Palimpsest by Matthew Battles

Author:Matthew Battles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

“Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. . . . Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” These lines, from Luke 12, contain a cluster of phrases that can be traced back to “Q,” the lost, postulated original source text for the Christian Gospels. In this fragment of papyrus, dating to the third century of the Common Era, the lilies are found without the ravens; differences in the wording here suggest that the phrasing is older than the version of Q that ends up in the canonical text of Luke. The possibilities raised by this fact are staggering: for the text in this fragment of papyrus is not Luke but the Gospel of Thomas, a noncanonical text long thought secondary. The papyrus itself was another fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; its survival and careful preservation, with its sutures of Japanese paper and wheat paste, is as expressive as the words it contains—reminding us that, unlike the lilies, we labor and spin together over centuries and centuries.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.