In this debate about Thomas� relationship to the canonical writings, at stake is the �map� of Early Christian communities. Raymond Brown, Robert Grant and many other scholar came up with the view that the Gospel of Thomas is a 2nd century Gnostic work. They support the view of Heresiologists that Gnosticism is a later deviation of Christianity. If this is the case, we must conclude that Thomas used and reinterpreted the existing Sayings tradition turning it into a launching pad of Gnosticism.
On the other hand, Helmut Koester sees the Gospel of Thomas as a first century independent re-interpretation of the sayings tradition. The Gospel of Thomas was written about the same time as the canonical gospels, since it does not presuppose the developed Gnostic cosmogony we know from the Gnostic writings of the second century. It is a collection of sayings like the Proverbs, Ben Sira, or the Wisdom of Solomon. While Koester correctly identifies the genre of Thomas as the sayings of a sage, or Logoi Sofwn, he does not consider the consequences of such a definition.
What is missing from both approaches is the placement of the Gospel of Thomas in its socio-cultural environment. One of the goals of this paper is to correct this in two ways, by establishing relationships with similar early Christian groups and by locating them not only geographically, but socio-culturally. Assuming that the Gospel of Thomas originated in Syria, the first step would be to establish intertextual relationship, if there is any, with other early Christian literary works originating from the same geographical and cultural environment. In this paper I have limited this task to the Gospel of John, because the Johannine community, in my opinion, belongs to the same geographical and socio-cultural environment. Furthermore, the Johannine community, not unlike the Thomean community, found it self on the periphery of the early Church. The difference is that the Gospel of John was preserved for the patristic Church by an ecclesiastical redactor. Thomas Christianity was �lost� when it crossed the borders of the Roman empire and went deeper into Mesopotamia and further east to India.
James Robinson has already proposed a much more sophisticated definition of the socio-cultural setting for the sayings tradition. He argues that if the tradition of wandering radicalism was to continue and expand beyond the bounds of Palestine itself, and if we are to understand this as a movement carrying on its activities primarily in the small towns and villages of the countryside, then linguistic factors [Aramaic language] alone will have left the itinerants but one direction to go: east, to Syria, precisely the route followed by Thomas Christianity. Yet, even this proposal links the Gospel of Thomas only to Q, leaving aside Thomas� closest �theological kin� among the canonical writings, the Gospel of John. Theological similarities between John and Thomas are often dismissed to quickly. It is not a coincidence that Thomas appears as a �flesh and blood� character only in John. In the fourth gospel, Thomas appears seven times. In the Synoptic, his name appears only in the lists of the twelve. The similarity between John and Thomas lies in their portrayal of Jesus as a fully self-conscious sage - redeemer whose words and judgments are true and flawless. Both gospels claim: to understand Jesus and his words is to achieve salvation.
The research into the relationship between the newly found sayings gospel and the Gospel of John started in the 1960s. Raymond Brown first investigated the relationship in a short article and concluded that Thomas is a later Gnostic work dependent in few places on the canonical Johannine tradition. The pioneering article of Brown offers a lot of lucid ideas, but unfortunately limits its own results with the presupposition that the Gospel of Thomas is later than the Gospel of John. The article start with a question: �How much use, if any, Gospel of Thomas makes of St. John�s Gospel.� Raymond Brown, nevertheless, established the fact that the gospels of John and Thomas have some common material. He explains this common material by presupposing that the redactor of Thomas borrowed from John.
A turning point in scholarship on John-Thomas relationship occurred with a continuing interest of Helmut Koester in the problem. Koester�s book �Ancient Christian Gospels� analyzes in detail the relationship between the Gospels of John and Thomas. The strength of Koester�s position lies in his careful literary analysis. He follows the development of Early Christian literary forms (sayings, dialogues, narratives, full-blown gospels) through their mutual influence and complicated interrelationship. Koester argues that the Gospel of Thomas and the discourses of John�s gospel belong to a trajectory based primarily on sayings. In many instances, �John and Thomas interpret the same traditional sayings, albeit with the use of quite different hermeneutic principles.� While dwelling on the differences Koester does not explain similarities, except for the fact that both John and Thomas dwell on the pool of the Synoptic sayings tradition.
The most radical step in interpretation of John-Thomas relationship was undertaken by Gregory Riley. He argues, convincingly in my opinion, that there was a close interaction between the two communities in Syria. This is a common sense proposal and I will presuppose it in this paper. But he also believes that John stands for the orthodox position, the resurrection of the flesh, while Thomas believes in spiritual resurrection. Riley�s conclusions about the orthodoxy of John and heresy of Thomas are based, for the most part on the Doubting Thomas episode, and cannot be maintained for the gospel of John as a whole. Such a sharp contrast between John and Thomas again emphasizes the differences and underestimates the similarities. It is difficult to make of John a champion of orthodoxy, as K�ssemann and many others have shown, since the gospel contains a docetic Christology, only occasionally dyed with orthodoxy. It is a well known fact that the Gospel of John distinguishes only between belief and unbelief, and not between correct and incorrect belief. Such a distinction is made by the author of First Epistle of John.
Thus, I believe that it is not productive to emphasize the contrast between the two texts coming form a very similar socio-cultural environment. Rather I will concentrate in this paper on the Johannine sayings in Thomas, that is, on similarities between John and Thomas. The number of the Johannine sayings in Thomas is defined by Raymond Brown�s pioneering article. Furthermore, both Koester and Brown agree that the Gospel of Thomas has a number of �Johannine sayings.� Building on this common ground, I propose a new explanation for the formation of the Johannine sayings in Thomas. I believe that these sayings are independent from the Synoptic tradition. Furthermore, in the common material neither has Thomas borrowed from John, nor vice versa. The similarity lies not in Thomas� dependence on John, nor in John�s influence on the redactor of Thomas. Rather, the Johannine sayings in Thomas and their parallels in John originate from the same Sitz im Leben, the popular wisdom of wandering ascetics - holy men and women in the first century Syria. If these sayings look different from the Synoptic sayings, that is because they were produced in a different socio-cultural location, namely, not in Galilee. In short, the weakness of Brown� and Koester�s arguments lies in the fact that they limit the production of sayings to the early Palestinian Jewish community and leave the interpretation to the �Hellenistic communities.� This paper argues that the sayings of Jesus were �produced� outside the early Palestinian community and focuses on the sayings created and transmitted by Syrian holy men and women. Furthermore, the theological closeness of the two gospels, specially the self-consciousness of Jesus that permeates both texts indicates that similar socio-cultural factors shaped the beliefs about Jesus in both communities. In sum, I argue that the parallel material in the gospels of John and Thomas is a product of the same Sitz im Leben, namely, the wisdom of wandering ascetics in the first century Syria.