Where was the Gospel of Thomas Written?

Abstract

Stevan Davies has helped to set the direction of modem scholarship in two areas throughout the 1980s. In The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts, he argued that the New Testament apocryphal Acts originated in communities of continent Christian women striving for a new mode of self-expression. His study sparked others which explored the social and feminist ramifications of this type of early Christian literature.In a second innovative book, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, Davies sought to convince us, contrary to the current scholarly direction, that the Gospel of Thomas was not a gnostic document of concern mainly to historians of second-century Christianity. Instead, he encouraged us to set this gospel in the mid-first century, to understand it in the context of Christian baptismal initiation and instruction, and to view it as representative of contemporary Jewish wisdom speculations. The challenging nature of his thesis, the appended English translation of the Coptic text by David Cartlidge, and the absence of other accessible commentaries on this gospel all helped to make this book the most widely-read study on the Gos. Thom. in North America during the last decade. This paper emerges directly from The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom. It addresses more narrowly the issue of where the Gos. Thom. was written. Davies, setting this gospel in the mid-first century, hoped to dislodge the prevailing theory that it probably was written in Edessa.He proceeded in this task by rebutting three of Helmut Koester's arguments which favoured such an Edessene connection