Category: Gospel of Thomas

Back in the summer, Christopher Skinner sent me a copy of his book, What Are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas? (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012). It is a slim book (around 120 pages), so it did not take long to read, nor did it take me long to make some notes on its contents. What did take a long time is for me to get around to finally blogging about it!

At first I was a bit leery about the book. I have read a number of discussions of the Christian Apocrypha from what one might call “conservative” scholars writing for presses with denominational affiliations. I have been critical about the authors’ polemical/apologetic aims and the shortcomings in their knowledge of the field. I was ready to place this book within that group. It didn’t help that the testimonials on the back cover were from scholars whose work veers close to the conservative end of the spectrum of thought on the text—i.e., they hold to the opinion that Gos. Thom. is late (second-century) and dependent on the NT texts. So, I expected to be unhappy with Skinner’s examination of Gos. Thom.

I found instead that the book is a fair and balanced treatment of a broad range of scholarship on the text. Skinner, currently based at Mount Olive College in North Carolina, is no stranger to Gos. Thom. He has contributed a monograph—John and Thomas–Gospels in Conflict? Johannine Characterization and the Thomas Question (Princeton Theological Monograph Series …

VIA Mark Goodacre's NTBLog: The latest Journal for the Study of the New Testament is a special edition focused on Simon Gathercole's The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas and Mark Goodacre's Thomas and the Gospels (which I reviewed HERE). See the original post for a full table of contents.

Mark Goodacre, well-known in biblio-blogging circles as the voice behind the NTBlog and in Synoptic Problem circles as a vocal advocate of the Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis, forwarded to me a copy of his latest book Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Eerdmans/SPCK, 2012). Much like Goodacre’s The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (2010), Thomas and the Gospels addresses a complex topic in an economy of space (only 226 pages) and with highly readable and lively prose. No-one but Mark Goodacre could get away with slipping a Doctor Who reference into a scholarly work (see p. 122; note also his amusing mention of the Beatles on p. 194); his appeal to pseudonymous blogger N. T. Wrong is testament also to Goodacre’s lack of pretention (p. 140). I hope readers will forgive me for the length of this review, but Goodacre's arguments demand substantial discussion (and even this review is somewhat cursory in places). To learn more about the book from Goodacre himself, watch this video trailer at NTBlog. 

Goodacre brings a different perspective to the question of Thomas’s dependence on (he prefers “familiarity with”) the Synoptics. For one, as a critic of the Two/Four Source Hypothesis, he does not believe in the existence of Q; without this other sayings gospel, Goodacre’s arguments about the genre, dating, and sources of Thomas are bound to be different. And second, though he joins North American apologetic scholars in arguing that Thomas is secondary to the Synoptics, …