School Buildings in Mediterranean Antiquity: Notes on the Provenance of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas

The provenance of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) remains an open question to scholars of early Christianity. Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor have been proffered as the most likely settings of origin (with the latter two favored especially in recent years). The educational scenes in IGT may provide helpful hints of the text’s original setting. Paul Foster, however, in comparing the details of such scenes with depictions of education in literary sources, concludes that they offer no features suggestive of a particular setting of origin. However, comparison of such scenes with material depictions of ancient education may provide more geographical precision. A reexamination of the text’s educational scenes vis-à-vis material-cultural evidence suggests that Egypt should be reconsidered as a viable setting of origin for IGT.

Distant Reading of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John: Reflection of Methodological Aspects of the Use of Digital Technologies in the Research of Biblical Texts

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the applicability of selected methods of the so-called distant reading from the area of digital humanities for the interpretation of early Christian texts, specifically for approaching similarities and differences between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. We use the term “distant reading” for the methods that allow us to explore, analyze, and visualize digitized textual data while using the tools from the area of data mining, natural language processing, or corpus linguistics. We want to explore whether methods from the field of digital humanities can allow for a sophisticated, quantifiable, and replicable comparison of the corpora of early Christian movements and thereby help to uncover the basic features of their theology and thus be a suitable complement to traditional exegesis and interpretation achieved by close reading.