I’ve been hearing lately some biblical scholars mention that The Gospel of Thomas may be one of the most authentic “gospels” that exist. Why is anyone saying this?

Thomas, unlike the four gospels of the canon, contains no biographical information about Jesus and no stories or sermons. No miracles or any other acts. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings of Jesus. 114 sayings.

So why are some scholars so interested in this manuscript? This book is thought to be a very early, possibly first century, before even the Synoptics, and these early quotations may have had great influence on the early church.

The manuscript was discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 and was dated to sometime in the fourth century.

So how do the scholars decide who borrowed from whom? Because it’s not obvious. About half of Thomas’s sayings have parallels in the Synoptic Gospels, and everybody agrees the material is connected. What they disagree about is the direction it traveled. There are basically two scholarly answers, and then there’s mine.

The first answer is that Thomas is independent and early. Scholars like Helmut Koester and John Dominic Crossan argue that Thomas didn’t copy the Synoptics at all — instead, Thomas and the Synoptics both drew on the same early pool of Jesus sayings and parables that was circulating in the first century. Their evidence: Thomas’s parables often look less developed than the Synoptic versions, without the allegorical explanations and church concerns that Matthew and Luke seem to have added, and Thomas contains no narrative framework at all, which would be a strange thing for somebody to produce by excerpting narrative gospels. Crossan even peels Thomas into layers and dates the earliest layer to the AD 50s. On this view, Thomas is a second, independent window on the earliest Jesus tradition — and that’s a very big deal.

The second answer is that Thomas is late and borrowed from the Synoptics. Mark Goodacre made this case in detail in his book Thomas and the Gospels, and Simon Gathercole argues along similar lines. Their key evidence is what you might call fingerprints: Thomas’s sayings sometimes contain the distinctive editorial touches of Matthew and Luke — wording that isn’t part of the old tradition but is those authors’ own additions, made when they were rewriting Mark. Scholars know how to spot this kind of thing. Inside the Synoptics themselves, for example, Mark calls Herod Antipas “king,” which is technically wrong — he was a tetrarch. Matthew, copying Mark, corrects it to “Herod the tetrarch,” but a few verses later he slips and calls him “the king” anyway, following his source. That little slip, sometimes called editorial fatigue, only makes sense if Matthew is editing Mark, not the other way around. Apply the same tests to Thomas, Goodacre argues, and the fingerprints point the same way: Thomas knew the finished gospels of Matthew and Luke. One example: Thomas’s version of the parable of the weeds (saying 57) keeps the owner’s answer but drops the servants’ question the answer was answering — which is why the scholar Gerd Lüdemann said Thomas 57 clearly presupposes Matthew’s version. On this view, Thomas was assembled in the early-to-mid second century, around AD 135 by Goodacre’s estimate, out of Synoptic material.

So those are the two scholarly directions: Thomas as an early, independent witness, or Thomas as a later borrower. Now here’s a third possibility, the one I keep coming back to.

But wait. There’s another way those fingerprints could have gotten into Thomas, and it doesn’t require Thomas’s author to have borrowed anything from anybody.

Textual critics like Bart Ehrman have been telling us for years what happened to ancient manuscripts as they were copied by hand, generation after generation. We have some 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament alone — copies of copies of copies, stretching all the way into the medieval period — and when scholars compare them, they find something like 400,000 differences among them. More differences, as Ehrman likes to put it, than there are words in the New Testament. Most of them don’t amount to anything: a misspelled word, a dropped line, a slip of the pen. But some of the changes look deliberate. And one of the most common things scribes did, deliberately or not, was harmonize — smooth a passage out so it matched the parallel passage they already knew.

Now think about Thomas. However early it started, the Thomas we actually have is a Coptic copy from around AD 340, translated from Greek. Between the original and that copy lie a couple of centuries of hand-copying by scribes who knew Matthew and Luke practically by heart, because those were the gospels read in church every week. Every time a scribe copied a Thomas saying that sounded almost like a saying in Matthew, he had the opportunity — you’d almost say the temptation — to nudge it the rest of the way, to make it sound like the version he knew. And we can catch Thomas changing in the act: the Greek fragments we have from around AD 200 don’t always match the later Coptic text. The Thomas that survives is not necessarily the Thomas that was written.

So maybe the direction runs the other way from what the scholars assume. Maybe Thomas didn’t start out borrowing from the Synoptics. Maybe it came to look more and more like them, one copied page at a time, over 300 years — absorbed into the familiar wording by the very people preserving it. The fingerprints of Matthew and Luke might not be part of the original design at all. They might be smudges left by the copyists.

I’m not a biblical scholar. But I know manuscripts change, because the scholars themselves keep telling us they do. And it seems to me that possibility deserves a hearing before we decide Thomas was just a late remix of the gospels in the canon.