Logia

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Loggia is the name given to a certain architectural feature

Logia is a term applied to collections of sayings credited to Jesus and used as source materials by the Gospel writers in the writing of the familiar canonic narrative gospels. The Greek word "logia" means "oracles, divine responses, utterances, or sayings." Some scholars, seeing many similarities between the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke that are not accounted for in the presumed earlier Gospel of Mark believe there existed an earlier source, now lost, termed the Q gospel upon which both Matthew and Luke drew in writing their gospels. Perhaps such a source was a logia, or collection of quotations attributed to Jesus.

The Apostle Paul may have been citing the logia when he spoke of "the words of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 20:35) recording a saying of Jesus not found in any of the four gospels: "It is more blessed to give than to receive."

Fragments of logia were among Grenfell and Hunt's first season's finds at Oxyrhyncus in 1897. A single leaf of a papyrus codex, written in the first half of the 3rd century, contains a collection of sayings of Jesus (Oxyrhyncus Papyrus 1), each headed "Jesus says". In 1903 a second 3rd century logia fragment, from a papyrus scroll that had been used for an official register, was discovered (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 654, now British Museum Papyrus 1531 verso). Controversy centered on whether the two fragments formed part of the same work, what authority could be attached to them, and the correct restoration of lacunae in the texts (Bell and Skeat 1935). Oxyrhynchus 654 had a heading which seems to describe the work as a collection of "sayings" addressed to Thomas and some other disciple, and when the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945, it was identified as a Coptic version of these two logia fragments. Thomas contains both alleged quotations from Jesus found in the canonical gospels and many sayings not found elsewhere.