The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is a sayings gospel: not a narrative of Jesus's life, death and resurrection, but a collection of 114 sayings (logia) attributed to "the living Jesus," strung together with little framing and no passion story. Many have close parallels in the canonical gospels, especially the sayings-source material shared by Matthew and Luke; others are distinctive and enigmatic, presenting salvation as the recognition of a divine light within and of a kingdom "spread out upon the earth" but unseen. A complete Coptic text was found among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, and it was then realised that three Greek fragments found at Oxyrhynchus around 1900 were pieces of the same work, so part of the text was in scholars' hands before its identity was known.

The 1945 Nag Hammadi discovery, thirteen leather-bound Coptic codices found near that Egyptian town, is now generally understood to be a collection buried by monks from a nearby Pachomian monastery, possibly in response to a fourth-century episcopal letter condemning uncanonical texts, which places its burial within a datable moment of canon enforcement even though the sayings themselves are older. Comparison between the complete Coptic text and the three earlier Greek Oxyrhynchus fragments shows real differences in wording and even in the number and order of sayings, evidence the text circulated in more than one recension. Whether some sayings preserve tradition independent of, and possibly earlier than, the canonical gospels, a question associated especially with the Jesus Seminar's evaluations, remains contested among specialists.

Two questions dominate discussion. The first is date: proposals range from as early as the mid-first century, which would make parts of it as old as, or older than, the canonical gospels, and an independent witness to the words of Jesus, to the mid-second century, with many scholars settling on a composite text with an early core and later additions. The second is classification: Thomas is routinely labelled "Gnostic," but a number of specialists (Elaine Pagels among those who have written most influentially on it) argue that this is imprecise, since the text lacks the developed Gnostic myth of a fallen creator-god and reads more as early Christian wisdom and mysticism with an ascetic, inward cast. Both questions matter because they bear on how far the surviving canon reflects a narrowing of a once far more varied early Christianity, the larger theme that the Nag Hammadi discovery forced onto the study of Christian origins.