I had no idea that St John's gospel is the only one that says Jesus is God

My ignorance of my own religion is shameful. I would not usually read anything by Mrs Pagel, a modish American academic who wrote a best-selling book about the Gospel of Thomas and chafes at the patriarchy of Christianity, but this passage in an interview with her is very interesting.

<But isn’t the teaching that Jesus is the only Son of God in all the gospels, not just John?

That’s what I thought, and most Christians would agree. But that just shows how the other synoptic gospels have come to be read through the eyes of John. 

Yes, they say Jesus was the Son of God, but what does that mean in the first century? Most scholars say “Son of God” meant a man who’s anointed by God to rule the nations. David was the Son of God because he was the anointed king of Israel.>

In one of my very rare times i went to Mass at university I heard a long demolition of the Gospel of St Thomas but I understood nothing.

In almost complete ignorance I had trusted MR James's opinion on the apocryphal gospels "There is no question of any one's having excluded them from the New Testament : they have done that for themselves". He said that before the Gospel of Thomas and many other manuscripts were discovered in Egypt.

To be clear I do not propose we should think the Gospel of Thomas divinely inspired but we should understand the three synoptic Gospels much better than I did till I read Mrs Pagel's words this evening.

Of course my Biblical Unitarian Facebook friend Daisy has been arguing that the Bible does not say Jesus is God eloquently (and worryingly for an orthodox Christian) for years.

She does not believe even the Gospel of John teaches that Jesus is God. He is described as ‘The Anointed One’, the ‘Son of God’ - the Messiah, not, she says, God Almighty Himself.