Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 49:1 (Mar 2006)
Article: Thomas: The Fifth Gospel?
Author: Nicholas Perrin

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JETS 49:1 (March 2006) p. 67

Thomas: The Fifth Gospel?

Nicholas Perrin

Nicholas Perrin is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College Graduate School, 501 College Ave., Wheaton, IL 60187. This paper was originally presented as a plenary address at the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Valley Forge, PA on November 16, 2005.

I. Introduction

Whereas for years those in quest for the historical Jesus have been content to pursue their investigations within the canonical Gospels, recent developments in source criticism along with certain twentieth-century papyrological discoveries have widened the field. Little could the discoverers of the Oxy-rhynchus fragments have realized back in 1898 that their Greek fragments containing sayings of Jesus, along with the much fuller, Coptic trove discovered in the Nag Hammadi desert fifty years later, would one day become a staple of historical Jesus research. John Dominic Crossan, for example, sees Thomas as essential to the investigation of Jesus of Nazareth, for he writes that “the collection is very, very early.”1 Burton Mack maintains a similar position, claiming that by the mid-1980s “it was well known, for instance, that the Gospel of Thomas was thoroughly nonapocalyptic in tenor and that it contained sayings from the very earliest period of the Jesus movements,” and for these reasons must also have been closely associated with the Q community.2 Like Mack, Stephen Patterson also draws attention to the similarities between Thomas and Q, and maintains that between these two documents the tide has now turned against the apocalyptic Jesus of yore. For Patterson, a new day in Jesus studies has dawned:

... no new quest of the historical Jesus can proceed now without giving due attention to the Thomas tradition. As an independent reading of the Jesus tradition, it provides us with a crucial and indispensable tool for gaining critical distance on the Synoptic tradition, which has so long dominated the Jesus discussion.3

From those seeking to show what we can really know about Jesus to those seeking to show what we can really know about early Christianity, the list of scholars goes on.4

JETS 49:1 (March 2006) p. 68

Clearly, the game has changed. Whereas those in search of the historical Jesus have previously been accustomed to looking for their most-wanted man somewhere near the intersection of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a new line of scholarship has appeared on the scene and, finding the Synoptic witne...

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