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THE GOSPEL of THOMAS REVISITED* I. Introduction This Is CHAPTER TWELVE THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS REVISITED* I. Introduction These are the hidden words which the Living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote. And he said: ‘Whoever fi nds the deeper mean- ing of these words will not taste death’. This is the reconstructed beginning of a leaf from a papyrusbook in Greek containing Sayings of Jesus and retrieved in 1903 by B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt from one of the rubbish-heaps of the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654. In 1897 and 1903 two other fragments were found in the same city, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1 and 655, which, as we now see, belonged to the same writing, the Gospel of Thomas, though to different copies of it. The discoverers concluded for palaeographical reasons that the papyri could not be much later than 200 A.D. Since then, no one has disputed or refuted this conclusion. Scholars at that time were no fools. Notwithstanding the frag- mentary state of the discovery and the mutilation of the papyri, they saw that these leaves had connections with the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Egyptians. In his book of 1920, The Sayings of Jesus from Oxyrhynchus, Evelyn White wrote: It would, perhaps, be generally conceded by those critics who regard the Sayings as extracts that only three of the various sources which have been suggested any longer have a serious claim to considera- tion—the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospels to the Egyptians and the Hebrews (XLII). Nobody said these Sayings were Gnostic, nobody said that they were taken from the canonical Gospels. Such judgments show how sensi- ble and reasonable scholars were at that time. * Previously published in: B. Barc (éd.), Colloque international sur Les textes de Nag Ham- madi (Québec, 22–25 août 1978), Québec-Louvain 1981, 218–266. 176 chapter twelve These “Sayings of Jesus” rapidly became famous. Everybody knew that they existed and students were taught about them at highschools. It is no wonder then that when Jean Doresse had made public the discovery at Nag Hammadi of a writing beginning with the pream- ble: “These are the hidden words etc.”, that a competent scholar like Henri-Charles Puech could identify this Gospel of Thomas as the collection of Sayings partially found at Oxyrhynchus. He located it in Edessa, traditionally the city of Thomas.1 After our fl ight from Egypt in 1956, when at last we had man- aged to obtain a complete photocopy of the text and to make a pro- visional translation of the complete writing, the following hypothesis was launched by Quispel: the Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Ham- madi is translated from the Greek. It contains 114 Sayings attributed to Jesus, and therefore is a collection of Sayings, taken from the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel according to the Egyptians. Those taken from the former source, the Jewish Christian source, have some affi nities with the fragments preserved of the Jewish Christian Gos- pels, with the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, with the Diatessaron of Tatian and with the Western text of the New Testament Gospels. This was because the Jewish Christian Gospel tradition had infl uenced the text of the Clementines, the Diatessaron and the Western text. It was suggested that this Jewish Christian source contained a tra- dition of the Sayings of Jesus independent from the four canonical Gospels. The latter source, the Gospel of the Egyptians, was said to be encratite, like the Gospel of Thomas itself. It was denied that the Gospel of Thomas was Gnostic, in the form in which it came from the pen of its author.2 I fi nd it necessary to repeat the above because many a critic has twisted, misquoted and manhandled these views in order to refute them convincingly. It never has been said, by me at least, that the Diatessaron was the source of the Gospel of Thomas, that the Gos- pel of Thomas was Jewish Christian, or that all the Sayings refl ected 1 H.-Ch. Puech, “Une collection de Paroles de Jésus récemment retrouvée: L’Évangile selon Thomas”, Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 1957, 59–73. 2 “The Gospel of Thomas and the New Testament”, VC 11 (1957) 189–207 = Gnostic Studies, II, Istanbul 1975, 3–16..
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