Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §7.6
cation (1959), opinion has been almost equally divided as to whether the Gospel
of Thomas knew and drew from the Synoptics (and John) or is a witness to an
early form of the Jesus tradition prior to the Synoptics and independent of the
Synoptics as such. 105 The evidence is not decisive either way. The problem is the
complexity of the traditioning process which such comparisons open up. In each
case we have to consider the possibility of interaction between Thomas in its
Greek form (attested by the Oxyrhynchus papyri) 106 or its subsequent Coptic
form and any of three or four levels — the traditions (oral or written) on which
each document drew, the documents themselves (Mark, Q, Matthew, Luke,
John), second-hand oral knowledge of individual traditions as they appear in
each document but as a result of one or more hearings of the document being
read (second orality), 107 or even subsequent assimilation by scribes of one text
form to another. 108 It is awareness of such complexity which causes Tuckett to
suggest, at the end of a paper in which he argues that five Thomas logia show
knowledge of Lukan redaction (GTh 5, 16, 55) and Markan redaction (GTh 9,
20), that 'the problem of the relationship between Thfomas] and the synoptics is
probably ultimately insoluble'. 109 At the very least, then, Thomas provides evidence
of the different forms or versions which particular sayings could and did
take, and possibly from an early stage of the traditioning process.
That said, however, certain caveats have to be lodged. First, the question of
the value of Thomas as a source for our knowledge of Jesus' teaching has been
caught up in the continuing search for evidence of pre-Christian Gnosticism. The
point is that the Gospel of Thomas is best categorized as a 'Gnostic' (or gnostic)
105. Bibliography in Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels 84-85; Meier, Marginal Jew
1.128-30. That Thomas is the product of a tradition history 'basically independent of the synoptic
tradition' is the central thesis of Patterson, Thomas and Jesus chs. 2-3, who concludes that
'Thomas is the offspring of an autonomous stream of early Christian tradition' (110); though
given the substantial overlap between Thomas and the Synoptic tradition 'autonomous' is a
questionable judgment (see also below, §8.6d).
106. See above, chapter 4 n. 191. See further Schneemelcher and Wilson, New Testament
Apocrypha 117-18, 121-23; Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament 128-33 (with bibliography),
135-36, 139-41.
107. See particularly R. Uro, 'Thomas and Oral Gospel Tradition', in R. Uro, ed.,
Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998) 8-32.
108. Cf. Patterson, Thomas and Jesus 92-93.
109. C. Tuckett, 'Thomas and the Synoptics', NovT 30 (1988) 132-57. Meier is overconfident
in his conclusion that the Gospel of Thomas 'knew and used at least some of the canonical
Gospels, notably Matthew and Luke' (Marginal Jew 1.139, referring to his earlier discussion,
134-37); he is supported in this by M. Fieger, Das Thomasevangelium (NTAbh 22;
Münster, 1991; Meier, 'Present State of the "Third Quest'" 464); similarly J. H. Charlesworth
and C. A. Evans, 'Jesus in the Agrapha and Apocryphal Gospels', in Chilton and Evans, eds.,
Studying the Historical Jesus 479-533 (here 496-503).
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