Apocalypse of Thomas

Historical English source page 591

APOCALYPSE OF THOMAS The emergence of this book has been recent. The Gelasian Decree condemns the book ‘called the Revelation of Thomas’ as apocryphal, and that was all that was known of it. In 1908 a quotation in the Berlin MS. (eighth—ninth century) of Jerome’s Chronicle was noticed by Dr. Frick. At the eighteenth year of Tiberius, the manuscript has this note: In a certain apocryphal book, said to be of Thomas the apostle, it is written that the Lord Jesus told him that from his ascension into heaven to his second advent the time comprised is nine jubilees. This does not appear in any of the published texts. Already in 1907 F. Wilhelm had printed, in his Deutsche Legenden und Legendare, a text from a Munich MS. which attracted little attention, but was in fact the lost Apocalypse, or part of it. In the same year E. Hauler showed that a leaf of a fifth-century palimpsest at Vienna—the same that contains a leaf of,the Epistle of the Apostles (see p. 485)—was a fragment of this book. Professor E. von Dobschiitz had, before this, begun making preparation for an