(b) The Gospel of Thomas.—
The UaiSixd, or Gospel of Thomas, survives in two Greek re- censions, one (A) longer than the other (B),* but the MSS are not earlier than the 14th or 15th century. The Latin version (L), however, survives in a Vienna palimpsest as yet undeciphered, and the Syriac (S) in a MS of the 5th or 6th century.
No satisfactory edition has yet appeared, but Tischendorf's Greek texts have been edited and translated by C. Michel, Evangilea Apocryphes, L (1911), Protdoangile de Jacques, pseudo-
* In Peregrinus Proteus, 1879, p. 39 f., J. M. Cotterill tries to show that A and B are from the same hand, and that the author not only uses the LXX of Ecclesiastes but deliberately parodies some verses of Proverbs — two equally hazardous hypotheses.
486 GOSPELS (UNCANONICAL)
GOSPELS (UNCANONICAL)
Matthieu, Evangile de Thomas ; S is published in Wright's Con- tributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, pp. 6-11, etc.
According to Haase (pp. 38-48), L represents in the main a version of A, while S also, though independently, resembles A; but all imply a common source which is not extant.
We know from Hippolytus {Philosoph. v. 2), that theNaassenes appealed, on behalf of their tenets, to apassagein 'tlie Gospel according to Thomas,' which ran as follows : * He who seeks Me will find Me in children of seven and upwards (iv iraidLois drrb izQv iTTTd), for hidden there I shall be manifested in the fourteenth age {or seon, alQui).' No other citation has been preserved.* Indeed, apart from the reference of Eusebius (HE iii. 25. 6), it is only- mentioned again by Cyril of Jerusalem, who twice warns Christians against it as a Manichsean produc- tion {Catech. iv, 36, 'There are only four Gospels in the NT ; the rest are pseudepigrapha and noxious. The Manichaeans wrote a Gospel according to Thomas which, invested with the fragrance of the evangelic name, corrupts simple souls '; vi. 31, ' Let no one read the Gospel according to Thomas, for it is not by one of the Twelve, but by one of Manes' three wicked disciples'). Since the Manichseans possessed a Gospel of Thomas as well as a Gospel of Philip (see below, p. 501), this Manichsean Scripture may have been the Gospel mentioned by Hippolytus, possibly in a special form.
Zahn attempts to date the original Gospel quite early in the 2nd century. He regards the second half of the quotation made by Hippolytus as a Naassene comment, and thus is free to mini- mize the Gnostic character of the work. He further argues that Justin's description of Jesus {Dial. 88) as a maker of ' ploughs and yokes ' in His native village is derived from the story in A 13 = S 13 = L 11 (Joseph, who 'made ploughs and yokes,' had an order from a rich man to make a bench. One plank turned out to be too short, but Jesus rose to the emergency, pulled the plank out to the proper length, and thus relieved His father). This maj^ be no more than a coincidence, and Justin might have derived the touch from oral tradition. But it is certainly remarkable how little Gnostic fantasy pervades the Stori/ of the Infancy, in any of its extant forms; apart from the 'great allegories' of the letter Alpha which the lad Jesus is reported to have taught His teacher, the stories and sayings are naive rather than speculative. On the other hand, the childhood of Jesus is possibly filled with miracles owing to a desire of heightening His Divine claims prior to the Baptism. It is usually argued that this motive ahso implies a Docetic interest, since the miracles represent Jesus as not really a human child, but exempt from the ordinary conditions of human nature. This, however, is not a necessary or even a probable interpretation of the stories. They exaggerate the supernatural element, but they do not suggest a wraith or phantom in the guise of a child. In S 6-8, the reply of Jesus to His teacher does recall dogmatic interests ('I am outside of you, and I dwell among you. Honour in the flesh I have not. Thou art by the law, and in the law thou abidest. For when "thou wast born, I was . . . When I am greatly exalted, I shall lay aside what- ever mixture I have of your race'), but the tone and even the wording are not remote from the Fourth Gospel ; and, as the Gospel evidently passed through several editions or phases, it may have accumulated such elements in the gradual course of its development. The above-quoted passage, for example, is peculiar to S, as we can see from the remark of Epiphanius (li. 20). There was even a
* Even this one is echoed only once, and that vaguely, in the pert reply of Jesus to the Jewish schoolmaster preserved in pseudo-Matthew 304 (' I was among you with children, and you did not know me ').
tendency among orthodox Christians* to accept stories of miracles during the boyhood, in order to refute the Gnostic theory that the Divine Christ did not descend upon Jesus until the Baptism — a tendency which helps, among other things, to account for the tenacious popularity of such tales. From this very natural point of view, the rise of these stories may have been due to interests which were not distinctively Gnostic, whatever be the amount of dogmatic tendency that must be ascribed to their later form.t