The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

ENNO E. POPKES 289
as well as the correspondence to other so-called Thomas-writings (above
all the Acts of Thomas) indicate that Syria is actually the home of these traditions,
which have spread from there in various directions. 18
The fascination of the Gospel of Thomas is founded above all in the
observation that it appears to have the same genre that had already been
reconstructed before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi writings for the
sayings source Q. Even if the subscript calls the work the “Gospel according
to Thomas,” it does not correspond to the genre of the Synoptic
Gospels. Instead, it offers 114 sayings only rarely joined into thematically
consistent units. Mostly they are single sayings of Jesus. Even if minor
dialogues are initiated by questions of the disciples, the Gospel of Thomas
does not offer any geographic, chronological, or narrative context of
these words of Jesus. Accordingly, it does not include a passion or
resurrection narrative. Various readers have seen these formal aspects as
indications that the Gospel of Thomas offers older stages of traditions than
the Synoptic Gospels. Some claim that it represents a trajectory of early
Christianity 19 that is markedly different from the Pauline, synoptic, or
Johannine traditions. They say that in this line of development, the
suffering, death, and particularly the resurrection of Jesus did not have
any central importance. Instead, they say that Jesus showed himself as a
teacher of wisdom who above all wanted to transfer self-understanding
to his disciples. At times they even claim that in the Gospel of Thomas readers
can discern the original intention of Jesus, which had not yet been
covered up by later attempts at interpretation, not to mention the restricting
formations of a canon and of dogmas.
It is evident that these questions gave rise to fundamental controversies.
As a point of interest, we can observe that at times there is almost a
“continental drift” between North American and European interpretations
of the Gospel of Thomas. For instance, various North American approaches
regard parts of the Gospel of Thomas as some of the earliest written documents
of the gospel tradition, closely connected with the sayings source
18. Concerning the relationship between the so-called “Thomas-writings,” see Paul-
Hubert Poirier, “The Writings Ascribed to Thomas and the Thomas Tradition,” in
The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature
Commemoration (ed. J. D. Turner and A. McGuire; NHS 44; Leiden: Brill, 1997),
295–307. For an overview of the geographical extension of the Thomas traditions, see
Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions
(London: SCM, 1987), 362–63
19. On the terms and understandings of various “trajectories” in early Christianity,
see the fundamental contributions of Helmut Köster and James M. Robinson,
Entwicklungslinien durch die Welt des frühen Christentums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1971).