Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

values, advocating the end of the world as we have known it and its replacement by
a quite new, utopian kind of life in which the ideal world would be real. He took a
stand quite independent of the authorities of his day ··· and did not last very long
before they eliminated him. Yet his followers reaffirmed his stand— for them he
came to personify the ultimate goal.... Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls [at Qumran]
were put in jars for safekeeping and hidden at the time of the approach of the
Roman Tenth Legion, the burial [three centuries later] of the Nag Hammadi library in
a jar may have been precipitated by the approach of Roman authorities, who had by
then become Christian.
—————————, ‘Nag Hammadi: The First Fifty Years’ (plenary address, Society
of Biblical Literature, 1995): Clearly the Gospel of Thomas does contain sayings that
cannot be derived from the canonical gospels,... that are clearly not Gnostic, but
have the same claim to being old, even authentic, as does the older layer of sayings
in the canonical gospels and Q. This can be illustrated by some of the kingdom
parables in the Gospel of Thomas.... Such sayings are not Gnostic inventions, but
simply part of the oral tradition of sayings ascribed to Jesus. What is perhaps even
more impressive is that the Gospel of Thomas contains some New Testament
parables found in their pre-canonical form.
Richard Valantasis, The Gospel of Thomas (1997): These sayings work at
constructing a new and alternative subjectivity. Through reading the sayings of the
Gospel of Thomas deliberately and consecutively, the readers gradually come to
understand not only the new identity to which the sayings call them, but also the
theology, anthropology, and cosmology that supports that new identity.... The dating
of the Gospel of Thomas by means of the oldest core of sayings suggests an early
date of 60-70 CE [AD].... The Gospel of Thomas does not contain any of the known
systems or theologies of gnostic writers.... [It] connects the hearer and seeker to the
very voice of the living Jesus speaking in the midst of an interpreting community.
John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (1998): Grenfell and Hunt drew
very decisive conclusions regarding the text contained in their pap. Oxy.1. They
clearly did not know that it formed part of the Gospel of Thomas, but I cite their
synthesis because, in my judgment, it applies perfectly to this Gospel as a whole.
They established ‘four points: (1) that we have here part of a collection of sayings,
not extracts from a narrative Gospel; (2) that they were not heretical; (3) that they
were independent of the four Gospels in the form preserved; (4) that they are prior to
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