First Glance

Lost sayings of Jesus, rediscovered? It may sound like something out of the vast pseudo-literature of modern apocrypha—hoaxes with titles like The Unknown Life of Christ, the Nazarene Gospel or The Lost Airplane Tickets of Jesus—but this time it may be true! One of the Nag Hammadi codices, a library of ancient writings found in Egypt in 1945, contains a tractate that purports to be a collection of Jesus’ sayings compiled by the apostle Thomas. As Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson show in “The Gospel of Thomas: Does It Contain Authentic Sayings of Jesus?” this collection, once thought to be a late apocryphal work, contains many sayings that appear to be earlier versions of sayings in the canonical Gospels as well as early parables that do not appear in the Gospels.

A leading authority on the history of the first centuries of Christianity, Koester is the John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Harvard University Divinity School. His major contributions have been studies of the Gospels and of other Christian traditions and their developments in the second century A.D., including his two-volume Introduction to the New Testament (Fortress, 1982), comprising History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age and History and Literature of Early Christianity. He also serves as chairman of the New Testament editorial committee of Hermeneia, the distinguished biblical commentary series, and as editor of Harvard Theological Review.