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The Fifth Gospel Unearthing Hidden Sayings.pdf

The Fifth Gospel: The Origins, Themes, and Philosophy of the Gospel of Thomas

In December 1945, a local farmer digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, unearthed a sealed earthenware jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices containing a lost library of early Christian and Gnostic texts. Among them was a document that would revolutionize our understanding of the early Church: the Gospel of Thomas.

Unlike the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Thomas is not a narrative of Jesus’s life. It contains no miracles, no trial, no crucifixion, and no resurrection. Instead, it is a "Sayings Gospel"—a collection of 114 secret utterances attributed to Jesus, offering a vision of salvation based not on faith, but on self-discovery.

Part I: The Origins of the Text

The Mystery of Authorship

The text begins with a provocative prologue: "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down."

In the early Syrian Christian tradition, Thomas was believed to be the "twin" of Jesus (the name Thomas is Aramaic for "twin," and Didymus is Greek for the same). While historians do not believe the historical apostle Thomas literally wrote the text, the attribution signifies that the document originated within a community that claimed a direct, mystical lineage to Jesus through his "twin."

The Dating Controversy

The dating of Thomas is the subject of fierce academic debate, dividing scholars into two camps:

1. The Early Date (50–90 CE): Some scholars, like Helmut Koester and Stevan Davies, argue that Thomas contains a kernel of sayings that are as old as, or even older than, the Synoptic Gospels. They point to the "Q Source" (a hypothetical collection of Jesus's sayings used by Matthew and Luke) as a parallel format. If this is true, Thomas provides a window into the very earliest layer of the Jesus movement.
2. The Late Date (120–150 CE): Others, like Nicholas Perrin, argue that Thomas shows signs of being a 2nd-century compilation that had access to the completed New Testament. They suggest it was originally composed in Syriac and reflects later "Gnostic" developments.

The consensus is that the version found at Nag Hammadi (written in Coptic) dates to roughly 340 CE, but it is a translation of a Greek original that likely reached its final form in the mid-2nd century.