The Battle to Authenticate The Gospel of Thomas (original) (raw)
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The Battle To Authenticate \u27The Gospel of Thomas\u27
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 ...
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 Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas
The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, 2015
Seven years, and a bibliography of over 100 pages: that is what Detlev Koepke invested in researching the gospel of Thomas. Over 600 carefully worded pages disclose in great detail his intricate study and findings on Jesus in the gospel of Thomas as well as in the New Testament, and Q. Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist and James are discussed in a separate chapter each, and we are presented with a full translation from Coptic, and a commentary on the gospel of Thomas. The second half of this book focuses on the New Testament and history of Christianity: its historical background, Josephus, Paul, the Roman Empire and Christian persecution are some of the highlights. Detlev Koepke passed away in 2015, leaving behind a truly majestic piece of work on the gospel of Thomas, its relation to Christianity, and the historical Jesus. A most complete work on the combination of these topics. Detlev Koepke was fluent in 4 languages, and learned ancient Greek and Coptic specifically for and during his research. Most of his research was conducted utilising Harvard Divinity School library as well as his own extensive personal library: "no stone has been left unturned". 2021 edition, republished with permission from his son, David Koepke ______________________ +++Version Management+++ Includes Discussion content (92 pages) - see https://www.academia.edu/57161277/Publication\_List\_and\_Discussion\_Content\_access
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.
Tracking Thomas: a text-critical look at the transmission of the Gospel of Thomas
2009
Wallace for his initial thoughts on the transmission of the Gospel of Thomas that pushed me to take up this subject in the first place, his guidance through the initial stages of the formulation of the argument of the paper, and his consistent availability in pursuing the project through its completion. Additionally, many thanks go to Stazsek Bialecki, Adam Messer, Philip Miller, and Matt Morgan, my σύνδουλοι, without whose thoughts, criticisms, and encouragement I would be in the tall grass. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely fiancée Angel, who has put up with many cancelled evenings through the completion of this work. 1 Technically speaking, this statement is untrue: though the Coptic manuscript was discovered approximately 60 years ago, Thomas has been known to scholars in one form or another since the late 19 th century.
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.
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.
A perennial and seemingly irresolvable conflict affecting the studies of early Christianity, the quest for the historical Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels has been whether the Gospel of Thomas and the diverse traditions that it preserves should be dated before or after the Synoptic Gospels. Scholars have primarily tended to resolve the issue by establishing its independence from or dependence upon the Synoptic Gospels. Recently, however, there have been signs that new methods may be opening up new vistas with respect to the dating issue. To name but a few, the diverse scholarship of Nicholas Perrin, April DeConick, and Risto Uro has been devoted to establishing new and creative methods precisely with respect to this problem. This essay seeks to use an alternative methodology whereby we examine a particular logion, in this case logion 53 on circumcision, and attempt to plot its particular teaching on an early Christian trajectory. After briefly surveying a few alternative methods for dating the Gospel of Thomas, we examine logion 53 within the Gospel of Thomas and suggest that its teaching on circumcision fits well within the larger Thomasine context, and then compare it with other early Christian texts on circumcision. We suggest that this logion fits well within a late first century or early second century context.