The Sayings-Block Structure of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (original) (raw)
Complete Thomas Commentary, logion 0-55, 2021
This most detailed analysis of the so-called gospel of Thomas evaluates and weighs every single Coptic word. The "Jesus" (I[h]S) that they reveal is radically different and polemic: Thomas reveals that we are split, separated, dualised; we are the Ego and the Self, and we created those two ourselves. Thomas points the way to salvation in the sense of liberation from both the Ego and the Self, slaveowner and slave: we are neither, those merely are the children of the living father - and we are the latter. The suckling infants in Thomas are still pristine, and stand in the Beginning - but then we bring about the end by "eating what is dead" and become dead ourselves. The cause for that is our upbringing, being patched with old patches: our new wineskins get filled with old wine. Thomas precedes modern psychoanalysis by one and a half millennium, and continuously points to the inside for finding answers: that is where the kingdom is. Thomas has nothing to do with Christianity at all, nor any Jesus that we know: Thomas precedes all that too
The true words of Thomas (Interactive Coptic-English gospel of Thomas)
Literal Thomas, Part VII, 2020
This groundbreaking translation of the "gospel of Thomas" follows the Coptic to the letter and reveals dozens of new words and meanings, significantly changing its interpretation. 'The true words of Thomas' hyperlinks to the Coptic Dictionary Online for each word: everyone is only one click away from the meaning(s) and verification of every single word in this text. The translation is fully normalised and contains a full double index as well as concordance: both English-Coptic as well as Coptic-English. The translation is literal, without interpretation. It contains not a single emendation (and it will reveal that every other translation contains dozens that you never knew of); the entire context for the text is the content of the text itself: and it speaks volumes. ______________________ +++Version Management+++ V1.9.5 2023-07-15 - moved the English translation, which has been rendered fully legible, up front
The Gospel of Thomas: Prospects for Future Research
The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years, ed. John D. Turner & Anne McGuire, 1997
What should our primary goal be as readers and interpreters of the Gospel of Thomas? Which form of the gospel text should we privilege, if any? I suggest that we should seek literary questions and literary answers about Thomas. The text obviously must have meant something to the many readers that we might imagine using the surviving Egyptian manuscripts. Perhaps the arrangement or sequence of statements and groups of statements does indeed convey meaning, though not necessarily the sort of meaning that we see even in other sayings gospels or in wisdom books. To explore this possibility requires adopting a more literary sensibility, a focusing of attention on reading the text in its own terms, searching out its hermeneutical soteriology. The task is difficult, and the meanings provided by stark juxtapositions are not always obvious. Perhaps that obscurity is already part of the point.
David Cielontko – Tobis Nicklas – Jan N. Bremmer (Hrsg.), The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 23), Leuven – Paris – Bristol, Ct, 2025.
Spanning over fourteen centuries, through dozens of versions in nine languages, the ancient and medieval transmission of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (henceforth IGT) is an intricate maze that has puzzled and fascinated scholars over the last three and a half centuries. Although the hypothesis of a Syriac Urtext has been advanced time and again, the current scholarly consensus posits a Greek archetype dating from the 2nd century. The recent discovery of a papyrus with the Greek text dated to the 4th/5th century not only endorses the thesis of a Greek original, but also raises the possibility of a critical reassessment of the oldest surving version in that language, namely recension S (= Gs), considered to be the closest to the original.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Thomasine Tradition
Collectanea Christiana Orientalia, 2023
The debates about various early ‘Christian’ communities are still in an incomplete and tumultuous never-ending process. This paper illustrates that the manufactured theories about ‘community’ or ‘tradition’ do not describe the particular social conditions of textualities such as the Gospel of Thomas. It is very common to the mainstream scholarship of the early Christianities to put together heterogeneous ideas and to understand them as forming a special type of singularity. This is, in our case, the idea of ‘apostle Thomas.’ The scholarly representatives have tried to use complex sets of borrowed methodologies in order to make the historical lines of flight of early Christianity ideas more appealing and to conceal the process of domestication of textualities as the Gospel of Thomas. They have intentionally constructed religious communities, several types of Christians, differences, and similarities; all these aspects have the purpose to join in one wide and domesticated ‘Thomasine’ tradition. This paper aims to follow the lines of flight as they are programmed by the Thomas-scholars in order to deconstruct such approaches and to provide an alternative reading perspective detached by any kind of theological agendum.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels
Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels, 2023
This article moves away from questions of dependence or autonomy to show that comparison of the texts' style and content is fruitful for understanding both Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels. When we read the Synoptics against Thomas, some of the central characteristics of Mark, Matthew, and Luke stand out in higher relief. Differences in theology, narrative structures, genre, and approaches to community formation combine to confirm that early gospel writers had a variety of choices about their modes of representation of the meaning(s) of Jesus. As part of its pattern of distance from Judaism, Thomas shows that it was possible to present Jesus as somehow removed from the thought world of Scripture, even as a source of revelatory or prophetic information.