Recovering The Original Gospel Of Thomas: A History Of The Gospel And Its Growth

by April D. DeConick

The Gospel of Thomas is an enigmatic collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. Here, April DeConick explores tough questions that have occupied scholars since the discovery of this gospel in the sands of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940's. Where did this gospel come from? When was it written? Who wrote it? Why was it composed? What is its meaning? Rather than taking the conventional approach to answering these questions, DeConick examines these issues anew by proposing that the gospel developed within a climate dominated by oral consciousness as a product of communal memory. She argues that the gospel was a "rolling corpus," a book of sayings that grew over time, beginning as a simple written gospel containing oracles of the prophet Jesus. This suggests that the sayings in the gospel represent different moments in the history of the Thomasine community and can be read as memoirs of practices, beliefs, and conflicts that arose within the community over time. As the community faced various crises and constituency changes, including the delay of the Eschaton and the need to accommodate Gentiles within the group, its traditions were reinterpreted and the sayings in their gospel updated, accommodating the present experiences of the community. This is volume 286 in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement series and is part of the Early Christianity in Context series.

290 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2005

About the author

April D. DeConick, Ph.D. (Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan, 1994), is Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University. She is also Co-Founder and Executive Editor of GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies published by Brill.

Reviews

[Simon Haverkamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

DeConick has written a decent and clear book, but I’d say your money would be better spent on Simon J. Gathercoles introduction and commentary, or on Mark Goodacre’s Thomas and the Gospels (if you want to study the relationship with them). I deem Goodacre’s argument for a literary relationship (and not primarily an oral one as DeConick argues) very convincing, as he shows that multiple logia in the gospel of Thomas contain verbatim quotes out of the gospels of Mark, Luke (and Matthew if I remember correctly, I read this book three years ago). In short, this is a fine book, yet I didn’t find it persuasive.

[Miles Nilsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is remarkable about this book is that the author has reasoned out when material was added to this gospel and what the original "kernel" must have been. Her thesis is that the first Christian preachers were itinerants sent thither and yon to spread the good news. At some point, early on, the literate among them carried what might be called "cheat sheets" with the basic teachings of Jesus written in them. (Alternatively, these might have been mental "cheat sheets" memorized by the preachers and only later written down.) In any case, each preacher might have had a slightly different cheat sheet compared to other preachers who went to other towns. Over time, these little lists of Jesus's sayings became part not only of the oral but the written tradition of each community, and, especially as material was added to them, they became different from each other, though the author points out that there are many agreements between, for example, the two best-known of these sayings gospels, the gospel of Thomas and the Q Gospel that became part of both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.

De Connick argues that issues that arose within each community led to the editing of the sayings. She tries both to identify where the Gospel of Thomas was edited and when each layer was added to the Gospel. I had long thought that this is what had happened to this gospel; from the two versions available--the partial Greek Oxyrhyncus version and the full Coptic Nag Hammadi version--we can see that different versions of this gospel existed, and we can tell it was changed probably without much respect for the integrity of the original. I never thought it might be possible to go through it and figure out exactly what changes had been made and what the earliest version looked like. De Connick makes a persuasive case that this can be done, and that she has done it.