jewish-christian gospels and syriac gospel traditions concerning a pre-synoptic Jewish-Christian gospel behind theGospel of
Thomasand theDiatessarondoes not find any support in the above obser-
vations.
However, it is theoretically possible that the harmonizing features
shared byThomasand the Jewish-Christian fragments were in fact de-
rived from aharmonizingJewish-Christian gospel. As a matter of fact, if
one is to draw conclusions only on the basis of the fragments analyzed in
this chapter, Ockham’s razor would cut through all the hypotheses which
speculate about an unknown harmony behindThomasand the Jewish-
Christian fragments because it is quite possible thatThomas’ logia ,
and derived their harmonizing readings from the same gospel(s) from
which the Jewish-Christian fragments come. Nevertheless, the number
of passages common to theGospel of Thomasand the Jewish-Christian
fragments is too small to allow any firm conclusions from this perspec-
tive and analyses in other chapters of this volume have shown that the
Gospel of the Ebionitesand theGospel of the Hebrewswere two different
compositions,althoughtheybothwereharmonizingpre-Diatessaronic
gospel traditions. It is also possible to hypothesize about “floating” har-
monistic collections available to Thomasine Christians and Jewish Chris-
tians. It has to be noted that this explanation also works better ifThomas
and the Jewish-Christian fragments are placed in the same cultural and
geographical setting, as will be discussed in the following section.
...Jesus As Wisdom Incarnate and the Spirit As Jesus’ MotherIn the course of the above discussion, a hypothesis has been developed
that theGospel of Thomasand the Jewish-Christian gospel fragments
have used the same harmonizing gospel traditions. Alongside the sim-
ilarities, a significant number of disagreements were also recorded. This
tions he finds in his Syriac retroversion of theGospel of Thomasindicate that theGospel
of ThomasmusthavebeenwritteninSyriac.BecausetheDiatessaronwas the first gospel
record in Syriac, it must have been amongThomas’ sources. Perrin also finds support
for his thesis in the fact that at some points,Thomas’ logia follow the order of Diatessa-
ronic tradition (See Perrin , –). Although the study includes several valuable
observations aboutThomas’ connections to Syriac (or Semitic) gospel traditions, I do not
find Perrin’s arguments for Syriac as the original language ofThomasconvincing, mainly
because the definition of the catchword connection is too broad—Perrin accepts seman-
tic, phonological and even etymological (!) associations as catchword connections (p. ).
The observations about the Diatessaronic order of some of the logia ofThomasare more
promising but in the light of the present analysis, I would suggest that the same order is
derived from a common, pre-Diatessaronic tradition.