What are some of my main conclusions about the Gospel of Thomas?
• It is a rolling corpus, a written gospel that developed over time within a rhetorical environment dominated by oral consciousness. This is a “living book” model, envisioning the literacy of the gospel in continuity with the oral world. The derivation of the gospel develops out of a dynamic oral-literate interplay. This is be distinguished from our previous models which understood orality to be the “background” for the written gospel or understood literacy to be everything, a post-Gutenberg cut-and-paste mentality. • It began as a smaller gospel of Jesus’ sayings, organized as a speech handbook to aid the memory of preachers. • I call the earliest version of the Gospel of Thomas, the Kernel Thomas. • The Kernel Thomas originated from the mission of the Jerusalem Church between the years 30-50 CE. • It was taken to Edessa where it was used by the Syrian Christians as a storage site for words of Jesus. • Its main use in the Syrian Church was instructional. • The Kernel sayings were subj
