¹ There are many convincing reasons why the Gospel of Thomas is older than Mark’s Gospel. For starters, Thomas does not mention the destruction of the Second Temple. It seems unlikely that any Jewish writer would have ignored such a disastrous turn of events if he or she had lived through it, which suggests that Thomas was composed before 72 CE. Helmut Koester of the Harvard Divinity School has also noted that Thomas must have come from an early group that was still appealing to the authority of the men who would become the Pillars of Jerusalem—Peter, James, and John. In Thomas 12, the “followers” say to Jesus, “We know that you are going to leave us. Who will be our leader?” Jesus said to them, “No matter where you are, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.” Since James died in 62 CE, that would date Thomas’s gospel well before Mark’s. It is also worth noting here that in Thomas, Jesus has only followers, not the symbolic “twelve disciples” later revered by Matthew and Luke as symbolic counterparts to the twelve tribes of Israel. That, along with the fact that, in Thomas, Jesus is never called “Christ” or “Lord” or the “Son of God,” suggests that those titles came later and were applied by the Pauline communities to whom the significance of Jesus’s death had overshadowed and nearly replaced the message of his teachings. If Jesus had been the Messiah, if he had performed the miracles attributed to him by Luke, he certainly would have attracted some attention. He lived, after all, very close to large Roman cities like Tiberias and Sepphoris. But Jesus never did draw much attention. If he had, some Roman historian would have certainly taken notice. None did, which leads one to suspect that while Jesus may have had the shaman-like powers to exorcise psychic demons in people, he did not routinely walk on water and raise the dead. On the contrary, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of the time when Jesus would have been wandering and teaching: Sub Tiberio quies—“Under Tiberius, nothing happened.” But the most substantial evidence for the early composition of Thomas lies in the sayings themselves as compared to the synoptic Gospels. Stephen J. Patterson has shown that Thomas only resembles Matthew and Luke when all three Gospels are independently using an earlier source—one now known as Q. When there are similar sayings in Thomas and the synoptic Gospels that don’t rely on Q, the wording of the sayings differs too widely to suggest Thomas’s dependence on the other Gospels. In addition, Thomas almost never orders his sayings in the same sequence as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which he certainly would have done had they been his sources. Perhaps the best argument for Thomas as the earliest account of Jesus’s teachings is the way he simply lets them stand on their own, without adding an interpretation that would align Jesus with the theological biases of later writers. One might suppose that the compilers of Thomas and Q presumably knew the context of the sayings, and saw no reason to replicate it, nor did they try to distort it to fit their own theological biases.