Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

(1) Are the Coptic Gospels Gnostic?
‘The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity.’
— James Joyce, Ulysses
Ever since the initial announcement of the Nag Hammadi find, and unto the
present day, the library as a whole has been consistently called ‘gnostic’, both in the
scholarly literature and in the popular press. 1 To begin with, the entire Nag Hammadi
Library was so labelled in the Preface to the first bilingual editions of Thomas (1959;
Biblio.6)— which classification was subsequently accepted by virtually everyone
who looked into the text. Thus, representative of almost all subsequent publications
was the report of Robert M. Grant & David Noel Freedman, The Secret Sayings of
Jesus (1960): ‘[Regarding] the Gospel of Thomas, [Jean] Doresse looked through
this gospel in the spring of 1949 and later announced that it was “a Gnostic
composition”.... The Gospel of Philip contains nothing but Gnostic speculations.’
Wiser counsel, at least regarding Thomas, soon came from no less an authority than
Gilles Quispel at the centenary meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1964:
‘The Gospel of Thomas ... is not gnostic at all. The adherents of the gnostic
interpretation ... must explain how the author could possibly say that the buried
corpse could rise again (logion 5, Greek version).’ Unfortunately, however, Quispel's
seemingly irrefutable point was soon eclipsed by a surge of fascination, in both
academic publications and the media, with gnosticism's apparently more exotic
enticements.
While there may well be gnostic writings amongst the several dozen titles found
so significantly near the site of Saint Pachomius' archetypal monastery, the three
Coptic Gospels in that collection are demonstrably not gnostic in content. This can
most readily be shown via an ordinary syllogism; the remainder of the present essay
1 The citations in Recent Scholarly Comments, in the Introduction above, are but notable exceptions— which the student will
encounter only by an extensive review of the more academic literature. More typical are the prejudicial titles of Elaine Pagel’s
best-selling The Gnostic Gospels (1979); E.J. Brill’s entire scholarly series, Nag Hammadi Studies: The Coptic Gnostic
Library; and The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, General Editor James M. Robinson
(2006 edition)— for these last two, more appropriate titles would surely be The Coptic Monastic Library etc.
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