ABSTRACT
The Gospel of Thomas (hereafter Thomas) is the most famous find from among the 1945 Nag Hammadi discoveries, even being published separately, Coptic text beside English translation, and without commentary, as if a Biblical text (in 1959 [Guillaumont et al]). Although fragments of Jesus’s sayings (logia) from it had been uncovered on Papyrus leaves (e.g., Oxyrhynchus Pap. (I), 654–55) from the end of the nineteenth century (esp. Blomfield 1900; Grenfell and Hunt 1904; Taylor 1905), these fourth-century fragments were only related to a whole gospel text after the Nag Hammadi codices (NHC) were carefully researched (starting with Puech, e.g., 1954). In the course of time Thomas became treated as a “Fifth Gospel” (e.g., Koester 1990; Funk et al. 1993), its 114 Logia of Jesus taken as comparable, even equivalent to the postulated Q source (Quelle), consisting of Jesus’s teachings found shared between the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke (but absent in Mark, the other, shortest “Synoptic Gospel”) (e.g., Kloppenborg 1988; Patterson 2013: 176–96).
