Truth is under attack. There are many “scholars” who would love to convince an uniformed mind that the early church fathers withheld and destroyed genuine records of Jesus life and words and selected certain works (the books of the New Testament) that would best promote the church’s agenda. Did the early church intentionally pervert the true Jesus? Since the finding of the Gospel of Thomas and many other ancient texts modern scholars claim that the historical Jesus has been lost (Witherington III, 20). Are these claims substantiated though? Is the Gospel of Thomas a trustworthy source that should have been included in the canon? This can only be determined after the facts have been presented.
The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 along with twelve other books full of various Gnostic works. The gospel found at Nag Hammadi was written in Coptic and dates to 400 A.D. (Wilkins, 23). The Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek and fragments of the Greek papyri date to about 200 A.D. (Brill, 117) but can be dated no earlier than 150 A.D. (Wilkins, 23). There is a fair agreement among scholars that the Gospel of Thomas was written after the canonical gospels and that the author relied heavily upon them to compose the work as well (23).
The Gospel of Thomas bears a misleading title. First of all it is deceitful in claiming that it was the apostle Thomas who wrote the book, and secondly because the good news (the gospel) is not even remotely similar to the message of the four canonical gospels. Since the book can be dated to no earlier than 150 A.D. it is impossible that Thomas the apostle wrote it. Thus, even before one begins to read the Gospel of Thomas there is an untrue claim of authorship. The “gospel” presented in the Gospel of Thomas is nothing similar to the Christian Gospel.
Before digging into the contents of this gospel it is important to understand the foundation that influenced the entire thing. Even non-Christian scholars agree that Gnostic theology influenced the book (Brill, 117). At the core of Gnostic belief is that the created world and matter is evil and that everything spirit was good (Douglas, 566). An inferior being created matter and he kept humans from escaping it with the help of archons. Only those who possessed a “divine spark” and had been enlightened could escape from physical existence (566). Gnostic thinking depreciates the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (in fact opposes it) and the concept of salvation is not the idea of being delivered from sin but is self-realization (understanding that one is truly God) (566). Gnosticism had various sects and other beliefs such as elitism and a low view of women. Without understanding these beliefs the Gospel of Thomas comes across very bizarre.
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings, which are similar to Jesus’ sayings in the New Testament Gospels (Boyd, 117). Even though half of the Gospel of Thomas is composed of sayings that are found in the canonical gospels not a single saying is exactly the same as the biblical parallel (Helmbold, 58). The parallels include the parable of the sower, the parable about the fisherman and the catch of fish, Jesus sending the disciples out among the country and instructing them to eat what is given to them, Jesus’ teaching his disciples that he did not come to bring peace to the world but a sword, the parable of the mustard seed, the parable about keeping watch lest a thief break in and steal, Jesus’ teaching about removing the plank from your own eye before helping remove the speck out of your brother’s eye, and various others. Some sayings are capable of either orthodox or Gnostic interpretation but many sayings are blatantly Gnostic (57). It is quite possible that the author of the Gospel of Thomas took canonical sayings and gave them a gnostic twist (59). This seems to best explain how the author created the work. For example, in the parable of the fisherman the fisherman pulled up a net full of small fish but discovered “a fine large fish” and threw back all the small fish and kept the large one (Brill,118). This parable is derived from Matthew 13:47-50 where the fishermen let down their net and pulled up all sorts of fish and separated the good from the bad. The elitist belief held by the Gnostics is taught in this parable instead of the original idea that at the end of the age the good will be separated from the wicked in Matthew. The elitist belief is also seen in the Gospel of Thomas when Jesus’ disciples asked him whom they should follow after he had left them. “Jesus told them, you are to go to James the righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being” (119).
In light of the Gnostic slant in the Gospel of Thomas it should not come as a surprise that the author recorded neither any narratives nor the entire Passion Week, which is so strongly emphasized in the four Gospels (Helmbold, 57). Jesus is the revealer, not the redeemer. Jesus did not come to give his life as a ransom but to teach “secret” truths to his followers in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus teaches to bring forth that which is within us in order to save us but if we do not have it we will die. Jesus teaches that only the solitary will enter the bridal chamber (Brill, 126). In Thomas, Jesus teaches that his light yoke will allow his followers to find “repose” and he also teaches that when the shepherd found the one lost sheep out of the 100 that he told the one lost sheep that he cared for it more than the 99 (129). Jesus teaches that he will make women male so that they too can become a living spirit and enter the kingdom of Heaven (130). The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas resembles nothing of the Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The reliability of the Gospel of Thomas as a genuine source of true historical information is weak. It is absurd to think as the Jesus Seminar does that the canonical gospel writers used both the Gospel of Thomas, a text that dates a century after the New Testament gospels, and the gospel of Q, a “hypothetical gospel” (which really amounts to just a figment of some “scholar’s” imagination), as sources to draw from when they wrote their own accounts of Jesus’ life. On the contrary, if there is anything genuine at all in the Gospel of Thomas it is because the author used the reliable New Testament accounts to compile the text. One cannot say that the Jesus of the four gospels depends on any saying that is found in the Gospel of Thomas (Boyd, 118). Further, the earliest date of the Gospel of Thomas is 150 A.D., but the Gnostic ideas communicated in the Gospel of Thomas are Gnostic ideas that were circulating in the second and third centuries but not in the first (118). To add to the problems of the Gospel of Thomas’ reliability is that the manuscript evidence for the text is weak. There are only a few Greek fragments and the Coptic manuscript found at Nag Hammadi. Compare that to the New Testaments’ 5000 Greek Manuscripts.
The Gospel of Thomas was never under consideration as a text to be included in the canon because it was clearly Gnostic and Gnostic gospels and other Gnostic documents were never under consideration for inclusion in the canon. The early church recognized that they were perversions of the true records of Jesus. On the other hand there were non-gnostic books that were greatly debated over as to whether or not they should be included in the canon. No document written after 120 A.D. was under consideration to be included in the canon because the authors weren’t in direct contact of the apostles (Witherington III, 22). The most likely place that the Gospel of Thomas would have been included in a Christian canon would have been in Alexandria, Egypt because it was the home region of the Nag Hammadi texts, but even there the Gnostic texts were not included in the canon. On top of that there was a clear distinction between the Christian canon and Gnostic works because when the Nag Hammadi documents were found they did not have a single book contained in the New Testament canon mixed in with them (23).
The Gospel of Thomas is evidence of the perversion of early Christianity (Wilkins, 25). The early church fathers did not exclude the Gospel of Thomas from the canon because they were trying to suppress the truth about Jesus, rather they were concerned about preserving the true accounts of Jesus. Origen said, “The Church possesses four Gospels, heresy a great many” (219). Irenaeus said that the Gnostics were like a man who took a mosaic portrait of a king, broke it apart and rearranged the pieces to make a picture of a dog…then called it the kings portrait (Helmbold, 59). Aside from awkward and twisted parallels, the Gospel of Thomas is just that.
Bibliography:
Boyd, Gregory A. Jesus Under Siege. Wheaton: Victor Books, 1995.
Brill, E. J., et. al. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1977.
Douglas, J.D., et. al. The Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Vol. 1. Wheaton: Tyndale House
Publishers, 1980.
Geisler, Norm L. Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. Grand Rapids: Baker Books,
1999.
Guillaumont, A. The Gospel According to Thomas. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
Helmbold, Andrew K. The Nag Hammadi Gnostic Texts and the Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1967.
Wegner, Paul D. The Journey from Texts to Translations. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
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Wilkins, Michael J. and J.P. Moreland. Jesus Under Fire. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing
House, 1995.
Witherington III, Ben. “Why the “Lost Gospels” Lost Out.” Areopagus Journal (2005): 6:5.
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