Al Kafirun

There's stuff in the canon that goes against a central church, too, but yeah, GOT is really... almost anti-church. The other gnostic documents that were later read alongside it were moreso. The Apocalypse of Peter was explicit in as much.

Jesus says: 'If those who seek to lead you say to you: 'See, the Kingdom is in heaven!' then the birds of heaven will be there before you. If they say to you: 'It is in the sea!' then the fish will be there before you. But the kingdom is within you and it is outside of you!'

Jesus says: "I am the light which is on them all. I am the All, and the All has gone out from me and the All has come back to me. Cleave the wood: I am there; lift the stone and thou shalt find me there!"

His disciples said to him: "On what day will the kingdom come?" "It will not come when it is expected. No one will say: 'See, it is here!' or: 'Look, it is there!' but the Kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it."

rlogan

Since we're trading GThom favorites, here's one I have not figured out:

105 Jesus said, "Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore."


Sorry I'm so stupid - but is this speaking about sex with your parents? It says "the" father and mother, not "their" father and mother.

Seb

I have 105 down as ''harlot'' instead of ''whore''. Here comes the quote.

Interesting stuff from Amundsen who after twenty years in the ministry turned his back on orthodox christianity.

Legion

I wrote up a post related to this question recently on another board, I'll re-post it here for your consideration.




I've read it before and done a small amount of research on it. The substantive difference between the Gospel of Thomas and the canonical gospels is that it is a Sayings gospel (it contains 114 Sayings); in other words, it is a collection of Jesus' sayings (sort of like Proverbs) rather than a narrative about it his ministry and resurrection (like the canonical gospels). As you suggested, the sayings contained within it, while somewhat similar to some of the canonical gospels' sayings (some of them are anyway), are different enough that scholars generally recognize it as a different strand of the tradition than the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and John (common organization, timeline and near word for word similarities found in the Synoptic Gospels are missing from the Gospel of Thomas, which is what leads scholars to conclude the common sayings represent separate strands of tradition rather than one copying from the other). Sayings that can be found in all three strands of tradition are actually generally viewed by scholars as highly probable to actually originate back on Jesus' lips; whereas the origin of statements not attested in all three strands are significantly more difficult to reliably pin down.

In any event, as Grant also said, the copy found at Nag Hammadi was a Coptic version (written on 4th century parchment), whereas the original was written in Greek; which means that what we have is a translation of the original, and thus has some inherent reliability questions; however, there are three Greek fragments that have also been uncovered (from sometime in the second century).

Interestingly regarding the name in the opening--"These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded"--is that that form of the Thomas' name is only found in eastern Syria (where it was found in The Acts of Thomas) which is where tradition records that Thomas carried out his post-Jesus ministry. Does that mean that the gospel actually came from Thomas? No; no more than the other gospels actually came from the persons they have been attributed to. However, the Acts of Thomas tells us that Thomas was a blood relative of Jesus, and both “Didymus� and “Thomas� mean “twin�; so in other words, Didymus Judas Thomas would be Jesus’ twin brother; as Bart Ehrman playfully asked, “Who better to relate the secret words of Jesus that can bring eternal life than his own twin brother?�

Some scholars (such as Robert J. Miller) date the gospel to late in the first century. He comes to this conclusion based in part on the gospel attributing it's authority and the source of its tradition to an individual apostle (like the canonical gospels do) rather than the later practice of appealing to "the twelve"; her further suggests that the genre of Thomas--a Sayings collection--had fallen out of favored usage by the end of the first century, in favor of narrative traditions (which Miller suggests may even mean that the Gospel of Thomas pre-dates the canonical gospels and comes from the Sayings traditions that many scholars surmise may have been a source for the later canonical gospels; if that is true, then some of these sayings may even be an earlier form of them than what is recorded in the canonical gospels). I suspect that he may well be right to a certain extent as far as the original composition of the gospel, but I also think that the version discovered at Nag Hamadi has likely undergone a number of revisions and thus the content can not be reliably dated. Portions could go back to the late first century, but with a Sayings gospel, editing is even easier than it is with a narrative gospel (which we've already seen to be wide-spread in the Synoptic tradition) due to the pure ease of dropping one saying and adding another. Given the outright scarcity of Gospel of Thomas manuscripts (the Coptic translation from Nag Hammadi and the three small Greek fragments being our only extant manuscripts) tracking any editorial revisions is essentially impossible right now (unlike with the canonical gospels which we can do with a fair amount of reliability).

I suspect then that the difference in dating for this gospel is not so much a result of a direct disagreement but a shift in the focus of what exactly they are dating. Miller is attempting to date the original composition for this gospel, and he presents a plausible (yet unprovable) case for that; Elaine Pagels and others attempt to date the composition that has reached our hands (or at least the Greek copy that our Coptic translation was translated from) and reasonably argue for a dating in the first half of the second century, such as the around 140 CE date that Pagels suggests. Further supporting Pagel, however (and the possibility that Thomas did not exist at all prior to the second century) is the reality that most of the sayings in Thomas do not appear anywhere else prior to the second century, though that doesn’t mean that some of the individual sayings do not go back to Jesus himself.

So overall, it’s fascinating research but there’s too many questions and too few concrete pieces to work with to be able to say much about the Gospel of Thomas with any certainty.



I consulted Robert Miller's The Complete Gospels, Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels, and Bart Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings in researching for this post.

Vinnie

First to say that Joh nwrote in response to Thomas is misleading.

Thomas was a fluid sayings document. It may have had a final redaction about 110. it also may have had several distinct layers. The earliest material is generally evident in THomas//Q overlapps and any Thomas//Mark overlapps.

Since it is a sem-popular issue I wrote a short response to "why isnt thomas in the bible?

http://www.after-hourz.net/ri/gthomascanon.html

We must also remember that we have, I think--30+ gospels and counting now.

Legion

To state that as fact surely would be, but there's no reason not to present it as theory that is possible.

Something like that, but why is it particularly important that this be remembered right now?

Vinnie

Since Thomas was fluid we would have to ask "what layering" did John respond to? But this is irrelevant. Thomasine type views are present already in 1 Corinthians 1-4 in the fifties. I misread Amaleq. Didn't say John wrote in response to Thomas but Thomas-like views. I have no qualms.

Someone asked why Thomas wasn't included in the canon. There are thirty or more books not included in the canon. Point is in canonization to remember how selevtive the church was out of a lot more diversity that modern readers don't tend to realize.

Vinnie

Legion

Ah, okay. I didn't realize you were responding to that question. In part, it wasn't included because parts of the theology and specific sayings didn't jive with what was considered "orthodox" by the folks creating the canon. There's more to it than that, but that's probably the most important reason.

spin

My understanding as to why Thomas didn't make it was principally because the ones who decided didn't like the plotline.


spin

Vinnie

Or lack of a plotline

Vinnie