Matteo Grosso - The Use of the Gospel of Thomas by Clement of Alexandria

It is acknowledged that beside the four Gospels received from the Church (Strom. 3,13,93,1), Clement of Alexandria made use of other books, which he considered reliable sources on Jesus’ teachings. Thus his work is an extraordinary representative of that crucial stage in the Canon’s formation in which those later excluded Gospel traditions could still have an impact on the work of an influential exponent of mainstream Christianity. Among those traditions, Clement quotes explicitly from the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and the Traditions of Mathias. Although he never mentions the title of the Gospel of Thomas, a number of parallels to Thomas sayings have been detected in his work. Through the examination of those passages and their contexts it becomes clear that Clement draws from the Thomas tradition some specific elements that are functional to support his own mystical reflection, with particular regard to the transformation of the self, in its various steps. Literary elements of Thomasine provenance are employed to express the necessity of the inner awakening that inaugurates that process (Gos.Thom. 2), the concrete features that are expected to affect the believer during such transformation (Gos.Thom. 22,5; 27; 114), and the inner anguish (Gos.Thom. 69,1) that will lead him to the visio Dei (Gos.Thom. 27; 37), according to a notion of gnosis that far from being intellectualist finds its realization in the full experience of God by the individual. Such reception of the Thomas tradition enhanced thus the mystical dimension recognized by recent scholarship as one of its distinctive features.