EclecticLip

The debate in Christian scholarship about the correct place for the Gospel of Thomas (earliest and thus most authentic Gospel?  Heretical late-comer?) is fun to follow — maybe because I’m not religious, and have no theological stake in the matter.

I imagine it’s similar to the debate in Buddhist circles as to whether the Mahayana tradition is as old as the Theravada tradition, or a centuries-later development.  (Whereas the Theravada tradition has a strongly monastic undercurrent, the Mahayana is more lay-person oriented; Tibetan and Zen Buddhism are strands of Mahayana Buddhism.)

For both Thomas and Mahayana, it seems as though the majority opinion is that they’re latecomers.  My gut feel is that Thomas is early, but Mahayana is a later development, perhaps even mildly influenced by Christian expansion into the Indian subcontinent in the first century CE.  To co-opt John Donne’s words, no religion is an island.  The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) form the narrative backbone of the Christian scriptures, commonly referred to as the New Testament.  They’re called Synoptic because the see Jesus in a largely similar manner, which is veeeeery different from the Gospel of John. When Christian proponents, or apologists, say that there are multiple eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life, it’s due to similarities in the Synoptic Gospels.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of many, many Christian writings from the first few centuries which were discarded as heterodox — heretical.  Rediscovered in the 1940’s, it’s the centre of a fairly robust controversy, as some scholars believe it predates the other Gospels.  Since serious scholars are in agreement that the canonical gospels were written in the following order:

• - Mark
• - Matthew  (using Mark and probably “Q” as a second source)
• - Luke (using Mark and either “Q” or Matthew as a second source)
• - John

…the main question is where Thomas fits in.  At the very end?  At the very beginning?  Or possibly somewhere in-between?

I found Elaine Pagels’ argument in Beyond Belief compelling, that there must have been a rivalry between Thomas communities and the community in which the Gospel of John was written.  (According to an unreferenced part of the Wikipedia article, John was popular in Asia Minor while Thomas was more popular in Syria.)
John is the only Gospel in which Thomas makes more than a cameo appearance, and in fact is delegitimized through the “Doubting Thomas” episode, and the fact that Thomas isn’t present with the ten remaining disciples — Judas Iscariot is excluded of course — when the resurrected Jesus first appears to them (John 20:19-26).

To me, the weakest link in the argument for Thomas being early, is that the Jesus portrayed therein doesn’t appear all that Jewish.  That said, the Gospel of Luke — aimed at a gentile audience — de-emphasizes Jesus’ Jewishness, also.
It is commonly argued that Gnosticism is a 2nd-century movement, and thus Thomas must have been written later than the canonical Gospels.  But Thomas doesn’t use the characteristic terms of the Gnostic texts I’ve read.  Paul does gives a passing criticism of knowers in 1 Corinthians (8:2) — gnosis means knowledge in Greek — but that’s a different context.
Another argument is that Thomas isn’t commonly attested in early Christian writing (or at least, the early writing that has survived) and thus must’ve been a fringe latecomer.  That doesn’t follow in my mind, though — the Gospel of Mark, without doubt the first written, was rarely attested in ancient times.  Besides, in many areas, first out of the blocks rarely becomes dominant.  To take the humdrum example of search engines, Google has dominated for many years, it was a relative latecomer.  I can remember when Yahoo! was my favourite search engine, and before that the heady days of Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, and Infoseek — when search was a much more… adventurous activity.
I’ll write more on the synoptics and Goulder’s lectionary hypothesis a bit later…