Gregory J. Riley has added another dimension hitherto lacking in the discussion and certainly complicating it. Using historical-critical methods usually reserved for the study of inter-synoptic relationships, methods that are also observed, however, in the works of Uro and Robinson discussed above, Riley, in his 1996 article “Influence of Thomas Christianity on Luke 12:14 and 5:39,” looked for instances where elements in the Gospel of Thomas that are indicative of Thomasine emphasis, and hence of redaction or modification of tradition, might be reflected in the Gospel of Luke.28 He found two such instances in Luke 12:13–14 (cf. GTh 72) and Luke 5:39 (cf. GTh 47:3–4). In the first case, Riley points out that the word for “divider” in Luke 12:14 rarely occurs in known Greek literature. Its presence does not add much to the saying in Luke.29 However, it is perfectly understandable in the Gospel of Thomas, where the unification of two into one is a central theme and Jesus is most definitely not to be understood as a divider.30 The most logical conclusion from this, considering Luke’s propensity for collecting from disparate sources, is that Luke has conflated two versions of a traditional saying, one of them represented by GTh 72.31 In the other case, Luke’s redaction of Mark 2:21–22 by adding a positive statement about old wine, while creating a generally true statement about good wine, contradicts the Markan emphasis on the value of the new over the old.32 Where did Luke get this idea? Thomas 47 provides a complex of Jesus’ sayings where a decision must be made between two choices, and in GTh 47:3–5 the choice is decidedly for the value of the old over the new. Riley sees this emphasis in Thomas to be redactional, epitomized by the recasting of the New Patch saying so that one is (incredibly) more concerned for an old patch than a new garment.33 According to Riley, Luke’s contradictory complex of sayings makes most sense if one understands Luke 5:36–39 to be a conflation of GTh 47:3–5 and Mark 2:21–22.
Riley chose perhaps the clearest and strongest cases for Lukan dependence on the Thomas tradition. And, while his argument that Luke was in contact with an actual community developing a Thomasine tradition of exegesis of Jesus’ sayings needs further development to be persuasive—Luke may have simply been working from a written collection of sayings that had found its way into the Lukan community from traveling apostles who had passed through a Thomasine community34—Riley has provided strong evidence concerning two sayings in Thomas (72, 47) which stands in sharp contrast to the findings of Uro (GTh 14:5) and Robinson (GTh 16:3). In light of Riley’s findings, Luke’s aggregation of two similar sayings in Luke 17:20–21, 23 might also be re-examined in light of the possibility that Luke has preceded the Q “Coming of the Son of Humanity” pericope (Q 17:23–37) with a saying from the Thomas tradition (GTh 113), or even with a conflation of two sayings from the tradition (GTh 3 and 113).35 Indeed, perhaps parallel Lukan Sondergut material as a whole should be reconsidered on a saying-by-saying basis.36
An equally important implication of Riley’s study is that one must reconsider the composition history of Thomas in a new light. Whereas the results of Uro’s (1990) and Robinson and Heil’s studies (1998) do not necessarily speak to the dating of the composition of Thomas, Riley’s study suggests that at least part of a distinctly Thomasine sayings tradition predates the composition of the Gospel of Luke. Hence, even if one suggests that the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas were written down for the first time at the end of the first century or early in the second century, if Riley’s study holds up under closer scrutiny, then the Gospel of Thomas as a developing tradition of sayings of Jesus transmitted with a particular theological perspective at the very least predates the Gospel of Luke. At the same time, the conclusions of the preceding studies also require that one consider the Thomas tradition, even the written Gospel of Thomas itself, as developing over time. A mid-to-late first century oral collection or written text of the Gospel of Thomas did exist, but did not include all of the sayings of Jesus found in the fourth century Coptic manuscript bearing the gospel title.
Finally, an important implication of the previous studies, when taken as a whole, is that the Thomas text and tradition and synoptic texts and traditions did not develop in isolation from each other.
Thomas and John
While New Testament scholars have mostly focused on the relationship between Thomas and the synoptic traditions, the similarities between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John have long been recognized.37 In contrast to the synoptic similarities, however, similarities between Thomas and John lie less in clear and distinct sayings parallels, and more in theological conceptuality and symbolism. Nevertheless, the parallels that exist invite comparison, and scholars have suggested a multitude of possibilities. Hugh Evelyn-White looked at the Oxyrhynchus papyri and determined that similarities to John could not come from direct use of the Gospel: “The two fragments [P. Oxy. 1, 654] do not contain a single passage which can be regarded as derived either from the Fourth Gospel or from any other Johannine work.”38 Instead, he suggested that similarities were due to the Oxyrhynchus fragments having been compiled in a pre-Johannine gospel milieu:
I do not see why the Oxyrhynchus Collection may not have been indebted to the same source (whether traditional or documentary) as St John, or to some nearly related source. At the same time Johannine influence is distinctly traceable in the Sayings. . . .
. . . Johannine influence is distinctly present, though definite dependence on any of the Johannine works or literary use of any of them is not likely . . . the Sayings were formed at a period when Johannism was already in the air but still nascent and undeveloped.39
Robert McL. Wilson, having the Coptic Gospel of Thomas at his disposal, still found Evelyn-White’s proposal to be plausible, arguing that similarities between Thomas and John exist “in the realm of ideas, not citation.”40 Surprisingly, these suggestions of White and Wilson were not picked up and developed in several subsequent decades of Thomas research.
Raymond E. Brown was the first to do a systematic comparison of parallels between John and Thomas. He began with the assumption that the Gospel of John predated the Gospel of Thomas.41 However, he also recognized that “the affinity to John in GTh is not nearly so clear or so strong as the affinity to the Synoptic Gospels.” In fact, he argues that “many of the parallels . . . are so tenuous that they would be of significance only after a clear relationship between John and GTh had already been established.”42 He offered four ways of understanding the relationship between Thomas and John:
(1) The author(s) of GTh may have read John in the past and have been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by recollections. (2) The author(s) of GTh may have had some familiarity with memories of the oral preaching that underlay the Fourth Gospel. There have been attempts to localize both GTh and John in Syria. (3) The author(s) of GTh may have drawn on a source which in turn drew on John. . . . (4) GTh and John may both be drawing on a third source like Bultmann’s hypothetical Offenbarungsreden source.43
In the end, Brown argues that the Gospel of Thomas originally contained a