Last time I seriously got into this stuff (gnostic literature, Nag Hammadi, etc) was about 20 years back and the thinking among scholars then seemed to be that this gospel was not early but dated to around the 3rd century AD.
That quite bowled me over. Earlier than the canonical gospels? That would be astonishing, especially given the heavily gnostic flavor of the gospel. But I’m a little skeptical. Is there really a ‘growing consensus among scholars’ that Thomas is a 1st century work?
I can’t answer your question, but the last few really big books in the field, reflecting the latest scholarship, have been Roelof van den Broek’s Gnostic Religion in Antiquity, and - crucially, and controversially - Michael Allen Williams’ Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.
Both, I’m sure, have something to say on the subject.
Within the last 5 years or so, I read a couple books which said this hypothesis holds up pretty well. I can’t say for sure that these books represent a “growing consensus” but it looks like the answer could very well be “yes”.
One of the most convincing arguments I read in those books is the observation that the Gospel of John reads like it’s a rebuttal to the Gospel of Thomas, which would mean Thomas was written before John. In particular, John’s book portrays the character of Thomas as a bumbling fool, which is strange because the other three canonical gospels don’t.
The Complete Gospels edited by Miller and Funk and published in 1992 dates Thomas to sometime in the range AD 70 to 100, just about the same time that the canonical gospels were being composed (Mark about AD 70, John AD 100).
It’s very clear that there were Christian sects around with proto-gnostic (or at least, proto-Dualist) ideas, very very early. Some of the Pauline letters (or pseudo-Pauline, if you prefer) make reference to them, as does portions of the Book of Revelation.
I don’t really have much evidence on when Thomas, itself, was written.
I’m not an expert, but based on my reading of various Wikipedia articles and other sources dealing with the dating of the apocryphal texts, there seems to be a sort of a priori assumption that Gnosticism was a 2nd Century occurence and thus the earliest dating for any work is the 2nd Century.
However, it’s also fairly unambiguous that there were Gnostic sects during the 1st Century, so the above really doesn’t make sense. Simon Magus, Dositheos, and John the Baptist are all contemporaries of Jesus, and are believed to held to be founders or foundational to various Gnostic groups, as is Jesus himself. There’s also Menander and Cerdo, who picked up from them and continued to teach Gnosticism during the late 1st Century. The Nicolatians are mentioned in the Book of Revelation (~95 AD) as a historic group. Cerinthus was popular around 100 AD. Valentinus, probably the most popular Gnostic writer, probably was most active around 130 AD, and yet a large number of Gnostic universes are described as “pre-Valentinian” or “post-Valentinian”. It’s hard to be pre-Valentinian without going into the 1st Century.
A number of Gnostic works state whom they got their information from. Some from angels, some from disciples, some from the students of the disciples, etc… If we assume that these statements are true, then the ones that come from disciples would be 1st Century. If we assume that these statements are lies, then we still would tend to think that the liars would use the most plausible source at the time they were crafted. So any that claim a disciple as their source still couldn’t be much later than the first decade or two of the 2nd Century.
By the time Iranaeus was writing, in 180, Gnostics were everywhere around the Middle East. There’s no particular reason to believe that they were a new occurence at that point in time. It’s just as likely that it’s simply at this point in time that the to-be Catholic church gained the clout and strength to start assrting its orthodoxy and their hereticism.
Note that there is a passion among certain people to force earlier and earlier dates on Christian writings beyond realistic dating methods.
One dubious method is to find a reference in a dated text to a phrase/passage/saying that occurs in an undated text then argue that the whole text, not just the phrase, predates the second text.
But bits and pieces of stuff were floating around all the time before the text might have been assembled. The “Q” document is a hypothesized example of this.
So John being aware of Thomas and his supporters in no way implies that the text of the Gospel of Thomas was written by this time.
There’s also the possibility that no one of the Nag Hammadi documents is that which we have references to. The Gospel of the Ebionites is something that was referenced by the early Christian writers. But whether the “Gospel of the Ebionites” that we’ve found in Nag Hammadi is the same one, there’s insufficient evidence to be certain of. It could be a different document from the Ebionites, something named after the reference in the early Christian writings, or significantly edited from its original incarnation.
There was a hypothetical “sayings” gospel before Thomas was discovered, so there was temptation to identify Thomas as that gospel, but I think that idea was discarded.
I think the main problem is that there is definitely 2nd century interpolation in the copy of the gospel that we have, so the question is whether or not there was an older, written text that was interpolated, or whether it was just a matter of the 2nd century author using older, oral stories.
I think the consensus right now is that there is an older, written document behind the extant text, and it’s that theoretical document that dates to around 70CE. Right now, exactly what the oldest parts of the text are, is still being debated.
I read Elaine Pagels’ book on it, but I just realized that book is now 10 years old, so I may be out of the loop as well.
