Loading...In this thread of posts I have been reproducing my comments on Gnosticism from the 2nd edition of my anthology, After the New Testament, to be released in the fall. In addition to the Sethians and the Valentinians, scholars talk about the school of Thomas and about yet other Gnostic groups that are not easy to identify with any of the other three or to group together in any meaningful way. Gnosticism was a messy group of religions! Here is what I say in the Introductions to the Thomasines and the Other Gnostic groups in the book.
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Thomasines
A number of books from the early Christian tradition are connected with a figure known as Didymus Judas Thomas. The word “Didymus” means “twin” in Greek; so too the name “Thomas” means “twin” in Aramaic. And so this person is Judas, or Jude, the twin. But the twin of whom? In our earliest surviving Gospel, Jesus himself is said to have a brother who is named Jude (for example, Mark 6). And in later traditions, especially from Syria, this Jude was thought to have been a twin of Jesus himself. In fact, in some traditions – including the Acts of Thomas that we have already seen (Chapter 2) – Thomas is Jesus’ identical twin. How Jesus could have a (mortal) twin if he was born of a virgin is something these traditions never explain.
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What are your thoughts on the idea that the Gospel of John’s story of Doubting Thomas is actually a dig at the Thomasine community? I’ve heard Pagels promote that idea.
I’ve never been convinced by that, in part because it is almost certain that the Johannine community was around before there were Thomasine Christians (in my opinion).
When do you think the Thomasines appeared on the scene? It’s always seemed to me that the Gnostic tradition was incredibly detailed in its belief system and mythology and couldn’t have just appeared over a relatively short period of time. Surely (it seems to me) a lot of their ideas were borrowed from other (fringe?) cults/religions from pre-Christianity. As such, why couldn’t their ideas have been pre-Johannine (since the basis of Gnosticism may have already existed in the form of other cults/religions)? Admittedly, though, these thoughts of mine are of Gnosticism in general so maybe I’m just babbling when asking this specifically with the Thomasines in mind.
I think the Thomasines go back to the early second century, and that they did not yet have the highly developed mythologies of the later Sethians.
How does this jibe with the tradition that “Thomas” went to preach in India? If he – or “Jude,” if they were two different men – actually did go there, might there have been any prior *Indian* beliefs that influenced Gnosticism?
The Thomas tradition is almost certainly not historical — it first occurs in the Acts of Thomas, which itself would have been written after the development of early Gnosticism.
I wanted to ask about the dating of the Gospel of Thomas. I know the standard scholarly opinion is that some of the sayings go back to the historical Jesus, while some are later sayings added by later gnostics. I have a friend who insists (without any evidence) that virtually all of the sayings go back directly to Jesus and that it is the earliest and most accurate of the gospels. In that view, the gnostic teachings of Jesus were removed from the tradition that led to the canonical gospels.
Is there some good evidence which leads scholars to accept the standard, later, dating of Thomas? Or is just that there’s no evidence to support to earlier dating? I’m hoping to set my friend straight.
It’s been a fascinating series of articles on Gnosticism, BTW. I think I might flip through my copy of the Nag Hammadi Library this afternoon.
A lot of scholars think that Thomas is dependent on the Synoptics — if so it is necessarily later. Mark Goodacre makes a good case for this in his recent book on the subject. I’m not completely convinced yet. But even so, the *kinds* of non-Synoptic sayings in Thomas fit much better with what we know about forms of second-century Christianity than first-century….
When scholars are analyzing the 4 canonical Gospels, do they consider the Gospel of Thomas as a source for independent attestation?
Thank you yet again!
It’s a much debated point. I’m not sure what most scholars think; there has been a move lately to stress that Thomas is dependent on Matthew, Mark, and Luke (thus a recent book by Mark Goodacre); I myself am not completely convinced by that — I tend to see it as independent.
Before these posts, I did not fully appreciate the complexity or the diversity of Gnosticism. I just thought it was a confusing area. Thanks.
“How Jesus could have a (mortal) twin if he was born of a virgin is something these traditions never explain.”
Yeah, well, no one’s ever explained how it was that Mary remained a virgin after giving birth, either, but what the hay.
If the myth would have been fleshed out in the context of the modern world, it would have been a C-Section. Speaking of which, and I know you have touched on this before, does it seem that the virgin birth idea was added to the tradition because of one person’s inability to translate the earliest Old Testament text accurately, or was it more of a development in the oral tradition over time? It seems to arrive rather abruptly with the writing of Mathew’s Gospel. Many thanks for all you do to help those of us who are desperate to understand these things.
I think it’s hard to know if the idea of a virgin birth came first, and the biblical “proof” then was found for it afterwards, or the other way around….
It seems odd that the gospel of *Thomas*, in which Thomas is the recipient of secret truths directly from Jesus, nevertheless identifies James as the authoritative successor to Jesus. I think this may be because the Thomasines consciously identified themselves as a kind of mysterious, mystical subgroup of early Christianity. Thoughts? Second question: has Goodacre convinced you that the gospel of Thomas should not be cited as independent attestation of anything?
Yes, James is given prominence in at least one saying. But I don’t think that in itself has any bearing on whether the Thomasines were a mysterious mystical subgroup. And no, I’m not completely convinced by Mark Goodacre, but I haven’t worked up any kind of counterarguments at this point.
DR EHRMAN:
The mystery of God is not a place, nor is it a secret knowledge that one must attain. The mystery of God is a person and that person is Jesus Christ. This is what I understand and it solves the “mystery” for me. The love and peace of God surpasses knowledge.
In the phrase “Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down”, do you have any idea why the author would use the redundancy of both words for “twin” even though they are in different languages? Was he writing for a broader audience?
It wasn’t just the author — it was a tradition. He was known by both names because there were traditions about him in both Aramaic and Greek, and the designations of him as twin were then taken as actual names.
The rise of so many traditions all claiming to be “Christian” was because the scriptures through which God supposedly spoke to his creation were not well-written or edited. Thus different groups of people could come away with very divergent views of the same text. Worse the delivery of the scriptures was haphazard so that some communities has some texts while others held different ones. The confusion is not surprising therefore.
This multiplicity of traditions, all supposedly Christian has persisted down through two millennia of Christianity. Ecumenical movements starting in the twentieth century have made no notable headway in bringing denominations together into one final Christianity. In my city Nairobi, the attendance at the annual ecumenical conferences has been dwindling, without any evidence of ever reviving.