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THE GOSPEL of THOMAS and the NEW TESTAMENT * by G. QUISPEL in This Paper It Is My Intention to Discuss the Possibility That Unkn

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THE GOSPEL of THOMAS and the NEW TESTAMENT * by G. QUISPEL in This Paper It Is My Intention to Discuss the Possibility That Unkn THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT * BY G. QUISPEL In this paper it is my intention to discuss the possibility that unknown sayings of Jesus, taken from a Jewish-Christian Gospel originally written in Aramaic, have come to light. The Gospel of Thomas, one of the writings found at Nag Hamadi in 1946 ( ?), contains about 114 Logia, that is words attributed to Jesus, short dialogues with rEoùiples or other people, and parables. About half of these Logia are of the syncretist type, perhaps all to be derived from the apocryphal Gospel of the Egyptians, and need not detain us here any longer. The other sayings, however, are of the synoptic type, though none of them agrees completely with the wording of our canonical Gospels. There is no doubt that these of the second one/of Logia type, number 2 in the edition. whk6h some of my colleagues and I have been is a from the lost prepariug, simply Quotation Gospel according to the Hebrews. which known to the Egyptians of the second century, as is shown by fragments transmitted by the Alexandrine authors Clement and Orig?n. Another Saying (12) com?s very near to the views of this apo- cryphal Gospel: it tells us that after the death of Jesus, his brother James is to be the leader of the disciples and declares that James is the "Righteous One", for whose sake heaven and earth have been created. This last expression, of course, is as Jewish as it could be; the view that James was the primate of Christianity has its close parallel in the Gospel of the Hebrews, according to which James was the first to whom the Lord appeared after his resurrec- * Lecture held at Oxford on September 18th 1957. The complete referen- ces and a full bibliography are to be found in the edition of the Gospel of Thomas, which will be published in the course of 1958. The English of this paper has been revised by Mr. J. V. M. Sturdy, Cambridge. 190 tion'. So it is almost certain that this saying about James comes from the same source. On the other hand, it is obvious that more than one Logion in the Gospel of Thomas is identical or almost identical with Gospel- quotations in the Pseudo-Clementine writings, which I for one consider valuable sources for our knowledge of Jewish Christianity in Palestine. , These Logia tell us that the Pharisees and the Scribes have received the keys of Knowledge, they have hidden them ; they did not enter themselves and those that wished to enter, they suffered not (39); again, Christ did not come to cast peace upon the world, but to cast divisions upon the earth, fire, a sword, war (16), Other examples: a city built upon the top of a high mountain, (well) established, can neither fall nor be hidden (32); the poor are blessed because theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven (54) ; and the merchant, who sold his merchandise and bought himself the one pearl, is called clever (76). The wording of these texts, so different, in spite of the similarities, from that of canonical Scripture, has its parallel in the Pseudo- Clementine writings2. So these Logia are undoubtedly of Jewish- Christian origin and almost certainly taken from a Jewish-Christian Gospel, to which also the quotations in the Pseudo-Clementines ultimately go back. I suggest that this source was the Gospel of the Hebrews, which now turns out to have been a Jewish-Christian writing of Palestinian origin. As far as I know nobody has ever defended the thesis that the Gospelquotations in the Pseudo-Clementine writings were borrowed from a collection of Logia and not from some apocryphal Gospel. It is true that some scholars maintain the independence of the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Nazarene Gospel from the Gospel of the Hebrews, though admitting that all of them were of the Jewish-Christian The first two of these, however, have their type. parallel in the Gospel of Thomas: They said to Him : Come and let us pray today and let us fast. Jesus Whczt then is the sin that I have done or in what have I been vanquished? (104) I E. Klostermann, Apocrypha II, p. 10, fr. 21. 2 Hom. XVIII, 16; Rec. II, 28; Hom. III, 27; Rec. II, 28; Rec. III, 62. .
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