Collecting papers from a research conference on Acts of Thomas (ATh) as “new trends” hardly does justice to their importance. Students of ATh still employ a Greek text edition from 1903 as an original version. Roig Lanzillotta dismantles that approach in the opening chapter on the textual transmission of ATh cataloging omissions, reworkings, and adaptations to the tastes and assumptions about orthodoxy of the medieval scribes who produced the manuscripts. A surprising result from comparing the one complete manuscript (U) with the same sections in others was the frequency with which speeches were either dropped or reworked. Thomas’ preaching was not a prominent feature in this tradition. The apocryphal acts in medieval art show that stories, not sermons, shaped memories of Thomas. A particular group of manuscripts provide the basis for reading the martyrdom of Thomas in liturgical contexts.

The next two chapters continue explaining desiderata in studying the Greek manuscripts of ATh. Muñoz Gallarte provides a table of Bonnet’s manuscript evidence for the 1903 edition, which indicates the sections preserved in each manuscript, their location, and also includes those now seriously damaged or lost. Another table provides the same information for forty-four additional manuscripts discovered since that time. In the third chapter, Roig Lanzillotta returns to Bonnet’s goal of providing a Greek text that reflects all of ATh. Are there sections that should be considered for later expansions? Studies of Gnostic and Manichaean thought often treat its allegory for the soul’s descent into the world, forgetfulness followed by a “message” to awaken it to return home, the Hymn of the Pearl as a separate piece that was later inserted into ATh. It only occurs in one Greek manuscript derived from a codex that combined homiletic and hagiographical materials. That volume had been assembled from combining older, more technically proficient 10th–11th century quires, with more recent ones copied in the 12th–13th century. Detailed analysis of the codex suggests that it was produced for private study. Some later details incorporated might indicate some liturgical use.

Chapters four to seven on special topics are based on the Bonnet text used for translations of ATh employed by students of the apocryphal acts. These analyses also treat topics more familiar to students of early Christianity than manuscript studies. Susanne Luther, a major voice in discussions of “speech ethics” in the New Testament, applies that approach to ATh. However, its ascetic paraenesis does not reflect the prominent examples of speech ethics from the NT as Luther recognizes. Her methodological turn claims that ATh employs, “the strategy of receiving speech-ethical admonitions from early Christian tradition and rephrasing it in narrative form,” (67). Readers may be skeptical in a slight-of-hand that claims speech-ethics in the miracle story narrative in tales of talking animals.

A detailed analysis of sōma and material reality in ATh, by Andrés Sáez Gutiérrez contributes to larger discussions of 2nd- and 3rd-century Christology. References to the relationship between God, Jesus, and the material world in ATh are not governed by a consistent philosophical or gnostic/Manichaean system. Instead, diverse pictures of the relationship emerge from analyzing how sōma Christou language functions in specific contexts: cosmological, Christological, sacramental, and soteriological. ATh presumes that God’s creative power is effective in the material world even though all matter will eventually perish. Sáez Gutiérrez concludes that ATh does not envisage salvation as bodily resurrection of the righteous even though its stories also insist that the Jesus known to the disciples had a human form that is bodily (ATh 72). ATh 47 acknowledges the paradoxical Jesus who is both a tired, hungry human and on who walks on the waves as God. Not only do miracles reflect divine power reaching into the material world, the martyrdom of Thomas story attributes healing powers to his bones or the surrounding dust (ATh 170). The sacramental rites that mark successful conversion in the stories conclude with a Eucharist, consumption of the “body and blood of Christ” in the consecrated bread and cup of water (ATh 49; 133; 158, “your body crucified for us we eat”). Given its complex textual history, Sáez Gutiérrez considers other ATh passages with similarities to Valentinian Gnosticism as the later incorporation of material shaped by a different ideology, (98 n. 69 on ATh 27).

Sergi Grau acknowledges the difficulty of categorizing the genre of a text that is recreated with every performance in “Building a Palace in Heaven, Sapiential Stories within Biographies and the Acts of Thomas.” He finds “fictional biography” indebted to rhetorical traditions of philosophical chreia the most plausible genre for comparison. However, the connection proposed between ATh and a tradition of building a sky-based palace tale from Ahiqar and Life of Aesop does not a sage’s verbal dexterity in that chreia genre. The sky-palace episode adapted by Christian storytellers points toward Jesus’ sayings about renouncing earthly possessions to obtain treasure in heaven. Muñoz Gallarte’s charts show that this palace building section occurs in most known manuscripts of ATh, though some drop the longer Thomas speech at the end.

Ángel Narro’s treatment of the influence of ATh traditions on late antique literature focuses on three motifs that ATh shares with other Apocryphal Acts, especially the Acts of Paul and Thecla, to explore its influence on later hagiographical traditions: (i) apostle’s impact on women, (ii) accusations of magic, and (iii) talking animals. These narratives originating at the end of the 2nd or early 3rd centuries became the seeds of the full-fledged hagiography that incorporates a wide range of literary topoi. The final essay in this collection, “Rewriting and Modulation Techniques in Text Type ‘Arabic I’ of the Acts of Thomas,” takes readers into the world of multi-lingual Melkite monks in Sinai during the 9th–10th centuries. Monferrer-Sala shows that the Arabic I version has recrafted the ATh story by drawing from both Greek and Syriac texts. Adopting a title not employed in either source, maymar (< Syr. memr ā ) “homily,” may indicate that the Arabic ATh would enable preaching in Arabic.

Spanish scholars are engaged in a collaborative research project working to produce a new edition of the Greek text accompanied by a commentary. These papers are more than a “trending topics” presentation. They demonstrate both the complexity and necessity of producing an edition of the Greek ATh that reflects its complexity. Papers on the manuscript traditions of ATh in this volume provide material for graduate seminars in text-criticism to challenge assumptions about establishing original fixed texts that students often learn in biblical exegesis.