J. K. Elliot, ed., The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Clarendon: Oxford University Press 2005). – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198261810/peterkirby Robert J. Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press 1992), pp. 416-418. – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060655879/peterkirby Schneemelcher, Wilhem, ed. Gospels and Related Writings. Translated by R. McL.…

Oxyrhynchus 1224 consists of two small fragments from the late third or early fourth century. J. D. Crossan notes the following in his introduction in The Complete Gospels: “The papyrus is badly mutilated with not even a single complete line anywhere extant. Restorations are therefore highly conjectural. The text does not seem to be dependent…

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…