The Tommentary: Interpreting the Gospel of Thomas

By Robert M. Price

Previous commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas have tended mainly to make this intriguing text less understandable to the general reader, not less. Choking on their authors' methodology, these commentaries are more about them than the text. Robert M. Price brings striking clarity to a fascinating text, bridging the dusty centuries. Price draws on the learning of his predecessors while providing many new interpretations. Does Thomas use the canonical gospels? Or was it written earlier? Why was it excluded from the canon? Is it Gnostic? Watch out! Thomas may become your favorite gospel!

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456601706

Robert M. Price

Robert M. Price is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute as well as the editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism.

Book preview

Introduction: The Thomas Gospel

The ensuing commentary presupposes certain information about the composition of the gospels and the make-up of early Christianity. Though this material will be familiar to readers who are conversant with critical New Testament scholarship, others may find the following summary useful in understanding the commentary.

Gospel Sources

Anyone who has read the four canonical gospels has no doubt noticed a large degree of overlap, even of verbal repetition, between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Most scholars adopt the following explanation of this phenomenon.¹ It seems that the two earliest surviving sources of information about Jesus, collections of his sayings and stories about him, were the Gospel of Mark written in Greek some time after 70 CE (I would date it some three decades later), and a list of sayings that scholars have dubbed Q, for the German Quelle, source. It was compiled and written in Aramaic, perhaps in more than one draft, around 50 CE as some think² (I would place it contemporary with Mark, maybe a bit earlier if we think he used it in a few instances).³ Some years or decades later, Matthew, a catechist in the bi-lingual, bi-ethnic church at Antioch, decided to prepare his own expanded, clarified, and corrected edition of Mark. Since he was striving for a definitive book about Jesus he decided to use most of the sayings of Jesus recorded in Q, which he translated and interspersed at various points in Mark’s narrative. He used some other material from a third source, which we call M. denoting special Matthean material found nowhere else. This M material may have come from oral tradition (what people were repeating, rightly or wrongly, as sayings of Jesus), or from other documents unknown to us—or, as I think most likely, from Matthew’s own sanctified imagination.

Independently of Matthew, Luke also decided to improve on Mark. Though he used somewhat less of Mark’s text than Matthew did (about 65% compared to Matthew’s 95%), he, too, used Mark as the basis for his enlarged version. He also used his own (or at least a different) translation of Q. He, too, had special material which we denominate as L. Again, some or all of the L material seems to come from Luke’s own creative pen, but some may have come from floating oral tradition. Things are probably a bit more complicated than this with Luke. There is some reason to think he may have written a first, now lost, edition (Proto-Luke)⁴ that supplemented Q with L. Then someone showed Luke a copy of Mark’s gospel, and he decided it was too good to ignore, so he went back to the drawing board, combining Proto-Luke with Mark to create our canonical Gospel of Luke. Others think this gospel began with what is called Ur-Lukas, the Gospel of Marcion. This theory eliminates Q and holds that this evangelist compiled something answering more or less to Proto-Luke but with some so-called M material to boot. According to this theory,⁵ Matthew used both Mark and the Ur-Lukas. So did Luke, the redactor (editor) of our canonical Third Gospel. In fact, there is good reason for thinking this Lukan redactor was Polycarp of Smyrna.⁶ He would have omitted some of the Ur-Lukas material that Matthew did include, and he would have added a good deal more material, including the Nativity story we find in Luke 1-2. And there are other theories besides, but they will not concern us here.

How is the reader to determine which sayings and stories in Matthew and Luke come from Q, Mark, M, or L? Of course we can compare the two finished gospels Luke and Mathew with Mark, but no copy of Q survives (if there was a Q!). Yet we are not left with a great mystery. Whatever material is found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark represents the other common source of Matthew and Luke: Q. And obviously whatever is only in Luke is L material. If it is only in Matthew it is by definition M material.

The fourth gospel, John, written, as most think, about 100 CE (I say fifty years later), looks quite different from the other three. The others, because of the shared perspective, are called the Synoptic (seeing together) gospels. Many scholars (me included) think John had read the Synoptics but did not copy material directly out of the texts as Matthew and Luke did from Mark. Others, like C.H. Dodd, make a good case that John had never laid eyes on the Synoptics. Rather, he would have made his own fresh selection from the Jesus-traditions current in his own circles, perhaps in Asia Minor. He would have filtered this material through his own theological lens, much of it in his own words, or the distinctive lingo of his sect.⁷

The issue at stake in John meets us everywhere in the critical study of the gospels: the evangelists were not reporters. Most likely, none was an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus (much less of his nativity or the temptation!), and there is really no telling whether Jesus actually did or said what any gospel ascribes to him at any point. The gospel writers (evangelists) seem to have attributed their own ideas to Jesus, updating him for new generations of disciples, so to speak. And the long chain of unknowns who transmitted the oral tradition (whether under the watchful eye of the apostles or completely outside their jurisdiction) may have, must have, made their own contributions. There must have been prophets who felt impelled to speak with the voice of the risen Christ (Verily I say unto you…!).⁸ What in the gospel, then, did Jesus say or do? For faith this ought to be irrelevant: all the stories and sayings (if you’ll forgive a subjective judgment) seem to breathe much the same prophetic spirit even when they contradict one another or feature anachronisms. Nonetheless, contradictions and anachronisms do pose puzzles for the historian to solve, and we might as well try to solve them. But why should the post-Jesus authorship of any Jesus saying make it any less worthy? Do we discount the teaching of the epistles because Jesus didn’t write them?

Where, you may be asking, does Thomas fit into all of this? Some scholars maintain that the Gospel of Thomas drew on two or more of the Synoptics,⁹ but many others think Thomas is like Q, an independent collection of oral tradition¹⁰ (though not necessarily without new creations by the evangelist). Where Thomas’ sayings parallel or overlap with canonical sayings, these scholars deem Thomas’ more primitive (original) in form.¹¹ I believe that Thomas would not read as it does if its evangelist/redactor were simply working from copies of Matthew and Luke, etc. Yet I also believe I detect stubborn instances where Thomas does seem to reflect either a harmonization of two canonical gospels’ versions of a saying or the unique redactional perspective of one of the canonical evangelists.

These factors lead me to propose a compromise solution: I suggest that Thomas does indeed draw independently on oral tradition, hence this gospel’s possible occasional preservation of earlier, simpler versions of sayings also found in the canonical gospels. But Thomas also compiled his gospel after the canonical gospels (at least after the Synoptics) yet without direct access to them. Matthew and Luke each had copies of Mark to work from, open on his scriptorium. Thomas did not. He remembered sayings as best he could from having heard them read in church; or else, other people quoting the gospel texts without direct access to them caused the sayings to re-enter the stream of oral tradition after pausing in stable, written form for a while. Memory quotations of the gospels have fed back into the oral tradition, as if a stream should branch off a river for a while, gather fertile silt along the way, and then later rejoin the river downstream. Thus Thomas presents some sayings which had survived in oral tradition independent of their written canonical versions, alongside others which preserve Matthew or Luke’s redactional coloring, though not word for word, because they had come to circulate orally anew, quoted from memory from hearing them in church.¹²

Another reason I think it less likely that, e.g., the parable of the Rich Fool or of the Wheat and the Tares survives independently in Thomas is that, for various reasons, the L and M versions seem to be cut from the redactional cloth of each evangelist. In other words, from studying them in the contexts of Mathew and Luke, I think they make good sense as redactional creations originating in these gospels. I think most of the M and L material had no pre-textual existence in oral tradition at all. Or, they first entered the stream of oral tradition once people began loosely repeating them by word of mouth with no direct availability of the texts from which they were derived.

The most exciting thing about the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas is the possibility that it contains hitherto-unknown (or, better, hitherto-forgotten) sayings of the historical Jesus. Does it? My comments on individual sayings will treat the question of historical genuineness, but at the outset I may say that Thomas’ case is little different from those of Matthew, Luke, or John. That is, we can often detect material created by the evangelist himself by its stylistic or theological distinctiveness. If a particular saying, story, parable, etc., features style, vocabulary, ideas, unique (or nearly so) to a particular gospel, we have to assume it is that evangelist’s own creation. Of course it is always possible a gospel writer happened to hear and include some Jesus saying that none of the others recalled or thought worth mentioning, but if the style of the saying is characteristically Lukan, Matthean, or Johannine (and very many are), we not only may but must doubt its authenticity.¹³ (I’m leaving Mark out of this simply because the only reason there are any uniquely Markan sayings (very few) is that Matthew and Luke didn’t pick them up.) In just this way, a number of sayings unique to Thomas seem to share a common theology and style and so must be considered that evangelist’s own creations. Some, however, of the uniquely Thomasine sayings show no such characteristics. They remain in contention, though there may turn out to be other reasons to doubt them.

Wisdom’s Twin

If we can, as I have just suggested, recognize certain stylistic or theological markers of the compiler of the Gospel of Thomas, it remains no easy task to know precisely who he was. It is most likely we will never know, and if by some fluke his real name did come to light, it would almost certainly mean nothing to us anyway. But Thomas is either a pseudonym or a title supplied by a scribe for an anonymous work. It seems that it was Polycarp of Smyrna¹⁴ who first chose and edited the canonical four gospels, none of them hitherto bearing any titles, but simply known, each in a different region or church, as the gospel. He chose apostolic names for two of them, Matthew functioning as a pun for mathetes, disciple, a prominent theme in the book, and John in order to counter the suspicions that the originally Gnostic work (which Polycarp edited, censored, and padded) was the heretical screed of Cerinthus. (Why take the trouble? John was the only gospel on hand that provided the basis for the Eastern churches’ practice of observing Easter according to the Passover calendar of the Jews, and Polycarp wanted to mollify this wing of the church.) Mark and Luke were given their sub-apostolic names because, though adjusted to Catholic orthodoxy, they were deemed inferior or disturbingly different from the other two, hence were supplied secondary (fictive) links to the apostles Peter (for Mark) and Paul (for Luke). This was also a way of reinforcing the unity Polycarp was concerned to build between Catholicism (whose figurehead was Peter) and Marcionites (who venerated Paul). Polycarp had, as already mentioned, to fumigate the Marcionite Ur-Lukas in order to make it our Luke. He may have similarly had to launder some Carpocratian Gnostic teaching from what we today call Secret Mark to make it palatable as our Mark.¹⁵

So Thomas, while intended to be the famous apostle Doubting Thomas, merely masks some unknown compiler. There is, however, a further point to it. The choice was not arbitrary. Ancient tradition preserved this apostle’s full name as Judas Thomas. The Aramaic Thomas, like its Greek counterpart Didymus, means twin. It is a nickname, not a name in its own right as it has become today, so its bearer must have been named "Something Thomas, Someone the Twin." Whose twin was this Judas? Early Christians were not slow to notice that Jesus had a brother named Judas (Mark 6:3). Could Judas Thomas have been the twin brother of Jesus Christ? Though it may seem far-fetched to us, many in the early church accepted the identification (never mind what a monkey-wrench it cast into the developing doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary!). I think the editor of our gospel knows of this identification and employs it metaphorically, whatever he may have thought of it as biographical fact. His point is that, as his gospel eventually reveals (saying 13), whoever understands the teaching of Jesus becomes exactly like him, his spiritual twin. A Thomas in his own right. Thus Thomas is both the (pen) name of the fifth evangelist and of any reader who grasps the meaning of his gospel’s sayings.

We start to read references to the Gospel according to Thomas early in the third century, and our Nag Hammadi copy was written down in the mid-fourth century. The first surviving mention is by the schismatic (but not heretical) Roman bishop Hippolytus about 230. There was also an Infancy Gospel of Thomas floating around, but we know Hippolytus was referring to ours because he quotes from it and calls it a Naassene Gnostic scripture. About the same time, estimated at 233, the Alexandrian theologian and Bible scholar Origen mentions it as suspiciously heterodox. A few centuries later, Thomas is sneered at as a Manichaean gospel. We know the Manichaeans did use it, because its distinctive language colors their liturgical texts. The Acts of Thomas (ca. 200) and the Nag Hammadi text, the Book of Thomas the Contender (also early third century, we think) show knowledge of the Gospel of Thomas, as does the Gospel of Mary.

Not surprisingly, a gospel that circulated so widely and amid different faith communities eventually came to exist in several versions. Scribes who copied and recopied it over the generations occasionally added, deleted or paraphrased it in accord with their own beliefs. We have quotations from rather different Naassene and Manichaean versions, as well as fragments of three different Greek copies discovered among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in Egypt in 1897 and 1904. Our only complete copy is the Coptic translation found in Chenoboskion (Nag Hammadi), Egypt in 1945. Comparing what remains of the various versions will sometimes help us arrive at the original reading of the text. Or so we may hope. (Of course, each version has its own integrity as a redacted text, but it interesting to see if we can trace how the document has evolved.) Davies argues that the text was composed in Egypt, but most scholars think it is a product of Syria, where there was great veneration of Thomas as well as literary productivity in his name (the Acts of Thomas, Apocalypse of Thomas, etc.). Most believe Thomas to have been composed originally in Greek, though Nicholas Perrin makes an impressive case for a Syriac origin.¹⁶

If early third century writings refer to the Thomas gospel (as Joseph Campbell used to refer to it), then it cannot be dated later than the mid- to late second century, and I for one