Why I date the Gospel of Thomas late

1945 was a year of upheaval — the Allied Forces were pushing through France into the Rhine, the United States Army managed to cross the Siegfried Line, and Soviet soldiers hoisting the red flag over the Reich Chancellery announcing the fall of Berlin. By May of that year the Germans would surrender at Lüneburg Heath, an event that eventually led to the full surrender of the Third Reich and the end of WWII. It is no wonder then that in the midst of such global turbulence, an alleged discovery that same year by an Egyptian farmer named Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman, went virtually unnoticed. Yet, this discovery of a clay jar filled with ancient manuscripts in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, would later prove to drastically influence the fields of antiquity, religious, biblical, and historical Jesus studies.

What was uncovered would later be referred to as the Nag Hammadi codices, a term that refers to twelve papyrus documents and one tractate that arose on the antiquities market two years after the alleged date of the discovery.

The Nag Hammadi codices in 1948. (Image adapted from Jean Doresse and Togo Mina, “Nouveaux textes gnostiques coptes découvertes en Haute-Egypte: La bibliothèque de Chenoboskion,” Vigiliae Christianae 3 [1949], 129-141, Figure 1; image appears courtesy of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Records, Special Collections, Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California.)

Found within the contents of this collection was a complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas written in Coptic. While the exact circumstances regarding the discovery by Muhammad Ali are up for scrutiny, one thing is not, the Gospel of Thomas’ introduction changed the landscape for the Christian academy. Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson refer to the Nag Hammadi library surfacing as “the single most important archaeological find of the 20th century for the study of the new Testament” (Koester, The Gospel of Thomas, p. 30). This Coptic text also helped scholars piece together three Oxyrhynchus papyri (P. Oxy 1, 654, and 6554) which had been unearthed before the Nag Hamaddi text and were not definitively known to be the Gospel of Thomas previous to the Nag Hammadi discovery.

What is the Gospel of Thomas?

The Gospel of Thomas is one of, if not the, earliest extant non-canonical Gospel accounts. However, unlike many other Gospels (both biblical and apocryphal) Thomas contains no narrative and only a list of 114 sayings between Jesus and his immediate followers. Many have argued that Thomas deserves to be in the Bible and represents an early sect of Christianity that was merely dismissed by the orthodox Christian church during its time of popularity. Others have pointed to the portrayal of Jesus within the Gospel of Thomas as evidence that Christianity was widely diverse in its beliefs and practice and that what we today call “historical Christianity” is merely the faith of the theological winners of the environment of the first few centuries AD.

When it comes to the composition of this particular document the scholarly community is torn. The majority of scholars place it somewhere in the middle to late second century. A handful of scholars, including John Dominic Crossan and Elaine Pagals, place Thomas within the first century. Yet those who conclude that the Gospel of Thomas precedes the year 100 AD remain a fringe minority.

As note before, Thomas is not a narrative like the canonical Gospels, but rather, a list of sayings that Jesus supposedly said to his immediate disciples. Unlike Jesus being described as “the way, truth, and light” in the biblical Gospels (John 14:6), the Jesus of Thomas is a teacher who reveals the light that exists within us (Thomas 24:3) representing some of the earliest witness to what would later be clearly defined as Christian Gnosticism. The Jesus in Thomas also decries fasting and prayer as evil (Thomas 14:1-3) unlike what we see from the biblical Jesus in places like Matt.4:1-11 or Luke 11:1-28. The Jesus in Thomas mirrors a lot of Greek teachers in Greco-Roman literature rather than a Jewish Rabbi. All of these create a strong disparity between the theology of Thomas and the canonical Gospel canon of Matthew.

Dating Thomas

Dating Thomas becomes tricky due to the internal and external evidence we have for it. We simply lack surviving documentary evidence to conclude anything substantial based on the external artifacts alone. There are only four copies and of those copies the only whole copy that survives today is the famous Coptic manuscript which is part of the Nag Hammadi library, which dates to 340 AD. Our other three copies are Greek fragments that only contain about 20% of Thomas and can be dated somewhere in the neighborhood of 200AD .

When all four manuscripts are examined there is notable textual difference between the full Coptic version and our three Greek fragments. So much so that there appears to have been a remarkable change between the earlier copies we have in Greek and the later version in Coptic. Unlike the minor variation that we see within the text of the New Testament manuscripts, our copies of Thomas have enough overlap to point to them being the same document but the content had clearly adapted over the course of 140 years. As John P. Meier notes in A Marginal Jew,

“[The Gospel of Thomas] may have circulated in more than one form and passed through several stages of redaction.”

— Meir, A Marginal Jew. pg. 125

Because of this I (and many others) believe that the text of Thomas represents an uncontrolled transmission of a document that adapted between the Egyptian communities that may have wrote it earlier in Greek and then again just over one hundred years later in Coptic. The text of what we know as "The Gospel of Thomas" was not static but had varying renditions, all clear attempts at the same document but one that evolved as a fluid text between the mid second and late third centuries.

Nag Hammadi Codex II, showing the ending of “The Secret Book of John” (Apocryphon of John), and beginning of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. (Image courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and the Egypt Exploration Society and Imaging Papyri Project, University of Oxford.)

The bulk of how Thomas is dated comes from the internal evidence which is harder to do than with other Gospel documents because Thomas’ content is simply a list of sayings that contain no historical references in order to cross-reference potential dates. On top of this Thomas shows little internal coherence outside of catch words and phrases.

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Find out how ancient manuscripts were dated by clicking here.

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However, a noteworthy aspect of Thomas is that it seems very familiar with other books already canonized within our New Testament. The Gospel of Thomas contains quotes or paraphrases from sixteen of the twenty-seven New Testament books. Therefore, a hypothesis that proposes that all of these documents relied on Thomas would force Thomas very very early, potentially in the late 30s or early 40s AD. It is far more probable that Thomas is using the New Testament books as source material rather than the New Testament books relying on Thomas as a point of information supply. In order to prove the latter one would have to push Thomas into the 40s and assume it is already well circulated and popular for all the New Testament authors to make use of it. It is far more probable that a later author made use of the New testament writings, that were already in frequent circulation and popularity within Christian communities by the second century, than it is to try and validate the New Testament authors making use of Thomas.

Richard Bauckham, in his work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, proposes that Thomas is actually comparing itself with the previous canonical Gospels. Bauckham argues that Thomas is doing this specifically with Matthew and Mark’s Gospel accounts. This is because section thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas has Peter and Matthew trying to guess who Jesus was and failing. The disciple Thomas then steps in and gives the "right" answer. Bauckham argues that using Matthew and Peter in particular (Peter being the source information that the early Church writers like Papias, Clement, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, said Mark wrote his Gospel from), indicates that the Gospel of Thomas is acknowledging and presupposing that he is already aware of the existence of Matthew and Mark (Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. pgs. 236-237). Likewise, N.T. Wright in The New Testament and the Story of God (pgs. 431-443), notes a smilar theme by pointing that Thomas lacks the identity of the early Jewish community and specifically the early Christian movement that came out of it.

There is also a noticeable connection between all the extant versions of Thomas and particular sects of Syrian Christianity in the mid to late second century. Nicholas Perrin in his paper, Thomas: The Fifth Gospel, analyzed the content of Thomas and translated it into Syriac and Greek and conclude that the phrases and contents of Thomas made more sense when written in Syriac than it did in Greek or Coptic. Specific catchphrases within Thomas are often transliterations of Syriac idioms (nearly 500 of them in total) frequently used within extra-biblical Christian Syriac writing. Craig Evans has noted something similar by stating that,

“[Thomas has] extensive coherence with late-second century Syrian tradition [and a] lack of coherence with pre-70 Jewish Palestine.”

— Evans, Fabricating Jesus. pg. 76

A simple example would be the title of Gospel being attributed to "Didymos Judas Thomas," a title common in Syrian traditions almost exclusively.

Those who date Thomas within the first century do so almost exclusive on its style rather than its content. That is, Thomas is a list of sayings and the narrative style of the canonical Gospels shows development that a sayings Gospel would predate. The problem with this argument is that there are multiple examples of sayings collections that can be traced to the second and third centuries. Rabbinic works like the Chapter of the Fathers or the Sentences of Sextus were both simple lists of sayings that find their origin and dissemination within the second and third centuries.

Closing the book on the Gospel of Thomas

I believe what we see with Thomas is a philosophical syncretism of Gnostic ideas (of which can be placed no later than the early second century) and the Jesus tradition. The Jesus of Thomas is palatable for a gentile audience who would see no problem with the mystic Jesus Thomas portrays. If we try to attempt placing the Gospel of Thomas before the canonical four it makes little sense to then say that the Gospel authors took this Greek philosopher Jesus and proceeded to dress him in Jewish garments. Especially considering that the Christian movement became increasingly more gentile as time went on. In my estimation it would make far more sense to take the Jewish Rabbi Jesus, and dress him up as a Greek mystic philosopher than the other way around.

I do not think the fact that Thomas is simply list of sayings gives us warrant to place Thomas early, never mind as early as the canonical Gospels. Combined with the fact that it seems to fit perfectly within the scope of later Syrian Christian movements, contains Gnostic elements that only started to develop within the second century, paints Jesus more like a Greek philosopher, and its textual fluidity means that the Gospel of Thomas should not and cannot be placed any earlier than 130 AD.