Welcher Thomas?

The Gospel of Thomas does not tell the story of Jesus' life; it presents itself as a loose compilation of words from his mouth. In it, the individual statements are isolated texts without the context necessary to study the interpretation of individual sayings. Nevertheless, in order to be able to deal with the text, there has been an increase in the development of approaches to a composition and redaction history of the Gospel of Thomas recently. However, those doing so neglected the fact that we have two versions of a whole range of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, and that these differ considerably. Wilfried Eisele studies these sayings, taking the Coptic text from Nag Hammadi and the Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchos seriously as independent text forms. The result is a number of interesting insights into the structures of the history of the text and the tradition of the Gospel of Thomas.