In this post I want to offer a few thoughts about the most popular of the “other Gospels” – The Gospel of Thomas. Before Thomas was discovered, we knew of about half a dozen references to a Gospel in his name. Once again, it is not that anyone believed that the actual Thomas – one of Jesus’ disciples, the one who gets a bad rap for demanding to see Jesus’ actual wounds – wrote it, but that it was assigned to his name. Then, in the 1890s, archaeologists dug up thousands of papyri (fragments of old “books”) in Egypt, a few of which were portions of The Gospel of Thomas. But they didn’t know what it was until 1945 when the Nag Hammadi library was discovered elsewhere in Egypt. There we found a copy of Thomas in an ancient language called “coptic.” The book consists of 114 sayings supposedly attributed to Jesus. I will make just a few points about Thomas, all of which will indicate that while fascinating, it gives us no new insight into the real Jesus of first century Palestine.
The first overall point I want to make is that The Gospel of Thomas is considerably later than the NT period and fits best within a late second century context. It is demonstrably connected to Christians in Syria who thrived at the end of the second century. Here’s why I think this:
(1) The Gospel of Thomas contains elements that are very Gnostic. (See the main elements of Gnosticism in the previous post.) Here is the last half of saying 3: “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.” This is exactly what we’d expect from Gnosticism, which didn’t take root in Christianity until long after the time of Jesus.
(2) Thomas alludes to almost half of the New Testament books. Anyone fairly familiar with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as well as Paul’s letters and other NT books, will notice allusions throughout the document. So either Thomas stands behind the entire New Testament as what would have to be the most important and earliest Christian document of all (which no one believes), or it was written sufficiently later than the New Testament so as to be familiar with its contents. If the latter is true, which it almost certainly is, much of what it says about Jesus depends on our canonical picture; the rest can best be explained, once again, by later Gnostic influences.
(3) Thomas quotes distinctive forms of Jesus’ sayings created by a guy named Tatian, who wrote the first “harmony of the Gospels” (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John blended into one unified narrative). Tatian wrote his Diatessaron (which means “through the four”) in Syriac in AD 175. The order and arrangement of Thomas also seems dependent on Tatian’s work.
(4) The Gospel of Thomas refers to Thomas as “Judas Thomas,” a name found in the Syrian church and nowhere else. The Syrians were into mysticism and elitism and were pretty anti-wealth, anti-businessmen, and anti-commercialism, which fits well with some elements of Gnosticism.
(5) Though some argue that there is an earlier Greek version that precedes the Syriac and Coptic versions, Thomas was most likely first written in Syriac. How do we know? In Greek and Coptic, it seems like a random collection of sayings. But when translated into Syriac, each of the consecutive sayings are connected by certain catchwords. So saying one has a word that is also in saying two, saying two has a different word that is also in saying three, and so on. This only works in Syriac, and otherwise there is no order to the collection. Of course it’s possible that there was just never an intended order, but it’s not as likely.
The last point I want to make is that The Gospel of Thomas is not the pseudo-Enlightened Jesus-for-the-21st-century that some suggest. This is important to realize because all the fluff about replacing the traditional Jesus with this new cool Jesus of the hidden gospels needs to be fleshed out a bit if it’s to be anything but rhetorical justification for avoiding God’s claims on our lives. I’ll just offer one example – the way The Gospel of Thomas talks about women in contrast to women in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Here is last of Thomas’ 114 sayings:
Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.” Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
Not exactly friendly to women, if I may say so. Of all the degrading “religious” things I could think of saying to women, teaching that they will be made men in order to receive salvation tops the list. In contrast, as we will talk about some this weekend, Scripture’s Gospels presents women as very active in the life of Jesus. In fact, Jesus sometimes broke social codes quite blatantly. In addition to the obvious examples (talking to the Samaritan woman, allowing a “sinful woman” to wash his feet with her hair), consider the familiar story of Mary and Martha. Martha was busy washing the dishes, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. Martha got upset and told Jesus to tell Mary to help in the kitchen, to which Jesus famously responded: “Mary has chosen what is better.” The point is often made that Mary is a “contemplative” who was silently and softly meditating on Jesus. I’m sure she was, but that’s not all that was going on here. The only reason you’d sit at a Rabbi’s feet would have been to one day become a Rabbi yourself. Jesus is affirming Mary’s breaking of social rules, her refusal to “stay in her place,” so to speak. Anyhow, the point is that the new Gospels aren’t as good as advertised, and the canonical Gospels aren’t as lame as claimed.
Tomorrow I’ll conclude these reflections on the other Gospels with a short summary post. Glad you guys are interested in this stuff!
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