Thesis Abstract and Dissertation Abstracts

The focus of this thesis is one stream of Jesus tradition in early Christianity. We can suppose that the Jesus tradition originated when the historical person (Jesus) was performing his kingdom ministry and miracles, and significant oral speeches were formlessly passed on as crucial teachings of the new religious movement. It was due to religio-political factors, including the persecutions by some Jewish and imperial authorities, that the delivered oral tradition of Jesus needed first to be written down in the middle of the first century C.E. The initial written tradition was not comprised of various narratives or episodes, but composed in the style of Logia (sayings), which is also the primary structure of Q. The canonical tradition emerged afterwards, based on the written Q material, and covering the life of Jesus; whilst the gnostic

tradition reflects the transformation or development of the Jesus tradition in the cross-cultural communities of the second, third and fourth centuries C.E.

If it is right that the Gospel of Thomas contains one kind of Jesus tradition, where should the Logia tradition of Thomas belong amongst the oral, written, canonical and gnostic developments? This thesis, on ‘the genesis of the Thomasine Jesus tradition’, argues that the Logia tradition in Thomas was independently created before the canonical tradition of Jesus. This pre-canonical character of Thomas does not belong to the gnostic sphere, but represents a kind of Q tradition. The Thomasine Logia, derived from the memories and personal archives of the Thomas circle, were documented by the heir(s) of the community founder before the Jewish War. The three Greek fragments of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 654, 1, 655, together with the Nag Hammadi Codex (NHC) II, 2. 32:10–51: 28, are used to establish my hypothesis that Thomas is one of the written sources connecting the oral to the synoptic tradition (so called, ‘the Thomasine-Q tradition’).

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Submission Details: Dissertation Abstract submitted by David W. Kim from Australia on 04-Jun-2013 12:23.
Abstract has been viewed 3273 times (since 7 Mar 2010).

David W. Kim Contact Details: Email: davidwj-kim@yahoo.co.uk