Gospel of Thomas?

Question

What is the basic meaning of the gospal of Thomas? Why does the Vatican reject it....they accept all of the other gospels? Finally, is there a religion that does accept and believe in the Gospel of Thomas?

Answer 1

You're thinking of Gnosticism, which was an early form of heresy that took two main forms, and lots of little ones. One of them said that you could anything you wanted to because the more you sinned, the more God could show His grace by forgiving you. The other said that Jesus (God) had secret teachings, and the more you learned the closer you got to those teachings (very un-biblical). The Gospel of Thomas was written around 250-300 years after Thomas dies (neat trick). It was excluded from the Bible for that reason. It, along with the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and others, is not scripture.

Answer 2

The Gospel of Thomas is a New Testament-era apocryphon completely preserved in a papyrus Coptic manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The book was bound in a method now called Coptic binding. Unlike the four canonical gospels, which combine narrative accounts of the life of Jesus with sayings, Thomas is a "sayings gospel". It takes the less structured form of a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus (including brief dialogues), the writing down of which is attributed to Didymus Judas Thomas. The words Didymus and Thomas are both translated "twin" giving emphasis to the name Judas, a derivative of Judah. The gospel does not have a narrative framework, nor is it worked into any overt philosophical or rhetorical context.

All the texts have been available to the general public since 1975. The Gospel of Thomas has been translated, published and annotated in several languages. The original version is the property of Egypt's Department of Antiquities. The first photographic edition was published in 1956, and its first critical analysis appeared in 1959. The historical and theological value of the Nag Hammadi library and its invaluable Gospel of Thomas cannot even begin to be evaluated. It should be realised that the contents of the texts are likely to challenge the very basis of Christianity.[1]

The Gospel begins mysteriously with the words, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, 'Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.'"

The work comprises 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of these sayings resemble those found in the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Others were unknown until its discovery, and a few of these run counter to sayings found in the four canonical gospels.

When a Coptic version of the complete text of Thomas was found, scholars realized that three separate Greek portions of it had already been discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in 1898. The manuscripts bearing the Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas have been dated to about AD 200, and the manuscript of the Coptic version to about 340. Although the Coptic version is not quite identical to any of the Greek fragments, it is believed that the Coptic version was translated from an earlier Greek version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/thomas.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
http://www.religioustolerance.org/gnostic.htm

Answer 3

It`s not a real bone fide Gospel for goodness sake, it`s the Gnostic equivalent of the Da Vinci code.

Answer 4

It didn't really fit with the others. But if you can just ignore one of them, why not just ignore them all? If Thomas wasn't right, how do you know the others were?

Answer 5

Because it was not reliable.It did not meet the time line. And also it put very unlikely words to the mouth of Jesus. : )