Jesus' Twin

A Dialogue with the Gospel of Thomas

The Crossroad Publishing Company

Contents

Profanum

Studying the text

As children of our times, we need to take care not to rush into the sacred precincts, the fanum, of the text of the Gospel of Thomas without first taking into consideration its place in the outer precincts of current scholarship, the profanum of the text. Without it, we risk the sacrilege of reading too much into it and taking too little out of it — in other words, of reducing it to a fashion event that glitters in the imagination for a moment only to be replaced by something more novel. The sheer volume of historical research compiled on the text over the past forty-five years and the fervor of academic debate that has surrounded it resist easy summary. Nearly everything that follows needs some qualification, even as the views I have chosen to ignore in most cases merit the courtesy of more detailed argument than I shall supply. My aim is simpler: to frame the range of questions that occupy scholars concerning the history and composition of the text, and in this way to clarify the standpoint from which I will attempt to read it. Only when that reading has been completed will we be in a position to ask the question that these preliminary remarks are bound to provoke again and again, namely, where to place the Gospel of Thomas in the Christian tradition and in the wider religious inheritance of humanity.

A VOICE FROM OUTSIDE THE TRADITION

The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is unlike any other in Christian scriptures or theology. Initial speculations after the rediscovery and publication of the text in 1959 confirmed the criticisms that had circulated already from the third century, identifying him as little more than a mouthpiece for gnostic Christianity. As further study began to question the gnostic character of the Gospel, voices on the fringe of the scholarly activity stepped up to suggest the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas was more like a Hindu or Buddhist sage, a Sufi master, or even a Cabbalist. The dust his figure has kicked up in the Christian world has yet to settle, but one thing is already clear: there is no easy way to graft it on to any of the variety of images of Jesus that have dominated Christian tradition down the centuries.

The blend of mythic and historical details about the life and death of Jesus recorded in the Apostolic Creed of the second century — and all traces of the metaphysical language added to the Nicene Creed in the fourth century — are missing from the Gospel of Thomas, as is any reference to his baptism, temptation, and healings found in the four canonical gospels. There are no evil spirits menacing humanity and no demons to be cast out; there is not so much as a heaven and a hell. In fact, Jesus is not even a teacher of supernatural verities in the sense that the four gospels present him. His is more the voice of an oracle than that of a preacher of selfless love and care for the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the outcast. His sayings offer no divine truths, make no prophecies, construct no philosophical arguments, and solicit no disciples. He is not presented as a redeemer or justifier of sinful humanity. No mention is made of his death, let alone of a resurrection or ascension. There is no hint of an impending apocalypse or of a return to judge the world in the final days. In effect, the historical person of Jesus is all but transparent to the reader of the text, as if to allow the words, the words of the "living Jesus," to resound with greater clarity.

The image of the human condition we meet in the Gospel of Thomas is also a radical departure from the scriptural and theological tradition as Christians have known it. If the language of redemption is absent, it is because human beings are not seen as born into a state of sinful disobedience which only an otherworldly divinity can rectify, but as suffering from a darkened awareness, a fundamental failure of insight into what it is that lies asleep in the recesses of their own nature. There is no personal relationship of the individual with God, and indeed the idea of a transcendent creator who rules a world beyond where the rewards of heaven or the punishments of hell await us is altogether foreign to the spirit of the text.

All of this would appear to nail shut the case for rejection of the text as non-Christian. But when one begins to look at what the text actually says and to reconstruct the history of its composition, the grounds for dismissing it are less sure.

The first thing one notices skimming through Thomas is that it is strangely familiar. In fact, all but 20 of its 114 sayings include sentences and phrases that have parallels in the canonically accepted New Testament. True, the sayings seem to be collected haphazardly with no obvious story line, but this raises the question of whether we might not have in Thomas a more faithful record of things said than we find in the canonical gospels where Jesus' teachings are rearranged into deliberately constructed "histories." Matters are not quite so simple, but at least the question leads us in the right direction by suggesting that Thomas is not a mere anthology of sayings drawn from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but represents a distinct tradition all its own. Although still resisted by some New Testament exegetes, this idea has in fact come to be widely accepted today among historians of early Christianity.

The Gospel of Thomas is not the only record of sayings about Jesus surmised to have been in circulation in the generations following his death. Luke himself cites one such saying that was not included in his gospel. The most important of these collections has been referred to simply as Q (for the German Quelle or "source"). Its existence as a background source for the canonical gospels is generally accepted among scholars of the New Testament, even though no actual text or even reference to it has ever been discovered. And this is only one of the numerous such anthologies of sayings attributed to Jesus that the historical records of the day seem to have taken for common knowledge.

The practice of using and recording disconnected "sayings" was hardly unique to the early Christian community. It is common throughout the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman world and can be traced back as far as the second and third millennia bce in the ancient "Wisdom literature" of Egypt and the Middle East. Some of the wisdom is self-evident, some of it a challenge to what is taken for self-evident, but all of it is accessible as reflection on ordinary experience. We see examples of the genre in the biblical books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach. Moreover, at the time and place that Jesus preached, the sayings of the Cynics or "dog philosophers" — the nickname given to the followers of Diogenes of Sinopes (c. 400–325 bce) whose "useful maxims" or chreiai were used to shake people out of their conventional ideas and to offer an alternative way of thinking — were circulating widely.

The Gospel of Thomas is much closer in genre to collections of such sayings than it is to the narrative form the New Testament gospels adopted to locate the words of Jesus. By the end of the first century the utility of these collections for established communities of Christians began to diminish, even as the biographical gospels continued to grow in importance. By the middle of the second century Wisdom literature itself had become something of an "anachronism." And so it was that the tradition of collecting sayings came to be associated primarily with itinerant preachers and with groups of Christians who recast them in the form of dialogues between Jesus and his disciples that favored an emerging trend of Christian thought that we have come to know under the generic name of "gnosticism." Leaving aside for the moment just where Thomas fits into this picture, it is enough to note that the blend of aphorisms, proverbs, parables, and cryptic sayings found in its dialogues is nowhere interrupted by interpretative glosses or allegorical readings of the sort we find in the canonical gospels. The words are simply left to speak for themselves, as if they had come directly from the mouth of Jesus.

THE MANUSCRIPTS

As is the case with other collections of sayings current before and after the composition of the canonical gospels, in all likelihood many of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas were transmitted orally before they came to be transcribed. Once in written form they continued to be passed around from hand to hand and to undergo adjustments according to the needs of those who used them and the peculiarities of the languages into which they were translated. Moreover, since these adjustments were going on at the same time as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were taking shape, it is hard to imagine that these compositions had no effect at all on Thomas — or that Thomas had no effect on them. Aside from the ever-present possibility of simple scribal error, we have also to take into account the fact that "copying" and "translating" meant something quite different in an age where oral tradition was alive and well from one where it had died the death of distrust and succumbed to the regency of the written word. For one thing, a text used for itinerant preaching, as Thomas was during the time it was taking shape, would naturally be rearranged or reworded to create word-associations and keywords that would facilitate memorization. For another, even with a text before them, scribes would not slavishly reproduce or translate each word or phrase. They had their own memories, their own familiarity with other texts, and some sense of what the intended audience expected of them. Today, even with the full kit of scholarly apparatus at one's disposal, separating a simple slip of the pen from a deliberate redaction is no easy matter, and it gets all the more difficult the further a text has traveled across time and space. Nothing the early Christians wrote about Jesus is exempt from this process. (For example, by the year 300 there may have been as many as five distinct versions of the Gospel of Mark being passed around in Christian communities.) Little wonder that historians shudder at attempts to elevate particular texts or parts of texts above the conditions of their birth.

In the case of the Gospel of Thomas the only extensive records of the process are a fragmentary set of papyri written in Greek and a complete text of the Gospel written in Coptic, each with its own story to tell.

The Greek manuscript is the older of the two, dating from around the end of the second century, but the text itself is considerably older, at least as old as the synoptic gospels. There is nothing particularly difficult about concluding that an earlier version existed, since the gospel is mentioned by name in written records predating the fragments that remain with us today. When it comes to deciding just when to date it, however, there is considerable divergence among those familiar with the literary styles and languages of the century that followed the death of Jesus. The general consensus is that one or the other Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas was known to the authors of the canonical gospels, and that its sayings "derive from a stage of the developing sayings tradition that is more original than Q." In this sense they bring us back to the earliest stages of memories about what Jesus actually said. Not that the sayings recorded were intended as an objective reproduction of Jesus' sayings, only that their selection was made at a time less removed from the historical Jesus then the canonical gospels. More precision than that, at least for now, is conjecture.

Without discounting the possibility of an earlier Greek version compiled in Jerusalem by communities associated with the apostle James (known as the brother of Jesus and hence of Thomas also), scholarly opinion is converging on the view that the most likely place for the composition of the Greek text that we now have was in the western Syrian city of Antioch, which Paul had used as a base for his journeys. The Hellenic influence was strong there, making Greek translations both possible and necessary for revering the memory of Jesus. The Christian presence in Antioch predates Paul's arrival — in fact, it is thought to be the first place that communities referred to themselves as "Christians" — and this was to prove a source of conflict on questions of doctrine and practice. It was there that the Gospel of Matthew, to which the Gospel of Thomas has more parallels than to any of the other gospels, was composed.

When we consider the basic structural divergence of the two texts, and the radically distinct images of Jesus that result, we are obliged yet again to recognize that there was no such thing as Christianity but rather a plurality of Christianities separated by differences every bit as marked as their similarities. Given the varieties of language, intellectual environment, religious history, liturgical form, community organization, leadership, and theological orientation in which the sayings of Jesus were mirrored like so many colored stones tumbling around in a kaleidoscope, it is not surprising that there was so little uniformity. As obvious as this fact now looks to historians of Christianity, equally obvious is the way in which this plurality would come to be overshadowed by the uniformity imposed by a later age.

All of this bears on the Gospel of Thomas. The written materials available today point us back to other texts and oral traditions where we simply cannot go. The fact that fragments of the Greek copy were in hand fifty years before they were identified as belonging to the Gospel of Thomas is some indication of just how "lost" this gospel was. In 1897 and 1903 a rubbish heap in an archaeological excavation on the site of an ancient library at Oxyrhynchus (about 160 kilometers southwest of Cairo, near a branch of the Nile at present-day Bahnasa, Egypt) turned up three papyri with sayings of Jesus that did not belong to any of the known gospels. Although the fragments were published soon after their discovery and critical reconstruction of the lacunae in them was attempted, there was no agreement on what fuller text they belonged to since they did not bear a title. The transcription was dated around the year 200. The assumption at the time was that this was not the first time that Syrian and Egyptian scribes had copied — and altered — the text, but it was not until the discovery of the later Coptic translation that the hypothesis of an original Greek composition in circulation already around the latter part of the first century, prior to the authorship of the canonical gospels, could be substantiated. The Coptic translation, which has twenty sayings overlapping with the Oxyrhynchus text, not only allowed that text to be clearly identified, but it also provided a touchstone for quotations and allusions to the Gospel of Thomas scattered throughout the writings of early historians and church fathers, which in turn provided evidence of other variants of the text since lost.

In late 1945, not far from the city of Nag Hammadi on a cliff overlooking the Nile in upper Egypt, a group of peasants happened across a sealed jar that contained the thirteen papyrus codices that have come to be known as the Nag Hammadi library. The manuscripts were all written in Coptic, a late Egyptian language with a written form based on the Greek alphabet and used primarily as a means to translate texts from Greek into intelligible Egyptian. Among them was a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Preserving texts in this way was a common practice up and down the Nile, but evidence suggests that this jar was deliberately hidden.

The origins of this Coptic translation of the Gospel of Thomas, whose codex is dated around 340, or a full century and a half later than the Oxyrhynchus papyri, are unknown. What is known is that although the entire Nag Hammadi collection represents translations of Greek texts spanning a period of some five hundred years, the translations into Coptic (actually two Coptic dialects) were produced in a wide area of Egypt over the course of a century and more. The extant manuscripts show the work of numerous hands.