I started looking into the Gospel of Thomas right before the start of the pandemic, which led to a number of rabbit holes:
* Turns out the work is not 'weird' or 'Gnostic' but is directly addressing details from Lucretius, including paraphrasing his view of evolution and atomism, but refuting the claim there's no afterlife by basically appealing to the idea we're in a simulated copy of an original physical world where the spirit doesn't actually depend on a body, because there is no actual body.
* As I dug more into the various mystery religions the followers of the work claimed as informing their views, I saw a number of those were associated with figures various Greek historians were saying came from the same Exodus from Egypt as Moses.
* Turns out a lot of the ahistorical details in the Biblical Exodus narrative better fit the joint sea peoples and Libyan resistance who end up forcibly resettled into the Southern Levant latter on. In the past decade we've also started finding early Iron Age evidence of Aegean and Anatolian settlement and trade previously unknown in the area, including in supposed Israelite settlements like Tel Dan, lending support to the theory that Dan were the Denyen sea peoples.
* Also turns out that in just the past few years a number of Ashkenazi users have been puzzled by their genomic similarity to ancient DNA samples, where the closest overall match in a DNA bank was 3,500 year old Minoan graves sequenced in 2017 or that they have such a high amount of Neolithic Anatolian (which the 2017 study found was effectively identical to Minoan).
* The G2019S LRRK2 mutation that's almost only found among the Libyan Berbers and the Ashkenazi appears to have originated with the former but appeared in the ancestry of the latter ~4,500 plus/minus 1k years. Which is a window that predates the emergence of the Israelites in the first place, but is on the cusp of the sea peoples/Libyan alliance.
* There's also been discovery of endogamy among some of the Minoan populations. Did the Ashkenazi endogamy evidenced from their emergence in Europe and the bottleneck in the first millennium CE actually go back much further than we've been thinking? Maybe Tacitus wasn't so off base when he talked about how some claimed the Exodus involved people from Crete hiding out in Libya.
Anyways, that's a very rough summary of some of the rabbit holes I was going down.
Bonus: Herodotus's description of Helen of Troy spending the whole time in Egypt has two datable markers to the 18th dynasty, which is when Nefertiti, "beautiful woman who arrived" is around during a complete change to Egyptian art and religion while she's the only woman in history to be depicted in the smiting pose, with her only noted relatives being a sister and wetnurse.
It was what resulted in Gnosticism, not the other way around.
You had this first century response to Epicureanism's naturalism as a foundation. In that paradigm, the Platonist demiurge recreating the physical world before it was an agent of salvation, liberating the copies from the certainty of death from the Epicurean original.
What happens is that Epicureanism falls from popularity over the second century, so in parallel to the increased resurgence of Platonism, Plato's forms becomes the foundation instead. For Plato, there was a perfect world of the blueprints of everything, the corrupted physical versions of those forms, and then the worst of all was the images of the physical. So the Thomasine salvation by being in the images of physical originals is through that lens corruptive.
So as the foundation shifted from the Epicurean original world of evolution (Lucretius straight up described survival of the fittest in book 5) to Plato's perfect forms, a demiurge creating a copy of what predated it shifted from being a good thing to trapping people in a corrupted copy.
For the first 50 years of the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, it was mistakenly thought to be Gnostic. This changed at the turn of the 21st century with the efforts of Michael Allen Williams and Karen King, and it's now labeled as "proto-Gnostic." It's absent a lot of the features typically associated with 'Gnosticism' though that term in general should be retired as it's turned out that there isn't any single set of beliefs to be considered 'Gnostic' in the first place (this was the chief realization of scholars over the past twenty years).
No, that's the mythology that develops around the travels of an apostle Thomas much later on.
I'm pretty sure that there was no 'Thomas.' My guess is that the philosophy of being in a twin universe and a twin of an original humanity ends up anthropomorphized by or before "doubting Thomas" in John and ends up credited with the tradition making those philosophical claims which was also denying the physical resurrection.
In the Gospel of Thomas itself, there's only two mentions of a 'Thomas,' both likely later additions. Moreso the work features him having female disciples and discussions directly with them, and the only later tradition following it claimed a female teacher named Mary as the starting point of their sect.
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings, and that core may have gone by different names before the 2nd century when it's rolled up in a more secretive context as attributed to 'Thomas' (despite the core itself seemingly being more anti-secretive than any other texts in the early Christian tradition).
* Turns out the work is not 'weird' or 'Gnostic' but is directly addressing details from Lucretius, including paraphrasing his view of evolution and atomism, but refuting the claim there's no afterlife by basically appealing to the idea we're in a simulated copy of an original physical world where the spirit doesn't actually depend on a body, because there is no actual body.
* As I dug more into the various mystery religions the followers of the work claimed as informing their views, I saw a number of those were associated with figures various Greek historians were saying came from the same Exodus from Egypt as Moses.
* Turns out a lot of the ahistorical details in the Biblical Exodus narrative better fit the joint sea peoples and Libyan resistance who end up forcibly resettled into the Southern Levant latter on. In the past decade we've also started finding early Iron Age evidence of Aegean and Anatolian settlement and trade previously unknown in the area, including in supposed Israelite settlements like Tel Dan, lending support to the theory that Dan were the Denyen sea peoples.
* Also turns out that in just the past few years a number of Ashkenazi users have been puzzled by their genomic similarity to ancient DNA samples, where the closest overall match in a DNA bank was 3,500 year old Minoan graves sequenced in 2017 or that they have such a high amount of Neolithic Anatolian (which the 2017 study found was effectively identical to Minoan).
* The G2019S LRRK2 mutation that's almost only found among the Libyan Berbers and the Ashkenazi appears to have originated with the former but appeared in the ancestry of the latter ~4,500 plus/minus 1k years. Which is a window that predates the emergence of the Israelites in the first place, but is on the cusp of the sea peoples/Libyan alliance.
* There's also been discovery of endogamy among some of the Minoan populations. Did the Ashkenazi endogamy evidenced from their emergence in Europe and the bottleneck in the first millennium CE actually go back much further than we've been thinking? Maybe Tacitus wasn't so off base when he talked about how some claimed the Exodus involved people from Crete hiding out in Libya.
Anyways, that's a very rough summary of some of the rabbit holes I was going down.
Bonus: Herodotus's description of Helen of Troy spending the whole time in Egypt has two datable markers to the 18th dynasty, which is when Nefertiti, "beautiful woman who arrived" is around during a complete change to Egyptian art and religion while she's the only woman in history to be depicted in the smiting pose, with her only noted relatives being a sister and wetnurse.