Page:Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents Relating to the History of Christ.djvu/74

lxx forged, and from one of them he extracts the story about Jesus and the man who went to teach him letters, much as we have it in some copies of Thomas. Origen mentions a Gospel of Thomas, but does not help us to identify it with ours. Hippolytus also, writing of the sect of the Naasenes, quotes from their Gospel of Thomas, but the passage is not in the book as we have it. Eusebius, too, mentions a Gospel of Thomas, and he is followed by others in the same century. Cyril of Jerusalem says, a Gospel of Thomas was written by one of the three disciples of Manes, but this cannot be true of the false Gospel mentioned by Origen and Hippolytus, unless he means to say simply that the Manichæans remodelled it.

Whoever the writer was, he believed Jesus to be the Messiah, and the peculiar institutions of Judaism to be abolished. He disliked the Jews, but he made Jesus petulant and revengeful. Joseph is made more prominent than Mary; but Jesus is not really viewed as his natural son, so much as a mysterious Being manifested in a human form, and yet Joseph is called his "father." The author's favourite Evangelist was St. John, and perhaps he was one of the Docetæ, in whose interests he wrote.