Talk:Logia

Older comments
On Wiktionary, logia is simply the plural of logion. Either of these titles could refer to the other article. Neelix 12:58, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

The article currently makes clear that the usage is confined to New Testament scholarship. A recent substitution seemed to labor under the misconception that there was one logia and that it was lost. Logia are collections of sayings attributed ro Jesus, whether we like the sayings or not. No neutral or rational definition of logia could exclude the "Gospel" of Thomas, which is merely a list of sayings attributed to Jesus. The rest is persiflage. --Wetman (talk) 10:40, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Wordnet at Princeton defines this as "a saying of Jesus that is regarded as authentic although it is not recorded in the Gospels". Why is WP deviating from this? Faith (talk) 14:59, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Logia are plural, for a start. The usenet definition, as it makes plain, is of a single logion, not of a literary genre.--Wetman (talk) 17:59, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
 * That would simply mean logia would be "sayings", rather than "a saying", moving both from singular to plural. So, again, why does WP deviate from this definition, relating these to Papias, while Princeton's wordnet relates them as authentically from Jesus? I would also point to the Catholic Encyclopaedia entry. Faith (talk) 18:38, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Rewriting
I see that PiCo has just recently gutted the article down to a well-cited stub, excising a great deal of arguably inappropriate material, while I was researching logia for my own revision. I would like to point out a few things, which may not be clear from reading the article itself.

The evolution of the words logion and logia in scholarship is quite a comical and absurd story. Back in the day, and even now, certain historical theories wanted to see Papias as referring to some kind of sayings-collection, so the word logia got twisted and contorted to make it fit. From time to time, voices continually arise to set the record straight, but somehow a majority of scholars seem to never quite catch on. (For example, see the complaint at Robinson p. xxvii.) So you have, for example, the publication of the first fragments of GThom under the title Logia, only to be retracted a few years later, and yet most scholars, unaware of the retraction and the firestorm that led to it, continue to speak of logion 1 and so forth. This has gone on for so many generations that a new sense of logion has grown up in scholarship quite apart from (but still close enough to be easily confused with) its original sense.

Now, to explain all this concisely, remembering that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a dictionary, it is necessary to address the ancient use of the term, its occurrence in Papias, disputes over interpreting Papias, the whole affair surrounding the Gospel of Thomas, and how the term has come to be used in modern times. Q gets dragged in because its origins are intertwined with the (mis)interpretation of logia in Papias. Most users reaching this article will either simply want to know what logia refers to, which is what ledes are for, or want to know about the logia of Papias, which can be treated in some depth. By treating everything in a single article, the important points about the ambiguity of the term and the history of its evolution are easily discoverable.