Note 7 — Chapter XI · THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT

Obviously the additional logia are far more likely to have been invented than found. Such a chronic windfall of papyri is a sufficiently fantastic hypothesis on the face of it, in no way justifiable from the recent discovery of a few enigmatic scraps that had not been embodied, and suggest no community of thought with those embodied. But even if we allow the probable existence of many floating leaves, where is the likelihood that their sayings all came from the same Teacher? In the terms of the hypothesis, he occupied himself mainly with the law (unless the lost logia outbulk the saved), while at the same time he duly provided for the Samaritans and the Gentiles! His disciples and apostles, nonetheless, paid no attention to these latter provisions until they found that such provisions were really necessary to accommodate the thronging converts! All this is very awkwardly suggestive of the Moslem saying that the Khalif Omar “was many a time of a certain opinion, and the Koran was revealed accordingly.”7 It would indeed have been a remarkable experience for the evangelist to discover the logion (Mt. xvi, 17–19) as to the founding of the Church on the rock of Peter when a Petrine claim had to be substantiated. To the eye of Dr. Rendel Harris, an orthodox but a candid scholar, the “rock” text suggests an adaptation of a passage in the Odes of Solomon in which God’s “rock” is the foundation not of the Church but of the Kingdom.8 Such probabilities Dr. Petrie never considers.