Brian,
Thanks for posting your lengthy response, it was a very interesting read. You haven't convinced me of anything, but I doubt that was your intention.
A couple of comments on your post for other who may be misled by your very confident assertions.
You state "Historians deal in facts. “What do we know based on the evidence?”"
Historians do not deal in facts. They deal in theories, assumptions, and data. The data is interpreted, based on their theories using assumptions where necessary and out pops what is their view of what happened and it is called "fact". Sometimes it's accurate, sometimes it's not.
This is important when you bring up writings such as "The Gospel of Thomas". You give the impression from your post that it was written by Jesus's twin brother Thomas (Didymos meaning twin) while Jesus was alive and then buried for 2000 years, and that this was "fact". It's been a few years since I looked into it but from what I remember, there is tremendous debate about who wrote this and when. It is not known whether it was written by Thomas the disciple . And to say that because Thomas is referred to the "twin" in the Synoptic Gospels, it is a stretch to say he was Jesus's twin. About the manuscript. It was translated at least once, from Greek to Coptic, by the Gnostics before being buried. There is at least some belief that the Gnostic traditions had some influence on the translations, so the manuscript may not be as pure as you contend. It's known that the Coptic manuscript found dates back to the fourth century with a badly damaged, incomplete, Greek version found elsewhere dating to the third century. It is unknown when the original was written, I've seen speculation from AD 70 - 200. There are differences between what's been found of the Greek version and the Coptic version, with the Greek "fragments" having a saying not found in the Coptic version. Due to the lack of supporting data, it's difficult to judge the accuracy or completeness of the Coptic version. There are a great number of the sayings in Thomas that are also in the Synoptic Gospels. Did, for example, Thomas take from Mark or Mark take from Thomas, or both take from some other source (Q??) - nobody really knows. As far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on The Gospel of Thomas. Yet as a history major being taught by a possibly biased professor at Yale, you seem to be allowing your beliefs to shape what you belive as fact. You take Gospels that have been generally acceped as authentic but do not support your views and label them as "hearsay" while taking a recently descovered manuscript which is still being studied for authenticity and you turn that into absolute fact.
BTW, my faith does not demand that I discredit The Gospel of Thomas. God sent the Spirit to guide me, I don't have to worry every time something challenges my faith. Besides, The Gospel of Thomas is a bunch a sayings with no context which can be interpreted many different ways.
One other thing, it is believed by many that Herod died in 4 B.C. So again, facts for some may not be facts for others when you talk history especially when in 4 B.C., the people recording events didn't know it was 4 B.C. so present day historians have to interpret the writings of these older historians. The more one has to interpret, the greater chance of error.
Michael
