April D. DeConick

The Gospel of Thomas in Translation is a companion to Recovering the Gospel of Thomas. The author, April DeConick, is a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Texas. She has thoroughly immersed herself in the study of early Christian literature, both canonical and non-canonical. The Gospel of Thomas is of special interest to her, although it is not her only interest.

The Gospel of Thomas was an early Christian, non-canonical document. It was mentioned by leaders of the Western church in the second century as a work of dubious authority, and was lost for more than one thousand years because no one copied it much after the fourth century, and, since there were no printing presses in those days, any book that was not copied over and over multiple times tended to disappear, especially as older copies fell apart or, in some cases, may have been burned.

There are some remarkable aspects of the Gospel of Thomas.

It consists of a series of sayings attributed to Jesus. There is almost no narrative content, though a couple of sayings include descriptions or at least hints of settings where there is someone posing a question to Jesus, or else Jesus addresses his remarks to someone in particular. This is the first 1Csayings gospel 1D to be discovered in modern times, although early Christian writers hinted that such documents existed in the early church, and, in the nineteenth century, German scholars suggested that the reason why Luke and Matthew quote so many of the same sayings attributed to Jesus is that they had access to a sayings book, which the German scholars called Quelle, the German word for 1Csource. 1D Quelle, or Q as it is often called, is not the same as Thomas. DeConick suggests that there were many such books in the early church. She calls them speech books, and suggests that non-canonical texts called the Pseudo-Clementines gives a hint as to how they were made: according to this text, James the Righteous asked Clement, who was able to write, to follow Peter around and write down what he said, including quotations from Jesus. Now, imagine this being done with other apostles, too. Then imagine Christian missionaries being sent out with copies of these speech books, not so that they could give them away for others to read 14books of any kind were too precious and too few people could read them anyway 14but in order to perform the sayings of Jesus and, probably, then comment on their meaning (deliver sermons, in other words).

Fragments of The Gospel of Thomas in Greek dating to the third century were discovered in the 1890s and early 1900s in northern Egypt. Then in the 1940s, a whole manuscript of Thomas from the fourth century, this one in Coptic 14basically the Egyptian language written in Greek letters, was found in southern Egypt. It wasn 19t until the 1950s that a French scholar recognized the connection between the Greek and Coptic texts. Comparison shows both similarities and differences between the sayings in Greek and Coptic. I have thought that perhaps the two versions existed at the same time, and that we should not assume that the Greek version is older than the Coptic version just because the Greek copy we have is older than the Coptic copy, but April DeConick is convinced that the Greek version is, in fact, the older of the two.

I have long suspected that the versions of the Gospel of Thomas, coming to us in versions no older than the end of the second century, do not represent its original form but, rather, that it has been added to over the centuries. (All of the Christian books were revised to some extent, but at some point, the canonical books had less and less changed in them while there was no authority to slow or stop the revision of non-canonical books, like Thomas.) DeConick, through painstaking linguistic analysis (She has studied Greek, Coptic, Aramaic and Syriac) has concluded that the oldest parts of Thomas were composed 14orally at first 14in Aramaic, then translated into Syriac, a related language, in Syria where the Gospel of Thomas found an early home (and the place where the first revisions and additions were made), then traveled to Egypt, becoming translated into Greek along the way, and finally was translated into Coptic. (Not counting the twentieth century when it has been translated into English and other European languages.)

Not only the Gospel of Thomas but other recently found early Christian writings have played a role in the revision of our conception of what is meant by Gnosticism, a term used disparagingly by some early church father to condemn those who believed that what saves Christians from sin and error is neither faith nor good works but spiritual knowledge. In both scholarly and then popular imagination this has become literalized as if Gnosticism were an actual religious sect. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this formulation. Gnosticism was a tendency that appeared alongside faith and good works throughout early (and later) Christendom, but was especially common in the East, appearing in the mystical writings of the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

DeConick has thus pieced together a story of the development of the Gospel of Thomas, beginning in Jerusalem at the time of Peter. Many sayings of Jesus were written down. Missionaries brought these sayings or speech books to other lands, especially Syria, where Christianity took root and the sayings book they used became like a bible to them.

Now, it has been widely agreed among scholars, from biblical Albert Schweitzer to Bart Ehrman, that the historical Jesus was an advocate of the apocalyptic view that the world was about to come to an end, and that we can only prepare for it by initiating the kingdom God now, which involves behaving righteously in our lives and in our relations to others. By the 50s CE, however, it was apparent that the end was not so near as had been expected. Leaders began dying off, and changes in the interpretation of Jesus apocalyptic teachings seemed necessary. At first, only a couple of changes were made to the text of the Syrian sayings book that came to be called the Gospel of Thomas. Then, as the community of the Syrian church found the need to distance itself from the teaching that a literal apocalypse was around the corner, it came up with the notion that the Kingdom of God is here and is laid out all around us, or at least the kingdom has been achieved within the community of the church. At least it can be, and this was the spiritual work of the Eastern Church, with the Gospel of Thomas periodically revised between the years 60 to 120 until it became a book of mysticism more than apocalypticism.

Many of the people who came to be associated with the term Gnosticism believed in an elaborate spiritual plane in which an ignorant demiurge created the world and scattered the divine sparks of wisdom in some humans. This, however, is not something that the Gospel of Thomas discuses at all; hence much of the doubt about any actual relationship between the various sects that came to be called Gnostic. Gnostics might read the Gospel of Thomas, but it was not originally intended for them because they did not yet exist when Thomas was developed.

An important difference between Western and Eastern Christianity arose when St. Augustine declared that Adam 19s sin cut humanity off from God and that only the intersession of Christ and the apparatus of the church could bring about salvation. In contrast, Eastern Christianity held that Adam 19s sin only impaired our connection with God, but did not leave it irreparable or impossible to restore through our own efforts. This view stands behind much of Eastern Christian mysticism, and it is not incompatible with the message in the Gospel of Thomas.

In DeConick 19s book, she has set out two versions of Thomas: first, her reconstruction of the original (Kernel) Thomas from circa 35 CE, and then the fourth-century Coptic version, with the accretions (added parts) in italics. Following this, she sets out the Coptic version again, but this time with a commentary on each saying, describing her reasoning in declaring various parts of each saying original or added later, and citing the opinions of various scholars on each saying, prominently including those scholarly opinions that are at variance with her own.

The Kernel Gospel of Thomas, the original collection of sayings around which the later additions were made, is naturally shorter than the fourth-century book. When the first saying in the Kernel Gospel is the one that is usually regarded as saying number two, we realize that DeConick has had to perform a pairing down process. Not only are entire sayings removed, but explanatory material at the end of some sayings is regarded as having been added later in order to reinterpret a saying that originally meant something else. (I am not sure whether DeConick has considered whether material might have been removed from the sayings by the later editors, but that undoubtedly is more difficult to determine than whether or not something has been added.)

This is the kind of book that I find quite exciting. I am kind of a nerd when it comes to early Christian textual history. This is the sort of thing that makes me high. So this book is right up my alley and might not appeal to everyone. The language is technical and references to other writings are often made without much explanation. It sometimes goes over my head. I am afraid it would be even more over the head of the average reader.… (mere)

What is remarkable about this book is that the author has reasoned out when material was added to this gospel and what the original "kernel" must have been. Her thesis is that the first Christian preachers were itinerants sent thither and yon to spread the good news. At some point, early on, the literate among them carried what might be called "cheat sheets" with the basic teachings of Jesus written in them. (Alternatively, these might have been mental "cheat sheets" memorized by the preachers and only later written down.) In any case, each preacher might have had a slightly different cheat sheet compared to other preachers who went to other towns. Over time, these little lists of Jesus's sayings became part not only of the oral but the written tradition of each community, and, especially as material was added to them, they became different from each other, though the author points out that there are many agreements between, for example, the two best-known of these sayings gospels, the gospel of Thomas and the Q Gospel that became part of both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.

De Connick argues that issues that arose within each community led to the editing of the sayings. She tries both to identify where the Gospel of Thomas was edited and when each layer was added to the Gospel. I had long thought that this is what had happened to this gospel; from the two versions available--the partial Greek Oxyrhyncus version and the full Coptic Nag Hammadi version--we can see that different versions of this gospel existed, and we can tell it was changed probably without much respect for the integrity of the original. I never thought it might be possible to go through it and figure out exactly what changes had been made and what the earliest version looked like. De Connick makes a persuasive case that this can be done, and that she has done it.… (mere)

Although she has not published books aimed at the general public, April DeConick is a star of the current generation of Biblical scholars who are looking deeper into what once seemed to be the black hole of first century Christianity. (I first heard of her through popularizer Bart Ehrman.) Where once scholars despaired of ever figuring out what was going on back then (or came up with theories about it that are now regarded as incomplete or inaccurate), DeConick 19s generation is finding creative ways of analyzing the first century of Christianity 14even the early part of the century 14based on an analysis of the late first and early second century texts. For beneath the surface of these texts are clues to the earlier written and oral traditions of first century Christianity.
The first chapter will put off the layman and the even the ex-sociologist who will be reminded why he fled the mind-numbing circumlocutions of academic jargon, but it gets more and more interesting from there.
In this book, DeConick looks at the Gospel According to John in light of what the author of the Fourth Gospel was trying to provide for the community that read his book and what he might have been reacting to in terms of competing theologies that were trying to seduce his flock.
It is generally agreed that John 14at least the version that has come down to us 14was written in the late first century. DeConick cites fellow scholars who have argued that John was reacting to and against Jewish mysticism. Indeed, DeConick would probably agree with Vernard Eller, the author of another book I recently read and reviewed, 1CThe Beloved Disciple, 1D which concludes that The Fourth Gospel seems to use mystical language to reject mysticism; the only difference is that the other book was written apologetically, that is Eller wrote about John 19s position because he agreed with the theology of the Fourth Gospel, but DeConick is not interested in upholding John 19s theology, only in describing it accurately; yet she nevertheless comes to a similar conclusion about John 19s anti-mystical intent. However, DeConick disagrees with those who think that John 19s PRIMARY aim is to disagree with Jewish mysticism. She thinks he is trying to discredit Christian mysticism, particularly in the form of the 1CGospel of Thomas, 1D an apocryphal collection of sayings of Jesus.
The 1CGospel of Thomas 1D has been a particular interest of DeConick 19s for some time. She has argued that the old scholarly consensus that Thomas was composed in the second century and that it is based on the canonical gospels is demonstrably wrong and that 1CThomas 1D actually has a more complicated history than that. It began as a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, as early as the 30s A.D. when it was much shorter than the edition that was found at Nag Hamadi Egypt in 1945. She believes that two new sayings were added in about the 50s, and even more sayings were added 14and existing sayings were expanded 14before 120.
1CThomas 1D has been called a Gnostic text, but DeConick says that not only was it not originally Gnostic, it was never Gnostic even though Gnostics read it. (Gnostics liked the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul, too, but that hardly makes those writings Gnostic.) What 1CThomas 1D always was 14at least from the middle of the first century on, if not from the very beginning 14was mystical. This jibes with the revision of Gnostic studies that has been going on among scholars for the past several decades; Gnosticism was not a religion unto itself, and there was no single 1CGnostic 1D point of view. Rather, gnosis was the Greek word for 1Cknowledge, 1D and Christian knowledge-seekers, 1CGnostics, 1D did not share one theology.
On the other hand, what people in the early church who sought gnosis generally agreed on was that there was an understanding, of some sort, as to the nature of God and the mystery of His kingdom, that the individual Christian could gain through some mental or physical or combined 1Cencratic 1D practice, and that this could be as important as or more important than faith alone. It was this view that John seems to be disputing in his gospel; in particular he is criticizing the personal vision-quest of the knowledge-seekers. There is a common misinterpretation of the text, in light of DeConick 19s interpretation of it: The Apostle Thomas, in John, is repeatedly seen to misunderstand Jesus words and deeds, and finally wants to have Jesus 19 resurrection proven to him with physical evidence. But this is not because Thomas is a materialist; rather it is because he is a vision-quester. He wants to know how the disciples will see Jesus when he is gone. This is not because Thomas doesn 19t understand that Jesus 19 will one day die, but because, when that happens, he expects to be able to see Jesus in a vision. Jesus persistently tells him that followers of Jesus will always be able to contact him but through faith, not through what they see. This is why, when Thomas touches the risen Jesus 19 wounds and finally believes, Jesus says to him that it is better to trust, to have faith, without needing to see.
The purpose of John 19s rhetoric, then, is to reject mystical visions in favor of a faith-based connection with Jesus. Only Jesus, he repeatedly says, can go between heaven and earth. (This reading of John shows why the Book of Revelations to John 1) has nothing to do with the theology of the author of the Fourth Gospel, 2) is ill-fitting in the same testament where the Fourth Gospel appears, and 3) was not unanimously accepted as part of the cannon, with many early Church Fathers opposing it.) More specifically, the Fourth Gospel rejects the Christian mysticism of those who followed the Apostle Thomas and read the 1CGospel of Thomas. 1D More evidence that the mystical tradition found in 1CThomas 1D was already established by the time that the edition of the Fourth Gospel that is known to us was composed.… (mere)