Recovering The Original Gospel Of Thomas

This book explores the fascinating and enigmatic collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, the 'Gospel of Thomas' that was discovered in the sands of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940's. Since its discovery, scholars and the public alike have been intrigued to know what the Gospel says and what light it sheds on the formation of early Christianity. Here, DeConick provides a new English translation of the entire Gospel of Thomas, which includes the original 'kernel' of the Gospel and all the sayings. A unique feature of this book is that translations to the parallels of the Gospel are also included.

Explores tough questions that have occupied scholars since the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas in the sands of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940's. Where did this gospel come from? When was it written? Who wrote it? Why was it composed? What is its meaning? This book examines these issues.

An enigmatic collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, the 'Gospel of Thomas' was discovered in the sands of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940's. Here, April DeConick provides a new English translation of the entire Gospel of Thomas, which includes the original 'kernel' of the Gospel and all the sayings. Whilst most other translations are of the Coptic text with only occasional reference to the Greek fragment variants, this translation integrates the Greek and offers new solutions to complete the lacunae. A unique feature of this book is that translations to the parallels of the Gospel are also included. Since its discovery, scholars and the public alike have been intrigued to know what the Gospel says and what light it sheds on the formation of early Christianity. In 'Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas', April DeConick argued that the gospel was a 'rolling corpus,' a book of sayings that grew over time, beginning as a simple written gospel containing oracles of the prophet Jesus. As the community faced various crises and constituency changes, including the delay of the Eschaton and the need to accommodate Gentiles within the group, its traditions were reinterpreted and the sayings in their gospel updated, accommodating the present experiences of the community. This volume was originally published in hardback as volume 287 in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement series and is part of the Early Christianity in Context subseries.

Heresy is a central concept in the formation of Orthodox Christianity. Where does this notion come from? This book traces the construction of the idea of ‘heresy’ in the rhetoric of ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric against ‘heretics,’ called heresiology. Here, author Robert Royalty argues, one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled ‘heresy’ in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as ‘heresy’ in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called ‘heresy.’ And by the end of the first century, the notion of heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of other Christian communities. This book is an original contribution to the field of Early Christian studies. Recent treatments of the origins of heresy and Christian identity have focused on the second century rather than on the earlier texts including the New Testament. The book further makes a methodological contribution by blurring the line between New Testament Studies and Early Christian studies, employing ideological and post-colonial critical methods.

The Gospel of Thomas preserves a core of authentic Aramaic sayings of Yeshua older than the earliest Christian writings. When they are isolated from the second-century Gnostic framework, they reveal many of Yeshua's inner-circle kabbalistic teachings. Scholars can restore much of the pre-kabbalistic tradition of Yeshua's era through sources like the Sepher Yetzirah, Sepher Ha-Razim, and the haggadah preserved in the Mishna, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, Philo of Alexandria, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. These were the Holy Scriptures of Essenes, Zadokites, and other messianic Jews of the period, including Yeshua and his disciples. The Psalms they chanted in worship and Shabbat Seder were not just those of our Old Testament, but the messianic Odes of Solomon and others preserved in Enochian and apocalyptic scripture. A study of this forgotten sacred literature allows modern scholars to understand and reconstruct the oral Kabbalah of Yeshua embedded in the Gospel of Thomas.

In this commentary, Simon Gathercole provides a detailed analysis of the most controversial of all early Christian apocrypha, the Gospel of Thomas.

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. Before it emerged in the second century, passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world. Subversive and revolutionary, Gnostics taught that prayer and mediation could bring human beings into an ecstatic spiritual union with a transcendent deity. This mystical strain affected not just Christianity but many other religions, and it characterizes our understanding of the purpose and meaning of religion today. In The Gnostic New Age, April D. DeConick recovers this vibrant underground history to prove that Gnosticism was not suppressed or defeated by the Catholic Church long ago, nor was the movement a fabrication to justify the violent repression of alternative forms of Christianity. Gnosticism alleviated human suffering, soothing feelings of existential brokenness and alienation through the promise of renewal as God. DeConick begins in ancient Egypt and follows with the rise of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, the advent of theosophy and other occult movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary New Age spiritual philosophies. As these theories find expression in science-fiction and fantasy films, DeConick sees evidence of Gnosticism's next incarnation. Her work emphasizes the universal, countercultural appeal of a movement that embodies much more than a simple challenge to religious authority.

A comprehensive overview of recent scholarly research on the Gospel of Thomas.