I’d really prefer factual answers to this… but I figure if this post gets more than a few replies, it’s likely to degenerate into a GD, so I might as well put it here.
A while back, a friend lent me a copy of The Gospel of St. Thomas. I’m an agnostic leaning more toward atheist, but I guess I’m still looking for a reason to believe (I think things would be much simpler if I could somehow come to believe in something like the Bible, although the more I read the less I want to have anything to do with it… but we won’t get into that in thhis thread )
ANYHOO, here’s the question:
What’s the evidence for the Gospel of Thomas actually being written by Thomas? What’s the evidence against it?
PLEASE don’t try to convert me by telling me that I’m close, and should just brainwash myself into believing (I’ve already read that thread).
There is exactly one manuscript for the Gospel of Thomas, found IIRC in Egypt in 1955. I don’t have dates for it (and it’s late, so I’m too lazy to Google) but I seem to recall its being a second century document.
Parts of it are clearly authentic, being direct quotes or paraphrases from one or another of the four canonical gospels. And other parts appear to be the work of Gnostics.
You have to remember that, whether or not you believe the doctrines founded on the Gospel stories, the basic four were originally approved, and about a dozen apocryphal gospels rejected, by people who were either eyewitnesses of some of the events related or who were taught by those who were. My namesake, for example, quotes extensively in his letter to the Philippians from them, and he is known to have been taught as a youth by St. John in his old age. Mark’s family were part of the same social circle as Christ and the Apostles. Luke claims to have known several of the apostles, plus Paul and Barnabas, and tradition has it that he became friends with Mary (Jesus’s mother) late in her life, and painted her portrait.
So on a relative basis, the four canonical Gospels are more objectively reliable than the other stuff. Even if you think they’re all out to sea, you can see the logic of a “peer review” process approving some as accurate in content and rejecting others as fable-mongering.
There’s no hard evidence either way. There’s no hard evidence that Thomas even existed. The fact that it’s quite an early text (contemporary with Mark) and that it is a pure sayings gospel unencumbered by mythological trappings and narrative agendas would suggest that it may well have an apostolic origin, at least by way of oral tradition, but there is no way of knowing for sure. the author of Thomas is simply unknown, but some scholars believe it to be a product of an early Gnostic community. The sayings cannot be properly classified as gnostic, but it does seem to have been used by Gnostics. Here is the Gospel of thomas Hompage which has a lot of info and links.
But why does it matter? How does the Gospel of Thomas differ from the canonical gospels, anyway? What does it mean to say it is a “Gnostic” gospel? Does it give a fundamentally different account of the events of Jesus’ life, or of his teachings?
There is no evidence that any of the Gospels were written by who their titles say they were written by. It’s doubtful that Matthew wrote “The Gospel of Matthew” or Mark, Luke, or John did likewise. Same thing with Thomas. It was common in the days of the early church to circulate gospels and other writings with the names of important Apostles or other Biblical figures attached. In fact, there are probably hundreds of “gospels” out there like that. If you go to a large enough library, you’ll usually find collections of these “apocryphal” gospels, which have some interesting stories of Jesus in them. There’s even works early Christians said had come from Adam. As mentioned above, though, there was a sort of “peer review” process which determined which were true and which weren’t. The ones in the Bible made the cut; the others are largely forgotten now, save for the “Gospel of Thomas.”
Thomas differs from the canonical gospels in many ways. One, it’s merely a collection of sayings. The other gospels have a narrative. The Jesus of Thomas is radically different from the Jesus of the canonical gospels, saying some pretty strange stuff. A lot of his sayings don’t make sense unless you study Gnosticism. Gnosticism is a word used today for a number of pretty different ancient heresies which were very common in the first few centuries of the early church. To make an over-generalization, Gnostics believed you needed secret knowledge (in Greek, “gnosis”) to advance to Heaven, and only Gnostic leaders had that knowledge to impart to their followers. At least, that’s what I remember from college. I’m sure someone else here can explain it a lot better than I can.
If you read Thomas, though, after reading about Gnostics, it seems clear to me (though I am definitely not an expert, and I must disagree with Diogenes) that a lot of Thomas was written by Gnostics.
Thomas is NOT a Gnostic gospel even though it was used by Gnostics. For one thing it was written too early (Gnosticism is a second century heresy at the earliest. Thomas dates from the 60’s), but more importantly the sayings themselves are not Gnostic. It is suggestive of Gnosticism only inasmuch as it it speaks of divine inner light within individuals. It says nothing, however, of core Gnostic beliefs about the the nature of God, Jesus and materialism.
In Gnostic belief, Yahweh was not really God but an evil “demiurge” who created the material world and trapped the divine souls of humans within evil physical bodies. Jesus was sent by the real God to show humans how to transcend the physical world of the demiurge and return to the pure spiritual world of God.
This is obviously a fairly radical departure from both Jewish and Christian doctrines but there is none of it in Thomas.
Thomas is much more like a mystical work, a collection of wisdom sayings about how to see the “kingdom of Heaven” spread out on the earth. It contains no miracles, and no direct claim of special divinity for Jesus, nor does it speak of spiritual redemption or salvation. It is about how to resume our status as the “image of God” in this lifetime. None of that is Gnostic.
Cite? A number of scholars have put the Gospel of Thomas around AD 120, such as Pheme Perkins, professor of theology at Boston College. Furthermore, the Gospel of Thomas, and its ideas, are not mentioned by the earliest apostolic fathers.
In the intro to “The Gospel of Thomas” in the 1990 ed. of The Nag Hammadi Library, Helmut Koester speaks of original Greek fragments of the Thomas Gospel:
“Fragments of this gospel in the original Greek version are extant in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1, 654 and 655, which had been discovered and published at the beginning of this century, but were identified as parts of The Gospel of Thomas only after the discovery of the Coptic Nag Hammadi library. The first of these Greek papyri contain sayings 26-30, 77, 31-33 (in this order!), the other two the sayings 1-7 and 36-40 respectively. At least one of these fragments comes from a manuscript that was written before 200 C.E.; thus the Greek version of this gospel was used in Egypt as early as the second century.”
So, we only have one “full” (even the Coptic version contains 5 gaps in the MS) copy but several fragments.
The Jesus Seminar puts it in the first century and some scholars even argue that it could pre-date Mark. This conclusion based on such as factors as the fact that it is a sayings gospel (a genre which died out by the end of the 1st century), it shows no knowledge of or dependance on the canonical gospels but derives, like Q, from oral tradition and it shows none of the mythological overtones that one would expect from a later gospel. (No deification of Jesus, no miracles, no resurrection no concept of Jesus as a saviour or even as the Messiah). It is true that opinion is not unanimous and that conservative Christian scholars prefer to believe that it’s a much later work. There is no real evidence to support that, however. Objective historical scholarship (as opposed to religious) leans heavily towards a date contemporary with or before Mark.
I’m getting this from a hard copy of The Complete Gospels which is put out by the Jesus Seminar but here is more from Gospel of Thomas FAQ.
Some of the sayings in Thomas are mystical in tone, rather than Gnostic.
One of my favorites:
"Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”
I have often wondered if the “Jesus is the son of God” thing could be a mis-understanding of “we are all the sons [and daughters] of God, if we only understood it” - a very typical mystic POV.
The phrase “Son of God” in Jewish tradition was just a designation for anyone who was especially righteous or favored by god. It had no divine connotation in Hebrew or Aramaic.
I agree that Thomas sounds mystical in nature. IMO Jesus was an ecstatic mystic and Thomas is a collection of mystic wisdom sayings.
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