Parallel text: The Thomas Gospel in French, Haitian Creole and English

This is a wonderful edition to my taste for somewhat personal reasons. I have learned to greatly respect the profound religiosity of my friends in the Haitian community. Equally, I have been surprised to see that the word of the Thomas Gospel has been slow to make the rounds in this community, and so it was a welcome surprise to find here in one volume a very good English translation, as well as a very nice French translation, along with a version in Haitian Creole. I might note here that my friend Samuel Augustin http://www.kreyolart.com is painting a picture that will be the cover of my upcoming book Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles, and an early version of this painting is available now in the photo section of this blog, soon to be replaced with a more final version soon. The English translation in the present volume is from the hand of Dr. Hans Gebhard Bethge, based on an earlier version which previously appeared in the book The Fifth Gospel (1998) by Patterson, Robinson, and Betghe, and it is a very clean, readable, serviceable translation, without any attempts to embellish, to modernize or interpret. There are always minor choices which are debatable, such as why not capitalize Kingdom? This is a translator's decision, since the Greek or Coptic do not use capitals, so this merely addresses modern sensibilities. This translation chooses not to. For the rest it is very faithful in showing where the translator supplied missing words, etc. The English text is printed in a large, very readable type on the left page, and the French and Creole versions appear in a two column format on the facing page. This makes for a very nice presentation, and a good tool for discussion in study groups, since the reality is that this edition addresses the needs of a tri-lingual community. French is the language of the educated in Haiti, and I notice with all my friends that when the conversation gets serious, French is a must. However ,we live in an English speaking world here, so the English is equally relevant for this purpose. The French translation is equally very pleasant and straightforward to read. As to the Creole, I may expand this review once I have the first feedback from my friends in the Haitian community. The introduction to this edition unfortunately is less than helpful. Some of the historical information is usable, but in my view it suffers from adopting what I have called the benign Gnostic view of the Thomas Gospel without explaining sufficiently that there are at least alternative views. In this respect the book lumps itself in with Jean-Yves Leloup and Elaine Pagels, and this results in what I feel is a muddled position. This lack of clarity shows in the position of the authors that Thomas dates from 60-100 AD, in which context they cite it as contemporaneous with the Gospel of John, while a few paragraphs further down they do cite the historical notion that Thomas would have left in 46 AD for Syria and India, and that the book would have most likely been composed before his departure, or while he was in Syria, which would place it in the range of 45-50AD, and thus about 15 years after the crucifixion, and well before Paul and the synoptics. However, even while this information is presented, the apparent conflict with the earlier position is not resolved in this introduction. It is interesting that the authors draw attention to the fact that the Gospel of John does not have Thomas quotes, and point out that the story of Thomas' doubts is in John, so that indeed it seems this reflects a disagreement between different communities who all claimed to follow Jesus. I think these type of issues are helpful for the modern reader, in terms of understanding that there were a series of partially conflicting traditions and never one homogeneous orthodoxy, as church history tried to make it seem in retrospect. However, for John to criticize Thomas it is not necessary for the book to be contemporaneous, rather it suggests that the Thomas tradition was solidified before John wrote, in perhaps ca. 90 AD. Further, right from the beginning, when on page 9 it says: "Thomas is a collection of words and teachings that interpret what Jesus said," evidently the authors assume that the Thomas Gospel is not what it appears to be, i.e. sayings of Jesus and and of a relatively early date, but rather an interpretation of Jesus that is put in his mouth, which would be more in line with the late date of 60-100 AD, except that as I'm pointing out here, they are not consistent in making this argument either, by allowing for the possibility that Thomas did write it himself. How the authors, in a book published in 2005, conclude that there are no Thomas quotes in the synoptic Gospels is a mystery to me, and when they write as if there are no other opinions, I feel that with the current state of the conversation about Thomas this amounts to a misrepresentation. At the very least they should have noted here that different opinions exist, when they seriously promote this kind of a minority view of the matter. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I think that in the spirit of truth in advertising an introduction to this type of a book should in part be an accounting for the positions the author(s) take in a field which is very active indeed, and where many conflicting explanations are in contention for the reader's attention. They are clear however on some major points of principle, such as the notion that to Thomas the resurrection clearly is a spiritual event, not a physical one, which is critically important. Except for this and a few other interesting tidbits, I unfortunately feel this introduction is too sectarian, and short on support for the positions it takes in the crowded field of Thomas scholarship. The introduction does a fair job however of a brief accounting of the historical facts of the Thomas traditions in Syria and India. They consequently propose a timeline which by implication would seem to make it likely that the Gospel of Thomas was written before 46 AD, simply because that is when Thomas left for India,  where he died in  72 AD, and where no copies of the Thomas Gospel are extant. As noted above, here the introduction really does the reader a disservice, is when it blatantly states that "...scholars of the Bible do not believe the authors of Matthew, Mark, or Luke, had Thomas on hand when they were composing their own books." This statement seems like an almost complete non-sequitur after they have just made the pre-existence of Thomas to those books seem highly probable. These authors' need to keep the Thomas tradition segregated from the canonical tradition, and mark it as "Gnostic" is a flaw in the presentation, even though in the rest of the introduction they do not unduly characterise "Gnostic" in a negative way, focusing only on the truly Gnostic notion of our ability of knowing God directly, different from the Pauline traditions of Christianity. On the whole the undertone is one of seeing Thomas as part of the history of Christianity, which results in the muddled presentation of him. To the contrary, if Thomas was recorded in 45-50 AD as part of this introduction implies, this should compel the notion that the Thomas Gospel does consist of Jesus sayings, and not interpretations, and that Christianity rather is the interpretation of Jesus, which is inconsistent with the teachings we find in Thomas. In other words, when seen in that light, Thomas would be relevant to the history of Christianity only by demonstrating that it has nothing to do with Jesus. The authors are not ready to draw that conclusion, even though parts of this material imply a high probability that this is so. In all, a great edition, if it serves your needs, but get a second opinion on the introductory materials. There's plenty on the web and in other books.