The possibility emerges, then, that the parables in the Gos. Thom. come out of an early pre-gospel stage of tradition that developed simultaneously in circles of Christianity alongside the circles that produced the synoptic gospels. When Hunziger showed that pericopes in the Gos. Thom. neither conjoin sayings in the manner in which Q tradition conjoins them nor adds the secondary elements present in Q tradition, the stage was set for the possibility that tradition in the Gos. Thom. had traveled from an early pre-gospel stage through different early Christian circles down to the point where it was written down toward the end of the first century alongside the canonical gospels.

Scholars who were envisioning an alternative mode of development of early Christian tradition needed a substantively different hypothesis for first century gospel tradition, and this emerged with the work of James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester (Robinson and Koester). Building on previous work on Q tradition, which features sayings of Jesus that do not include predictions or rehearsals of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Robinson posited the existence of a genre he called "sayings of the wise," which had a trajectory of existence from the Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible through Jewish and Hellenistic literature down into the Gnostic literature of the second and third centuries C.E. As this hypothesis has developed during the last two decades, the conclusion has been drawn by a growing number of scholars that the earliest sayings of Jesus contained an eschatological wisdom about the kingdom that did not contain substantive apocalyptic features. As the tradition developed, this eschatological wisdom was simultaneously apocalypticized and gnosticized by different circles within first century Christianity.

Within the last decade, the third quest of the historical Jesus has raised the issue of whether Jesus' eschatological wisdom concerning the Kingdom of God was truly apocalyptic, or whether it was an eschatological wisdom without apocalyptic features that was as open to gnostic development as it was to apocalyptic development. Within this new environment, the issue of orthodoxy versus heresy has returned in the form of apocalypticism versus wisdom. Stevan Davies has emphasized that the Gos. Thom. is not gnostic in any genuine sense of the term but has emerged naturally out of wisdom tradition that was in dialogue with an apocalyptic view of this world (1983). Another response has been to emphasize that the eschatological wisdom of Jesus is akin to Cynic perceptions of "royalty" that challenge conventions and institutions of daily life and society (Crossan 1991: 72-88, 421-426; Mack 1993: 191-205; Mack 1995: 39-41). For interpreters who continue to maintain a loyalty to the early twentieth century view that only an apocalyptic Jesus is an orthodox Jesus, these descriptions of wisdom tradition look like an inclusion of heresy in the earliest stages of the Christian tradition. For other interpreters, these descriptions are the logical result of careful investigation of the tradition with insights gained from data available at the end of the twentieth century that was not available at the end of the nineteenth century. In this context, James Robinson appears to have parted ways with his colleague Helmut Koester by arguing that the apocalyptic teaching in the Q tradition is most fully akin to the teaching of the historical Jesus (Robinson 1993). For Robinson, then, most of the wisdom tradition in Gos. Thom. is a gnosticizing, and thus a modifying, of the apocalyptic tradition of the historical Jesus, while others see an eschatological wisdom compatible with much in the Gos. Thom. at the earliest stages of first century Christian tradition.

In the context of the present debate and disagreement, the question arises whether the view toward "gnostic" wisdom that lies at the foundation of the Robinson/Koester hypothesis really gets at the heart of the development of gospel tradition in the Gos. Thom. (cf. Williams). It might help if there were another kind of conversation on the Thomas tradition than