Warren Oates reads from the Gospel of Thomas in the 'funeral' scene. I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure the Gospel of Thomas wasn't found until 1945. Am I wrong here?
Anyway, it doesn't hurt the movie for me or anything, I'm just wondering if anyone can shed some light on this possible anachronism (is it even really an anachronism since the Gospel was written almost 2000 years ago?)
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I would guess that Fonda wanted a "bible-sounding" scripture, but one that had a different "take" than the canonical Gospels.
Note that its format is not biblical. Rather, it seems to be written in an Eastern language (Coptic?) and it looks quite foreign.
Moreover, its format is as a personal letter which encloses a picture of the character's mother. I got the idea that this special "Jesus text" was passed along in this family from very old times. Or that somehow his mother was expressing ideas that were later to be discovered in the Thomas Gospel.
I can only surmise that its "familiar foreigness" was used to suggest the strangeness of the characters' situation, and to make the viewer ponder in what way the logion, "the Kingdom of the Father is spread out over the earth, but people do not see it", relates to seeing or not seeing an all-pervading divine grace.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It being passed along through the family is a very likely possibility. I definitely liked the way the passage was used in the scene so I didn't want to disparage its inclusion. Just wondering if anyone knew of an earlier finding of the Gospel before 1945.
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No modern discovery pre-dates 1945, according to my sources. Maybe Warren Oates had an original, 2nd century copy. ;-)
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