Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

THOMAS, GOSPEL OF

(II, 2)

A Coptic document buried near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, ca. a.d. 340, containing “the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.” Like most of the early Christian Coptic texts in the Nag Hammadi library, it is a translation of what originally was a Greek text. Less than 10 percent of the material in the Coptic manuscript exists in the fragmentary Greek manuscripts written ca. a.d. 140 and found earlier in the remains of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. Both Didymos (Greek) and Thomas (Aramaic) mean “the twin,” so Judas, the supposed author of the text, had a bilingual nickname. Who this man was is unknown, but it is highly unlikely that he was Jesus’ disciple Thomas.

A list of at least 150 separate sayings attributed to Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas is the most important noncanonical Christian text for inquiry into the teachings of the historical Jesus. Scholars divide those sayings into units (some containing several sayings) separated by the very common introductory phrase “Jesus said.” This manner of division results in a set of 114 sayings, the basis of the numbering system used by all scholars today. The structure of the Gospel is an almost random list of separate sayings connected sometimes by “catchwords” (words which appear in several sayings in a row). This is evidence that Thomas may indeed be what it says it is, a list put together from memory by an individual. There are few glosses and little commentary in the text itself. What little there is emphasizes a theme of unity, e.g., making the two one, becoming a single one, but the question “two what into one what?” is never clearly answered.

Both Q and Thomas are lists of sayings, having about one third of their sayings in common, but they are not otherwise connected. Thomas is not Q, nor a source for Q, nor is Q a source for Thomas. The Q hypothesis does, however, gain strength from the fact that Thomas proves that lists of sayings did circulate in the early churches.

More than half of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas also appear in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (very few also appear in John). Most of the remainder are otherwise unknown. Many of those hitherto unknown sayings indicate that the kingdom of the Father is to be found now, within people and spread out upon the earth. Discovery of the kingdom of the Father requires, in the Thomasine view, discovery of the light within oneself and realization that the kingdom has been present, although invisibly, since the beginning of time. From the Thomasine perspective, Jesus came to earth to reveal the hidden presence of the kingdom. Some call these perspectives “gnostic,” others “proto-gnostic”; still others simply find them to reflect ideas common in 1st-century Platonism and see no need to apply the loaded term “gnostic” to Thomas.

Although Thomas contains sayings parallel to material unique to the Synoptic Gospels and a considerable number of sayings that are also found in Q, the additions and contextualizations and elaborations of sayings that characterize the efforts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as they worked to include Jesus’ sayings into their Gospels are almost completely lacking here. It is highly unlikely that Thomas went through the three Synoptic Gospels, carefully cutting sayings from their narrative contexts and eliminating in detail the additions to sayings that we have reason to believe were put there by the Synoptic authors. The versions of the sayings in Thomas that are also found in the Synoptic Gospels often form critically less elaborated versions lacking allegorical commentary and narrative context, and so they appear to be in more primitive forms. Such considerations allow scholars to conclude that the Gospel of Thomas came into being as an independent document, deriving its sayings from oral tradition and not from the canonical Gospels. Because it was repeatedly copied by Christian scribes, who at any point may have inserted elements they knew from other Gospels into the Thomas text they were copying (a process called “scribal harmonization” that is well known to text critical scholarship of the NT), Thomas in some places shows knowledge of details found in canonical Gospels. While some scholars believe that these details prove Thomas’ dependence upon the canonical texts, that perspective is less frequently adopted today than it was decades ago.

The date of the Gospel of Thomas is unknown. Because it is simply a list of sayings, and because it made use of material circulating in early oral tradition, Thomas may derive from the same time as Q, ca. 50-80. Indeed, recent scholarship has shown that Q was a more organized sayings list than Thomas, a fact that hints at a somewhat later date for Q. However, scholars who take the view that Thomas is a gnostic text tend to date its origin to the early to mid-2nd century. Similarly, the place of Thomas’ origin is unknown. Various documents having to do with the Apostle Thomas seem to have originated in Syria, although at a considerably later date than the Gospel of Thomas, and so some argue that Thomas also probably originated there. Alternatively, because it was well known in Oxyrhynchus at an early date, it is possible that Thomas is an early example of Egyptian Christianity.

Two parables found in the Gospel of Thomas are particularly interesting because they show every sign of having been spoken by Jesus himself, and yet they are not to be found in the canonical Gospels. They are:

97. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of the [Father] is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking [on] a road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realize it; she had noticed no accident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty.”

98. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall to order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man.”

The following two sayings seem to express a particularly Thomasine view of the teachings of Jesus:

3. Jesus said, “If those who lead you say, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky 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.”

113. His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” ˂Jesus said,˃ “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

Bibliography. S. Davies, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York, 1983); A. D. DeConick, Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas. VCSup 33 (Leiden, 1996); M. W. Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas (San Francisco, 1992); S. J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, 1993).

Stevan Davies

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

THOMAS, GOSPEL OF

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)