When Was the Gospel of Thomas Written?

What the manuscripts actually prove

Four manuscripts carry the Gospel of Thomas, and together they prove only this: a Greek version of the collection was circulating in provincial Egypt by about 200 CE, and a Coptic translation of a longer form was copied around 340–350 CE. No manuscript reaches the first century. Every earlier date on offer is an inference from the text's contents, not a reading from a papyrus.

The Oxyrhynchus scraps were dug up and published by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt decades before anyone could identify them. They were catalogued simply as sayings of Jesus; only after the 1945 find at Nag Hammadi gave scholars a complete Coptic text could the fragments be matched to it. The Coptic codices are dated partly by their bindings: the leather covers were stiffened with waste papyrus, and the dated documents recovered from that packing — in Codex VII, letters and receipts from 341, 346 and 348 CE — put the manufacture of the books in the middle of the fourth century.

One more fact matters for dating, and both camps accept it: where the Greek and the Coptic overlap, they do not match word for word. The collection was still being revised as it was copied. Whatever date you assign, you are dating a moving text.

The two camps side by side

The dispute is not about whether Thomas contains old material — nearly everyone grants that some sayings are old. It is about whether the collection is an independent line of transmission or a second-century digest of gospels already written. Here are the positions as their advocates state them.

The case for a first-century core

The early camp argues from genre, from form, and from what Thomas does not contain. A collection of sayings with no passion narrative and no resurrection is the kind of document scholars had already reconstructed behind Matthew and Luke — so finding a real one, complete, in 1945 looked like confirmation that the genre existed and was early.

Four specific arguments recur. First, the parables in Thomas frequently lack the allegorical explanations and framing that Matthew and Luke are known to add; a writer copying those gospels would have had to strip out precisely the material we can identify as their own editing. Second, Thomas's order follows no synoptic sequence and is often organized by catchword instead, which looks like oral transmission rather than book-copying. Third, the collection shows no awareness of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, a shadow that falls across the canonical gospels. Fourth, saying 12 points to a leadership situation that ended early:

The disciples said to Jesus, “We know you're going to leave us. Who will lead us then?”

Jesus said to them, “Wherever you are, you'll go to James the Just, for whom heaven and earth came into being.”

James was executed around 62 CE. A saying that makes him the movement's designated successor is difficult to explain as a second-century invention, and Koester and Patterson treat it as a fossil from the first generation. Note what the argument does and does not claim: not that the book we have is that old, but that material this old is embedded in it. Whether any of this makes Thomas older than Mark is a separate and genuinely open question.

The case for a second-century book

The late camp turns the same evidence around and asks a sharper question: does Thomas ever reproduce wording that Matthew or Luke invented? If it does, it must come after them. Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole argue that it does, repeatedly, and that the pattern is not accidental.

Goodacre's best-known observation is what he calls the missing middle: where Thomas overlaps a synoptic passage, it tends to preserve the striking opening and the punchline while thinning out the material between them — the signature of someone writing down what they remember from texts they know well, rather than of an independent stream. Gathercole adds a linguistic layer, arguing that the case for an Aramaic substrate behind Thomas does not hold and that the collection was composed in Greek with knowledge of the Greek gospels. Nicholas Perrin pushed later still, arguing that the catchword links binding the sayings together work best in Syriac, which would place composition after Tatian's gospel harmony of about 170 CE.

External attestation supports a later profile too. Nobody quotes Thomas by name before the third century: Hippolytus reports a gospel of Thomas used by the Naassenes in the 220s, and Origen lists it among gospels the church does not receive around 233 CE. Silence is weak evidence — plenty of early texts go unquoted — but a first-century gospel that no second-century writer names is at least an oddity requiring explanation.

The layered answer

A third position refuses the question as posed, on the grounds that a collection with no narrative spine has no single date. April DeConick argues that Thomas is a rolling corpus: an oral kernel of speeches from roughly 30–50 CE that accumulated accretions as the community's expectations changed, with the growth ending around 120 CE.

On that model, the arguments on both sides are partly right and mostly aimed past each other. Early-camp evidence tends to come from the kernel; late-camp evidence tends to come from the accretions. It also explains the one fact nobody disputes — that the Greek fragments and the Coptic differ — as the tail end of a process that had been running for centuries. The model is contested in its details, but it has reframed the field: the live question is now less “what year?” than “which layer?”

Why the date matters

The date decides what kind of evidence Thomas is. If an early core is independent of the canonical gospels, then Thomas is a fifth line of access to what Jesus was remembered saying, and its distinctive material — a kingdom already present and simply unseen, found by looking rather than waiting — has a claim on historical Jesus research. That is why John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar weighted Thomas so heavily, and why the weighting was so fiercely contested.

If the late camp is right, Thomas is still valuable, just about something else: it becomes a window into second-century Christianity in Syria or Egypt, showing how the sayings of Jesus were being re-collected and reinterpreted by communities that already had the gospels and wanted something more interior. Both outcomes leave a real text of real importance. Neither outcome requires the conspiracy version, and the reasons Thomas never entered the canon are independent of its date.

So when was it written?

The defensible answer is a range with a floor. The floor is hard: a Greek Gospel of Thomas existed and was being copied in Egypt by about 200 CE. Above that floor, the balance of published scholarship allows a collection assembled somewhere between roughly 60 and 140 CE, with older sayings inside it and later editing on top of it — and with serious specialists still arguing for both ends of that span.

What can be stated without hedging is the prologue's own claim, which stands first in the book and also survives in Greek on P.Oxy. 654, in a damaged and partly reconstructed line whose wording differs from the Coptic:

These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.

Almost nobody in either camp believes the apostle wrote it. But the fight over when someone did is not a fringe dispute — it is one of the genuine open problems in the study of early Christianity, and it is argued from the text itself. Read all 114 sayings, note which ones sound like Matthew and Luke and which sound like nothing else, and you are doing the same work the specialists are doing. If the question underneath yours is whether Thomas belongs to a gnostic system at all, that has its own answer — and it is more interesting than the label suggests. So does the older question of whether a sayings source like Q ever existed.