Contarini;8005579:
Because they were unlike the canonical Gospels doesn’t make them wrong. It just makes them unlike the canonical Gospels. Thomas is now dated by scholars doing the most recent translations to be about 40 CE,
What scholars? The consensus seems to be that Thomas is late-first or early-second century. Stevan Davies puts it earlier–in the 50s. Helmut Koester apparently put it around 50. I have yet to see any example of a scholar who puts it around 40. Indeed, I know of no serious scholar who puts any Christian text whatever as early as that. Elaine Pagels puts it in the 90s, and that seems to reflect more of the scholarly consensus.
It’s a complicated issue, because most NT scholars think that all the Gospels are the result of a process of editing and may be “stratified” texts with earlier and later elements. So we have to distinguish whether we’re talking about the text as we have it or the earliest recension of some of the material.
Two debates I found online which are helpful in understanding Thomas scholarship are
this one between William Arnal and Stevan Davies and
this one between Ben Witherington and Elaine Pagels. If you have better sources, I would love to see them.
which is before Mathew, Mark, Luke or John.
Yes. If Thomas was written in the 40s or 50s it would probably be the first of the Gospels (though you can find folks who date some of the canonical Gospels very early as well). But this is a position held only by a tiny minority of scholars. Pagels, whom I would not call a conservative or even a middle-of-the-road scholar, puts it much later than that.
It more closely resembles other Nag Hamaddi codices than it does the canonical Gospels.
I’m not sure that’s true–I think that Stevan Davies, for instance, would disagree. Just because it was found with them doesn’t mean that it’s altogether the same kind of text. However, if what you’re saying is true, then that might point toward a later date for Thomas, since we know the other texts are late. (It might not, if by “resemble” you just mean “in the same way that Matthew or John resembles Irenaeus,” i.e., apparently standing within the same theological trajectory.)
He was more interested in pushing his agenda than He was in Christ.
I don’t see any evidence for such a judgment. I think you’re making a highly prejudiced judgment here–Irenaeus stands in the way of your desire to Hinduize Christianity, and so you make pejorative claims about his character. (And yes, that would be no different from how orthodox folks have treated those they deemed to be heretics! But that’s my point–you can fall into the error of calling your theological opponents bad people without being a bad person yourself.) Irenaeus believed that his “agenda” was the teaching of Christ. You assume this to be false, and then accuse him of being more interested in pushing his agenda than in Christ. But that would only be true if your version of Christ’s teaching were correct and his incorrect–and even then, it seems unfair to use such language if Irenaeus sincerely believed that he was defending Christ’s teaching, even if he were wrong. I would not say, for instance, that you are more interested in pushing your agenda than in Christ, even though I think you get Jesus badly wrong. I assume that you are sincere and deeply care about the truth and about Jesus, and I respect this about you even as I disagree with your conclusions.
He spent his life calling other people heretics.
But this is circular. Again, you’re assuming that he not only was wrong but ought to have known that he was wrong. If these people were distorting the message of Jesus, he was right to say so, and he was right to spend his life trying to keep the record clear. Even if he was wrong but was wrong in good faith, his efforts to defend orthodoxy are not to his discredit.
That’s true, but he gave it the strict structure, and the centralized machine like nature that it took on, complete with creeds by which one swears.
Certainly the imperial recognition of Christianity contributed to the development of ecclesiastical organization, but I think you’re ascribing way too much to Constantine. Christians had a fairly well-developed organization before that point, with bishops around the world consulting with each other on a regular basis. And many aspects of ecclesiastical organization were only developed later–the five-patriarch system, for instance, or the pyramidal structure of modern Catholicism.
Also, you find something approaching creeds in the early “orthodox” writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian. It seems to me that you’re collapsing a complex process, smearing the earlier folks by association with the “worldliness” of the Constantinian era even as you exaggerate how much of the structures of orthodoxy come from that era as opposed to earlier (or in some cases later).
