New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel from Oxyrhynchus

rather than with the 5th obviously produces no serious conflict between the two documents.

We proceed to a closer examination of the two series. In 2 the 7th Logion ("A city built on a hill") is connected with St. Matthew’s Gospel alone; the 6th ("A prophet is not acceptable") has a marked point of contact with St. Luke in the use of the word "acceptable," and the 1st also agrees with St. Luke. The 5th ("Wherever there are") starts with a parallel to St. Matthew, but extends into a region far beyond. Nowhere in 2 can the influence of St. Mark be traced, nor was there any direct parallel with St. John’s Gospel; but the new matter, both in thought and expression, tended to have a mystical and Johannine character. In 1 we have one Saying (the 2nd) of which the central idea is parallel to a passage found in St. Luke alone, but of which the developments are new; the conclusion of the 3rd Saying connects with St. Matthew and St. Mark rather than with St. Luke, while the 4th is a different version of a Saying found in all three Synoptists, and is on the whole nearer to St. Mark than to the other two Evangelists. The 1st Saying and, so far as we can judge, the 5th have little, if any, point of contact with the Canonical Gospels. As in 2, so in 1 the new elements tend to have a Johannine colouring, especially in the 2nd Saying; and though the Sayings in 1 contain nothing so markedly Johannine in style as e. g. "I stood in the midst of the world . . ." in 2, the introduction contains a clear parallel to John viii. 52. This at first sight may perhaps seem to imply a knowledge of St. John’s Gospel on the part of the author of the introduction, but it must be remembered (1) that St. John may well not have been the sole authority for the attribution of that Saying to our Lord, and if so, that the author of the introduction may have obtained it from another source, (2) that a knowledge of St. John’s Gospel on the part of the author of the introduction does not necessarily imply a corresponding debt to that Gospel in the following Sayings, which, as we have said, stand on a somewhat different footing from the introduction.

In our original edition of 2 we maintained (a) that the Sayings had no traceable thread of connexion with each other beyond the fact of their being ascribed to the same speaker, (b) that none of them implied a post-resurrection point of view, (c) that they were not in themselves heretical, and that though the asceticism