chapter seven

ASCETICISM IN THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND Q: THE PECULIAR PRACTICE OF THE EARLY JESUS TRADITION1

Introduction

Was Jesus an ascetic? What shall we make of someone who leaves house and home to pursue the life of a mendicant holy man, eschewing family, village, economic stability, and religious acceptance? Whatever one might call this socially radical life, it has not normally been seen as ascetical. Part of this has to do with our ideas about the historical Jesus; more than that, however, it has to do with our ideas about asceticism. We tend think of ascetics as strange—strange in a disturbed sort of way.Many would like to think of Jesus as unusual, but not strange and certainly not disturbed. He is our Savior, after all. And whatever we might think of him, it would be nice to know at least that we could get along easily with our Savior. It is hard to imagine an intimate walk in the garden with Simon Stylites. These are, of course, common stereotypes with which one must contend in any attempt to bring fresh insights about asceticism to bear upon New Testament texts. In what follows, I intend to look at the figure of Jesus and the early Jesus tradition, as represented especially by the sayings tradition shared by Q and the Gospel of Thomas, to see whether askesis proves to be a helpful category wherewith to understand the practice of earliest Christianity. I will argue that indeed it does, but only when one moves beyond the stereotypes to consider what asceticism really represented in the ancient world. Drawing on a number of recent theoretical discussions of the phenomenon,2 I will suggest that asceticism is an appropriate framework for understanding what the early Jesus movement was all about.

1 Originally this essay appeared as “Askesis and the Early Jesus Tradition,” in Asceticism and the New Testament, ed. L. Vaage and V. Wimbush (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 49–69. 2 I refer especially to the studies collected in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 176 chapter seven

Q, Thomas, and the Social Radicalism of the Early Jesus Movement

Let us begin with the tradition among Jesus’ early followers of cultivating and collecting sayings attributed to him. We know of two documents from the first century ce that represent the fruits of that labor, one lost but recoverable through careful research, the other lost but rediscovered by chance in 1945. The first, of course, is Q. Many scholars date Q in the 50s or 60s of the first century ce on the grounds that it betrays no knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem, a fact that is so prominent in later texts like Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Many also follow the hypothesis of John S. Kloppenborg that Q passed through two major compositional phases: an early phase consisting of several sapiential speeches (Q1) and a later phase in which severe words of judgment against “this generation” were added (Q2).3 In any event, Q is perhaps the earliest repository for material attributed to Jesus and cultivated by his initial followers. The second “sayings-gospel” from this early period is the Gospel of Thomas, which cannot be dated with any certainty. However, the fact that the tradition it preserves is basically autonomous, that is, rooted in the oral traditions common to Q, Mark, and the later gospel writers and not literarily dependent on the canonical gospels means that the Gospel of Thomas, too, is a repository for material whose provenance is possibly very early.4 More- over, since it is an autonomous tradition, the overlapping material between Q and Thomas stands to be very old—older than the first editions of Q or the Gospel of Thomas and potentially very revealing of the basic content and ethos of the early sayings tradition from which both the Q and Thomas trajectories originally emerged.

3 See John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987). Kloppenborg also dis- cusses a third phase, relatively late, of little significance for this discussion. 4 For the autonomy of the Thomas tradition, see Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, Foundations and Facets (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1993), pp. 9–110. An earlier helpful study is that of John Sieber, A Redactional Analysis of the Synoptic Gospels with regard to the Question of the Sources of the Gospel of Thomas, Ph.D. Dissertation, Claremont, 1965 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966). For a review of the scholarly discussion of this issue, see Patterson, “The Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptic Tradition: A Forschungsbericht and Critique,” Forum 8 (1992): 45–97; more recently, Nicholas Perrin, “Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research (1991–2006): Part I, The Historical Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels,” CBR 5.2 (2007): 183–206.