The Gospel of Thomas.

        Next came the Gospel of Thomas, which consists of nothing but sayings of Jesus-treated as secret sayings the risen Lord addressed to a few of his disciples. Sometimes they are similar to what is preserved in the Gospel ofthe Hebrews or the Gospel ofthe Egyptians; sometimes they are not paralleled elsewhere; more often they are strikingly similar to sayings preserved in the Synoptic Gospels and presumably come either from these gospels or from oral tradition or from a mixture of the two. The general outlook of the author-compiler is clearly Gnostic, although it cannot be identified as that of any one school. H.-C. Puech showed that the “sayings of Jesus” found in Greek among the Oxyrhynchus papyri actually come from this gospel, and that the book itself was probably used in the Acts of Thomas and among the Manichees.