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The Gospel of Thomas, and a Coincidence

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The Gospel of Thomas, and a Coincidence

The Coptic Gospel of Thomas, recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, is conventionally divided into a hundred and fourteen sayings. That the Quran also has a hundred and fourteen divisions has been noticed and made much of, and the comparison does not survive examination.

The manuscript has no numbered divisions. Nag Hammadi Codex II, tractate 2, runs continuously, with the sayings separated only by the recurring formula Jesus said. The division into a hundred and fourteen numbered logia was imposed by modern editors from the first publications onward, in the late 1950s. It is a scholarly convenience that became standard because everyone needed a common reference system, and other divisions have been proposed; some editors combine or split sayings differently, giving different totals.

So the comparison sets a canonical, ancient and universally agreed count against a count decided by twentieth-century European editors. It is not a coincidence between two traditions. It is a coincidence between one tradition and a modern editorial choice.

The text itself is of real interest independently. It is a collection of sayings without narrative, passion or resurrection, roughly half of which have parallels in the synoptic gospels while the rest do not. Its date is genuinely contested: proposals range from the mid-first century, which would make it as early as any gospel, to the mid-second, and the argument turns on whether its parallels show knowledge of the canonical gospels or independent access to a common tradition. Greek fragments found at Oxyrhynchus decades before Nag Hammadi were identified as belonging to it only after the Coptic text appeared.

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