Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is a unique apocryphal gospel that contains sayings attributed to Jesus, many (but far from all) with parallels in the three "synoptic" Gospels. Unlike them, it does not give any narrative of the life of Jesus, but is instead a "sayings gospel", a collection of the statements of Jesus, and a possible witness of the hypothetical text known as the Q Document, a source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The Gospel of Thomas was rejected during the first Councils which set out to establish the Biblical canon. Cyril of Jerusalem, an early theologian and Doctor of the Church, was one of those who spoke against Thomas. For many centuries, no surviving text was known. A complete Coptic text of The Gospel of Thomas was among those discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt. While not recognized as an authoritative text by any major Christian denomination, many Biblical scholars, and many Christians today, have been fascinated by the picture it paints of early Christian beliefs.

Further reading

• Marvin Meyer, The Gnostic Discoveries, esp. chapter 3, "They Will Not Taste Death": the Wisdom of the Living Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas and the Thomas Texts. Harper Collins Publishers, San Francisco, 2005. ISBN 0-06-085832-X.

• Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas: the Hidden Sayings of Jesus Harper San Francisco, 1992.

• Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas, Vintage Books, New York, 2003. ISBN 0-375-70316-0

Internet resources

• Early Christian writings web site: contains a commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, several translations, and a list of on-line resources