Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

a true Christian Gnosis here, but no Gnosticism.... There is no clear evidence of
dependence on any of our present Gospels.... Nevertheless, the Greek has, I think,
the true ring of the evangelical style. It is marvelously simple and clear.... Everything
in this present fragment points to the simple Palestinian Greek of bilingual Jews,
accustomed to render word for word the memoirs of the original hearers of the Lord.
I doubt if the second century or the soil of Egypt could have produced anything of
the kind.... I find it difficult to believe, judging from the form in which they are cast,
that any of these sayings are later in their origin than the first century, or that the
collection which contained them was put together after our canonical Gospels came
into general use. Both St Luke's preface and the postscript to St John speak of
books other than the Gospels which had been written, or might have been written, to
contain the Gesta Christi. We have now for the first time distinct evidence of the
existence of books which contained His sayings only, detached from the narrative....
If it be asked why no collection of λογια found its way into the canon of the NT, or
has survived as a whole to our own time, the answer may well be that the Church
needed, above all things, histories of the Lord's Life and Passion and Resurrection.
——————————, ‘ The New Oxyrhynchus Sayings [PapOx 654]’ (lecture
delivered at the Divinity School, the University of Cambridge, 7 July 1904): We now know that in
the third century there existed a collection of Λογια Ιησου which was in circulation at
Oxyrhynchus and probably elsewhere in the valley of the Nile. The sayings were not
simply jotted down in the note-book of a private collector, but were prepared for
publication.... My impression [is] that the new sayings are substantially genuine,... at
once new and after the manner of our Lord's earlier teaching,... which it is difficult to
regard as the creation of subapostolic times,... traditions based on the recollections
of those who had heard the Lord.
Gilles Quispel, ‘The Gospel of Thomas and the New Testament’ (lecture held at
Oxford, 18 Sept 1957): Unknown sayings of Jesus, taken from a Jewish-Christian
Gospel originally written in Aramaic, have come to light. The Gospel of Thomas ... is
nothing else than the Gospel used by the descendants of the primitive community of
Jerusalem, who seem to have lived on in Palestine almost completely isolated from
the main stream of Gentile Christian tradition.... There is, as far as I can see, nothing
to show that this is not good tradition.... I do not see why these ... sayings of Jesus
that are contained in the Gospel of Thomas and by their wording, their style and their
content betray their Palestinian origin, should not have the same historical value as
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