Dans la perspective de la préparation d'une nouvelle édition annotée de l'Évangile selon Thomas, à paraître dans la collection « Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi » (Leuven, Peeters), cet article revient sur quelques-unes des questions qui ont été débattues à propos de cet écrit, à savoir son lieu et sa date de composition, ainsi que sa langue d'origine.

The Gospel of Thomas (GThom) is a collection of sayings, most of which come with the stereotypical introduction ‘Jesus said: …’ The GThom thus looks like a loose collection of disparate material. However, several sayings in the collection are introduced by ‘He said: …’, thus omitting explicit reference to Jesus as the speaker. This points to greater (narrative) coherence: when the speaker's name is missing in a logion, the logion depends on the surrounding context and ceases to be a self-contained unit. This article views the GThom as a sayings collection on the way to becoming a literary composition titled ‘The Gospel according to Thomas’.

It has been proposed that references to Jesus' relationship to Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Philip represent a possible context for an early gospel fragment in which Jesus refers to her as ‘My wife’. It will be argued here that Mary's relationship to Jesus in Philip is determined by her role as privileged recipient of revelation, not by her marital status. More significant in accounting for the Jesus' Wife fragment is the Gospel of Thomas, which the author appears to have known in precisely the text-form represented by the one surviving Coptic exemplar.

This article argues that Luke influences the Gospel of Thomas, on the basis of an examination of those places where redactional material in Luke not in Mark is found in Thomas. This has been argued already by various scholars, but the present study aims (a) to refine further the method used to argue this position and (b) to expand the catalogue of those Thomas sayings which can be shown to indicate Lukan influence. Furthermore, it proposes (c) to respond to recent scholarship arguing that Thomas influences Luke, as well as to scholars maintaining the independence of Thomas and the Synoptics.