Metalogos The Gospels of Thomas & Philip & Truth

a radical movement. Jesus called for a full reversal
of values, advocating the end of the world as we
have known it and its replacement by a quite new,
utopian kind of life in which the ideal world would
be real. He took a stand quite independent of the
authorities of his day ··· and did not last very long
before they eliminated him. Yet his followers
reaffirmed his stand— for them he came to
personify the ultimate goal.... Just as the Dead
Sea Scrolls [at Qumran] were put in jars for
safekeeping and hidden at the time of the
approach of the Roman Tenth Legion, the burial
[three centuries later] of the Nag Hammadi library
in a jar may have been precipitated by the
approach of Roman authorities, who had by then
become Christian.
—————————, ‘Nag Hammadi: The First
Fifty Years’ (plenary address, Society of Biblical Literature,
1995): Clearly the Gospel of Thomas does contain
sayings that cannot be derived from the canonical
gospels,... that are clearly not Gnostic, but have
the same claim to being old, even authentic, as
does the older layer of sayings in the canonical
gospels and Q. This can be illustrated by some of
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