The Gospel of Thomas
Of unknown authorship and date, the Gospel of Thomas is a controversial book which was written during a period which is disputed as being shortly after the life of Jesus to the beginning of the third century AD. It is not a description of the life and ministry of Jesus but is instead a collection of statements and sayings attributed to him. The complete text of the book was discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi. Papyrus fragments of the Gospel which were written in Greek and discovered much earlier were determined to be from the Gospel of Thomas following the discovery of the complete text, one of the fragments was dated from 130 AD.
At least two ancient writers, Hippolytus of Rome and Origen of Alexandria referenced the Gospel of Thomas in their writings early in the third century. Hippolytus found it to contain heresies, a position echoed by some early Church Fathers. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote that it was not the work of one of the Twelve Apostles, the Thomas who expressed doubt about the Resurrection until he had seen Jesus with his own eyes. The sayings listed in the Gospel of Thomas do not follow the same timeline as they do in the works of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, indicating that the author of Thomas did not have access to them as references.
Instead, there is a clear relationship between Thomas and the Gospel of John, where the sequence of John appears to answer the sequence of the sayings in Thomas. This has led scholars to suggest that John was written in response to Thomas, and the Gospel of John is the only one of the four in the Christian Canon in which Thomas has any role or is represented as having spoken. Thomas also assigns to James the role of leadership in the Church, rather than Peter, who in the Gospel of Thomas is unable to grasp Jesus’ mission and significance.
The Gospel of Thomas was well known to the early Church and its leaders, and a sect was built around it which was referred to as the Thomasines. It was also considered by some of the early leaders to have been written by a disciple of the prophet Mani, the founder of an ancient religion known as Manichaeism, now extinct. Despite this, it contains many similarities to some of the writings of Paul. Although it contains many of the sayings of Jesus which appear in similar form in the other Gospels included in the Canon, it does not contain the teaching of what we now call the Lord’s Prayer.
It is clear why the Gospel of Thomas was not included in the Canon of the New Testament. It is of uncertain authorship, disputes the authority of Peter as Jesus’ choice to lead the Church, and was considered by many of the early Church to be heretical. None of the Christian religions considers the book to be an authoritative account of the teachings of Jesus. Still, it offers another view of both Jesus of Nazareth and the early formative days of the Christian Church.