to fit the evidence to
some
||degree, at least IMO.
||
||[Michael Mozina]
||_____
||
||
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