Endnote 5 – The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?

Simon J. Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). This helps account for various factors. First, Thomas shows that it has been influenced by Luke’s Gospel in particular, and also Matthew. (In fact, it probably refers to the disciple Matthew because he was known as a gospel writer.) Second, it is also influenced by some epistles of Paul, notably Romans but perhaps also 1 Corinthians. Third, there is an intriguing fragmentary statement in which Jesus says, “I will destroy this house, and no one will be able to build it […]” (Gospel of Thomas 71). Most scholars take this as a prediction that the Temple will be destroyed, and that it will never be rebuilt. Some have taken this to be the kind of saying that would have come into existence soon after 70 C.E. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. However, Thomas’s confidence about the non-rebuilding of the Temple would be unlikely to follow directly from the events of the First Jewish Revolt. For a generation or so after 70 C.E., one could not necessarily assume that the Temple would never be rebuilt. Josephus, for example, wrote that many disasters had befallen the Jews, but that each time their fortunes had been restored; even with the Temple, however many times it may be destroyed, it will inevitably be rebuilt: “The God who made you will give back to your citizens both cities and the Temple, and the loss of these things will not happen just once, but many times” (Antiquities of the Jews 4.314). It was only after the Bar Kochba revolt in 132‒135 C.E. that the rebuilding of the Temple began to look next to impossible. And this is the time when other Christian theologians, such as Justin Martyr, Aristo of Pella, Tertullian and Origen, began to see the destruction of the Temple as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and as a permanent desolation. The combined evidence of factors such as Thomas’s literary influences, as well as his view of the Temple, has led scholars like Mark Goodacre and myself to view Thomas as a product of sometime in the mid-second century. In addition to my book already mentioned, see further Mark Goodacre, Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012); Simon Gathercole, The Gospel of Thomas: Introduction and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2014).