Nicholas Perrin - Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas - Research (1991-2006) - Part I, The Historical Jesus and The Synoptic Gospels

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Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research (1991-2006): Part I, The

Historical Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels
Nicholas Perrin
Currents in Biblical Research 2007; 5; 183
DOI: 10.1177/1476993X06073807
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Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas
Research (1991–2006):
Part I, The Historical Jesus
and the Synoptic Gospels
NICHOLAS PERRIN
Wheaton College Graduate School, Wheaton, IL, USA
nicholas.perrin@wheaton.edu
ABSTRACT
This article, the first of a two-part series, reviews research between 1991
and 2006 dealing with the Gospel of Thomas. It focuses on two questions:
(1) whether the Coptic sayings collection preserves material going back
to the historical Jesus, and (2) whether it is dependent on the synoptic
Gospels or attests to an independent line of tradition, relatively uninflu-
enced by the canonical texts. In connection with the former issue, the
article observes that Thomas is little used in contemporary Jesus schol-
arship and seeks to elucidate reasons for this. As to whether or not the
author of Thomas was privy to our synoptic gospels, scholarship has been
undergoing an ever-deepening entrenchment of positions. This has not
only resulted in a scholarly culture that resists making generalizations
regarding Thomas’s origins, but has also provoked new approaches to
explicating those origins. The article closes with suggestions for future
study.
Keywords: Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Gospels, Historical Jesus,
source criticism, Third Quest.
Introduction
In the halls of the academy the most important early Christian text outside
the canon of scripture is the Gospel of Thomas. For the time being this is
no overstatement. The 1945 discovery of the Coptic sayings collection,
anticipated in part by the discoveries of the Oxyrhynchus Fragments some
Currents in Biblical Research

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184 Currents in Biblical Research 5.2 (2007)
fifty years earlier, continues to arouse scholarly curiosity and elicit a wide
range of opinions on various issues. But it has not always been an evenly
sustained curiosity, nor has the spectrum of judgments been consistently
diverse. In the initial flurry of secondary literature following the publica-
tion and translation of the Coptic text, scholars were generally of the mind
that the text was Gnostic (e.g. Grant and Freedman 1960; Gärtner 1961),
which in turn seemed to settle (for a time anyway) a good number of other
questions, including the collection’s dependence on the New Testament
Gospels. By the end of the same decade things were beginning to cool
down; experts on the Gospels and early Christianity were turning to other
pursuits and the Thomas discussion had every appearance of being del-
egated to the backburner.
And perhaps matters would have stayed that way had it not been for the
contributions of two scholars. First, there was James M. Robinson and his
seminal ‘LOGOI SOPHON: Zur Gattung der Spruchquelle’ (1964). This
essay, which placed Thomas alongside Q on a trajectory of sayings collec-
tions within the Jewish–Christian tradition, broke ground in that it was the
first serious attempt to locate the Thomasine sayings within the broader
trajectory of early Christianity. Once revised and translated into English
in 1971, Robinson’s piece would transform the Coptic collection into
something more than a Gnostic curiosity and afford the Gospel of Thomas
renewed status as a historical datum, one with the potential of reaching back
to Jesus himself. Even though Robinson himself saw Thomas as marking a
transition along the trajectory of early Christian texts, its alleged similari-
ties to Q not only reinvigorated investigation into Q, but also served to turn
up the heat on Thomas research.
As seminal as Robinson’s essay was, Helmut Koester’s prodigious con-
tribution to the investigation of the Jesus tradition in early Christianity was
to play an even larger role in placing Thomas front and center (e.g. Koester
1965; 1968; 1979; 1980). Koester was certainly not the first to call for
bringing down the wall between the canonical and Thomasine accounts
of Jesus’ words, but he was the most influential. While Thomas has typi-
cally been dated around 140 ce (largely in unreflective dependence on the
opinion of the Oxyrhynchus discoverers, Grenfell and Hunt [1897: 16]),
Koester’s application of Bultmannian form-critical principles have given
plausibility to the theory of a much earlier core document. He has also
laid the groundwork for those who would follow in his path: the so-called
Koester school. Koester’s work on this area, bringing the status quaestionis
to a rolling boil, finds its culmination in his monograph, Ancient Christian
Gospels (1990).

Perrin Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research 185
Giving new urgency to the question as to how the Gospel of Thomas is

to be understood within early Christianity, together Koester and Robinson
have set the agenda for both sympathizers and detractors alike, at least in
the North American context. As a result, scholars across the board have felt
a pressing need to settle two issues, namely, (1) the Gospel of Thomas’s
usefulness as a source for historical Jesus studies, and (2) the relationship
between the Gospel of Thomas and the synoptic Gospels. Because Koester’s
1990 monograph represented a high point in his research, the year 1991 is a
good place to start in considering how various scholars have set themselves
to building on or refuting the basic outlines of his thesis. In the subsequent
installment of this two-part series, which follows in the path of earlier Forsc-
hungberichte (Fallon and Cameron 1989; Patterson 1992; Dehandschutter
1992; Riley 1994), I will focus on the relationship between Thomas and the
Gospel of John, as well as on issues of composition, genre, theology and Sitz
im Leben.
1. The Gospel of Thomas and the Historical Jesus

a. The Crossan–Meier Debate
In historical Jesus studies, the year 1991 marked the publication of two
important works, both interacting with the Gospel of Thomas in very dif-
ferent ways. The first, John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus: The
Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, casts Thomas in an important
role in reconstructing the words of Jesus. For Crossan, much of the collec-
tion ‘is very, very early’, having been pieced together in the fifties under
James’s authority (see Gos. Thom. 12) (Crossan 1991: 427-28). According
to Crossan, after James’s death in 62 ce and a migration of the Thomas
Christians to Edessa, the second layer of material was added on ‘possibly as
early as the sixties or seventies under the aegis of Thomas’s authority’ (see
Gos. Thom. 13) (Crossan 1991: 427). Appealing to the dual considerations
of primitiveness and multiple attestation, Crossan sees the Thomasine
sayings as having a high degree of authenticity.
The same year witnessed a diametrically opposite approach to the Gospel
of Thomas in John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical
Jesus (1991). Relying largely on the work of Christopher M. Tuckett (1986;
1988), Meier judges the collection to be reflective of second-century Gnos-
ticism; it ‘is only in the light of this strange mixture of mysticism, asceti-
cism, pantheism and polytheism that many of the sayings of the “living”
Jesus can be understood’ (Meier 1991: 126-27). Arguing for the Gospel of

Thomas’s dependence on the synoptic Gospels, he flatly states: ‘the Gospel

of Thomas will not be used in our quest as an independent source for the
historical Jesus’ (1991: 139).
The differences between Crossan and Meier could not have been starker.
But it was to be the former Jesus scholar, seemingly holding a bolder and
more provocative position, who was to attract the lion’s share of atten-
tion. For example, in his own well-known study of Jesus, N.T. Wright
calls Crossan’s hypothesis ‘a remarkable piece of bravado’ (Wright 1996:
48). Objecting to Crossan’s identification of Thomas Christianity with the
asceticism discernible behind 1 Corinthians, he further remarks that
to imagine that the Corinthian opponents were a recognized group who
can be identified with a document reflecting an ideology which we can
only know for certain to have been embraced a century later, and then in
Egypt, is straining credibility way beyond breaking point (1996: 63).
In an earlier study, Wright offers his own negative evaluation of the Gospel
of Thomas as a witness to Jesus (1992: 435-43).
Sharing Wright’s Schweitzerian understanding of Jesus, Dale C. Allison
(1998) is equally critical. While Allison claims that some isolated Thoma-
sine sayings do in fact go back to Jesus, it is nonetheless his ‘conclusion
that Paul, Mark, and Q are probably our earliest sources, and that nothing
noncanonical can be confidently placed before 70 ce’ (1998: 17). As Allison
sees it, the recent scholarly apologies on behalf of the Gospel of Thomas’s
reliability are ‘if not much ado about nothing, then much ado about not too
much’ (1998: 17). He adds that Crossan’s Jesus would not look too much
different, even if the Gospel of Thomas was taken out of the picture com-
pletely (1998: 17-18).
Other Jesus scholars are more sympathetic to Crossan’s reconstruction.
Although Stephen J. Patterson does not follow Crossan’s lead in grant-
ing chronological priority to the Gospel of Thomas vis-à-vis the synoptic
Gospels, he is far more amenable to an early Thomas than either Wright
or Allison (Patterson 1993a: 120; 1993b; 1995a; 1995b; 1998: 22-23). In
his The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning
(1998), Patterson makes occasional use of Thomas, but only, as far as I
can see, in instances where it already parallels the synoptic record. This is
consistent with Patterson’s first and most important book, where the Coptic
collection not only authenticates certain wisdom sayings, but also Jesus’
social radicalism and parables. Here too he makes an impassioned plea for
employing the Coptic gospel in Jesus research (1993a: 218-41). In practice,
Patterson’s methodology has the effect of weeding out traditions which

depict an apocalyptic Jesus (see 1995a; 1995b; 1998), thereby yielding a

vision of Jesus similar to Crossan’s, that is, a sapiential figure. A similar
portrait is upheld by Stevan L. Davies (1983; 1992: 663; 1995), Robert
Funk (1996: 212-39) and Marvin Meyer (2003: 17-34).
In his review of Crossan and Meier, Jean-Daniel Kaestli (1998) faults
the methodologies of both scholars. Meier is taken to task for inferring a
late dating for the Gospel of Thomas on the basis of its Gnostic quality, a
move which exaggerates the collection’s Gnostic character and fails to con-
sider the putative Gnostic traces as the products of late redaction (Kaestli
1998: 377-78). Also against Meier, Kaestli believes that the presence of
Sondergut and Q material in Thomas proves nothing about dependence,
for ‘the parallels with Q, M, and L and the triple tradition may well have
coexisted in a tradition prior to the redaction of the synoptic gospels’, a
tradition on which the Gospel of Thomas may have drawn (1998: 383).
Finally, according to Kaestli, Meier fails to address one of the pillar argu-
ments for the Gospel of Thomas’s independence, namely, the apparent lack
of organization in the arrangement of the sayings (1998: 381-82). Kaestli is
equally unimpressed with the strength of Crossan’s argument. The author
of Mediterranean Peasant is charged with an arbitrary stratification of the
first-century texts and an over-reliance on the criterion of multiple attesta-
tion to the neglect of other source-critical tools (1998: 384-89). The result
is a skewed portrait of Jesus, one which draws disproportionately from Q
and Thomas, and coheres somewhat too conveniently with Crossan’s pref-
erence for a sapiential Jesus (1998: 389).
David E. Aune (2002) also evaluates Meier and Crossan, and like Kaestli,
finds them both wanting—and for many of the same reasons. In a separate
piece, Aune reiterates the standard form-critical principle that Thomas,
where it is less developed than its canonical confrères, must be seen as
reflecting a more primitive stage in the transmission process (1991: 222).
Yet form criticism has not yielded uniform results, as can be seen by J.W.
Marshall (1997), who swings his guns in the direction of the New Questers
who use Thomas as a means of establishing a Cynic Jesus. For Marshall
the collection’s future orientation, themes of reversal, and concern with
ultimate unity are ineffaceable marks of consistent eschatology (Marshall
1997: 53), not demonstrably the viewpoint of Jesus.
Even though Crossan and Meier did not spark the debate regarding the
proper use of the Gospel of Thomas in Jesus research, their contributions
certainly added fuel to the fire. The difficulties of using and not using
Thomas remained apparent. For those who have been persuaded that the
collection preserved early and independent Jesus tradition, identifying and

authenticating such sayings has been no easy task. For those who have
rejected the first-century origins and/or the reliability of Thomas as a witness
to the historical Jesus, proving the inauthenticity of the Thomasine materi-
als en masse has remained equally difficult. As a result, Thomas’s witness
was to be, at least in theory, either sustained or stricken less by literary
considerations (which remained inconclusive) than by each scholar’s prior
judgments regarding the collection’s coherence with the historical Jesus.
b. The Limited Use of Thomas in Historical Jesus Research

Notwithstanding the weighty judgments issued in the early 1990s by schol-
ars like Crossan (1991), Patterson (1992; 1993a; 1993b), and Cameron
(1991), not to mention the Jesus Seminar (R.W. Funk and R. Hoover 1993),
Jesus scholarship of the past fifteen years has been rather restrained in its
use of the Gospel of Thomas. In his The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), a
popularized revision of his earlier Jesus and Judaism (1985), E.P. Sanders
writes that he shares ‘the general scholarly view that very, very little in
the apocryphal gospels could conceivably go back to the time of Jesus’,
which is to say that ‘only some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas
are worth consideration’ (Sanders 1993: 64). In his popular-level Meeting
Jesus Again for the First Time (1995), Marcus J. Borg states that the two
main sources for studying Jesus are, on the one hand, the early layers of the
synoptic witness, and, on the other, the early layer of the Gospel of Thomas.
For Borg, ‘a strong case can be made that some of these [sayings] go back
to Jesus himself’ (Borg 1995: 22). Even so, oddly enough, Thomas is never
mentioned any other time in the whole book. In keeping with the views
expressed in his The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (1983),
Davies finds the comparison between Thomas and Q to be a helpful one
(1992: 663-64), but rather surprisingly he makes no appeal to the Thoma-
sine sayings in his own Jesus the Healer (1995: 12). Meanwhile, Marcus
Bockmuehl (1996: 14-16) is generally skeptical of the Gospel of Thomas’s
usefulness for historical Jesus studies, as are Charlesworth and Evans
(1995: 502), Ben Witherington (1995: 48; 1999: 255 n. 30), Luke Timothy
Johnson (1996: 22), Christopher Tuckett (1998), Craig A. Evans (1999:
3-4; 2006), Jean-Marie Sevrin (2001: 476), Nicholas Perrin (2004: 151;
2006: 80) and (implicitly so) Paula Fredriksen (1999: 81). Other accounts
of Jesus make exceedingly little or no reference to Thomas (Vermes 1993;
Twelftree 1993; Chilton 2000; Horsley 2003; Freyne 2004). Just slightly
more sanguine are Bart Ehrman (1999: 77-78), Bruce J. Malina (2001:
115-16); J.D.G. Dunn (2003: 161-65), Brant Pitre (2005: 24-25) and Scot
McKnight (2005), who only make scanty use of Thomas at best.

As Jürgen Becker (1998: 9) sees it, the Thomasine logia ‘might help us
bring some greater precision to our exegesis…however, we get no signifi-
cant help’ from them in reconstructing the proclamation of Jesus. Graham
Stanton agrees: the Jesus Seminar may be correct in finding five sayings in
the collection which are authentic to Jesus, but, despite this, ‘Thomas does
not provide a new royal path back to the historical Jesus’ (Stanton 2002:
129). The voices of Becker and Stanton are generally representative. If
Davies was correct to write in his 1992 article that a ‘consensus is emerging
in American scholarship that the Gospel of Thomas is a text independent
of the synoptics and that it was compiled in the mid to late first century’
(Davies 1992: 663), this new consensus has had little measurable influence
on how Jesus scholars—with the exception of Patterson (1998) and Theis-
sen and Merz (1998: 47)—have recently gone about their business.
c. Renewed Calls for Employing Thomas in Historical Jesus Research

This is not to say that the case for Thomas as a witness to the historical Jesus
is closed. In the most recent commentary published on the Coptic gospel,
Das Thomas-Evangelium (2004), author Reinhard Nordsieck writes: ‘in any
case, the view should be taken seriously that a portrayal of the preaching
of the historical Jesus, much less an outline of New Testament Theology,
which ought to be based on the historical Jesus, might not be possible apart
from a sufficient consideration of Thomas’ (Nordsieck 2004: 27). Thomas
Zöckler is another German scholar (see also Liebenberg 2001) taking up
the view that the Gospel of Thomas in fact gives us a fair bit of informa-
tion about the historical Jesus. In his Jesu Lehren im Thomasevangelium
(1999), he argues that the collection, like Q, presents Jesus not simply as
a teacher of wisdom but as wisdom personified (Zöckler 1999: 128-35).
In keeping with the Koester-Patterson-Crossan line, Zöckler posits a two-
stage redaction, whereby the first sayings came together during the time of
James, and the second stage followed decades later (1999: 23-24). Starting
(again following Koester and Robinson) with an assured core of early and
independent sayings, Zöckler knits these with other sayings through the
identification of thematic complexes. The implications for Jesus research
are more suggestive than concrete: if recent strands of Jesus studies have
identified the kingdom with interiority, it is Thomas, rather than the synop-
tic Gospels, that gives expression to this concept (1999: 255).
d. Thomas, the Historical Jesus and Social Memory

Zöckler’s work, largely assuming the validity of the Koester–Robinson
thesis, was published just two years after a monograph that takes the very

same assumptions to task. In a revision of his Habilitationsschrift, pub-

lished under the title Erinnerung an Jesu Worte. Studien zur Rezeption der
Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas, Jens Schröter uses Mark,
Q and Thomas as test-cases in order to observe the transmission of the
remembered Jesus from orality to inscripturation. Taking his cue from Güt-
tgemanns, Kelber, and above all Assmann, Schröter criticizes some of the
major assumptions of form criticism both as it developed under Bultmann
and as it has been refined and applied by Koester and Robinson (Schröter
1997: 12-40). For Schröter, the programmatic privileging of Thomas (along-
side Mark and Q) rests on an illegitimate collapsing of the literary and
historical categories (1997: 34-35). Concerned with Thomas as a repository
of social memory, the author concludes his massive study by stating that
Thomas compares only remotely with Q, represents an intentional dissolu-
tion of the biographical elements of the Jesus memory (1997: 480-81), and
derives from a second-century setting which sought to give contemporary
relevance to Jesus’ preaching (1997: 484). Accordingly, its memory of
Jesus is at a far remove from that of Mark and Q (1997: 484-86).
In her most recent book, April DeConick follows suit with Schröter’s
interest in social memory, but places Thomas considerably earlier. For
her, ‘the teachings of Jesus as they were remembered played a big role’
(DeConick 2005b: 247 [original emphasis]; cf. 2005a) in the birth of Chris-
tianity, as did early Christian reflection on Jesus’ death, but DeConick is
disinclined to link Thomas directly to the historical Jesus. Even though,
for her, Jesus the sage (per, e.g., Crossan) must be replaced with Jesus the
preacher of eschatological judgment (2005b: 149-50, 238), it is neverthe-
less the case that ‘our understanding of the “historical Jesus” is a product
of our era’ (2005b: 249).
e. Conclusion
In the past decade and a half it appears that scholars have been reluctant
to employ Thomas in reconstructing the historical Jesus. Perhaps for these
researchers, despite the claims of Koester, it is by no means clear that
Thomas is any freer of redactional accretion than the synoptics. As Philip
Sellew puts it, we
have no more license to treat Thomas as a quarry to be mined for Jesus
talk, consciously or heedlessly oblivious to literary and compositional
realities, than we should have in the case of other Christian texts, be they
narrative gospels in their basic orientation or sayings gospels (Sellew
1997: 334-35).

And while Gospel scholars have inherited a legacy of critical tools for
sifting the synoptic materials, no such analogous tools have been convinc-
ingly developed in the case of the Thomasine collection. There is another
way to explain the absence of Thomas in current investigations into Jesus.
Since Thomas can only be used constructively when it is verified by mul-
tiple attestation in the canonical Gospels, and since the synoptics as nar-
ratives lend themselves more easily to historiographical corroboration and
analysis (see Horsley 2003: 97; Schröter 2004), the Coptic logia may be
expected to stand in the shadow of their canonical cousins. This would
seem to be the case, at any rate, as long as historians continue to take seri-
ously Jesus’ actions and continue, as has been customary in the so-called
Third Quest, to construe these actions as historically interrelated. Finally,
since the primitiveness and authenticity of the Thomasine sayings are still
at this point broadly controverted, it makes little sense for the Jesus scholar,
if he or she hopes to convince a broad audience, to rely heavily on Thomas.
Until new methodologies are developed or a new consensus is achieved,
the Gospel of Thomas—despite protestations of a theoretical sort—will
likely remain a little-used platform on which to build the historical Jesus
(see also Jenkins 2001: 54-81).
2. Thomas among the Synoptic Gospels

The failure of Jesus scholars to achieve a shared understanding as to the
proper role of the Gospel of Thomas in reconstructing Christian Origins
only underscores the importance of the question of dating. Dating in turn
is closely tied to the question as to whether or not the author of Thomas
knew and used the synoptic Gospels. Naturally, the thesis that Thomas is
essentially a first-century document fares best on the understanding that
the Coptic collection contains an independent record of Jesus’ words. On
the other hand, those who doubt the possibility of such an early document
are equally likely to doubt its independence from the canonical Gospels.
A sound means of determining the collection’s relationship to the synoptic
Gospels will go a long way to settling the issue of how much this Coptic
Gospel tells us not only about Jesus, but early Christianity as well.
a. The Case for Thomasine Independence

One of the most important developments in the last fifteen years is an
emerging interest in socio-historical considerations, especially among those
sympathetic to the Koester school: if Thomas is comparable to Q, how
might this observation help shed light on the community behind its origins?

Alongside and within such new trajectories of scholarship one also finds a
new mode of discourse, marked by a ‘settling in’ of assumptions that were
in earlier years the central point of contention. We begin to find, in other
words, a number of scholars on both sides of the dependence/independence
debate taking their positions very much for granted.
(i) Stephen J. Patterson. In 1993 a watershed discussion of Thomas came to

press in Stephen J. Patterson’s The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus. Patterson’s
book, building on his dissertation under Robinson at Claremont, principally
seeks to challenge the case made by Schrage (1964) that the collection could
be shown to be dependent on the synoptic Gospels on account of its similari-
ties to the Coptic NT text. For Patterson, as for Koester before him, the chief
weakness of the ‘dependence view’ is ‘there is neither a consistent pattern of
dependence of one text upon the other, nor a substantial amount of agreement
in the way each text has ordered the material they share’ (Patterson 1993a:
16). This claim is followed by an extensive logion-by-logion analysis of the
Thomasine material paralleled by the synoptic accounts. In some cases, Pat-
terson points out, Thomas witnesses to the precise form theorized by form
critics before the Nag Hammadi text was even discovered (1993a: 31). At
other places, that which has been ascribed to the distinctive hand of Luke or
Matthew turns out to be Q material. Where Thomas does in fact reproduce
the incontestable textual fingerprints of Matthew or Luke or their ordering
of pericopae, these are to be taken as evidence of harmonization in the later
stages of textual transmission. Because the Coptic text has felt the impress of
the synoptic tradition in this sense, Patterson prefers the term ‘autonomous
tradition’ to ‘independent tradition’ (1993a: 93).
As for form, the author contends that ‘catchword association is the
principle upon which the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas were originally
collected’ (Patterson 1993a: 102). This catchword structure betrays the
collection’s oral origins and provides the key to understanding Thomas’s
genre (logoi sophon) and socio-historical location. Behind this list of
sayings, including in particular the legal injunctions, Patterson surmises the
same kind of Wanderradikalismus first posited by Gerd Theissen (1977)
in regards to the early Christian movement (1993a: 158-70). This move-
ment eventuated in Syrian monasticism (1993a: 118-20, 152-53), which
succumbed to the Gnostic proclivities inherent in the genre. The original
Gospel of Thomas, however, was composed ‘in the vicinity of 70–80 ce’
(1993a: 120). Although a number of the arguments laid out here echo
Koester, by virtue of his careful source-critical argumentation and inge-
nious historical synthesis the author has succeeded in granting the theory

of independence (autonomy) a renewed plausibility. It remains one of the

most important books on Thomas.
(ii) Other arguments for independence. The period under our review begins
with three pieces appearing in a Festschrift for Helmut Koester. With a
view to describing its social setting, Robert Doran (1991) assumes the
independence of Gos. Thom. 86. Despite insightful comments in regards to
the cluster of sayings surrounding this logion, Doran’s piece is somewhat
undermined by its failure to engage an earlier source-critical investigation
of the same text, but with different results, undertaken by August Strobel
(1963). Richard Horsley (1991: 201, 205), wishing to loosen the tightening
bond between Q and Thomas, assigns the core of the Nag Hammadi collec-
tion, unstructured as it is, to a stage earlier than Q. Ron Cameron emphasizes
the difference between the vision of Thomas and the faith passed down in
the likes of Mark and Paul, a difference which constitutes ‘nothing less than
a call to see early Christianity in a fresh light, not as something given but
as itself an unsettled issue’ (Cameron 1991: 392). Later Cameron assumes
rather than argues Thomas’s chronological priority when compared to Mark
and Q (Cameron 1996: 43). Perhaps the conspicuous absence of dialogue
with scholarly voices that might contest this point can be explained by
Cameron’s own programmatic vision of Thomas studies:
The Gospel of Thomas cannot be explained as a variation of the myth of
origins constructed by Luke and canonized in the New Testament, because
Thomas’s genre, designs, logic, and theology are incompatible with the
dominant paradigm of Christian origins. Therefore, in place of a singular
point of origination, Thomas necessitates a different starting point, frame
of reference, and mode of comparison. Instead of appeals to incompara-
bility and uniqueness, Thomas demands a different discourse, series of
scholarly assumptions, and theory of religion (Cameron 2004: 107).
Lest any should doubt Thomas’s independence or the significance of that

independence, Cameron insists on both in no uncertain terms.
Bradley McLean likewise argues more from than for the theory of inde-
pendence (McLean 1995). Again, oral origins are suggested by the sayings’
lack of interpretive elements and any discernible order; it is ‘a cumula-
tive product that expanded over time by the interpolation of new sayings’
(McLean 1995: 324-32). Re-advancing the Koesterian notion that Thomas
shows close comparison with an early version of Q, McLean concludes
that ‘GThom and Q testify to the presence of a primitive form of the Jesus
tradition which was originally independent of, parallel to, and in tension
with, the emerging synoptic and Pauline traditions’ (1995: 345). Although

Arland J. Jacobson is agnostic in regards to the chronological ordering

of Thomas and Q (Jacobson 2000: 211), his comparison of the two texts
imply the former’s independence as far as the synoptic Gospels are con-
cerned. The same notion is implicit in the arguments of Cameron (1991;
1994; 1996; 2004), William Arnal (1995), Funk and Hoover (1993), Jon
Asgeirsson (1997; 1998), Vernon K. Robbins (1997; 1998); Marvin Meyer
(2003: 6-7) and Arthur J. Dewey (2004), among others. But if Davies and
Johnson (1997) are correct, Thomas is not only pre-Double Tradition, it is
also pre-Markan. Gregory J. Riley (1995) argues that Gos. Thom. 47 and
72 have influenced Luke’s choice of words. The veteran Thomas scholar
Gilles Quispel (2001: 438) allows for a ‘Judaic Christian’ layer reaching
back to the mid-first century, with Hermetic accretions around 100 ce, but
continues to hold to a date of final composition around 140 ce.
In his contribution to the Hans-Martin Schenke Festschrift, Charles W.
Hedrick (2002: 116) sees Thomas as ‘a collection of collections’. This is
borne out not only by semitic features but also by the presence of dou-
blets. These points, together with five other factors, induce the author to
conclude: ‘the Gospel of Thomas must in principle be treated as indepen-
dent of the canonical gospels’ (Hedrick 2002: 119). A test-case follows
whereby Gos. Thom. 81 is deemed on form-critical grounds to be inde-
pendent. Edwin K. Broadhead (2000) also applies form criticism to the
next logion, Gos. Thom. 82, and argues for its independence.
b. The Case for Thomas’ Dependence

When Michael Fieger’s Das Thomasevangelium: Einleitung, Kommentar
und Systematik was published in 1991, it signified two broad differences
between the conversations on Thomas as they were being carried out on the
western and eastern sides of the Atlantic. First, while the Koester school
and most North American scholars had up to that point typically relied on
form-critical methodologies, Fieger takes up a redactional approach and
therewith shows his indebtedness to the methods and results of Wolfgang
Schrage’s research (1964). Secondly, Fieger is more concerned with text as
a whole, rather than—as the North American viewpoint would generally
have it—as a series of discrete sayings. He writes: ‘even if it is only with
little confidence that the traces of redactional handiwork of the individual
evangelists can be made out, there is nevertheless in ThEv a knowledge
of these redactional changes’ (Fieger 1991: 6). The absence of a narrative
framework and the alterations of the synoptic material suggest a second-
century, Gnostic background (Fieger 1991: 6-7). For Fieger, Thomas is
clearly dependent on the synoptics.

Focusing in particular on distinctive Mattheanisms and Lucanisms,

Christopher Tuckett has also been a staunch advocate for Thomas being
principally dependent (Tuckett 1986; 1988; 1991; 1995; 1998). In 1991,
the first year of our review, Tuckett criticizes Koester of circular reason-
ing in that he seeks to prove Thomas’s similarity to early Q by forcing the
contents of Q (and within that the earliest stage, Q1) on a procrustean bed of
Thomas parallels. Reaffirming his earlier conclusions, and against the argu-
ment already made by Koester and later to be repeated by Patterson, Tuckett
writes: ‘I would claim that we do find a widespread evidence of dependence
on the finished synoptic Gospels that seems to be too deep-seated to be
explained simply by scribal glosses in the later textual tradition’ (Tuckett
1991: 359). Impressed with Tuckett’s point, Jean-Marie Sevrin states that
such observations ‘show the weakness of a theory which radically excludes
all dependence in regards to the synoptics’ (Sevrin 1997: 348), and pleas—
along with Philip Sellew (1997: 335-39) in the same volume—for analysis
more sensitive to the whole text (Sevrin 1997: 353-59).
Still, the analysis of the individual logia is felt to have its own probative
value. Tjitze Baarda (1991; 1993; 1995; 1997a; 1997b) has been indefatigable
in seeking to refute arguments which claim the independent tradition behind
various sayings (e.g. Gos. Thom. 8, 44, 54, 65). Likewise, Strickert (2000)
builds a case for the influence of the synoptic tradition on Gos. Thom. 99.
John Halsey Wood (2005) finds a positive correlation between the synoptic
material as it appears in Thomas and the same material as it is appropriated
in Mark, Justin Martyr, and Tatian. Since all four New Testament Gospels
find parallels (of some sort) in the Coptic text, Thomas should be regarded as
possibly affording ‘the earliest witness to the use of the four-Gospel collec-
tion’ (Wood 2005: 595). Sevrin (1992) and Dehandschutter (1992) also judge
Thomas’s use of the material to be reflective of second-century approaches
to the synoptic tradition. Meanwhile, Silke Petersen (1999) and Dieter Lüh-
rmann (2004: 175-81) assume without argument that the Thomasine sayings
hailed from the second century, for, as the former writes, ‘the majority of
German exegetes…presuppose the dependence of EvThom on the synoptic
Gospels and date it correspondingly late’ (Petersen 1999: 184).
c. Towards a via media and Case-by-Case Judgments

The polarization of scholarly opinion on the issue of Thomas’s origins has
engendered a middle-of-the-road, if not agnostic, posture among a third cat-
egory of scholars, who have come to resist global statements regarding the
collection’s independence or dependence (see, e.g., Kaestli 1998: 390-92).
For example, while Steven R. Johnson (1997: 320-21) sees Gos. Thom. 76.3

preserving tradition on which both Luke and John drew, he is non-committal

regarding the direction of dependence when it comes to Gos. Thom. 5 and 6
(Johnson 2002: 184-85). A less felicitous result of this deadlock has been a
certain tentativeness in regards to, if not downright avoidance of, historical
issues. For the first twenty-five pages of his The Gospel of Thomas, Richard
Valantasis appears diffident on the matter of dating, that is, until he writes: ‘I
have not looked toward the development of the material over the course of
the period from roughly 60 ce until the dating of the Coptic manuscript, but I
have looked at the material as a complete collection from the first decade of
the second century ce’ (Valantasis 1997: 26). How or why he arrives at this
determination remains unstated. Gridlock on the issue of dating and sources,
together with the sense that form and redactional arguments have run their
course, may have been a driving force in turning Thomas scholars of recent
years to a fresh consideration of the text as a whole.
d. New Approaches to Thomas: Uro, Perrin and DeConick

All the same, the source-critical issues have not gone away. But there have
been new approaches. One such new approach can be found in Risto Uro’s
lead essay in his edited volume (1998b), an article entitled ‘Thomas and the
Oral Gospel Tradition’ (1998a). Eschewing, on the one side, the form-criti-
cal collapsing of oral and literary categories, and on the other side, Werner
Kelber’s sharp disjunction between the two, Uro calls for striving ‘for a
model which would allow for an interaction between oral and written tradi-
tions’ (1998a: 15). In this light, ‘the suggestion that Thomas had access to
some “pure” oral traditions, uninfluenced by any written records of Jesus’
sayings, is simply unrealistic’ (1998a: 19-20). Turning his sights on Gos.
Thom. 14, Uro argues that the editor of the logion
was either freely quoting Matthew and Q or Luke from memory, or using
traditions which were influenced by the reading of these gospels. The
border between these two alternatives is fluid, and it is perhaps impos-
sible to make a firm decision between them on the basis of the present
evidence (1998a: 31).
This places Gos. Thom. 14 no earlier than the writing of Matthew (1998a:
32). This does not mean, however, that Uro envisages Thomas as funda-
mentally late and dependent. Rather, his intention is to forestall facile gen-
eralizations either way. This is consistent with conclusions in a later study,
where he theorizes that the Thomasine editor used books, informal notes,
and oral sources, all of which ‘would explain the mixed evidence that has
fueled the continual debate over Thomas’ sources’ (Uro 2003: 129). In a

separate study, Uro hesitatingly suggests the dependence of Gos. Thom. 89

on the synoptic tradition, but criticizes the procedure whereby ‘the standard
comparison of the synoptic gospels and Thomas is too often determined
by the—often illusory—search of the hypothetical “original form” ’ (2000:
318). By raising the prospect of ‘secondary orality’, this Finnish scholar
has introduced a plausible explanation as to why (at least some of) the
Coptic sayings cohere only imperfectly with their Greek counterparts. His
larger objective, however, consists in laying down a multiplex approach,
effectively reinforcing a culture of Thomasine interpretation resistant to
generalizations regarding the collection as a whole.
Hans-Martin Schenke bucks this trend when he states that ‘a single-
stage hypothesis should be preferred to any pluralistic one’ (Schenke 1994:
26). The author of this review has agreed with Schenke on this score,
conceiving Thomas to be a compositional unity, written late in the second
century, a position argued out in his published dissertation, Thomas and
Tatian: The Relationship between the Gospel of Thomas and the Diatessa-
ron. Reconstructing the individual words of Coptic Thomas as they would
have been read aloud in Syriac (Perrin 2002: 57-155), Perrin argues that
the constitutive 114 sayings are completely joined together by hundreds of
catchwords, but only so in Syriac. This in turn suggests that Coptic Thomas
preserves the contents and order of a textually unified document that was
first composed in Syriac. Since Thomas reflects countless Diatessaronisms
and also parallels the sequence of the Diatessaron at more than a half
dozen points, it follows that the collection must have been dependent on
the Tatian’s harmony and therefore written in the last quarter of the second
century (2002: 191-96). In a follow-up piece, Perrin (2004) augments his
argument by showing that seven points of difference between the Greek
Oxyrhynchus fragments and the Coptic text can be resolved by positing
common dependence on a Syriac original. Anticipating a counter-argument
to his thesis, viz. that the cumulative probative force of his Syriac retrover-
sions is weakened by the possibility of tendentiousness and/or coincidence,
Perrin elsewhere states that the multiple recurrences of a number of these
Syriac-specific catchword pairings render coincidence statistically impos-
sible (2006: 74-75). Moreover, the gospel’s Edessan provenance is by itself
‘prima facie grounds for inferring that Thomas first saw the light of day
in Syriac (not Greek, not Coptic) script’ (Perrin 2006: 79; cf. Desjardins
1992). He adds, Thomas as a late second-century, paronomastic Syriac text
not only coheres with what we know about Syriac theology and literature of
the same period (2002: 184, 194; 2006: 78-79), it also explains the gospel’s
mysterious ordering of sayings—and with that undermines the principle

plank of Thomasine independence (2006: 75). Perrin has most recently

been followed by Evans (2006).
While somewhat swayed by Perrin’s argument regarding Thomas’s orig-
inal language of composition (DeConick 2005b: 49, 233-34; cf. Morrice
2003), April D. DeConick sees the project as a misguided attempt to ‘revive
the old cut and paste model’ (DeConick 2005b: 48). Elaborating on her
article dedicated to explaining the compositional origins of the Thomasine
gospel (2002), in her Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History
of the Gospel and its Growth (2005b; cf. 1996: 176-80), she proposes an
alternative to the ‘literate model’, the ‘oral-literate model’ and the ‘redac-
tion model’ (2005b: 39-55). Drawing on William McKane’s description
of Jeremiah as a ‘rolling corpus’, a fundamentally orally-based collection
snowballing over time, DeConick sees Thomas as the cumulative product
of different communities building on a core tradition (2005b: 60-61; cf.
1996: 178-80). Employing modified form-critical methodologies (2005b:
64-111), she delineates four (not necessarily consecutive) stages, consist-
ing of the Kernel Gospel (30–50 ce), accretions involving relocation and
leadership crisis (50–60 ce), accretions involving accommodation to the
Gentiles and the ‘Non-Event’ of the parousia (60–100 ce), and finally accre-
tions incorporating hermetic and encratic elements (80–120 ce). DeConick
emphasizes the eschatological character of the earliest Kernel Gospel; it is
most similar to the traditions associated with conservative Christian
Judaism from Jerusalem and those developed later by the Ebionites. It
seems very likely that this collection of speeches was used by the Jerusa-
lem mission between 30–50 ce as it labored to convert people to the faith,
especially in Palestine and its environs (cf. Acts 10–11.18; 15.1, 22, 27,
32) (2005b: 153).
The earliest material, DeConick reasons, must pre-date the church’s disap-
pointment with Jesus’s failure to return, thus initially putting it no later than
60 ce (2005b: 148). But the original Kernel also occupies ‘a stage parallel
to the earliest Jerusalem church and Paul’s letters that recognizes Jesus as
God’s great angel of Judgment but has not yet narrowed his identification
to that which is given to him by the later pesher’ (2005b: 153). This would
push the core ‘extremely early, predating even Quelle’ with a terminus ad
quem of ‘roughly 50 ce’ (2005b: 152). For DeConick, the origins of the
gospel, with its shifting points of view, is best explained by a constantly
evolving community who ‘would have provided alternative ways to hear,
read, and exegete the gospel’ (2005b: 248-49). DeConick’s methodologies
and conclusions await response.

Conclusion
In recounting the past fifteen years of Thomas scholarship, especially as
it relates to the question of the historical Jesus and synoptic interrelation-
ships, it is appropriate to consider how matters have been clarified and
which matters remain to be clarified. First of all, today there is a keener
sense of the limits of traditional methodologies. If Schrage’s redactional-
critical methods tended to show only marginally more than what they pre-
supposed, namely, Thomas’s dependence, much the same could be said for
form-critical approaches seeking to prove independence. There has been a
healthy collective turn toward reformulating classical form- and redaction-
critical procedures, or moving beyond them altogether. Second, progress in
Thomasine studies demands further exploration into how texts and tradi-
tions were transmitted and appropriated in antiquity. Overgeneralizations
regarding the oral or cheirographic mentality of the Thomasine community
must give way to properly attenuated models of traditioning. Finally, we
continue to need more work on the collection as a whole, including and
especially those sayings not paralleled in the canonical Gospels. What these
114 sayings meant and how they functioned for the Nag Hammadi commu-
nity and its predecessors are questions deserving higher billing. Following
a discussion of Thomas and John, this last set of questions will take center
stage in our subsequent article.
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Nicholas Perrin - Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas - Research (1991-2006) - Part I, The Historical Jesus and The Synoptic Gospels

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Nicholas Perrin - Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas - Research (1991-2006) - Part I, The Historical Jesus and The Synoptic Gospels

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Currents in Biblical Research

Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research (1991-2006): Part I, The

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Currents in Biblical Research

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Giving new urgency to the question as to how the Gospel of Thomas is

1. The Gospel of Thomas and the Historical Jesus

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Thomas’s dependence on the synoptic Gospels, he flatly states: ‘the Gospel

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depict an apocalyptic Jesus (see 1995a; 1995b; 1998), thereby yielding a

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b. The Limited Use of Thomas in Historical Jesus Research

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c. Renewed Calls for Employing Thomas in Historical Jesus Research

d. Thomas, the Historical Jesus and Social Memory

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same assumptions to task. In a revision of his Habilitationsschrift, pub-

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2. Thomas among the Synoptic Gospels

a. The Case for Thomasine Independence

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(i) Stephen J. Patterson. In 1993 a watershed discussion of Thomas came to

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of independence (autonomy) a renewed plausibility. It remains one of the

Lest any should doubt Thomas’s independence or the significance of that

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Arland J. Jacobson is agnostic in regards to the chronological ordering

b. The Case for Thomas’ Dependence

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Focusing in particular on distinctive Mattheanisms and Lucanisms,

c. Towards a via media and Case-by-Case Judgments

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preserving tradition on which both Luke and John drew, he is non-committal

d. New Approaches to Thomas: Uro, Perrin and DeConick

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separate study, Uro hesitatingly suggests the dependence of Gos. Thom. 89

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plank of Thomasine independence (2006: 75). Perrin has most recently

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