Minding the Margins: "Scholia" in the Text of the Gospel of Thomas

Abstract

The following article aims to contribute to the scholarly discussion of both the development and the uses of the text of the Gospel of Thomas, now extant only in a single, fourth-century Coptic manuscript, with very fragmentary attestation of a few sayings among the Oxyrhynchus papyri as well. Here the concern is with post-compositional changes to the (Coptic) text, as opposed to redactional and pre-redactional literary developments. Specifically, the article examines in some detail four of the sayings (G. Thom. 111, 45, 29, and 61) identified by Uwe-Karsten Plisch as interpretive glosses, concluding, on the basis of mainly internal evidence, that in at least three of these cases, there are good arguments to be made that the form of the saying in our Coptic manuscript has been embellished by interpretive comments, perhaps originating as marginalia. The article also aims to link this phenomenon of interpretive glosses getting into copies of the text to the scholarly culture of antiquity, finding analogues for this kind of textual change not only in the NT texts, but also and especially in school- and study-oriented classical texts such as Homer and Isocrates.