The End of Orality: Transmission of Gospel Tradition in the Second and Third Centuries

Abstract

In a recent book Goodacre observes that in the early days of scholarship on the Gospel of Thomas "the majority view was that Thomas knew the Synoptic Gospels. These days, essays on the state of the question tend to represent the debate as a scholarly split, half on the side of Thomas's independence, half on the side of its dependence on the Synoptics." While this may be true quantitatively, the independence view, with its easy dismissal of dependence by means of an appeal to orality, has probably been more influential. Even though Goodacre argues that the Gospel of Thomas knew the synoptics, he avoids the word "dependence" because it associates "a text that is apparently so oral in nature" with "literary dependence" (sc. slavish derivation from the synoptics). Instead, he suggests that the Gospel of Thomas accessed the synoptic materials through memory. "While it is not impossible" that the author had manuscripts on hand, "the logistical efforts involved in that enterprise are far greater than those involved with recalling texts from memory" Goodacre thinks that his attempt to chart a via media might also explain what is happening in other "second-century texts that are familiar with but not necessarily dependent on the canonical Gospels."4 Despite its many good points, this approach - just like the independence view with which it takes issue - underestimates the impact of literacy on the transmission of gospel tradition in the second and third centuries. The papyrological evidence often points to the physical consultation of manuscripts of the synoptic gospels or, at the very least, of synoptic or thematic compilations of the same. That adds up to dependence, albeit very creative dependence.