The Gospel of Thomas: The greek fragments

The Gospel of Thomas: Manuscripts, Texts, and Early Citations


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(Part C)

The Greek Fragments

All three of the Greek fragments, P.Oxy 1, P.Oxy 654 , P.Oxy 655, were discovered in an ancient trash heap in Oxyrhynchus Egypt alongside a treasure trove of Christian writings, including the bulk of our earliest New Testament manuscripts2. It is interesting that these manuscripts of GThomas found themselves among so many Christian documents. 

Although the Oxyrhynchus trash heap was certainly not used exclusively by Christians and therefore no definite conclusions can be drawn, there is no reason to conclude from the location of these three fragments that their readers were part of a "Thomasine" community that existed in distinction from a more "main stream" community of Christians.

P.Oxy 1 and P.Oxy 655, are paleographically dated to around the year 200A.D., while P.Oxy 654 was written somewhat later – around the mid-3rd century – on the back of a land-survey list which itself was written about the same time as the other two manuscripts3. P.Oxy 1 was written in a codex which contains a portion of another, as-of-yet-unidentified, text, while P.Oxy 655 was written on an unused scroll. We will revisit the significance of these and other physical characteristics of the Greek manuscripts later in this article.


The Nag Hammadi Codex

The Coptic manuscript was found in a collection of codices (books) which are estimated to have been buried around the start of the fifth century4 near a burial site which was still in use at that time. Although the claim is sometimes repeated that these Nag Hammadi Codices – named for the largest city in the region – were found in a tomb, this appears to be in error. Little about the circumstances surrounding their discovery has been verified, but it is known that they were discovered accidentally by local farmers who reported they found the collection of books hidden in a ceramic jar. Exactly who buried the collection and why is uncertain, but the Nag Hammadi Codices contain 45 works which were translated from Greek into Coptic. Most of these works are gnostic texts, including the "Valentinian Exposition" and the Gospel of Phillip5.

The GThomas manuscript itself contains 114 sayings, although only 113 of these were originally penned c. 340/350 A.D.. The final saying seems to have been added sometime afterward.


The Texts

The text of the three extant Greek manuscripts is only fragmentary of course, together containing all or part of only about 14 sayings. Unfortunately, none of the Greek manuscripts contain the same sayings, so they cannot be compared, but what is striking is that when compared to the Nag Hammadi codex, they demonstrate that the Coptic text is the product of "an extremely fluid transmission."

The sayings they contain have significant variations and can only be said to roughly correspond to those in the Nag Hammadi codex. For instance, in P.Oxy1, the saying which should correspond to Nag Hammadi's saying 33 is so very different from the latter text that is amounts to a completely different saying with no Coptic parallel10! Another example is in P.Oxy 655 where nearly all of saying 36 is absent from the Nag Hammadi codex's 36th saying. 

Variations in the sayings and differing orders of arrangement are well noted, and the more conservative scholars advise caution in assuming the earlier Greek manuscripts originally were particularly similar to the late Coptic text known today.

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