The Gospel of Thomas is of another kind, a “Sayings” Gospel, which records 114 of Jesus’s sayings rather than the story of his life, death and resurrection. Its purpose is to promote the secret teachings of Jesus and explain to the faithful that by understanding his words rather than by believing in his death and resurrection that they would have everlasting life. The Gospel is attributed to Didymus Judas Thomas, whom Jesus says is his “twin” , “Didymus” being Greek and “Thomas” Aramaic for “twin”. If it is not a forgery, as some believe, it may be the closest we ever get to the real Jesus. Yet the leadership of the church in Jerusalem passed, not to Thomas, but to Jesus’s brother, James the Just.
The convert Paul was, apart from Jesus, the most important figure in the spread of Christianity. His letters to the young churches were probably written sometime between 50 and 60 AD. Paul’s conversion appears to have been the result of a vision of Jesus following his death which completely altered his understanding of Jesus, God’s Law and the true road to salvation. He became convinced that the end of the World was nigh and people needed to be saved before it was too late. His theological belief in the Resurrection of the Christ had the clearest implications for the ethical well-being of the community.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke have been dated to between 80 and 85 AD. The Gospel of Matthew concentrates on Jesus’s Jewishness but at the same time demonstrates his opposition to the Jewish leaders of his day. Yet for all that, Jesus was a Jewish Messiah, sent by a Jewish God to a Jewish people to gather Jewish disciples, in fulfilment of Jewish Scriptures. He was merely summing up the Jewish Law into two Commandments: to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbour as oneself (22:35-40).Thus he superseded the Scribes and Pharisees and all their works.
Luke was a Gentile physician, known to have been a travelling companion of the apostle Paul, but there is the usual academic debate about whether he wrote the Gospel or not. Nevertheless, Jesus is portrayed as a Jewish prophet, who as the Son of God brought the whole world to salvation, not just Jewish people but Gentiles as well. He was therefore the Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World. He was born like a prophet, preached like a prophet, and finally died like a prophet. He was even obliged to go to Jerusalem to be killed, for that is where all the prophets die (13:33).
The Gospel of John has been traditionally ascribed to John, the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’s closest friends. But this ascription cannot be found anywhere until the latter part of the 2nd Century. In earlier sources John is described as a countryman from Galilee, who would have spoken, like Jesus, Aramaic, not the literary Greek in which the Gospel is written. Moreover in Acts 4:13 John is described as illiterate. The Gospel is, in fact, likely to have been translated from oral Aramaic sources towards the end of the 1st Century, so that whether John was illiterate or not is of no special significance.
John’s Gospel provides a completely different view of Jesus. He is no longer the compassionate and charismatic healer and worker of miracles, proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God, a prophet without honour among his own people. Nor even the Jewish Messiah, sent by the Jewish God to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures. He is now the Logos, the Word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. Jesus had passed from the prophetical to the mystical to the Divine….