Just over 120 years ago fragmentary papyri, some of it written in Greek were discovered in an ancient rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt containing several sayings attributed to Jesus. Then in 1947 there was another similar find at Nag Hammadi in Palestine. Part of this was a tractate entitled "The Gospel According to Thomas" also containing Jesus' sayings.
It must be remembered that at the time they were written there was no fixed church authority, and thus they are a fascination in the development of primitive Christianity.
Three aspects I would like to look at:
1. There had been a school of thought that behind Matthew's and Luke's revision of the Gospel of Mark stood a collection of sayings known as the Synoptic Sayings. Were these the material previously undiscovered?
2. There were religious ideas largely originating in the Jewish physical & social settings of the 1st & 2nd Century AD that there was within the human body an existing Divine spark trapped but which could be released by an identification with wisdom, ( the sayings?) This development of Gnostic ideas was thus contemporaneous with the writing of the New Testament. However this belief held that the kingdom of heaven is already here and not a future event. By the end of the 2nd Century to the 4th Century there was a reaction by the proto-orthodox church and this belief was condemned as heresy.
3. Was this the voice of Jesus without the intermediary of the institutional church and orthodox theologians?