The Gospel of Thomas gets scholars’ and historians’ juices flowing for a

number of reasons:

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 It’s a lengthy work and therefore lends itself to serious study.

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 It consists mostly of 114 sayings of Jesus with very little narrative

description of the life of Jesus (as is found in the canonical Gospels).

For decades, scholars have proposed that Matthew and Luke must have

used a collection of sayings of Jesus when they wrote their Gospels because

so many sayings of Jesus are the same word for word in both Gospels. Many

historians doubted that such a document (called “Q” for the German word

“quelle,” or in English, “source”) could have existed . . . until the Gospel of

Thomas was found! Note: We aren’t saying that Thomas is “Q.” In fact,

nobody is saying that. However, the very existence of an early collection of

sayings of Jesus like Thomas suggests that writings like this did exist, and

thus the possibility of “Q” is more likely.

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 Many New Testament scholars believe that some of these sayings of

Jesus may well be genuine because of the work’s age. Origen was already

talking about a Gospel of Thomas in the second century CE! Just

because they ended up in a collection with other sayings that probably

aren’t genuine doesn’t mean the whole collection is worthless