jewish-christian gospels and syriac gospel traditions gospels, it is impossible to draw definite conclusions.^55 )Pure coinci-
dence. A “free-floating” saying may have ended up in several gospels that
do not necessarily have any genetic connection with each other.^56 )Com-
mon independent tradition. Helmut Koester has defended the indepen-
dence ofThomas’ traditions from the canonical gospels. If this is cor-
rect and Jewish-Christian gospel fragments also partly draw on the same
independent gospel/sayings tradition, this may explain some of the sim-
ilarities.^57 )Common post-Diatessaronic tradition.HanJ.W.Drijvers,for
instance, has argued that both theGospel of Thomasand theGospel of the
Ebionitesmust depend on Tatian’sDiatessaron.^58
This chapter focuses on discussing the logia and fragments which
are similar enough to suggest a literary dependence between theGospel
of Thomasand Jewish-Christian gospel traditions. The passages to be
discussed are: ()Gos. Thom. (P.Oxy. .–)/Clement,Strom.IIIX
.; V XIV ., ()Gos. Thom./Epiphanius,Pan. .., ()Gos.
Thom. (P.Oxy. )/A “Jewish” marginal reading^59 in Matt : (“To
Ioudaikon;” Codex Novi Testamenti , ad Matth. :) andPs.-
Clem. Rec. ..–;Hom. ..–. ()Gos. Thom./Origen,Comm.
Matt. .. In addition to the linguistic comparison of these passages,
I also discuss two aspects of Wisdom and Spirit traditions that connect
the Jewish–Christian fragments to Thomasine writings: The idea of the
Spirit as Jesus’ mother and Jesus himself as Wisdom incarnate.
(^55) See, for instance, Baarda , .
(^56) Thus, Cameron , and Fieger , . In fact, this explanation partly
overlaps with the third one. Sometimes it is difficult to discern whether scholars are
thinking about independent sayings collections to which Thomas would have a genetic
connection or only referring to traditions that were freely floating around. Cameron and
Fieger offer clear examples of the latter, coincidental explanation. See also Vielhauer &
Strecker ^2 (^1 ), , and Klijn , –, who emphasizes that the traditions
in theGospel of the Hebrews(including the parallel toThomas’ logion ) must have been
“circulating in the Christian community.”
(^57) See, Koester , –. Patterson , .
(^58) Drijvers & Reinink , , ; repr. in Drijvers , IV. This hypothesis has
been defended by Perrin .
(^59) In this volume, I have excluded the “Jewish” marginal readings from my reconstruc-
tion of Jewish-Christian gospels (see above Chapter .). This is mainly because these
readings are probably derived from a variety of sources. Nevertheless, it is possible to
discuss individual readings, their tradition history and Jewish-Christian profile without
any specific theory about the origin of all the marginal readings.