Wating for Klemot

 Waiting for Klemot 

from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 224) –

The so-called unrecorded sayings of Jesus are often difficult to reconstruct. This is a good example, preserved separately in a much-corrupted manuscript yet to be dated. The Greek may have looked like this (or it may not have):

 

          kai\  ei]pen  au00toi=v  o(  'Ihsou=v:  o(moi&a  e!stin  h(  basilei&a  tw~n  ou)ranw=n.  xroni&zei 
         o(  keklhme&nov au)tou=  e1rxetai,  a)pekde&xetai  au'to__n  o(  keklhw&v.

      The kingdom of God is like this: when his guest was delayed, the host waited for him.

Commentary

This is one of the shortest of the parables, very much like “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who gave his brother a fish” (page 211)  or “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls” (Matthew 13:45). There is very little we can know for certain about any of these, however much anyone else has written about them. (Again, see page 211.)  It is, however, worth noting here that the Aramaic of Jesus’ time had no word for “hour” as a measure of time - it is only when Rome sticks its nose in where it does not belong that time gets numbered (Matthew 27:45 and ||s); xroni&zei  (cf. chronos)  in this parable refers to a space in, not a length of, time: That someday a bell would ring and someone would stand at a blackboard under a school clock, draw a line across it and begin to elaborate “history” with hash-marks and numbers representing dates would not have occurred to Jesus*; if it had, he might well have wondered if this were a guest worth waiting for.

     The New Testament may have a word for “late” in the day, but it does not have a word for being “late,” much less the sin of not being on time. Therefore, the guest is “delayed.”

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*It did not occur to me until that sixth-grade class that before Jesus the Romans had to subtract to know what year it was, and presumably, what day and time.

12.06.18