The ‘Gospel of Thomas’: Gnosticism and the New Testament

When Oscar Cullman announced the discovery of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 19, 1959, issue), popular newspapers and magazines spread sensational reports of the newly-recovered “sayings of Jesus,” speculated about their possible authenticity, and even referred to Thomas as a long-lost “fifth Gospel.” Dr. Cullman had indicated that this apocryphal gospel was as important a contribution to the study of the literary problems of the New Testament as the Dead Sea Scrolls are for its historical background. Because the Gospel of Thomas contains a large number of sayings, previously unknown and attributed to Jesus, some laymen wrongly expected these sayings to contain genuine elements of Jesus’ teaching omitted by the canonical writers.

The Gospel of Thomas is really no “gospel” at all in the usual sense of the word. “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke,” it begins, “and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them.” Then follows a collection of 114 short sayings, parables, and dialogues, with no connection or order of arrangement. There is no account of Jesus’ works, nothing that could properly be called narrative; a short “Jesus said,” “he said,” or a question from the disciples begins each saying. The canonical gospels were written “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). But pseudo-Thomas (the writing is obviously not apostolic) proposes to lead the readers to life, not by faith in Christ but by finding the interpretation of these “secret” sayings: “He who will find the interpretation of these words will not taste of death.” About half of the sayings parallel those in the New Testament (but never word for word), and many of the rest seem hardly worth keeping secret. Here are a few examples of the “new” sayings: “Jesus said, ‘Know what is before your face, and what is hidden to you will be revealed; for there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the man who has suffered; he has found life.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of the father is like a man who wanted to kill someone great. He took the sword into his house; he pierced the wall to know that his hand would be sure; then he killed the great man.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion which a man eats and the lion becomes man; but abominable is the man whom a lion eats that the lion should become man.’ ” Some of these sayings were already known from previous discoveries or from quotations by the early Church Fathers. But well over 40 of them were completely unknown until the discovery in Upper Egypt of the Gnostic library containing the Gospel of Thomas and 43 other apocryphal writings.

The Gnostic heretics who used the Gospel of Thomas, though they probably did not write it, could find no scriptural basis for their teaching and faced the opposition of the entire orthodox Church; thus they often supported their doctrines by producing “secret” traditions putting their fantastic myths into Jesus’ mouth. They claimed that Jesus said these things privately to one or more of his disciples during the interval between the Resurrection and the Ascension. The recently-discovered Gnostic library contains, besides the Gospel of Thomas, a Wisdom of Jesus, a Dialogue of the Savior, a book of Thomas different from the Gospel of Thomas, and a Revelation of James, all based upon supposed dialogues between Jesus and his disciples. Other books in the library are anonymous or pseudo-apostolic treatises on Gnosticism. Most of these are not yet available even to scholars, but brief descriptions of them have appeared. The few writings now available have already greatly affected studies of the origin and development of Gnosticism. No one could predict at this stage what the outcome of these studies will be, but articles appearing in a number of European publications indicate at least some of the probable results of this study.

What has the study of Gnosticism to do with the New Testament? During the last 40 years German scholars, notably Rudolph Bultmann, have claimed that New Testament writers, especially in their understanding of Jesus Christ, depended largely upon Gnostic myths. In the face of such assertions any revaluation of Gnosticism holds meaning for students of the New Testament.

The Gnostics, with their various systems, taught that the creator of the material world (therefore the God of the Old Testament) was in fact an inferior and malevolent god, the abortive offspring of one of the higher powers. They said that man spiritually belongs to the higher realm, but that he is trapped, imprisoned in a physical body and a material world, and powerless to escape because he is ignorant of his true state. The Saviour came down from the higher spiritual world to awaken man from his ignorance, to forge a pathway out of this world, and break the power of its god. Early writers regarded Gnosticism simply as an aberration of Christianity, but more recent scholars have viewed Gnosticism as a world-wide syncretistic movement that drew from many ancient religions. Bultmann and others argue that Gnosticism, widespread before the rise of Christianity, affected central New Testament teaching. Bultmann says, for example, that references to Satan as the “god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4) and the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31), and the terms “principalities,” “powers,” and “rulers of this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12) are, in context, truly Gnostic expressions. Paul gives a Gnostic exposition of Adam’s fall (Rom. 5:12 ff.) and gives a Gnostic exhortation to throw off sleep and the works of darkness (Rom. 13:11–13; 1 Thess. 5:4–6), says Bultmann.

More important to Christians, Bultmann finds the picture of Christ as found in John, Paul, and the epistle to the Hebrews to be simply an adaptation of a pre-Christian Iranian Gnostic “Redeemed Redeemer.” This is essentially a myth about the first Man, made in the image of the highest God; he is set above the creation and thus becomes an intermediary between men and the unknown God. Bultmann finds the understanding of Christ in the fourth Gospel thoroughly dependent upon this myth, as the pre-existent Christ, like the Iranian Man, comes to lead his own to the world of light. Bultmann sees in Philippians 2:6–11 a capital expression of the Gnostic myth: the Saviour appeared as a “cosmic power,” came from heaven to do his work, then was exalted to heavenly glory and placed as ruler over all. Gnosticism also, says Bultmann, provided Paul with his emphasis upon the unity of believers with Christ and with each other: the Gnostic redeemer was to reunite to himself the divine sparks scattered about in material bodies. One might continue such comparisons almost indefinitely.

But recent studies of Gnosticism, based in part upon the new library, show increased skepticism about Bultmann’s claims. For the Gnostic library presents a world of thought wholly apart from that of the New Testament. Anyone reading the description of the perfect man, Adam, in the Apocryphon of John can hardly imagine that such fantasies help explain Paul’s reference to Adam, a “type of him who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). The same words and formulas often occur in both the New Testament and the Gnostic library, but the religions they represent belong to different worlds. The publication of each new Gnostic writing underlines this vast separation.

And these Gnostic writings give no support at all to the theory of a pre-Christian redeemer myth. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus has appeared “in the flesh,” while the Gospel of Truth clearly mentions his crucifixion—ideas diametrically opposed to the supposed myth. A writer in the recent memorial volume to T. W. Manson notes regarding Bultmann’s claims that “such ideas may need at least some revision. There is no ‘pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer’ in the mid-second-century Gospel of Truth.” G. Quispel (Utrecht University, Holland), a member of an international committee working on the texts, feels that Gnostic sources used by Bultmann and others do nothing to explain New Testament thought. Quispel states that in pre-Christian times a sort of Gnostic mentality may have existed, and even a myth about spirits who misunderstood the being of God, who fell, and who were imprisoned in matter. This original Gnosticism was a religion of self-salvation; it received its concept of a redeemer from Christianity, not vice versa. Quispel has seriously challenged belief in the supposed Iranian redeemer myth, and writers discussing the Gnostic texts seem more inclined to agree with Quispel than with Bultmann at this point. The Gospel of Thomas and the rest of the Egyptian library, by clarifying the real nature of Gnosticism, will probably help to put an end to theories of extensive Gnostic influence upon the New Testament.

Apart from Gnosticism, the Gospel of Thomas will provide textual critics with a great deal of new, and often puzzling, material. About half the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas parallel those in the canonical Gospels, but never exactly. Thomas’ citations add material, compress sayings, combine two or more of them, or put a saying into a context different from that of the synoptics. These differences make it difficult to believe that pseudo-Thomas depends always upon the synoptics, and the synoptics obviously do not depend upon Thomas. Examples of these sayings are: “Jesus said, ‘Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my lordship is gentle, and you will find rest’ ” (compare Matt. 11:28–30); “A rich man had much property; he said ‘I will use my property in order to sow and reap and plant and fill my storehouses with fruit, that I may lack nothing’; these were the thoughts in his heart, and in that night he died” (compare Luke 12:16–21); “A woman from the multitude said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts that nourished you.’ He said to her, ‘Blessed are those who have heard the word of the Father and have kept it in truth. For days will come when you will say “Blessed is the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk” ’ ” (compare Luke 11:27–28 and Luke 23:29).

The differences between canonical sayings and those in the Gospel of Thomas have led scholars to feel that these sayings may reflect a tradition of Jesus’ words quite independent of synoptic tradition. Some of the sayings contain elements apparently reflecting an Aramaic background; others confirm textual variants known from other sources. None of these variants indicate an understanding of Jesus significantly different from what we read in our English Bibles. But to textual scholars, anxious for exactness at every point, these differences are significant. For example, the Greek texts of the parable of the sower say that some of the seed fell by (para) the path (Mark 4:4, etc.); but the context and a few early citations indicate that the seed really fell upon (epi or eis) the path. Thomas’ citation also says that the seed fell “upon” the path. Matthew Black (St. Andrews University, Scotland) said that the variant results from ambiguity of the Aramaic word Jesus used. In that case this variant further testifies that Thomas’ source is independent of the synoptics. The citations in Thomas seem to result from a Jewish-Christian tradition of Jesus’ sayings independent of the synoptic texts and of the Gentile Church. This impression, if substantiated by further scholarly examination, can have a great deal of significance for New Testament studies.

To Quispel, part of that significance is already clear. The parable of the king’s son in the Gospel of Thomas gives the allegory of Mark 12:1–9 (and parallels), apparently without dependence upon the synoptics and with a Jewish-Christian tint. In this allegorical parable Jesus clearly announces himself to be the Son of God who will be killed, so Bultmann and others attributed its origin to the Hellenistic Church. Quispel notes that a Jewish-Christian community, unaffected by the supposed prejudices of Hellenistic mythology, could not invent the same story as the Gentile community supposedly behind synoptic tradition; the parable must go back to Jesus who claimed to be the Son of God and who predicted his own death, as the synoptics tell us. “This might prove,” says Quispel, “that these diverging streams of tradition cannot originate in an anonymous collective consciousness as some historians of the synoptic tradition would have it”; undue skepticism about the authenticity of Jesus’ sayings in our canonical Gospels is unwarranted. In a sense, then, concludes Quispel, the Gospel of Thomas confirms the trustworthiness of the Bible. “We may now have an independent Gospel tradition which … in the broad outlines of both style and theology, agrees with the text of our canonical Gospels. This shows that behind our Gospel tradition there stands a Person whose words have reached us substantially unchanged.”

Swiss theologian Oscar Cullman has characterized the so-called ‘Gospel of Thomas,’ one of 44 Coptic rnanuscripts found in 1946 in a tomb in Upper Egypt, as more important to New Testament scholars than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its 114 reputed “sayings of Jesus” reflect Gnostic influences. Richard E. Taylor, engaged in special study of Gnosticism and the writings found in Egypt, holds the B.A. from University of California, B.D. from California Baptist Theological Seminary and is a candidate for the Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews.

In This Our Time

In this our time of triumph when
Our word goes forth as swift as light,
Our circling comets span the night,
And power is given unto men
To bloom with fire the cloudy pillar,
Forgive our pride, forgive our shame,
O Lord, Creator and Redeemer,
Teach us to glory in Thy name.

In this our time of treason, Lord,
Our words deny the gifts we take,
Our deeds betray the vows we make,
Our hearts are not of one accord.
O send Thy truth, Thy Holy Spirit,
To guide, to quicken and inspire
Our feeble wills and clouded purpose;
Purge us as silver in Thy fire.

In this our time of trouble when
Our hearts are failing us for fear,
O come to us, O draw Thou near,
O stand among us once again,
Thou brightness of the Father’s glory,
Thou fullness of the Father’s grace,
Extend Thy hands in mercy toward us,
Grant us a vision of Thy face.

In this our time of trial, come
And speak again Thy saving Word,
Let everywhere Thy truth be heard
To strike our empty boasting dumb.
Arise upon our blind confusion,
For Thou art worthy, Thou alone,
To take the seat of highest power;
Raise us to worship at Thy throne.

JAMES WESLEY INGLES

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