Acts of Thomas

Paleojudaica is pretty much where the biblical-scholarship blogosphere goes to die, but among its linked barely-updated blogs we do have one recentish piece from, er, January. This concerns the up-to-2021 status-quaestionis for The Acts of the Apostles. I'm interested in Thomas.

All the Acts were popular literature and, absent a publisher (or sometimes present a publisher) they are moving-targets. Gilgamesh was famously similar in the Bronze Age - if you were (say) an Anatolian, you wanted to read about what the hero did in Anatolia. With religious fiction come questions about censorship for orthodoxy.

It turns out that although the text of all these works is godawful and barely studied in academe, censorship wasn't such a problem as you'd think. Once the Church ruled these books as too silly for Church services; people just read 'em at home, for fun. So who cared if they made Problematic doctrinal assumptions.

Acts of Thomas piqued my interest as a potential Syriac text. Syriac became Church Aramaic but I do wonder, often, when. Also where exactly - Hims / Emesa, for instance, is getting dangerously close to Palaestinian Aramaic territory if not Arabia. Ditto Damascus. The titular saint is known to be a hero among the greater Syria (and not Palaestina).

Also of interest, to me anyway, is to what degree this work used our Gospels (Peshitta, perhaps) or the Diatesseron (pre-Peshitta in Syriac form).