title: The Apocalypse: A Literary and Theological Commentary
author:  John Christopher Thomas 
description: John Christopher Thomas (PhD, University of Sheffield) is Clarence J. Abbott Professor of Biblical Studies at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary, Cleveland, TN, USA and is Director of the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, Bangor University, UK.
zlib_text: The Apocalypse of Thomas 
  Introduction 
  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- was a fragm