What Shall We Do? The Community Rules of Thomas in the ‘Fifth Gospel’ The Logia tradition in the Gospel of Thomas contains various institutional regulations that depict not only the genesis of the Thomas people, but also their autonomous beliefs and life within the broad Jesus movement. What was, then, the functional role of the Jesus Logia in the early Christian group? The community rules in the Thomas text are not organised in a systematic way, but are mixed with other Logia that have a different textual purpose. The Jewish traditions were partly quoted by the Logiographer of the text, but the anti- Christian rituals were rejected or reinterpreted in terms of the primary requirements of entering the community or maintaining the idiosyncratic identification of the new Christian movement within the Jewish-dominated environment. The interpretation of the community rules will be discussed in the view of a domestic concern, which substantiates not only the Thomasine community conflicting with Judaism, but also the self-governing ability, indicating the growth and development of the movement. The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) contain several types of doctrinal scrolls, which justify the survival of the Qumran community in the desert of Judea in the pre-Jewish War period of the first century C.E. The isolated Jewish community kept the regular rules to maintain the unknown group in peace; this is apparently proven in the scrolls called The Community Rules. The scrolls 1QS, 4Q 255-264 and 5Q 11 (1), written by the Masters or Guardians of the community, are about “statutes concerned with initiation into the sect and with its common life, organisation and discipline, a penal code, liturgical ceremonies, the fundamental religious duties of the Master and his disciples” (2). (1) The texts of 4Q 280, 286-287, 4Q 502 and 5Q 13 are also regarded as the community rules of the Qumran community. (2) The major part of the community scrolls were discovered in the form of a parchment scroll in Cave 1 of the Qumran site. The fragments of twelve other manuscripts were also found in Caves 4 and 5. G. VERMES, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London 1998) 97-98, 99-239. L. ROST, Judaism Outside the Hebrew Cannon. An Introduction to the Documents (Nashville 1976) 164- 169. J. CAMPBELL, “The Textual Development of the Qumran Community Rules”, JTS 51 (2000) 628-631.