As for the Gospel of John, lets agree to accept the dating proposed by the majority of scientists and see what follows from this for us. Remember this fact: John is the end of the first the very beginning of the second century.
Separately, I would like to note once again that according to the traditionally accepted dating of the Gospel texts, Mark is attributed to the 60s, Matthew to the 70s, Luke to the 80s, and John to the end of the first century. Thus, in the tradition of religious studies, the opinion was fixed that John is the latest, and therefore the least reliable source, and even partially compiled by the synoptics, and constructed by a certain Gnostic community, possibly from the circle of the disciples of John the Theologian. However, as I pointed out above, the Gospel of Marcion is now considered a presynoptic text used by synoptics to create their gospels. At the same time, Dr. Marcus Vincent in his monograph Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels quite reasonably proves that the author of the Gospel of the Lord Marcion was Marcion of Sinope himself, and, according to our assumption below, it was written in Rome between 140 and 144 years. At the same time, the first mention of all four canonical gospels together by Irenaeus of Lyons [13]refers to the 180th year. Thus, the dating of the synoptics is shifted to the second half of the second century, although this does not apply to the original dating of the s. John 90100 years, which presumably remains in its place. And here the most interesting thing begins: shifting the dating of the synoptic gospels to the second half of the second century, as secondary sources in relation to the Gospel of Marcion with a dating of about 140 and leaving the dating of John fixed at the turn of the 12 centuries., we get that John is not secondary in relation to the sinoptics, but, on the contrary, it was written off by the synoptics (including Marcion) from John.
Therefore, the gospel of John is brought to the forefront, as the most ancient of the canonical sources, its reliability is strengthened, and those borrowings that are attributed to it are overturned: now it is precisely these borrowings that should be attributed not to John from the synoptics, as before, but to the synoptics from John.
However, this is not all. As I indicated above, the proven[14]primacy of Ev. Marcion, in relation to the synoptics, shifts them to the third place: first John, then borrowing from John is ev. Marcion, and then from Marcion to synoptics. And we undertake to prove this statement in our book.
As for the gospel of Thomas, which most scholars attributed to the 60140 years[15] (which is doubtful, I did not find any arguments, and I personally believe that the end of dating should be shifted at least to the end of the 1st century), then it is the form of this gospel in the form of a record of scattered and not connected by a single meaning records first of all testifies to the greatest antiquity of this document: it looks like a sequential record on a single carrier (a sheet of parchment or a papyrus scroll) of recordsrecords in the order of sequence in which they were collected by the author from the oral retellings of many of those interviewed by him. Apparently, this very form of recording was also used by other collectorsrecords, which were subsequently lost.
As for the indications of a 50% similarity between Thomas and the records that Marcion and the synoptics have, then after the shift of all synoptics to the middle of the second century, these coincidences unambiguously indicate the opposite: that the Gospel of Thomas is an early monument, which It was used in the preparation of the later texts Marcion and further the synoptic gospels, and may well claim a place of mysterious Q source, the existence of which is pointed out by historians and text analytics that study synoptic gospels. As for the gospel of John, its textual connection with ev. Marcion, as we will see later, is hardly visible, despite the ideological similarity, and this suggests that here we are dealing with two ancient sources independent of each other, which are, perhaps, the product of two different schools of apostolic Christianity.
Credibility
We will have to admit that ALL, without exception, sources we have mentioned are unreliable due to their secondary nature: both Jesus Himself and his disciples from pagan Galilee were most likely illiterate, and spoke Aramaic, and the Gospels were written in literary Greek, which could never be done by the disciples of Jesus even on the assumption of their subsequent mastery of the Greek language and writing. That is, the Testament is a record of oral stories of authors unknown to us by unknown collectors who recorded them in the Gospels. First of all, inaccuracy concerns gospel events, the oral transmission of which always creates the effect of a spoiled phone: the narrators retell what happened to one another in their own words, and they are also prone to exaggeration and direct fantasy in order to give themselves increased significance and enhance the effect of the importance of what is happening, often containing impossible details. At the same time, in the retelling of conversations and monologues, storytellers tend to simplify in the name of greater simplification to the listener. In this sense, similar simplifications of the parables of Jesus from Thomas to John and further to Marcion are characteristic: the often mysterious content of Jesus logic expressed in Thomas is simplified by Marcion to commonplace platitudes.
Biblical scholars deny the Gospel of John authenticity for example: Most modern historians, being careful, prefer to completely put the Gospel of John out of brackets when reconstructing the image of Jesus. In subsequent chapters, we will follow this respectable academic tradition, referring to the texts of John only when the outlines of real earthly history are visible behind the mystical-theological fabric of this work. " [16]This is done under various obviously far-fetched pretexts, behind which often looms primarily a reluctance to recognize the clear anti-Jewish orientation of the Teachings of Jesus in the text of Ev. John, which so inopportunely undermines the foundations of the coherent theory of Judeo-Christian continuity, developed over the last century by the majority of modern historians. In particular, such a reason for the unreliability of ev. John refers to the gnostic character of this gospel. However, none of the inherent Gnosticism, professing knowledge of secrets, nor these secrets are present in the Gospel of John, and Jesus is not revealing, not reporting and not promising this.
The same applies to the ancient gospel of Thomas, also called the fifth gospel because of the centuries-old church litigation about its inclusion in the canon of the New Testament it does not, in my opinion, contain any secrets, and the riddles it contains have the meaning of allegories of acute political and religious themes of that time, for just one attempt to discuss which, without due reverence in those wild times, one could be killed by a crowd of religious fanatics. Or philosophical parables, the interpretations of which by simplifying and flattening meanings were subsequently proposed by numerous interpreters, starting with the authors of the canonical gospels, who widely used the records from the same gospel of Thomas. However, there are no mystical secrets that have the magical power of dominion over Being by any of the interpreters, both Gnostic and Orthodox, in Thomas gospel: for two millennia it was not found and offered which means that they are not there, and were not originally.