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The Gospel of Thomas: Is It Beyond Belief?
Due to the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, we're hearing a lot about the Gnostic gospels — books that were not included in the Bible. Craig Blomberg takes a look at the pages of the Gospel of Thomas.
Dan Brown's Missed Opportunity
Thanks to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, millions of people around the world who had never heard of the Gnostic Gospels now know that there was a Gospel (falsely ascribed to) Philip just as there was a Gospel supposedly from Mary Magdalene. Thanks to the National Geographic Society, almost as many people have suddenly heard about the newly translated Gospel of Judas. But bona fide scholars of all theological persuasions agree that little if anything in these documents adds to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, only to the nature of the second- and third-century Gnostic groups that produced them.
Had Brown really done any true research for his fictitious rewriting of Christian origins, he would have chosen the Gospel of Thomas as the one to put forward as disclosing the true nature of the beginnings of Christianity. For here, at least, he would have found a significant minority of (more liberal) scholars in agreement with him.
For example, the Gospel of Thomas is the document to which Elaine Pagels turns in her widely heralded book, Beyond Belief, for an understanding of Jesus to which she can warm, unlike the portraits of Christ in the canonical gospels. This is the document which the Jesus Seminar of the 1990s included along with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as they voted on and color-coded the sayings and deeds of Jesus in the five gospels according to the likelihood that Jesus really did or said the things attributed to Him in each passage.
The Background
But what is the Gospel of Thomas and what is in it? First, it is important to point out that there are two ancient documents sometimes referred to as the Gospel of Thomas. One is also known as the Infancy Gospel, and it contains a series of legends about Jesus' childhood.
The more significant Gospel of Thomas with which we are concerned here is sometimes called the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas or, for those scholars not convinced of its full-fledged Gnostic roots, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Coptic was the language of ancient Egypt and northern Ethiopia. The complete copies of Thomas that were discovered in the Nag Hammadi Library near Chenoboskion, Egypt, just after World War II, were naturally written in that language and stem from the later fourth or early fifth centuries. Fragmentary scraps of some of the identical sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, however, were found in the late 1800s in Greek at another Egyptian site known as Oxyrhynchus.1
The Unambiguous Sayings
The term "Gospel" for this document can easily mislead, because it is not a connected narrative or story like most people think of when they hear the word. Rather it is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus — it reads somewhat like the book of Proverbs. More than half of them begin with no additional context other than, "Jesus said." Occasionally, there are thematic relationships between two or three consecutive sayings, but, to the casual reader, in many cases, there appears to be no rhyme or reason for the order in which the sayings have been arranged.
Almost half of these sayings have at least a partial parallel somewhere in the canonical Gospels. Thus saying 34 reads, "Jesus said, 'If a blind man leads a blind man, they will both fall into a pit'" (cf. Matt. 15:14). Saying 44 has Jesus declaring, "whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven" (cf. Mark 3:28-29). Saying 48 finds Jesus announcing, "If you make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move away,' and it will move away" (cf. Mark 11:23).
Almost a third of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas fit in very well with hypotheses of a Gnostic origin for this "Gospel."2 Thus saying 3b reads, "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."
Or again, saying 29 proclaims, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty." In other words, it is amazing that the corruptible could come from the incorruptible, but it would be even more amazing if it were the other way around.
The Ambiguous Sayings
The remaining sayings in Thomas are not paralleled in the New Testament, are not demonstrably Gnostic, and could be acceptable, depending on their interpretation, to Gnostic or orthodox Christians alike. The shortest of Jesus' teachings in this collection is saying 42: "Become passers-by." But what does that mean? Treat this fallen world as if you are just a visitor passing through it? The Jesus of the New Testament could have taught that. Or treat the material universe as that which you long to divest yourself of? Now the saying becomes blatantly Gnostic and both anti-Jewish and anti-Christian.
Or what of saying 56: "Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world"? Does this mean that if people align themselves with the fallen world system they will die, but that if they recognize this fact and become true Gnostics their spirits will transcend this world now in part and fully after death? It's hard to be sure because of the cryptic nature of these sayings.
This third category of sayings has particularly intrigued scholars, because it is always possible that it includes a few authentic teachings of Jesus that were handed down through oral tradition though never included in the canonical Gospels. After all, Acts 20:35 describes Paul quoting Jesus' teaching, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," which never appears in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.
Some of Thomas's sayings that have the "ring" of the historical Jesus include saying 98 — a parable: "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 in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man." One thinks especially of the parables of the tower builder and king going to war in Luke 14:28-32. Or consider saying 82: "he who is near Me is near the fire, and he who is far from Me is far from the Kingdom."
In other instances, some scholars have speculated that sayings in Thomas that do have canonical parallels might actually preserve the oldest and most authentic forms of those sayings. Particularly noteworthy are a number of parables that closely resemble their canonical counterparts except that they are noticeably shorter and less susceptible to allegorizing. Thomas' version of the parable of the wheat and weeds declares:
The Kingdom of the Father is like a man who had [good] seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, 'I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.' For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.'
Unlike in Matthew, no interpretation of the parable follows.
At the same time, a close reading suggests that this is really a drastic abbreviation of a longer original. Who are the "them" that the farmer prevented from weeding? Only the canonical version is fully intelligible at this point; they are the farmer's servants. Indeed, a careful study of the 11 parables of Thomas that have parallels in the New Testament discloses that nine are shorter and actually abbreviated. Despite claims to the contrary, the oral tradition behind the canonical and non-canonical Gospels more often than not shortened and streamlined lengthy narratives, rather than expanding and embellishing them.
Which Came First: The Synoptics or Thomas?
Thus when the Jesus Seminar postulates as a premise, not even to be demonstrated, that Thomas stems from the mid-first century, they are choosing a date about 100 years earlier than any hard evidence actually supports. A powerful argument for not dating Thomas until well into the second century involves the fact that Thomas contains parallels to every one of the four canonical Gospels and to every layer of those Gospels — material unique to each one, material shared by two of the three Synoptics (that is, Matthew, Mark and Luke), material found in all three Synoptics, and language that appears to reflect the final editing of Mark by either Matthew or Luke or both.
The odds of every one of these strands of Gospel tradition having known and borrowed from the comparatively short, unorthodox Thomas are miniscule compared with the probability of Thomas simply having drawn widely from the finished form of the canonical Gospels after they started to circulate together, probably no earlier than mid-second century.3
It's All or None
It is understandable why scholars like Pagels, as well as many people in other occupations, are attracted to the teachings of Thomas or to Gnosticism more generally. For individuals raised in churches or religions that have an elaborate hierarchy, that mediate the presence of God through their church leaders, here is a religion that offers direct, special knowledge of God and freedom to think and act for oneself. But modern-day supporters of ancient Gnostic thought are typically very selective about what they will endorse. Thomas, like the other Nag Hammadi texts is very anti-Jewish, condemning such standard Jewish rituals and virtues as circumcision, fasting and almsgiving.
Thomas, like most Gnostic literature, scarcely supports modern feminism the way many allege. Saying 114, notoriously, climaxes the Gospel of Thomas with Peter telling Jesus and the other disciples, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life." Jesus replies, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Gnostics promoted celibacy far more often than endorsing sexual indulgence. These facts are conveniently suppressed by most modern-day supporters of Gnosticism or the Gospel of Thomas!
C O F F E E S H O PWhat do you think of the authority of the Gospel of Thomas? Does it have any?
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The title of Pagels' book, Beyond Belief, thus better applies to Thomas than to orthodox Christianity. The non-canonical Gospels truly are "beyond belief." But because Thomas actually resembles the canonical Gospels quite often, Dan Brown might have even gotten scholarly support for part of his otherwise vacuous revision of Christian history had he appealed to this Gospel. But the utter lack of correspondence between most everything Brown labels "fact" and the true facts suggests that his "research" never came close to being that sophisticated.
- These dated to as early as the mid-second century. Scholars have typically assumed, therefore, that the Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek, probably sometime between A.D. 100 and 150. Back^
- Gnosticism was a branch of Greek philosophy that believed that the material world was inherently evil, so that salvation involved immortality of the soul but not resurrection of the (material) body. Already in this life, the Gnostic began to experience that salvation through true "knowledge" (Greek, gnosis) — not everyday knowledge that parents or teachers could impart, but the knowledge of secret, often esoteric revelations given to the elite humans who recognize the spark of divinity embedded within them and begin to fan it into flame. Jesus, when introduced into this belief system, becomes the supreme Revealer of Wisdom (Greek, Sophia), not the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. Back^
- Nicholas Perrin at Wheaton College, moreover, has translated our Coptic Thomas back into the Syriac language, in which the earliest known Gospel harmony (an interweaving of all of the information in the four gospels into one, narrative account), Tatian's Diatessaron (from the Greek for "through four"), was composed in A.D. 180. Perrin observes that the resulting text discloses "catchwords" — terms that are either identical synonyms or homonyms — that link every single saying to the sayings that precede and follow it. In neither Coptic nor Greek does this occur more than half the time. Perrin plausibly postulates that Thomas was therefore first written in Syriac and relied on the Diatessaron for its knowledge of the canonical Gospel tradition (since, to our knowledge, no other Syriac text of the Gospels yet existed). This means that we have dated the Greek Oxyrhynchus fragments a bit too early, that the finished form of Thomas cannot be earlier than the late second century and that the likelihood of it containing more reliable information about the teaching of Jesus than the first-century canonical Gospels is almost nil. Back^
Craig Blomberg is a distinguished professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. In addition to writing numerous articles in professional journals, multi-author works, dictionaries and encyclopedias, he has authored or edited 15 books, including The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Interpreting the Parables, Jesus and the Gospels, Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Posessions, Making Sense of the New Testament, Preaching the Parables, and Contagious Holiness: Jesus' Meals with Sinners.
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