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The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, with almost no narrative frame and no account of the crucifixion or resurrection. The complete text survives in Coptic in Nag Hammadi Codex II, found in 1945; three Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus, excavated between 1897 and 1904, had been published for decades before anyone could recognise what they belonged to.

Independent Witness or Second-Century Reworking

The ascription to Didymus Judas Thomas is pseudepigraphal, the atlas notes, and that is not in question. What is debated is whether the sayings collection behind it is independent of Matthew, Mark and Luke or derived from them, and with that, whether Thomas is a first-century source or a second-century one. Roughly half the sayings have close parallels in the three synoptic gospels and the rest do not, the atlas records, and the atlas states plainly that choosing between the two readings of the text's origin is the whole argument, and it is not settled: an early date makes Thomas an independent witness to the sayings tradition, a late one makes it a Gnosticising reworking of the Synoptics.

A Label Increasingly in Doubt

The atlas's own record adds a second live dispute on top of the dating question: many specialists now doubt the text should be called Gnostic at all, a label attached to it since its recovery at Nag Hammadi alongside genuinely Gnostic material but increasingly treated as a mismatch for a text with almost no cosmological content of its own.

Where To Read More

• Gospel of ThomasGnostic GospelsCarries a debated dating and authorship question, unsettled on the atlas's own account