New 'Gospel throws light on

THE HISTORY OF EARLY HERESY
C.H.' Reporter THE chief importance of the recently discovered apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas, an English translation of which is shortly to be published, lies in the light it throws on the history of heresy in the early centuries of the Church's existence, I was told by Fr. J. H. Crehan, S.J., the well-known Scriptural scholar.
-1 he papyrus manuscript was discovered in 1946 in the cemetery of a ruined Coptic monastery in southern Egypt. The date of composition of the Gospel has been fixed to the satisfaction of most scholars in the middle of the second century, a period for which we have few extant Christian documents, although the writings of Fathers of the Church who lived before and after this period have survived, and a period when heretics were beginning to be very active.
I asked Fr. Crehan how this Gospel of St. Thomas compared with other apocryphal Gospels that have survived. "There is less narrative in it," I was told; "it consists mostly of sayings and parables." By contrast. the apocryphal Gospel of James—written at the end of the second century— is almost entirely narrative, dealing as it does with the birth of Our Lord and the events immediately before and after.
This insistence on the verbal teaching of Our Lord, as edited for a Gnostic audience, and the minimising of Our Lord's actual life on this earth, was hardly unexpected, Fr. Crehan pointed out, since the Gnostics were unlikely to stress the Incarnation.
PARALLELS
Some of the sayings attributed to Our Lord can be paralleled from the canonical Gospels. Others embroider sayings found in the Gospels, sometimes adding details that give a Gnostic twist to the passage, sometimes adding details that seem pointless.
Some of the sayings are only paralleled in quotations by early Christian writers, which probably means that both used the same source—a source that may even have been oral tradition. Other sayings can only be paralleled in other unorthodox documents, such as the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews and the Clementine writings, neither of which, said Fr. Crehan, are "very reputable."
The phrase used that "James is our leader" points to a dissident group that disagreed with the leadership of the Church by Peter and his successors, Fr. Crehan quoted the parallel in St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, who went around describing themselves as "of Paul" or "of Apollo" or "of Cephas."
A final point made by Fr. Crehan was that this apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas throws light on the need there must have been for keeping the canonical Gospels under close supervision, to guard against interpolation.