Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is an early Christian text with strong parallels to the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, while the New Testament Gospels contain both sayings of Jesus and narratives of his life, the Gospel of Thomas is simply a collection of 114 sayings, most of which are introduced by the phrase “Jesus said.” Written largely without narrative, the Gospel of Thomas is the only surviving example of one of the oldest forms of Christian literature, namely, the sayings collection. Its discovery was important for the field of Christian studies because it proved that such a sayings collection was used in early Christian circles. Many scholars had posited for years that an unrecovered sayings Gospel, referred to as Q, was ...