Jesus Puzzle: Chapter 15

Chapter 15 Critiqued:

Earl Doherty wrote: “The complete Gospel of Thomas was part of a cache of manuscripts buried in a jar in Egypt in the fourth century and uncovered in 1945” (TJP:151).
Earl Doherty also wrote: “The recovered document in Egyptian Coptic, was made in the fourth century, but is thought to be based on a Greek original that reached its present form some time in the first half of the second century, likely somewhere in Syria” (TJP:152).
In this chapter Earl Doherty alludes to the idea that the contents of the Gospel of Thomas cannot be traced back to the historical Jesus, and the compiler of this critique agrees with Doherty on this point.
The New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman wrote: “Although we cannot know whether a source like Thomas existed during the first century, there are good reasons for thinking that Thomas itself did not. The most obvious is that the full-blown Christian-gnostic myth that many of Thomas’ sayings presuppose cannot be documented as existing prior to the second century” (TNT:206).
The New Testament scholar Joseph Tyson wrote: “The third century Christian writer Hippolytus had transmitted one saying from it, and several sayings are contained in the Oxyrynchus papyri, which had been discovered in 1897. But until the Nag Hammadi discovery, we did not know that these sayings had come from the Gospel of Thomas” ( TNTEC:205).

The Oxyryrnchus papyri mentioned by Joseph Tyson above consist of several Greek fragments discovered in an ancient trash heap in a town called Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
These small fragments date to some point in the second century, much earlier than the Coptic translation (TNT:204).

“Does the Gospel of Thomas indeed prove how Q, allegedly the oldest gospel, was shaped-consisting mainly of sayings, with no Passion or Easter reports? Let me answer with another question. If a young man is leading a rock band, does this prove that a deceased person of his grandfather’s generation played rock music, too? Of course not, even if it were known that the deceased was a musician" (BCOT:29).
"The Gospel of Thomas is mentioned or quoted by some church fathers in the first decades of the third century. Recent scholarship dates its earliest compositionat about A.D. 140 (though the only complete manuscript is a Coptic translation dating from around A.D. 400)” (BCOT:29).

Thus, Doherty’s conclusion that the Gospel of Thomas does not go back to the historical Jesus has no bearing on whether or not Jesus existed.