The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Thomas begins with a captivating first line: "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down." This already sets off some alarms, asking the question if Jesus actually had a twin, and what does this alleged twin know about Jesus that has never been heard before? This is considered a gnostic gospel due to the fact that it emphasizes on a more spiritual nature and getting to know oneself instead of getting to know God, the Father. The main reason the gospel of Thomas is not and will not be considered a canonical gospel is because it really stresses the fact that knowing yourself is the way to salvation, not the Father. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." "But the Kingdom of God is within you and outside of you. Once you come to know yourselves, you will become known. And you will know that it is you who are the children of the living father." The message of The Gospel of Thomas differs significantly from what the other gospels tell us. We, as humans, are born with original sin, and it should be our mission to be like Jesus, although it is impossible due to out inept inclination to sin. "And what you discover as you read the Gospel of Thomas, which you're meant to discover, is that you and Jesus at a deep level are identical twins. And that you discover that you are the child of God just as he is." -Elaine Pagels
[The Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic gospels claim to be] proclamations about Jesus, of the same sort as the four better-known “gospels,” despite the fact that they do not narrate the story of Jesus, do not (for the most part) proclaim him as Messiah, do not tell of his death and resurrection—do not, in fact, do the very things which seem, from the Pauline evidence, to be what the earliest Christians regarded as “gospel.” - N.T. Wright, on the book The Five Gospels. |
Why the Infancy Gospel of Thomas does not Belong in the Canon
The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. Many Scholars believe the book was to be written around the 1st or 2nd century. One thing that separates the synoptic gospels from other written works, such as the gnostic gospels, is that there is an overarching narrative to their stories about Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is just a composition of "114 sayings of Jesus," some of which can be correlated with the synoptics, some of which cannot.
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