jewish-christian gospels and syriac gospel traditions almsgiving, which are explicitly rejected in theGospel of Thomas.Thus,
in some respects the Jewish-Christian fragments are ideologically closer
to later Thomasine writings than to theGospel of Thomasitself....Conclusion:
Common Roots in Harmonized Synoptic TraditionThe observations about the literary and ideological connections between
Thomasand the Jewish-Christian fragments are compatible with the
hypothesis thatThomasand the Jewish-Christian fragments were com-
posed in the same Syro-Palestinian milieu but, due to the writers’ dif-
ferent ideological orientation, they cultivated different parts of their
common scriptural tradition. If the reconstruction of the Diatessaronic
sequence of three rich men, of whichThomasused the first one and the
Gospel of the Hebrewsthe second one, is on the right track then it is a
prime example of the “pick and choose” that was going on:Thomasfur-
ther developed the discussion about the “divider” that was closely con-
nected to its ideology and used the Rich Fool as one example in its own
criticism of the “businessmen.” The framers of theGospel of Thomashad
no interest in the Jewish story about a rich man but that story inspired
the editors of a Jewish-Christian gospel who used it in their own inner-
JewishpolemicsagainsttherichwhodidnotshowmercytotheirJewish
compatriots, “sons of Abraham.”
The material analyzed in this chapter is too restricted to allow any
firm conclusions aboutThomas’relationtotheDiatessaron,butitsug-
geststhatitmightbeprofitabletolookfortheanswerinharmonizing
traditions that preceded theDiatessaronrather than trying to show that
Thomasdepended directly on theDiatessaronor vice versa. A hypothesis
that suggests pre-Diatessaronic harmonizing gospel traditions to be the
source of sayings that were further developed in a context where “scribal
and oral cultures were intertwined”^131 would provide a fruitful starting
point for future discussion aboutThomas’origins.
Although it is often presented in defense ofThomas’ independence
that there is no editorial coherence in the way in which snippets of syn-
optic expressions from different gospels and from different parts of the
same gospel are found together inThomas,^132 the same phenomenon is
(^131) Thus Uro who provides a useful summary and assessment of the discussion
about the role of oral tradition in the formation of theGospel of Thomas.
(^132) InthecaseofGos. Thom. Patterson (, ) argues that “If Thomas were