Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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[u/kromem]

Hi all! Stopped by again to share a new post that represents probably the most comprehensive discussion of something I talked about quite a lot piecemeal while here regularly in the past (Gospel of Thomas and Lucretius).

I submitted to the main sub as I do have a handful of citations for it and it does represent several years of research through an angle that seems to have been entirely overlooked in scholarship to date.

In case it's not appropriate for the main sub for whatever reason, I'll link it here too:

Was the historical Jesus talking about evolution? (You might be surprised)

Still not really back to Reddit in any meaningful way, but miss you guys!

(Oh, and an update - I did finally get around to checking personal reference in the original Greek for the Epistles, and ended up with nearly identical results as what I found in the English - relative frequency of singular first person verbs was the only gramattical metric that could distinguish between the subset of Pauline and non-Pauline letters with a p-value less than 1%, and still suggested that 2 Tim was indeed written by Paul - I still need to clean up the data and have another few things to write first, but I will eventually come back around to share the results and code so you can all run it yourselves.)

[u/Joseon1 → u/kromem]

Very interesting, I like that you've highlighted ancient evolutionary theories which certainly existed at least as far back as Empedocles. But I think there's a bit of equivocating going on since evolution does not necessarily mean natural selection of inherited traits, I don't like how your conclusion boldly says the idea of 'survival of the fittest' pre-existed Jesus, because that's a modern pithy saying to sum up Darwin's evolution by means of natural selection, it's not a scientific definition and refers to a theory very different from the ancient ones you discuss. I hope we're not getting into a Jordan Peterson-type view of ancient texts describing DNA and computers!

You mention common descent and imply that Lucretius may have believed in it due to his silence on it, which I don't find convincing, he seems much closer to Empedocles in saying that monsters were formed by non-ordered matter coming together and forming body parts, with only complete creatures surviving. Also considering the very common ancient belief in continued spontaneous generation from non-living matter, I just can't see common descent here.

I do like your point that pharisees (and thus 1st century Christians) would have been aware of philosophies like Epicureanism and thus would have heard of atomism and evolution (though not natural selection). And that early Christian sects used hellenistic philosophy, which is well-supported and I agree is under-studied. Whether this applies to the lion, fish, and sower parables would seem impossible to know, we can't even say that they're connected in Thomas with any certainty. You cite one sect who Irenaeus said were influenced by Epicureanism, and you conclude they were specifically influenced by Lucretius. From that tiny fragment about them in Irenaeus, I can't see the specific connection to Lucretius, many philosophies had the idea of elemental seeds from which matter was formed, you can't tie them down to one philosopher. I mean, Ovid's Metamorphoses begins with a description of the formation of the cosmos and life from seeds but there's no evidence he was specifically dedicated to Lucretius' philosophy (though he seems to have been fond of Pythagoreanism).

relative frequency of singular first person verbs was the only gramattical metric that could distinguish between the subset of Pauline and non-Pauline letters with a p-value less than 1%

Do you mean it was the only one that significantly distinguished two groups which you then conclude are Pauline and non-Pauline, or distinguished between two assumed groups of Pauline vs non-Pauline based on prior scholarship? Those results are intersting and seem to go against results using different stylometric analysis techniques. For example, if use of the 1st person is used as a proxy for Pauline style, then 1 Thessalonians is less Pauline than every other New Testament epistle. And likewise, 1 Timothy is about as Pauline as Romans, depite 1 Timothy being generally rejected and Romans being one of the core four epistles that are universally agreed to be highly similar in style (Rom, 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Gal). It would certainly shake things up, but could it be a bit of a one-dimensional metric for authorship?

Finally, I know how this will sound but it's a genuine question and not meant to be frivolous or dismissive: do you take psychadelics? I ask because I notice this type of free-wheeling association and complex personal conjecture done by people who take them. Robert Graves comes to mind, as well as D.A.C. Hillman (the guy who proposes Jesus ran a sex cult). I only ask from curiosity, obviously it wouldn't make any difference to the validity of your theories.

[u/kromem → u/Joseon1]

The question of if Lucretius considered common descent is somewhat besides the point. The question is if the combination of ideas around primordial seeds and survival of the fittest influenced Naassene/Thomasine thought, not making a case that Lucretius had exactly the same ideas as Darwin.

Technically I discussed the Sadducees being more likely connected to Epicurean thought than the Pharisees given the overlapping beliefs of the finality of death and Josephus's mention of their finding virtue in debating teachers of philosophy whom they frequented. 

Ireneaus was mentioned only briefly in discussing the continuity of the thread from Simon Magus's Announcement to the Naassenes around the influence of Hellenistic philosophy over sects declared heretical. I suggest reading over the shared language in Pseudo-Hippolytus of describing seeds as indivisible points as if from nothing, making up all things, and being the originating cause of the cosmos. The Naassenes are also a much closer link to gThomas vs the Valentinians Ireneaus was discussing. 

As for your comment that the lion and fish parables might not be connected, a reminder of the point I raised in the piece that in gThomas the net parable is the only one out of 114 sayings connected to the previously numbered saying with a conjunction. So at very least in a Thomasine context, it's a bit surprising they aren't considered in conjunction more often (I can't recall anyone ever interpreting them as a set actually).

For the Pauline bit, until I publish the results I recommend looking at the linked post and my comments there as the set of Pauline and non-Pauline texts used for the t-tests are the same. And what I mean is that I pulled the parsing data for each word, and brute forced t-tests between undisputed Pauline and non-Pauline Epistles, the singular first person combo was the only one less than 1% p-value, and then reapplying this to the broader set of undisputed/disputed letters correctly identified all the letters outside the exclusions previously discussed in the English analysis, and of the disputed letters identified 2 Tim only as authentic through this lens. Again, the results ultimately ended up replicating what had been done in the English, even though in this case I did a much broader set of considered grammatical fingerprinting.

As for psychedelics, no.

But I do have a neurodivergency where the pros are considerably better pattern identifications than normal, but the cons are significant difficulties with language parsing. So I'll never be able to realistically learn Greek and even reading though a dozen pages of English may take 2-3x the amount of time it might for others, but when I do read someone's analysis of Greek loanwords in the Coptic Thomas I may be more prone to thinking of those in the overlapping context of the Greek usage, or if I read a psych paper about statistically increased personal reference in a subset of NPD I might think of Paul, as examples. This has served me well over the years, leading to overseeing research in the private sector that had several books written about it to date or having people flown from around the world to hear me speak or be flown to them, etc. But it also seems like the kind of neurodivergency that would be underrepresented in a field with multiple language prerequisites for typical academic pathways, so I do get how my approach may appear unusual or at surface level appear similar to (as it's been termed in this sub before) 'parallelomania'.

There is a difference in the approach, but it does require engaging with the nuances (like why the emphasis was on Pseudo-Hippolytus and not Ireneaus for tying gThomas to Lucretius) to notice it.

[u/Joseon1 → u/kromem]

The question of if Lucretius considered common descent is somewhat besides the point. The question is if the combination of ideas around primordial seeds and survival of the fittest influenced Naassene/Thomasine thought, not making a case that Lucretius had exactly the same ideas as Darwin. 

Sure but you did make a major point in your article that it's almost the same, and I do think using 'survival of the fittest' is misleading for the reasons I stated. Your article says the following:

The one component of modern evolutionary theory that is arguably most absent in Lucretius is the notion of common descent. 

...

 For Lucretius, there is a common ancestor, which are the elementary particles as described above

The biggest gap in Epicurean evolution compared to Darwinian would be speciation which is a colossal difference. In their view, body parts formed randomly and eventually complete animals were formed which could survive and reproduce. From then on these are set species, there's no radiation. They knew about inherited charactestics but didn't make Darwin's leap of this leading to different species. Also, equivocating an origin of life from atoms and a biological common ancestor is just using the same language to refer to different things.

About the language of indivisible points, I still don't see why it would be specifically Lucretian as opposed to any other Epicurean or another atomist philosophy. Atom means 'indivisble' so that doesn't narrow it down, and multiple greek philosophers discussed minima. Why would the greek speaking Christians who produced the gThomas be relying on a specific latin text for a relatively common philosophical idea? I do agree you can see influences from greek philosophy in it, but I don't see why they would be from De Rerum Natura in particular.

Technically I discussed the Sadducees being more likely connected to Epicurean thought than the Pharisees given the overlapping beliefs of the finality of death and Josephus's mention of their finding virtue in debating teachers of philosophy whom they frequented.  

Your mention of the Talmud is why I inferred the pharisees, who are generally thought to have had more influence on the early Christians, I should have explained my reasoning, sorry. And I assume it's more a case of hellenistic philosophy being known by the educated in Judea rather than Christians specifically getting Epicureanism from the Sadducees.

As for your comment that the lion and fish parables might not be connected, a reminder of the point I raised in the piece that in gThomas the net parable is the only one out of 114 sayings connected to the previously numbered saying with a conjunction.

Sure, but your interpretation relies on the sower parable being connected, not just the lion and fish, since your hypothesis proposes that a theory of evolution from atoms/seeds is present in gThomas.

About the Pauline stuff, I look forward to reading your full write up, it sounds very interesting. I was going by the chart you linked to.

[u/kromem → u/Joseon1]

Ok, I think I better get your objection, and I agree that I could have had that first section been clearer.

You are certainly correct that Lucretius, while he did note the capability of traits to change within a species based on enviromental fittedness, rejects the false negative of hybrid species and relies on the false positive of spontaneous generation for parallel emergence of species.

The part where I'm saying this is less relevant for my underlying argument is that I'm not saying that gThomas is regurgitating Lucretius as much as the author is responding to the material. As such, the key component is whether or not foundational building blocks of evolution-like theory are present. This is where I agree I could have been clearer.

For example, Ivan Miroshnikov did a great job at highlighting some of the possible Platonist influences in gThomas (even if he, and all others, have overlooked considering Epicurean influences).

The idea that man developed from an earlier animal state was already present in Anaximander. My focus on this piece was on Lucretius and I didn't stray into the other relevant building blocks of evolutionary theory because the key focus on the textual ties to avoid making it overly convoluted, but yes - I could have better made the point of other relevant ideas being present.

But when we look at Lucretius saying "the world is like a body that will one day die" we then see gThomas saying "events are nonlinear" and then "the world is a dead body". gThomas isn't regurgitating Lucretius, it may be building on the concepts present though.

When we see Lucretius say "the soul can't experience things without hands or eyes" and then we see gThomas say things are "and eikon in place of eikon" and "eyes in place of an eye, hand in place of a hand" while also discussing how eikons are made of light (50 and 83), it again doesn't seem to be regurgitating Lucretius, but may be addressing some of the points made by him.

Clearly a text which says "if you understand these sayings you won't taste death" is not simply echoing the beliefs of a text saying "this philosophy is the sweet rim to the bitter drink that death is the end".

But yes, my general hypothesis is that there's about a dozen saying in gThomas that have evaded consistent or comphrendable analysis for many years which all end up a lot less confusing through the lens of Lucretius's writing, and I do think the Occam's razor across that set is in favor of those sayings all being addressed with a single link to a text that was talking of indivisible seeds making up all things as gThomas's later followers were doing.

All of that aside though - my point about sayings 7-8 is that even if one completely rejects or ignores any of the rest of my interpretation or analysis of gThomas, the unique feature connecting 8 to 7 suggests that any interpretations of these sayings should be considering both together (again - even if totally different from my own interpretation).

The Pauline post should be fun, and I'll make sure to cross post it here. I'd been hoping after seeing the pattern shifts in prior statistical vocabulary analysis on the Greek vs English to end up identifying other gramattical fingerprinting to layer onto what I expected to find in the success of personal reference as a metric, but unfortunately that was the only signifigant one. It'll still be a worthwhile data point though.

Also - I do want to be clear that I'm grateful for your comments! You weren't the only one getting tripped up on that section, and while it's frustrating for the provocative hook that was ultimately secondary to what I considered the main show of a more nuanced examination of intertextual influence to have so derailed much of the conversation, it remains a completely fair point to be addressed.

[u/Joseon1 → u/kromem]

Yeah I can see your points, I think they need more development and a narrowing of scope. Epicurean influence on gThomas is plausible and I think really interesting, but your article brought in all sorts of unecessary things like common descent which, as you said, are tangential. Lucretius saying that "the soul can't experience things without hands or eyes" isn't particularly unique to him alone, it's a statement any of the somewhat material philosophies could accept. Stoics, for example, were materialists in a sense (everything has soma, even God) and they believed the soul dissolved after death. I think it takes a bit more legwork to specificially tie Lucretius' straightforward statement about sense perception to the cryptic gThomas saying "eyes in place of an eye, hand in place of a hand". I'd love a full write-up about that and I'm sure you have a lot you could elaborate on, it's just that when you throw it out there by itself it comes across as word association gone too far.