Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics by Mark Goodacre (review)

As the subtitle suggests, this is a book that argues for the Gospel of Thomas’s knowledge of the Synoptic Gospels. The question is consequential, for if Thomas shows no knowledge of, or dependence upon, the Synoptic Gospels, it provides another ‘‘window’’ on the Jesus tradition. On this view, scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Robert Funk, and many others have used Thomas in their constructions of the historical Jesus. And in the conception of the development of the thinking and practice of the earliest Christ-cults, an independent Thomas has played an important role in the model of ‘‘trajectories,’’ articulated forty years ago by James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, but also taken up by theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx. This model does not privilege Jesus’s self-immolation as the vehicle of salvation but instead imagines multiple conceptual frameworks with which to conceive the significance of Jesus, including apocalyptic scenarios, thaumaturgy, and schemas of the revelation of hidden wisdom.

If Thomas is entirely dependent on, and hence subsequent to, the Synoptic Gospels, the case for another independent line of access to the early Jesus tradition disappears, and the ‘‘trajectories’’ model requires adjustment. It is not that the conception of Jesus as a heavenly revealer disappears entirely; there are still hints of this at Corinth (1 Cor 1–4) and in the Gospel of John. But this model loses one of its earliest and pristine examples, and the Jesus-as-revealer model can be dismissed more easily as an aberration rather than as one of the earliest generative soteriological models.

In approaching the issue of Thomas and the Synoptics, Goodacre, who teaches at Duke University and who is the author of The Case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, pa: Trinity, 2002), is aware of the linkage of the question of the status of Thomas and American evangelical scholarship, frightened of theological diversity at the earliest stages of the Jesus movement, and wedded to the notion that only the documents that were canonized in the fourth century should be used for constructing the historical Jesus and the main lines of early Christian theologizing. He insists that he is not engaged in such identity politics, and for the most part this seems to be the case. Further, he tries to distinguish between ‘‘knowledge of the Synoptics’’ and ‘‘dependence on them,’’ the latter implying that Thomas is a merely derivative document. He affirms the former—‘‘knowledge’’—ostensibly on the analogy of debates about John’s knowledge of the Synoptics, which does not automatically turn John into a ‘‘derivative’’ gospel. Nevertheless, as the book progresses, it is in fact about ‘‘dependence,’’ since Goodacre ignores the non-Synoptic portions of Thomas and in fact a good deal of the Synoptic-like materials where the case for Thomas’s knowledge of the Synoptics is not strong, or where the contrary case could be made.

The main and most important argument he advances—which is hardly new—is that in a number of instances, one can detect in Thomas elements in Matthew and Luke that are redactional. For example Gospel of Thomas 20, 54 use the distinctively Matthaean expression, ‘‘kingdom of the heavens,’’ and Thomas’s version of Mark 7:15 in Gospel of Thomas 14.5 agrees with Matthew’s redactional transformation of Mark, where Matthew makes clear (15:11) that he is interested in ‘‘what goes into your mouth.’’ Likewise, Goodacre detects the presence of Lukan redaction in Gospel of Thomas 5 (Luke’s adjective phaneros in place of Mark’s aorist subjunctive) and in 31 (Luke’s dektos in place of Mark’s atimos). More doubtfully, Goodacre argues that Luke’s editorial use of internal monologue in Luke 12:15–21 is betrayed in Gospel of Thomas 63, but he fails to note that internal monologue is a standard...