Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

as the original Gospel Messianics were eventually supplanted by the
Pauline ‘Christians’ (Ac 11:2526). Thus the Epistle of Barnabas (late first
century) remains unacquainted with the historical Gospels, whereas Justin
Martyr (mid-second century) shows no awareness of Paul's writings—
indicating an ongoing schism between the Petrine and the Pauline
traditions. Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyon, at the end of the
second century, are the first authors explicitly to quote from both the
Gospels and from Paul. I have attempted to analyze the basis of this rift
in ‘The Paul Paradox’, Comm.5, below. Essential reading on that formative
period is Walter Bauer's pioneering study, Orthodoxy and Heresy in
Earliest Christianity (1934; http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/humm/Resources/Bauer).
The translations of the texts themselves are both as literal and as
lyrical as I could make them. Any grammatical irregularities encountered
(e.g. the verb tenses in Th 109) are in the Coptic text itself. Plausible
textual reconstructions are in [brackets], while editorial additions are in
(parentheses). ‘[...]’ indicates places where it is not possible to
interpolate the deterioration of the papyrus manuscript. The Greek
Oxyrhynchus variants to Thomas are within {braces}. ‘You’ and its
cognates are plural, ‘thou’ and its cognates represent the singular (but
generally with the modern verb-form). Notes at the end of each logion
are indicated by superscript¹, those at the end of the current text with a
circle°. The scriptural cross-references listed are essential to an
understanding of the saying in its biblical context, and the reader is urged
to refer to them in every case; explicit parallels to Thomas in the
Synoptics are separately marked with an equal sign=, to spare the reader
looking up what is already well-known. In antiquity, of course, there were
no lower-case letters, and thus in order to represent the Hebrew, Greek
and Coptic scripts I have not here used their subsequent cursive letters
but rather their classic forms, which are easier for the non-scholar to
read. In turn, in translating such ancient texts to modern languages, it is
virtually impossible to capitalize in a consistent and adequate manner; I
7