Article Therein is also demonstrated the relative priority of GosThom to the New Testament’s synoptic gospels, while simultaneously refuting Nicholas Perrin’s argument for a late production of the text from the Diatessaron. See Nicholas Perrin, Thomas and Tatian: The Relationship between the Gospel of Thomas and the Diatessaron (Boston: Brill, 2002). Despite the elimination of…

Article Raymond Brown, Robert Grant and many other scholar came up with the view that the Gospel of Thomas is a 2nd century Gnostic work. On the other hand, Helmut Koester sees the Gospel of Thomas as a first century independent reinterpretation of the sayings tradition. The Gospel of Thomas was written about the same…

The situation is well summarized by this paragraph:Several scholars such as April DeConick, Peter Nagel, A. Guillaumont, and G. Quispel, have advocated for an Aramaic origin of Thomas. Nicholas Perrin has argued for a Syriac original, linking Thomas with Tatian’s Diatesseron. There are others who are more convinced of a Greek origin. R. M. Grant…

The Coptic ‘kingdom’ here is ⲙⲛ̄ⲧⲉⲣⲟ, etymologically from Egyptian mdt pr-ꜥꜣ ‘word/matter of the pharaoh’, but by Coptic times the first element no longer meant ‘word’ and had become a general prefix forming abstract nouns. The Coptic word is used in both the sense of ‘kingdom’ and ‘kingship’. The Coptic ‘heaven’ is ⲡⲉ, the ordinary…

Valantasis’ The Gospel of Thomas (1997) to be a good starting point, and he makes very clear a number of problems in dating the text: Meyer in Jesus Then & Now: Images of Jesus in History and Christology (2001) says that a 1st century dating of Thomas is “reasonable though probably not compelling”, and also…

According to DeConick (http://aprildeconick.com/gospel-of-thomas),The quick answer to this is “no.” The esotericism in this gospel has been misunderstood and mislabeled from the very beginning of its interpretative history. The reason for this has to do with the fact that until the Nag Hammadi texts were found, we didn’t know what Gnostic really was. Scholars tended…

The writings we call gnostic generally depend on the four gospels, as can be seen in Robert Miller’s “The Complete Gospels”: the apocryphal ones rely on the “orthodox” narratives, particularly, surrounding the passion and post-resurrection stories, if only to subvert them. At the same time, as Kurt Rudolph discusses in “Gnosis,” gnostic tendencies were evidently…

What is the Gospel of Thomas?The GTh is “an anthology of 114 ‘obscure sayings’ of Jesus, which according to its prologue, were collected and transmitted by St. Didymus Jude Thomas. The sayings do not appear within a biological narrative about Jesus, although some of them individually contain elements of dialogue or an abbreviated setting. Instead,…

Stevan L. Davies, The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated and Explained (Skylight Paths Pub 2002) – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893361454/peterkirby Stephen J. Patterson, The Fifth Gospel : The Gospel of Thomas Comes of Age (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press 2000). – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563382490/peterkirby Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press 1993). – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944344321/peterkirby Richard Valantasis,…