Thomas: the fifth Gospel?

Abstract

"Whereas for years those in quest for the historical Jesus have been content to pursue their investigations within the canonical Gospels, recent developments in source criticism along with certain twentieth-century papyrological discoveries have widened the field. Little could the discoverers of the Oxyrhynchus fragments have realized back in 1898 that their Greek fragments containing sayings of Jesus, along with the much fuller, Coptic trove discovered in the Nag Hammadi desert fifty years later, would one day become a staple of historical Jesus research. John Dominic Crossan, for example, sees Thomas as essential to the investigation of Jesus of Nazareth, for he writes that “the collection is very, very early”"