Why the Gospel of Thomas was excluded from the canon?
The characteristic of the “Gospel of Thomas”, or “The Coptic Gospel of Thomas”, is that it does not narrate Jesus’ miracles, neither life, but 114 sayings destined to the inner circle of his disciples. It was discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945 belonging to the Nag Hammadi library and includes sayings from Jesus as spoken to his disciple and twin brother (?), Didymos Judas Thomas. It is believed that it was written in the second half of the 1st century, or in 140 CE. Some of Thomas’ sayings are mentioned in the other canonical gospels, namely in Luke’s and Matthew’s, although without their “spiritual”, or “allegorical” nuances.
The Gospel of Thomas is written in Coptic language and it is argued that it shows the real Jesus’ teaching that has nothing to do with theology, or the Christian myths and bias we read in the New Testament. Besides, the latter, is not an authentic original document and is a much later and heavily edited version, that incorporated pieces of the Gospel of Thomas as well as of many other “exterior sources”.
In this Gospel, there is no life story, no theology, there are no miracles, but rather cryptic sayings resembling to Thoth Hermetism, Delphic maxims and according to some scholars, to Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching (see Stephen Mitchell’s, Geza Vermes’, Albert Schweitzer’s, Detlev Koepke, etc), portraying Jesus not as a messiah, but rather as a “wise man” who drew on Classical and Jewish ideas and nuances with a mystical and Buddhist/Taoist bent. Besides, it is known the Greco-Roman and Buddhistic influences upon Judaism and not only.
In 2007 the “Jesus Project” that was held in New York ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Project ) collected the highest standards of scholarly inquiry scholars from around the world to determine authentic sources on Jesus’ historicity and teaching. The project halted in 2009 when the research was considered as fruitless due to the fact that “the gospels were written at a time when the line between natural and supernatural was not clearly drawn and that further historical research was not realistic”.
But why that Gospel was intentionally veiled by the “fathers”? Some argue that it is because the Gospel of Thomas has been consistently translated and interpreted with a Christian bias and has been turned into a Christian document instead of remaining as a Judaic one. Others argue that the originally Coptic texts were not literally translated, -the Jews also claim the same for the Septuagint- but some words were omitted or changed and some were added, to suit to translators’ own assumptions or prejudices. And once the texts are translated according to the Coptic dictionaries, one finds absolutely not only nothing similar to Christian about it, but alludes to Eastern or Greco-Egyptian theo-philosophies. Through these texts, Jesus emerges not as a false prophet or a pseudo-dying and rising god, but as a mortal sage, as also the early Gnostic Christians believed.
Why the New Testament authors rejected the idea to portray Jesus as a sage?
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Article URL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas