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Shambhala: Why do you call the sayings of Jesus in your book “unknown”?
Marvin Meyer: These sayings are unknown in two senses of the word. They are “unknown” or “hidden” as sayings that derive, in part, from the so-called New Testament “apocrypha,” but they are also unknown in the sense of sayings that are not commonly addressed by scholars as words that may shed light on who Jesus was and what he may have had to declare.
S: Why should we be interested in these sayings today?
MM: These sayings should be part of the database of sayings of Jesus that may help clarify who the historical Jesus was, what he had to say, and what various people—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—thought of him. The sayings may also be fruitful for our own contemporary reflection and meditation.
S: What are the various sources of the sayings in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus?
MM: The sayings come from the Greek Gospel of Thomas, a variety of other early Christian gospels that did not make the cut for inclusion in the New Testament, Nag Hammadi, and other sources. A few of the sayings come from very obscure sources! The end result is a collection that complements the sayings of gospel Q and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi library.
S: Do any of the sayings resonate with, or even match, the sayings we find in the canonical gospels?
MM: Some of the sayings do parallel sayings from the New Testament. Some may build upon and interpret New Testament sayings, and some may be earlier versions of sayings that made it into the New Testament.
S: Are any of them particularly at odds with the words of Jesus found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
MM: Many of the sayings are quite different from anything found in the New Testament, and some contradict what was included in the Christian Bible. A goodly number of the sayings are much more mystical than what we typically find in the New Testament gospels—for instance, Saying 87, “Blessings on One Who Exists Before”—and some of the sayings pay attention to female aspects of the divine and female disciples of Jesus. These may provide a corrective to some of the sexist biases built into the perspectives of New Testament gospels.
S: You mention that some of the sayings are from a source called the “Greek Gospel of Thomas.” Is this a different work than the Gospel of Thomas that you’ve translated elsewhere and that is so widely read today?
MM: The Gospel of Thomas was apparently copied and translated in several versions,
and Greek versions of some of the sayings—found in the Christian author Hippolytus of Rome and on an ancient rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt—are also known, in addition to the Coptic version from Nag Hammadi. The Greek texts are earlier than the Coptic text and written in the language in which the Gospel of Thomas was likely composed, so they remain extremely valuable. They may well bring us a step closer to the sayings of the historical Jesus!
S: A few of the sayings you include are from Islamic hadith—none of which come from before the eighth century. How can you determine that stories or sayings attributed to Jesus from hadith are genuine?
MM: The determination of authentic sayings that go back, in some form, to the historical Jesus is hardly an exact science, but there are criteria that we can bring to the table in the discussion of the sayings: multiplicity of attestation, distinctiveness, pithiness, and so on. I present some of these criteria in the introduction to the book. The sayings of ‘Isa—Jesus—from Islamic sources are especially worthy of discussion, since they derive from the Semitic world and were never filtered through Greco-Roman and European thought, and they are free of the Christological burden—of the need to demonstrate that Jesus was son of God and lord and the rest—that dominated thinking about Jesus is the Christian church.
S: Do you think that we have reached the limit of what can be known about Jesus—that the discovery of written records has been exhausted—or is it possible that more material will arise in the future?
MM: Without a doubt new materials will be found. Some already have been found and await our attention—for example, the Gospel of Judas and other early Christian texts in a Coptic codex are currently being prepared for publication and are already being subjected to heated discussion in cyberspace; and another collection of texts just unearthed by Polish scholars was announced in February 2005. And we still have plenty of work to do on the sayings of Jesus we now have in our possession—such as these Unknown Sayings of Jesus!
S: Do you have a personal favorite among all the sayings in this book?
MM: Yes—Saying 194, “The Dead Dog’s Teeth Are White”:
“Malik, son of Dinar, said this: one day Jesus was walking with his followers, and they passed by the carcass of a dog.
“The followers said, ‘How this dog stinks!’
“But Jesus said, ‘How white are its teeth!’”
(from al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences, 3.108)
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