Following his recent monograph, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas (Cambridge, 2012: see my survey/review article in SJT 66 (2013), pp. 221–9), Simon Gathercole has now published this full-scale commentary on the Gospel of Thomas. Certainly compared to other recent commentaries on Thomas (e.g. Nordsieck, Plisch, Pokorny), this is by far the fullest and most comprehensive currently available. Gathercole provides a massive (180 page) Introduction, dealing with issues about the manuscripts containing the text, references to Thomas in antiquity (including a very long list of testimonia and possible early allusions to Thomas), the language, provenance and date of the gospel, its structure and genre, and a long section on the ‘religious outlook’ of Thomas. Issues covered in detail in the earlier monograph, above all the language of Thomas and its relationship to the New Testament and the historical Jesus, are summarised here, with the reader referred to the earlier work for more detailed discussion. Gathercole thus assumes here that Thomas was originally a Greek composition, written in the second century (saying 71 suggests post-135 ce), and dependent (directly or indirectly) on the synoptic gospels: as such it is not a direct witness to the historical Jesus. He argues here that the provenance of the text is uncertain (Syria or Egypt are the best guesses); the text is probably structured around catchwords; the religious outlook of the text is summarised in some detail, and it is argued here (along with many today) that, the text is not ‘Gnostic’ (with some discussion on what ‘Gnostic’ might mean: but the absence of any demiurgic creation myth, and a possibly positive reference to the creator (of Adam), saying 85, is taken as crucial).
The commentary discusses each saying in turn, seeking primarily to interpret the sayings in the historical context of second-century Christianity. Each saying has a ‘textual comment’ (important where a Greek fragment is extant as well as the Coptic), together with a general ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Notes’ on smaller details within the saying. Where there is an extant Greek version available (in one of the fragments), the Greek text is printed alongside the Coptic with no attempt to construct explicitly a single ‘original’ version, though comments are offered here on which version might be secondary at some points. For each saying, a bibliography of modern treatments is also supplied.
Inevitably, given the flood of scholarly writings on Thomas, not every view can be considered here in detail and Gathercole has to cut some corners. The commentary is massive in scope already, and Gathercole has clearly read, and carefully considered, a huge range of the secondary literature. Hence it may be carping to complain about abbreviated treatments in any way. For the most part, exegetical and/or interpretative decisions made are presented concisely and clearly, with a mass of secondary references in the footnotes. However, some decisions are presented fairly briefly (e.g. on the allegedly ‘wrong’ views of ‘Peter’ and ‘Matthew’ in saying 13), and the discussion of the possibly ‘Gnostic’ nature of the text does not give a very clear indication of why the text might have been considered by some as ‘Gnostic’. But it is probably inevitable that, in a commentary of this length and detail, there will be some options taken by the author which are debated by others!
There is no doubt that this volume represents a massive achievement, and will provide an invaluable resource for all readers of Thomas. The comprehensive coverage in the Introduction, as well as the detailed discussion of all the 114 sayings in the gospel, will make this an essential reference work for all future work on this fascinating text.
