Named Testimonia to the Gospel of Thomas: An Expanded Inventory and Analysis

• Published in: The Harvard theological review 2012-01, Vol.105 (1), p.53-89
• Main Author: Gathercole, Simon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antiquity; Apostles; Apostolic letters; Biblical apocrypha; Biblical hermeneutics; Christianity; Churches; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Gnosticism; Gospels; Heresy; Hippocrates (460?-377? BC); Infancy; Middle Ages; New Testament; Sacred texts; Testimony; Theology
• ISSN: 0017-8160; 1475-4517
• DOI: 10.1017/S0017816011000538

The question of how much apocryphal Gospels were rebutted, suppressed or even destroyed in antiquity is a question of perennial interest, both popular and scholarly. The present article makes no attempt at any sort of complete answer to this question, but has the rather more modest aim of analyzing the various testimonia—from antiquity into the middle ages—that make explicit reference to a “Gospel of Thomas.” This article will not touch on the numerous allusions to, or quotations of, the contents of this Gospel, but will be confined to treatments of the title (hence “named testimonia”). The impetus for this particular investigation is of course the presence, at the end of the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, of a colophon reading “The Gospel according to Thomas.”1 Given the controversial contents of this Gospel, and the equally controversial place that it occupies in scholarly reconstructions of Christian origins, Thomas's reception in antiquity has been widely discussed since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (see n. 2 below).