The Gospel of Thomas
1.
Nag Hammadi library
a.
Discovered in 1945
b.
Translated into English in 1977
c.
13 leather bound books (codices)
d.
Manuscripts dated AD 350-380
e.
Written in Coptic (Egyptian written in the Greek
alphabet)
2.
Oxyrhynchus
a.
Discovered in 1890’s
b.
Greek fragments: unknown at time of discovery
what they were but with the discovery at Nag Hammadi it was realized that these
Greek fragments were pieces of Thomas
c.
About 20% of Thomas
in three papyri
i. P.
Oxy 654 = Thomas 1-7, part of 30
ii. P.
Oxy 1 = Thomas 26-33
iii. P.
Oxy 655 = Thomas 24, 36-39, 77
d.
Manuscripts dated AD 200-300
3.
Two views on origins and translation
a.
Greek to Coptic
b.
Syriac to Greek; Syriac to Coptic
4.
Thomas
and Gnosticism
a.
Not full-blown Gnosticism but definitely Gnostic
elements[1]
i. Definition
of Gnosticism:
1.
Dualism: mixture of good and evil in creation
and man; distinction between good transcendent unknowable God and God who
created the world. “The knowable
God who is a projection into the creation is the Creator, while the unknowable
God is over everything but is too transcendent to be directly involved with the
creation. The true God and the
Creator God of Genesis are not the same thing.” [2]
2.
Cosmogony: dualism in the creation itself;
“anti-cosmic dualism” which rejects the physical material world as evil and
inferior.[3]
3.
Soteriology: “Salvation and redemption are
understood primarily in terms of knowledge about creation’s dualistic
nature. Salvation of the
nonmaterial spirit or soul within a person is what matters, not a salvation of
the creation or of the flesh. In
fact, the flesh is not redeemable.
There is no resurrection of the body from the dead.”[4]
4.
Eschatology: “one understands where existence is
headed, namely, the redemption of the soul and the recovery of the creation
into the ‘fullness’ or ‘pleroma’ that is where good dwells.”[5]
ii. See
especially verses 18, 29, 36-39, 50, 77, 83-84
b.
Thomas
1 and John 11.25-26
i. Thomas 1: “And he said, ‘Whoever finds
the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.’”
ii. John
11.25-26: “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes
in me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in
me will never die. Do you believe
this?’”
1.
“Now we can see how John’s message contrasts
with that of Thomas. Thomas’s Jesus
directs each disciple to discover the light within (‘within a person of light
there is light’ [24]) but John’s Jesus declares instead that ‘I am the light of
the world’ and that ‘whoever does not come to me walks in darkness’ [8.12]. In Thomas, Jesus reveals to the
disciples that ‘you are from the kingdom, and to it you shall return’ and
teaches them to say for themselves that ‘we come from the light’; but John’s
Jesus speaks as the only one who comes ‘from above’ and so has rightful
priority over everyone else: ‘You are
from below; I am from above …. The one who comes from above is above all.’
[8.23; 3.31] Only Jesus is from
God, and he alone offers access to God.
John never tires of repeating that one must believe in Jesus, follow
Jesus, obey Jesus, and confess him alone as God’s only son. We are not
is ‘twin,’ much less (even potentially) his equal; we must follow him, believe
in him, and revere him as God in person: thus John’s Jesus declares that ‘you will die in your sins, unless you
believe that I am he’ [8.24].”[6]
2.
“At the same time, I was also exploring in my
academic work the history of Christianity in the light of the Nag Hammadi
discoveries, and this research helped clarify what I cannot love: the tendency
to identify Christianity with a single, authorized set of beliefs—however these
actually vary from church to church—coupled with the conviction that Christian
belief alone offers access to God.”[7]
3.
Pagels is challenged spiritually by Thomas. For example, verse 70 reads: “Jesus said, ‘If you bring
forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’” Pagels comments: “The strength of this
saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to
discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and, with a shock of recognition, I
realized that this perspective seemed to me self-evidently true.”[8]
5.
Contents of Thomas
a.
Missing Gospel elements in Thomas
i. No
narrative
ii. No
passion/cross
iii. No
resurrection
iv. Non-eschatological
(i.e., Thomas 18)
v. No
“Jewish-ness”: Jewish language and concepts are used but are give a different,
non-Jewish understanding
“One of the most telling
weaknesses in the whole Q-and-Thomas
hypothesis, it seems to me, is the presence within Thomas of sayings about the ‘kingdom of god’, or, as the book
regularly calls it, the kingdom of the Father [3, 22, 46, 49, 97, 113,
114]. From our earlier study of
the Jewish evidence, it is unthinkable that this motif should be introduced
into a community from scratch with the meaning that it comes to have in Thomas, i.e. the present secret
religious knowledge of a heavenly world.
It is overwhelmingly likely that the use of this emphatically Jewish
kingdom-language originated with an overtly Jewish movement which used it in a sense
close to it mainline one, i.e. which spoke of the end of exile, the restoration
of Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of YHWH to Zion, and so
forth, however much these ideas were transformed within the ministry of Jesus
and the lives of his first followers.
If there has been a shift in the
usage one way or the other, it is far more likely to have been from this Jewish home base into a
quasi-Gnostic sense, rather than from a Gnostic sense, for which there is no
known, or imaginable precedent, to a re-Judaized one—a shift which, on the
hypothesis, must have taken place somewhere between an early Thomas and a later Mark.”[9]
b.
Thomas doesn’t
fit “gospel” message or genre
“When the early Christians picked up the term ‘gospel’, they had in mind
the good news of things Jesus had done,
while also including some of his teachings. For example, the earliest Gospel, Mark, is mostly
action—focusing on Jesus’ deeds.
It is doubtful that the earliest Christians would have seen a mere
collection of teachings, without a recounting of Jesus’ saving activities, as a
Gospel… On this account it’s doubtful that we should see the Gospel of Thomas, mostly a collection of
teachings, as a Gospel.”[10]
6.
Dating the Gospel
of Thomas
a.
Two views
i. Early:
50-60 (Jesus Seminar)
ii. Late:
150-185 (majority of scholars)
b.
Arguments for late date
i. Thomas knows many of the NT writings
ii. Thomas contains material from the
Gospels that many scholars regard as late (i.e., M, L, John)
iii. Thomas reflects later editing in the
Gospel
iv. Thomas shows familiarity with traditions
distinctive to Easter, Syrian Christianity that emerged in the middle of the 2nd
century (i.e., name Judas Thomas)
“The attribution of the Gospel to
‘Didymus Judas Thomas’ (prologue) shows that it derives from the East Syrian
Christian tradition, centered in Edessa.
It was only in this tradition (from which come also the Book of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas) that the apostle was
known as Judas Thomas and regarded as a kind of spiritual twin-brother of
Jesus. Thomas was thought (perhaps
correctly) to have been in some sense responsible for the founding of the
church in this area, and it is probable that the oral Gospel traditions of this
church were transmitted under the name of Thomas and that the Gospel of Thomas drew on these oral
traditions. Its points of contact
with other literature from this area and especially its probable use by the Acts of Thomas (end of second or early
third century) confirms this hypothesis.”[11]
c.
Arguments for early date
i. Form
is like Q (collection of sayings without narrative) which is early
ii. Sayings
in Thomas are more simple than
parallels in canonical Gospels
Example:
parable of the wicked tenant farmers (Mt 21.33-41; Mk 12.1-9; Lk 20.9-16; Thomas 65)
iii. Sayings
in Thomas do not follow the order in
Synoptic Gospels
7.
Answering the arguments for an early date
a.
“Form is like Q.”
i. Q
is a hypothetical construct; no manuscript evidence
ii. Q
could have contained a narrative—who knows? Speculation abounds.
b.
“Simple sayings = early sayings.”
“Advocates of Thomas’ independence
of the canonical Gospels often point to the abbreviated form that many of the
parables and sayings have in Thomas.
One of the best known examples is the parable of the wicked tenant
farmers (Mt 21:33-41; Mk 12:1-9; Lk 20:9-16; Gospel of Thomas 65). In the opening verse of Mark’s version
approximately eleven words are drawn from Isaiah 5:1-7 to form the backdrop of
the parable. Most of these words
do not appear in Thomas. Crossan
takes this as an indication that the older form of the parable has been
preserved in Thomas, not in Mark, which supposedly preserves an expanded,
secondary version. However, in
Luke’s opening verse only two words from Isaiah 5 (“planted vineyard”) remain. We have here a clear example of
abbreviation of the tradition.
Other scholars have concluded that the version in Thomas is an edited
and abridged form of Luke’s version of the parable. The same possibility applies to the saying about the
rejected stone (Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10-11; Lk 20:17; Gospel of Thomas 66). Mark’s longer version quotes Psalm
118:22-23. But Luke only quotes
Psalm 118:22. Once again Luke, who
depends on Mark and is further removed from the original form of the tradition,
has abbreviated the tradition. The
shorter form also appears in Thomas.
Thus, it is risky to draw firm
conclusions relating to priority on the basis of which form of the tradition is
the shortest and appears abbreviated.
It is thus possible that Gospel of Thomas 65 and 66 are neither separate
logia nor derived from pre-Synoptic tradition, but constitute an edited version
of Luke’s abbreviation of Mark’s parable.”[12]
c.
“Sayings in Thomas
are not in the same order as Synoptic Gospels.”
i. Gnostic
writers of the 2nd century customarily arranged material around
themes/catchwords
ii. We
know of one place for certain where the Coptic writer changed the order from
the “older” Greek version (P. Oxy 1) to organize it around catchwords.
1.
The saying on “splitting the wood” which in P.
Oxy 1 is at the end of saying 30 becomes part of the 2nd half of
saying 77 in the Coptic version.
2.
This creates a link-word between 77a+b; both
halves of the spliced verse contain the Coptic verb meaning “attain” or “split”[13]
[10]
Ben Witherington III, The Gospel Code:
Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Da Vinci (Downers Grove,
Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2004), 97.
Also see Simon Gathercole’s discussion—“ Jesus, the Apostolic Gospel and
the Gospels”—summarized at Steve Walton’s blog online: http://stevewalton.info/simon-gathercole-on-the-canonical-and-non-canonical-gospels/
[13]
See Glenn Miller’s online essay “What about the Gospel of Thomas?” for details
and further bibliographic information.
Online: http://christianthinktank.com/gthomas.html.
