Loading...We’ve talked about Gnosticism and in the previous post I mentioned Gnostic groups connected with “Thomas,” allegedly the (twin!) brother of Jesus. There are a number of writings written in the name of Thomas, the most famous of which is the Gospel of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi. I haven’t talked at length about it on the blog for several years now, so it seems like a good time to return to it here.
This will take three posts. The one today is a broad introduction to what the Gospel is and what it contains. I have taken this from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.
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The Gospel of Thomas is without question the most significant book discovered in the Nag Hammadi library. Unlike the Gospel of Peter, discovered sixty years earlier, this book is completely preserved. It has no narrative at all, no stories about anything that Jesus did, no references to his death and resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus.
The sayings are not arranged in any recognizable order. Nor are they set within any context, except in a few instances in which Jesus is said to reply to a direct question of his disciples. Most of the sayings begin simply with the words “Jesus said.” In terms of genre, the book looks less like the New Testament Gospels and more like the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible.
Like Proverbs,
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So when do you think this Gospel is dated or written?
These days it’s usually dated to around 120 CE or so.
Having finished reading your recently published book Armageddon – which I greatly enjoyed and am in the process of writing a review for Amazon – I can’t help wondering whether you know of any evidence that Gnosticism may have emerged, at least in part, as a reaction against Jesus’s neo-Jewish, messianic, Divine Warrior role portrayed in the Book of Revelation.
THere’s nothing to indicate that Revelation had an effect, one way or the other, on Gnostic views. It wasn’t extraordinarily popular in the first couple of centuries, so it seems unlikely that it generated a large reaction.
Hi Dr Ehrman, was just wondering what your opinion is on how many apostles were definitely martyred. I know in one of your previous blog posts it seemed that you seemed sure that at least Paul and Peter were martyred, so was curious if your opinion had changed since that post and also what you think concerning particularly James the brother of Jesus’ martyrdom. When rereading, you seemed to indicate the evidence for James wasn’t good enough to know for sure. So was wondering why you think this is? (providing I have not put words in your mouth.) Lastly was also curious for your thoughts were on Paul’s martyrdom as know in previous posts you mentioned you thought it was legendary because of the milk flowing from Paul’s neck. However I remember Sean Mcdowell in a video mentioned about a medical condition where a milky white substance secretes from the neck which *may* account for the mention of the milk. Therefore, providing Mcdowell is right (although he never cites a source.) Would this make you rethink the historicity of what we know about his martyrdom, or are there other factors that make this account not reliable regardless of the milk?
McDowell: really?!? OK, then. Ha, well, that’s a bit extreme. I doubt if he’s actually studied the Acts of Paul but the scholarship on it is very interesting and no scholar I’ve heard of takes it seriously as a historical account — not just the martyrdom but the whole thing. In it Paul preaches that salvation comes (not by the death of Jesus but) by keeping sexually pure, that is, by not having sex even with a spouse, and he encounters a talking lion in the arena who expresses its gratitude for Paul having baptized it. I wonder if McDowell thinks those are plausible as well?
I do think Peter and Paul were probably martyred — the Gospel of John seems to assume Peter was and Acts that Paul was, and we have a mention of them in 1 Clement. James: Josephus mentions it so it seems completely reasonalbe. James the son of Zebedee — Acts says so and I don’t see much of any reason to doubt it. I don’t think we have much evidence for anyone else, though we do have some great legendary materials from the apocryphal Acts!
Apologies turns out he did cite a source (even if it is Wikipedia) and the condition is called Chylothorax.
Ah, so he thinks lymph spurt out of his neck instead of blood. (Maybe a lymphatic condition was Paul’s thorn in the flesh?) Does anyone really take him seriously when he says things like that? Are we supposed to think that when Paul was beheaded it was lymph mistaken for milk instead of, say, blood?
Good point maybe I won’t include this as evidence for Paul’s martyrdom in my EPQ! -Thanks for the help greatly appreciated!
beautiful!
Is there really anything fundamentally different about the Gnostic Gospels from the canonical ones, other than they were not selected for inclusion in the New Testament?
Yup, they are HUGELY different. Thomas may not be Gnostic. But read something like the Gospel of Philip or the Apocryphon of John and I think you’ll see pretty clearly: this ain’t the same kinda thing!
Although my original comment (i.e., question) concerning this post of Bart’s awaits moderation, I subsequently have realized that I can pose it in a more general way. In Bart’s opinion, are all Gnostic writings evidence of an attempt by formerly pagan Greeks (i.e., gentiles) to elevate their own metaphysically based, Platonic concept of the highest high over the Jewish and subsequently orthodox Christian concept of what, in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (1993), Prof Jon D. Levenson calls the “theology of chosenness”? Or to paraphrase Jacques Derrida, “Are we Greek? Hebrew? What?”
I”m not sure Levenson and Derrida are often mentioned in support of a position side by side! But yes, I do think Gnosticism comes out of largely gentile traditions (thought there are obvious Jewish connections, especially with the focus on Hebrew Scripture), and it has been ehavily influenced by middle-Platonism. But I don’t think that there was some kind of planned attempt to take on Jewish / Christian views about “chosenness” per se. It’s more that there is a development of chosenness into an almost deterministic sense that only some have a divine spark within and that it is not a matter of effort ti aquire it.
Amazon has just published my five-star review of Bart’s Armageddon. So, here’s a revised comment that combines the contents of the previous two.
Having recently read and five-star reviewed for Amazon your book Armageddon, I can’t help wondering whether you interpret all Gnostic writings as evidence of an attempt by formerly pagan Greeks (i.e., uncircumcised gentiles) to elevate their own metaphysically based, Platonic concept of the highest high over the Jewish and subsequently orthodox Christian concept of what, in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (1993), Prof Jon D. Levenson calls the “theology of chosenness”? Or to paraphrase Jacques Derrida, “Are we Greek? Hebrew? What?”
Having also read Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief, I also can’t help wondering about a comment in one of your recent posts that she has changed her interpretive position. Please elaborate.
Additionally, Bart can find an extended version of my review of his Armageddon at my Blog post website historyhighjackers.com
Elaine no longer thinks that Thomas is best characterized as a Gnostic text. She’s very firm about that these days, or at least was last time we talked about it a few years ago. Thanks for your review! May your tribe increase.
Dr Ehrman, wondering why specifically scholars think Thomas is most significant the 50-some manuscripts in Nag Hammadi?
Well, it’s a judgment call, but usually they mean the text that is most known, read, talked about, written about, and possibly of greatest use historically for knowing about Jesus.
Thanks very much for your reply. I am teaching a class on the gospel of Thomas and I am certainly no biblical scholar. I am primarily interested in studying and discussing the logions. But I find myself going down rabbit holes online (including subscribing to your blog) and with piles of books about early Christianity, beliefs and writings that have come down to us.
You might check out the Introduction to the Gospel of Thomas in the book I co-wrote with Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels. He did the translation (out of Coptic) and I wrote the Intro, but he agreed wiht what I said there (he’s a major Coptologist and expert on Gnosticism).
Whatever you do, skip Ehrman’s on Thomas, as the translation by Plese is the usual Christian one, full of misleading mistranslations and impossible emendations.
You can verify that yourself via the interactive translation that allows you to click any word, upon which the dictionary entry will be shown
https://www.academia.edu/42110001
Note logion 3 (of your eye, not outside you), the singular seed of Logion 9, the singular weed of Logion 57. The separation and sickness of Logion 74, the colostrum of Logion 96 – to name just a few.
Bart doesn’t know any Coptic so he isn’t to blame – although he can read Greek, perhaps, and should have noticed that the Greek Transcription is falsified as well, e.g. Logion 2 says βασιλεύσῃ the present tense (to be precise, verb 3rd sg aor subj act) yet gets translated with the future tense – and each Logion contains a few like those.
Yes, Thomas is falsified, heavily – lest the truth be exposed
There is no scholarship on Thomas; only Christian apologetics (or amateur ramblings), and Bart’s book on Thomas just adds to that pile.
Read Koepke’s, or mine – the only reliable translations
Martijn Linssen
It’s a very big mistake to think that Zlako Plese does not know how to translate Coptic. He is widely known as one of the top Coptologists in the world, and for good reason. He is quite a remarkable philologist.disabledupes{9e19a15da50d4bd30774fc95ce22627c}disabledupes
Bart’s “It’s a very big mistake to think that Zlako Plese does not know how to translate Coptic.” is presumptuous, and an assumption of his own – and certainly not something that I’ve said.
But it does put the emphasis exactly on where it is: the Christian “translators” of the Nag Hammadi Library deliberately falsified their translations
It’s all in writing, Bart – and we can just compare Guillaumont and other very early ones to falsifications like that by Plese – or Gathercole, Meyer, DeConick and other much lesser gawds who basically are clueless about Coptic
Johannes Leipoldt translated Logion 96 with Butter:
1960 Koptisch-gnostische Schriften aus den Papyrus-Codices von Nag-Hamadi; page 23 (emphasis mine): 95 (96).
https://archive.org/details/koptischgnostisc0000leip/page/23/mode/1up
‘Jesus [sprach]: Das Königreich des Vaters gleicht einer Frau. Sie nahm ein wenig Butter, [tat sie ins] Mehl und machte zu großen Broten. Wer Ohren hat, der höre9’.
The footnote states ‘9Matth. 13,33 usw. Angesichts der Butter handelt es sich wohl mehr um Kuchen als um Brot’
Obviously, Crum’s dictionary offers only one single choice as well: colostrum (or butter, cheese) but most definitely not leaven.
https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.py?tla=C3685
Why do you appear not so interested in this, Bart? These are irrefutable facts – within biblical academic!
Well, if they cannot be refuted, then there’s no oint my trying to refute them! But you think Zlatko is clueless about Coptic? Good luck with that one… I suppose someone could say I’m clusless about English.
Bart, I already responded that your “you think Zlatko is clueless about Coptic” is your own invention
Neither did I ask you to refute the mistranslations – as we all know that facts, especially when written down in e.g. multiple dictionaries, are indeed hardly possible to refute
Let me quote a Coptologist with over 25 years of experience, Prof. Dr. Caroline T. Schroeder, who perhaps provides the simplest insight into the Christian-centric mind as well as that of the translators, regarding Logion 96 indeed saying colostrum: ‘ⲥⲁⲉⲓⲣ in this passage is often translated as “leaven” because of the parallels with Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:20-21 and the similar lemma ⲥⲓⲣ (=“leaven”), but see ⲥⲁⲉⲓⲣ as “colostrum” or “first milk” in Crum 383a.’ (private communication).”
I will have to repeat myself, in the hopes that you read it this time: “the Christian “translators” of the Nag Hammadi Library deliberately falsified their translations”.
Zlatko Plese is one of those – and either he is incredibly incompetent in Coptic, which is hardly likely, or his mistranslating Thomas is intentional
Actions speak louder than words, Bart. Why do you shrug this off? Aren’t you a researcher, an academic? In search of Christian origins?
You are certainly welcome to your opinions about translation and other scholars. I don’t think being dismissive of some of the worlds leading Coptologists is very helpful. Differences in opinion are not the same as raw incompetencies.
I’ve known Caroline Schroeder for many years, btw, since she was a student at Duke; I’d suggest you ask her what she thinks about Zlatko as a Coptic scholar. (I can’t remember just now if he taught her Coptic or not)