The Gospel of Thomas (video)

September 17, 2023

Gospel of Thomas

“These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke. And Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.”

…a 9 minute video

“The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus: Thomas were dependent upon the synoptic gospels, it would be possible to detect in the case of every Thomas-synoptic parallel the same tradition-historical development behind both the Thomas version of the saying and one or more of the synoptic versions. That is, Thomas’ author/editor, in taking up the synoptic version, would have inherited all of the accumulated tradition-historical baggage owned by the synoptic text, and then added to it his or her own redactional twist. In the following texts this is not the case. Rather than reflecting the same tradition-historical development that stands behind their synoptic counterparts, these Thomas sayings seem to be the product of a tradition-history which, though exhibiting the same tendencies operative within the synoptic tradition, is in its own specific details quite unique. This means, of course, that these sayings are not dependent upon their synoptic counterparts, but rather derive from a parallel and separate tradition.”

“Determining a plausible date of composition is speculative and depends on a delicate weighing of critical judgments about the history of the transmission of the sayings-of-Jesus tradition and the process of the formation of the written gospel texts. The earliest possible date would be in the middle of the 1st century, when sayings collections such as the Synoptic Sayings Gospel Q first began to be compiled. The latest possible date would be toward the end of the 2d century, prior to the copying of P. Oxy. 1 and the first reference to the text by Hippolytus. If Gos. Thom. is a sayings collection based on an autonomous tradition, and not a gospel harmony conflated from the NT, then a date of composition in, say, the last decades of the 1st century would be more likely than a mid-to-late-2d-century date.”

“There is an underlying message in this gospel, which is this: The laws of this world are not the laws of the Kingdom. What makes sense in one realm makes no sense in the other. From the viewpoint of each, the other is absurd. Throughout the text, we see this message repeated again and again.”
~ William G. Duffy, 
The Hidden Gospel of Thomas: Commentaries on the Non-Dual Sayings of Jesus

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