Critique of purportedly authentic agrapha

Abstract

" The term agrapha designates isolated sayings attributed to Jesus in the tradition, but which are not recorded within the canonical Gospels.' In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Alfred Resch2 and James Hardy Ropes3 worked meticulously to collect and to critically evaluate a large quantity of agrapha. The subsequent publication of the Oxyrhyncus Papyri between the years 1897-1908 disclosed the existence of early collections of the sayings of Jesus which produced new agrapha (P. Oxy. Nos. 1, 654, and 655). More recently, the discovery in 1945 of the Coptic library at ancient Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt has made available a large quantity of sayings attributed to Jesus which were previously unknown. From the standpoint of the agrapha, the most important document from Nag Hammadi was the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, which shed surprising light on the nature of the agrapha known from the Oxyrhyncus Papyri. In form, this document is a sayings collection. After a prologue of four and a half lines, which itself contains a saying, the collection preserved 144 sayings, the larger number of which are introduced by the formula "Jesus said""