The Gospel of Thomas by Stevan L. Davies

In Analysis 1, we first apply a rather general method to gain a rough comparison of the vocabulary of Jesus’ sayings in the canonical While our case study is based on a very small amount of documents, we envision that the very same methodology could be employed to analyze much larger corpora.Īfter the introductory section, which offers an overview of the recent debate concerning the relationship between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas, we proceed with a section on QTA consisting of three subsections. In general, we propose that these methods represent a suitable complement to traditional exegesis and interpretation achieved by close reading of the texts. Going even further, we even believe that these differences might reflect differences in theologies of the early Christian movements associated with these texts.

Following this research pathway, we want to explore to what extent these methods allow for a sophisticated, quantifiable, and replicable comparison of the two texts and their respective theologies. However, it has been further suggested that distant reading might represent a fruitful methodology for the history of religions as well. Over the last several years, these methods have become widely popular in the digital humanities and are referred to under the umbrella term “distant reading,” especially in respect to the macroanalysis of English literature. On a more general level, we also attempt to demonstrate the applicability of these types of methods for the study of early Christian history in general. Therefore, the first aim of this study is to use selected methods of quantitative text analysis (QTA), which are based on standardized tools and algorithms from the fields of computational linguistics, information retrieval, and digital humanities, to explore whether these methods can help us to decide which of these two views – commonly based on more traditional exegetical interpretations – is better grounded in evidence. Attempts to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the relationship between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John: While one group of scholars emphasizes the similarities between the two, others highlight the differences.

The Gospel of Thomas by Stevan L. Davies