The Temple in the Gospel of Thomas. An Interpretive Perspective on Some Words Attributed to Jesus

The essay investigates the conception of "Temple" in the Gospel of Thomas, starting from the analysis of logion 71, which is a parallel of the Jesus' sayings about destruction/rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, attested in the Synoptics, the Gospel of John, and other texts. The essay compares logion 71 with other Thomas' logia and with other Jewish and early Christian texts, aiming to understand the view of the group that produced the Gospel of Thomas. The hypothesis proposed here is that this group could interpret the original Jesuanic logion as referring to the destruction of the Temple and its replacement with a new one, which in the Gospel of Thomas is interpreted as the "community"/group itself (as may be inferred from other logia in the collection).