Return to search

Know Yourself and You Will Be Known: The Gospel of Thomas and Middle Platonism

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus and is primarily composed of rhetorical statements that were used to preserve the teachings of itinerant Greek philosophers. These collections were used to persuade individuals to join the philosophical schools represented, much like the early followers of the Jesus movement would use his teachings to convince others to join them as well. However, the theological background for the text is still debated because it contains esoteric and enigmatic references not fully understood by most scholars. This work argues that the theological and philosophical background for the Gospel of Thomas is the Alexandrian School of Middle Platonism. This background contains an understanding of the divine, the secret nature of the teachings in the text, and the presence of daemons in the cosmos. In short, this is my attempt at supplying the hermeneutical key to the text or at least supplying a valid ideological background on which the Jesus tradition is cast in the Gospel of Thomas.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CLAREMONT/oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1094
Date01 January 2014
CreatorsClark, Seth A
PublisherScholarship @ Claremont
Source SetsClaremont Colleges
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceCGU Theses & Dissertations
Rights© 2014 Seth A. Clark, default

Page generated in 0.0021 seconds