The Gospel of Thomas
by Paul Williams
We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices that the actual text became available. The Gospel of Thomas is basically a collection of sayings, or logia, that sometimes seem similar, perhaps more primitive than sayings found in the canonical Gospels. Sometimes, however, the sayings seem better explained as reflecting a “Gnostic” understanding of the world. This involves a rejection of the material world and a desire for gnosis, a secret knowledge, in order to escape the world and return to the divine being.
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Nag Hammadi Codices and Thomasine Literature
10:35 – Chapter 2. The Sayings of the Gospel of Thomas
28:15 – Chapter 3. Proto-orthodoxy and “Gnosticism”
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses
that’s an interesting question. There were many different Christian movements in the early centuries who esteemed as ‘scripture’ different books. For some Christians the Gospel of Thomas (containing for them the words of Jesus) was clearly sacred or Scripture – but for others it was rejected as scripture. Obviously for the victorious Catholic church the gospel was not scripture and as with history in general the victors got to write the history and determine what *they* considered to be the canon of the Bible, ie the 73 books you mention. But many Christians clearly had different views – see the Codex Sinaiticus and the Muratorian fragment which had a different list, for example.