Should Thomas be considered a fifth gospel?

January 27, 2009 Matthew Keedy Clifton Apologetics

In the last few decades, there has been in increasing fascination with the attempt to identify the “real” Jesus. From the so-called Jesus Seminar which sought to take a pen knife to the New Testament to remove “non-authentic” statements of Christ from the Bible, to the work of scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels who claim some writings were unduly excluded from the canon, there has been a movement afoot that denies the picture of Jesus as presented in the New Testament is a full and trustworthy image of the Christ of Christianity.

Scholar Frank Thielman has observed that this attempt to identify the “real” Jesus has placed a great emphasis on noncanonical texts.[1] Among those prominently mined for nuggets of information about the historical Jesus are the hypothetical document called “Q,” the Gospel of Peter, the Secret Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Thomas.

But among these extra-biblical sources, the Gospel of Thomas is one which has received a great deal of attention in this respect. Stevan Davies, for instance, says the Gospel of Thomas is “roughly as valuable as a primary source for the teachings of Jesus as Q, and perhaps more so than the gospels of Mark and John.”[2] In fact, Davies confirms that many of those seeking the “historical Jesus” turn to the Gospel of Thomas as readily as to the synoptic gospels.

Writers including Hengel[3], Cameron[4], Crossan[5] and Valantasis[6] believe the Gospel of Thomas contains sayings of Jesus that represent an independent source from the four gospels of the New Testament, and that these sayings were recorded contemporaneously with the synoptic gospels, if not earlier. Other researchers, such as Bart Ehrman, attempt to make cases for extra-biblical writings, but reject Thomas as a first-century work and call it a forgery,[7] agreeing instead with the conventional dating of the book in the second century. In fact, Ehrman leaves the Gospel of Thomas completely out of his New York Times Bestseller, Misquoting Jesus.[8]

It would be impossible to fully expound upon the various positions taken by scholars on the Gospel of Thomas in this paper. Instead, the focus of this short overview will be to answer three questions. First, what is the Gospel of Thomas, who is the author, and when was it written? Second, does the work reflect the same theologies as the gospels of the New Testament? And third, in light of what is known about the work, should it be accepted as a “fifth gospel,” as some researchers have suggested?

Author and Dating

The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, by peasants digging for fertilizer. The workers unearthed a jar which held 13 leather-bound manuscripts containing 52 written works, most related to Gnostic Christianity. These writings are now known as the Nag Hammadi Library. While the fourth-century manuscripts were written in Coptic, it is generally believed that they were originally taken down in Greek. Some dispute this in the case of Thomas, however, as Nicholas Perrin so argues in some very recent research. Perrin believes linguistic analysis shows that the Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Syriac, not Greek, and later translated into Coptic.[9]

Among the Nag Hammadi writings, only Thomas has received much attention. This is because the piece claims to be written by Didymus Judas Thomas, one of the Twelve (John 11:16), and it contains 114 sayings attributed to Jesus Christ. Many of the sayings are very similar or paraphrases of passages found in the New Testament gospels. Other sayings are completely new. But could the apostle Thomas actually be the author? The plausibility of Thomas the apostle as author is an idea that depends strongly upon the dating of the original document. If Thomas was written in the second century, obviously the apostle could not have been the author.

Up until the recent “historical Jesus” movement, the generally accepted date for the writing of the Gospel of Thomas stood between AD 140-170. The work was definitely known by the middle of the third century, as Origen names the Gospel of Thomas among the many “gospels” the heretics circulated among themselves.[10] Eusebius, Ambrose, and Hippolytus also contain references to the Gospel of Thomas[11]. In all cases the work was categorized as a heretical writing, not as a source of Christian truth.

On the other side of the coin, some radical scholars like John Dominic Crossan of Jesus Seminar fame believe the Gospel of Thomas to have been written “in the fifties C.E.”[12] He uses Thomas in his “first stratum” of information sources of the “historical Jesus.” The assumption is that the sayings of Thomas, since they contain no narrative, are closer in form to the hypothetical Q document, and therefore more pure than the New Testament gospels.

Perrin, however, has made a very good case for a mid-second-century authorship in his linguistic studies. His work shows a strong possibility of dependence upon the Syriac Diatessaron in many ways. He argues that since Thomas shows dependence in this way, it is likely that it was written closer to the time of Tatian’s writing of the Diatessaron AD 173. Additionally, he shows other connections with a Syriac Christian atmosphere. Other scholars had previously investigated the Gospel of Thomas’s apparent connections with Syriac Christianity and early asceticism, including Kathleen E. Corley, who has studied the connections between Saying 61 of Thomas and the communal practices of Syrian ascetic groups.[13]

Perrin’s research seems to add additional weight to the witness of the early Christians. If the Gospel of Thomas was written early as some scholars allege, why did Origen and others reject its authenticity? Thomas would have been among those given perfect and total recall of the teachings of Jesus Christ (John 14:26; 16:13). Had Thomas been an apostolic work, the early Christians would have accepted it, and it would have been part of the accepted canon. The weight of logical evidence seems to be that Thomas was written in the second century between AD 140 and AD 173, and that it was not accepted by orthodox Christians as an apostolic writing. Because of this, the Gospel of Thomas must take its place among the pseudepigrapha.

But who was the author? We cannot know for sure. However, there are some reasons for why a forgery such as this would be made. Seeking to gain respect for a written work, it was a common practice to write under the name of an apostle or prophet in an attempt to pass the work off as inspired. Thielman says such attempts actually solidify the reliability of the four canonical gospels.

The widespread authority of the four canonical gospels is also tacitly confirmed by the production of noncanonical gospels in the second century, such as the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. These gospels mimicked the titles of the four commonly accepted gospels and used much of their content because Matthew, John, Luke and Mark were simply the best and most widely accepted sources for the historical Jesus available. The only hope that the authors and editors of those texts had for gaining them acceptance lay in imitating the commonly accepted gospels.[14]

Another issue in the dating of the Gospel of Thomas has to do with the content, which reflects Gnostic teachings. While not as blatantly Gnostic as many of the other Nag Hammadi writings, Thomas definitely presents Gnostic teachings and beliefs. The theological content of the work will be examined in the next section. But if N.T. Wright is correct in his assessment that the type of Gnosticism displayed by the Gospel of Thomas was unknown until at least the second century,[15] then it would be unwise to date the work earlier and attempt to place it as a source for the canonical gospels.

If early Christian writers rejected the Gospel of Thomas as a heretical forgery, an opinion with which even some modern Biblical revisionists agree, then we should reject it as well. The dating is a problem for acceptance as well, with AD 140 or beyond being well out of the apostolic era. And while the lack of a firm author for a work should not necessarily exclude the inspiration of the work (such as is the case with Hebrews of the New Testament), the dating surely must. Also of great importance would be the teachings the work contains. Do they agree with the accepted inspired writings of the New Testament?

Theological Content

The theological material contained in the Gospel of Thomas reflects the developed Gnostic teachings of the second and third centuries. F.F. Bruce has given a good explanation of the basic tenets of the heretical beliefs:

Gnosticism took a bewildering variety of forms, but basically it teaches salvation through knowledge (gnosis). Its underlying philosophy is a dualism which regards matter as inherently evil, the product of a demiurge or master-workman who is an inferior being to the Supreme God. The Supreme God, being pure in spirit, naturally cannot allow Himself to contract defilement by coming into contact with matter in any way. (Hence Gnosticism cannot accept in their fullness the biblical doctrines of creation, incarnation or resurrection).[16]

Does the Gospel of Thomas show signs of rejecting the basic teachings of Christianity? There is very little narrative in the work, generally only sayings prefaced by “Jesus said.” However, the Gospel of Thomas begins in this way: “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

On the front end of the work, the Gospel of Thomas says salvation is on the basis of gnosis, or knowledge. This is in deep contrast to the gospel of the New Testament. The canonical gospels see a great importance in knowing who Jesus is, what He came to do, and the consummation of those things He came to do. In other words, the death, burial and resurrection are the pivot point of the gospels, and play a crucial role in most of the other books of the New Testament. In fact, Paul says it is by this gospel (the death, burial and resurrection of Christ) that men are saved (1 Cor. 15:1-5).

So right away it may be seen that Thomas places salvation in the realm of knowledge of secrets. Paul, though, says in Romans 16:25-26 that the mystery of salvation has been revealed:

Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but
now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith;

For the Gospel of Thomas to claim hidden knowledge and to say that deciphering these sayings is the key to eternal life runs counter to the New Testament’s admonitions to believe in Jesus as the Son of the Living God (Matt. 16:16-18; John 8:24), repent of sinful actions and turn our minds toward God’s way of doing things (Luke 13:3,5; Acts 17:30), confess Jesus openly as Savior (Matt. 10:32-33; Rom. 10:9-10), and to be baptized into Christ for the remission of sins (Mark 16:16; Acts 2:38; Gal. 3:26-27). This appears to be the “form of doctrine” that Paul and the other apostles delivered in the first century (Rom. 6:17).

With no emphasis on the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, nor man’s commanded response to that gospel, where does that leave Thomas theologically? If Jesus is not presented as Savior, who is He in Thomas? Bloom, for one, seems to identify the Jesus of Thomas more as a mere teacher than a Savior. He writes:

Nothing mediates the self for the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas. Everything we seek is already in our presence, and not outside our self. What is most remarkable in these sayings is the repeated
insistence that everything is already open to you. You need but knock and enter…The emphasis of this Jesus is upon a pervasive opacity that prevents us from seeing anything that really matters.
Ignorance is the blocking agent.[17]

Citing Bloom, one researcher has put forth the idea that the Gospel of Thomas reads more like a Buddhist text than a Christian document.[18] The insistence on salvation being found within the self would seem to confirm this comparison.

Out of the 114 sayings, approximately half have some similarities to the canonical gospels. Space does not permit a discussion of each individual saying. However, we can identify a number of statements that are close to parallel with the canonical gospels, some that are similar but altered or distorted, and some that are completely new sayings. Some have postulated that the “here and there” nature of the sayings reflects a “process of creative borrowing and reworking over time, in which original contributions were combined with traditional materials to create novel literary forms addressed to specific Christian communities.” Such a process could help explain why there is seemingly no consistent pattern of dependence on other sources.

Examining the sayings, one first sees passages that remind one immediately of New Testament parallels. For instance, in Saying 10 we see Jesus saying, “I have cast fire on the world, and see, I am watching over it until it sets aflame.” This is very similar to a portion of a canonical narrative found in Luke 12:49. Looking at Saying 5, we can see a similarity with Matt. 10:26; Mark 4:22; Luke 8:17 and Luke 12:2. Jesus says in Thomas, “Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest.” The passages in Matt. 10:34-36 and Luke 12:51-53 are very similar to what is found in Saying 16:

Jesus said, “Verily, people think that I have come to send peace on the world. But they do not know that I have come to send on earth dissensions, fire, sword and war. Verily, if there are five in a house, they will find themselves ranged three against two and two against three-father against son and son against father-and they will rise up in isolation.”

Saying 39 of the Gospel of Thomas is also very close to Luke 11:52: “The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them, they have neither entered in themselves nor allowed those who wished to enter in to do so.” In this saying, the author of Thomas has emphasized knowledge once again, no doubt applying the term to the saving gnosis that is the theme of the work. Another saying is similar in thought, in which Jesus says, “Woe to them, the Pharisees, because they are like a dog lying on a pile of fodder, who will not eat it of himself and will not allow it to be eaten by anyone else.”

Second, there are sayings that are expanded upon in some form from the ones found in the canonical gospels. An example of this kind is Saying 31, which has Jesus saying, “A prophet is not welcomed in his own town, and a physician works no cure on those who know him.” This saying is paralleled somewhat in all four gospels, but only Luke 4:23-24 has the saying in the context of a physician. Bruce suggests this shows the author of Thomas’s dependence on the gospel of Luke.[19]

In Saying 47, Thomas adds two illustrations to Jesus’ admonition that “no servant can serve two masters, otherwise he will honor the one and be roughly treated by the other.” Additionally, Saying 100 is similar to the Biblical account of Jesus’ teaching on paying taxes to Caesar in Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; and Luke 20:25. One difference in this saying is that in Thomas a gold coin is substituted for the denarius, which is silver. Additionally, Thomas has Jesus saying, “Give Caesar what is Caesar’s, give God what is God’s, and give me what is mine!”

Finally, there are some new sayings as well, some of which strike the modern reader as slightly bizarre. Saying 7 quotes Jesus as stating, “Happy is the lion whom the man eats, so that the lion becomes man; but woe to the man whom the lion eats, so that the man becomes lion!” Saying 8 speaks of a man who is like a wise fisherman who casts his net into the sea and brings up a load of many little fishes and one very large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and kept the big fish without hesitation. The meaning of this parable is not quite clear.

Another statement that seems out of touch with New Testament gospels is Saying 12. In this statement, “James the Just” is the center of the universe!

The disciples said to Jesus: “We know that you are going to leave us: who will be the greatest over us?” Jesus said to them: “In the place where you go, you will betake yourselves to James the Just, on whose behalf the heavens and earth alike were made.”

Perhaps the most outlandish passage is the final saying, No. 114. In this passage, Jesus tells the disciples that Mary must “become male” in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary depart from our midst, because women are not worthy of the life.” Jesus said: “See, I will so clothe her that I may make her a man, in order that she may also become a living spirit like you men. For every woman who becomes a man will enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

From the remarkably similar, to the expanded, to the outlandish, the Gospel of Thomas contains a lot of information on which researchers may speculate. However, knowing what we know about the work, should it really be considered a “fifth gospel?”

A Fifth Gospel?

While it is true that some contemporary researchers are pushing for acceptance of the Gospel of Thomas, one might make the argument that it can hardly be called a “gospel,” since it bears little resemblance to narrative history of the canonical gospels. Missing from Thomas is any mention of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. A gospel without the good news is no gospel at all!

Other considerations should govern any discussion on acceptance. Primary among these would be authorship. It seems evident that Thomas bears no signs of apostolic authorship. The content is wrong for such authorship, and the dating of the material is too late for apostolic authorship. If a work is untruthful about its authorship, why should we seek truth within its pages?

Theological content is also important. With no mention of the resurrection, and almost zero narrative to place the sayings in any sort of context, the Gospel of Thomas seems divorced from the immediacy of the resurrection event and the happenings of Pentecost and the first century.

So what can be made of Thomas and the sayings it contains? After all, many are similar to Biblical passages. Is it proper to see Thomas as a pre-synoptic source for information about the historical Jesus, as Crossan suggests? Or is it a second-century forgery containing bits and pieces of oral remembrances of the teachings of Christ?

F.F. Bruce sums things up well about the Gospel of Thomas when he says that the memorable words of great men are frequently remembered in their own right, without being related to a firm context.

We can see this happening in the case of one of our own great contemporaries, Sir Winston Churchill. Some sayings are attributed to him in oral tradition whose authenticity is doubtful at best, and of
those that may be accepted as genuine many are not securely attached to a historical setting. But from this oral tradition one fact emerges with clarity: Sir Winston Churchill is the kind of man to whom such pithy sayings are credibly assigned; no one would assign a typical Churchillism to his wartime colleague Earl Attle![20]

And so it seems with Jesus Christ. Lacking authorship and dating acceptable for a contemporaneous witness of the resurrection and the birth of the church, lacking in fact any perspective on the resurrection at all, we must see Thomas as a collection of oral remembrances of things Jesus might have said, possibly even things he did say, but Thomas must not be afforded weight as an inspired document. In the search for the “historical Jesus,” the canonical gospels continue to be the surest source available.

WORKS CONSULTED

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[1] Thielman, Frank. Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan) 54.

[2] Davies, Stevan. “The Christology and Protology of the Gospel of Thomas, Journal of Biblical Literature 111/4 (1992) 663-664.

[3] Hengel, Martin. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001) 59-60.

[4] Cameron, Ron. The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) 24-25.

[5] Crossan, John Dominic. Four Other Gospels: Shadows and Contours of Canon (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985) 35-37.

[6] Valantasis, Richard. The Gospel of Thomas. London: Routledge, 1997.

[7] Ehrman, Bart. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 47-65.

[8] Ehrman, Bart. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

[9] Perrin, Nicholas. “Thomas: The Fifth Gospel?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49/1 (March 2006) 67-80.

[10] Origen. Homily on Luke 1.

[11] Bromiley, Geoffrey W., ed. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1979) 186.

[12] Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) 427.

[13] Corley, Kathleen E. “Salome and Jesus at the Table in the Gospel of Thomas,” Semeia (March 22, 1999) 85-94.

[14] Thielman, p. 50.

[15] Wright, N.T., Christian Origins and the Question of God: Vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996) 63.

[16] Bruce, F.F., “The Gospel of Thomas,” Faith and Thought 92.1 (1961) 3-23.

[17] Bloom, Harold, “A Reading,” in Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) 112, 115.

[18] Arnold, Kenneth, “The Circle of the Way: Reading the Gospel of Thomas as a ChristZen Text, Cross Currents 1:1 (Winter 2002) 461.

[19] Bruce, 10.

[20] Bruce, 7.

Apologetics, gnosticism, gospel of Thomas,