8. The Gospel of Thomas
A lecture on the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, a text unearthed in 1945 that claims to share the sayings of Jesus Christ.
In 1945, an Egyptian farmer unearthed a trove of ancient documents, sealed in a jar and buried in a graveyard near the town Nag Hammadi. Among other documents, the jars contained 52 early Christian texts. These works were likely hidden away in response to an increasingly strict canonization of the Gospels—the buried texts were a few of those that hadn’t made the cut. But they provide a fascinating insight into the early, often divergent, period of Christian doctrine, particularly the Gnostic tradition. Perhaps most important among them was the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings mainly attributed to Jesus Christ.
The Gospel of Thomas was allegedly written by ‘Didymus Jude Thomas,’ a ‘brother of James,’ alluding to a possible brother (or even twin brother) of Jesus. Its accuracy and meaning are still hotly debated and mostly a matter of personal opinion. To help you form your own opinion, Professor Dale B. Martin gives a more detailed look into the Gospel of Thomas, its context, and the theological debates surrounding it.
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