Soteriology in the Gospel of Thomas in Contrast to Orthodox Christianity (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
2018
Within the relevant literature there have been different (often conflicting) approaches to the issue of the sources of the Gospel of Thomas. This topic is connected to the relationship between Th and the Synoptics (and other early Christian texts)—hence, to the vexata quaestio of Th’s “dependence”/“independence.” The article begins with some methodological considerations on the composition and sources of Th, also trying to provide a list of the sources that have been proposed for this gospel. The second part examines the possibility of a relationship between Th and the Pauline epistles, a theme which is emerging with new perspectives in the research on Th’s sources and parallels: some of Th’s logia seem to have connections with certain Pauline trajectories and texts. The final part focuses on Th 17 and 1 Cor 2:9, also exploring their relationship with some parallel texts (e.g. 1 Clem. 34.8, Turfan M 789, and 1 John 1:1), in order to investigate the possible sources of Th 17.
The Battle to Authenticate The Gospel of Thomas
LUX: A Transdisciplinary Writing and Research Journal of the Claremont Graduate University, 2013
Many early Christian sects were aware of and accepted The Gospel of Thomas as authentic Christian scripture, despite its unorthodox, radical doctrine, igniting an ideological battle in and around the Thomasine communities of the ancient world. This ideological war is still raging and conflict renewed and amplified with the discoveries of the Greek and Coptic texts of The Gospel of Thomas in the first half of the 20th Century. Since it’s discovery, The Gospel of Thomas has presented scholars with ferocious debate, as serious probability exists that Thomas preserves an older tradition of the historical Jesus than that of the Synoptic Gospels. Though the fierce theological battle of religious scholars in the 1990s hardly sparked The Gospel of Thomas debate, their combined research has renewed questions of how to validate Thomas, and thus, Jesus scholarship over the last half century has been restrained in the use and acceptance of Thomas. Failure of modern scholars to develop a shared understanding of the proper role of The Gospel in reconstructing Christian origins underscores the importance of accurately dating documents from antiquity. Progress in Thomasine studies requires exploration of how texts and traditions were transmitted and appropriated in the ancient world. The greatest contribution of Thomas’ discovery will be to deepen knowledge and understanding of early Christianity. The Gospel clearly bares witness to an independent branch within early Christianity and is a prime example of the diversity of the early Christian Church.
HOW THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS WORKS
Pp.261-280 in William Arnal, Richard Ascough, Robert Derrenbacker, and Philip Harland, eds., Scribal Practices and Social Structures among Jesus Adherents: Essays in Honour of John S. Kloppenborg. Leuven: Peeters, 2016
Of the documents unearthed near Nag Hammadi in 1945 1 , none has attracted so much attention, scholarly and otherwise, as the Gospel of Thomas. The second volume of David Scholer's Nag Hammadi Bibliography, for instance, covering the period from 1970 to 1994 2 , devotes 39 pages to listing academic bibliography on Thomas. To put this in perspective, consider that Scholer requires a scant six pages to list all books, articles, reviews, and dissertations on the Apocryphon of John over a period of more than two decades. In 2012 alone, three significant new Englishlanguage books on Thomas were released 3 ; in 2014, Journal for the Study of the New Testament had a special issue largely devoted to Thomas, Simon Gathercole published a full-blown commentary 4 , and Stephen Patterson published a popular treatment 5 . The fact that Thomas is so disproportionately (at least vis-à-vis the other Nag Hammadi writings) the subject of scholarly interest means that most avenues relating to original language 6 , 1. Or otherwise acquired. See n.D. LewIs -J.
Contribution to Early Christianity Timeline - Gospel of Thomas Entry
2014
An entry on the "Gospel of Thomas" will be displayed as part of a larger timeline on Early Christianity and will be accessible online. The entry will cover basic information on the text with separate sections on the categories of logia in the GTh, the identity of Jesus as it relates to the Christology of GTh, relation to the NT and other early Christian texts, and a conclusion highlighting the importance of GTh in understanding how Christianity developed.
The Gospel of Thomas: The "Fifth Gospel" or a Writing that Excludes Itself from the Canon
Annales Theologici, 2021
In the first centuries of Christianity many writings appeared bearing the title “Gospel” yet only four of them ended up being recognized as such and as worthy of being read, copied, revered and transmitted through the ages until our day. The rest were considered spurious and most ended up being lost to posterity. Thanks to the new-found interest in archeology in the 19th and 20th centuries, many of them have been found and made available for scholarly study. One of these—the Gospel of Thomas—has received a great deal of interest mainly due to its similarity both in its form to the hypothetical document “Q” of the two source theory behind the formation of the synoptic Gospels, as well as in some of its contents to some of the sayings of the Lord found in the canonical Gospels. That of course raises the question: why was the Gospel of Thomas not included among the canonical Gospels? In this paper, we will examine the concept of “Gospel” in a bid to elucidate what it is that was found to be common to the 4 canonical Gospels and yet lacking in the Gospel of Thomas, so much so that, despite the similarities with the other four, it ended up being altogether rejected.