Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

against certain types of established doctrine; and the exegesis, for example, of the
Prologue of John at the beginning of the work, is of surprising originality. The
frequent references to New Testament passages and to ‘Jesus the Christ’ indicate
the author's conviction and determination to be a real Christian. In a number of
instances, for example in his view of man, the author is obviously indebted to
Hebraic realism.... Far from being a philosophical treatise, the Gospel of Truth is a
poem. The elegance of its style, the loftiness of its outlook, the tenderness with
which the ‘secret’ is described, the unfailing dexterity with which the right term is
chosen in each instance ... point to an author of uncommon talent and profound
spirituality and in every respect superior to the [Church] Fathers of the second
century.... With the Biblical writers he shares the Hebraic view of the Ego as the
totality of body and mind.... [There is an] almost complete absence of mythological
elements in the Gospel of Truth.
Robert M. Grant & David Noel Freedman, The Secret Sayings of Jesus (1960):
Those who worked with Togo Mina, director of the Coptic Museum before his death
in 1949, made the first discoveries. These scholars were H.-C. Puech of Paris and his
pupil Jean Doresse.... [Regarding] the Gospel of Thomas, Doresse looked through
this gospel in the spring of 1949 and later announced that it was ‘a Gnostic
composition’.... By 1952 Puech had discovered that Greek fragments of the same
work had been found, many years earlier, among the Oxyrhynchus papyri but had
never been correctly identified.... In 1958 the first complete translation of Thomas
appeared; it had been made from the photographs of Pahor Labib's edition by the
German scholar Johannes Leipoldt.... The Gospel of Philip contains nothing but
Gnostic speculations. The Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand,... is probably our
most significant witness to the early perversion of Christianity by those who wanted
to create Jesus in their own image.
Krister Stendhal, ‘Method in the Study of Biblical Theology’, in J. Philip Hyatt
(op.cit., 1964): The gospel traditions ... in the Gospel of Thomas or in the Agrapha may
point toward traditions which are as valid as those in the NT. For the student of early
Christian history the limitation to the ‘biblical’ is an act of textual laziness or a
methodological sin.
Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (1965 edition): It is a great help which
the Gospel of Thomas gives us, in offering us eleven parables from the Synoptics in
its own version [9 20 21b/103 57 63 64 65 76 96 107 109].... [Moreover, Thomas]
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