Post Author: Bill Pratt

For the last several years, a lot of hay has been made concerning the Gospel of Thomas, an alleged fifth Gospel only discovered in 1945.  A few New Testament scholars have tried to make the case that the views espoused in Thomas represent a competing strain of Christianity that was suppressed by the early church hierarchy.

These scholars, in order to make their case, must show that Thomas was written in the first century along with the other four Gospels and the rest of the New Testament writings.  Unfortunately for them, the evidence seems to place the Gospel of Thomas in the late second century, at the earliest.

Lee Strobel and John Ankerberg (see video below) explain that Thomas was completed more than a century  after Jesus lived, and that this Gospel actually draws upon the other books of the New Testament, thus removing it from contention as an early version of Christianity.  The truth is that it came along far after Christianity was well underway as a religious movement.