Now Playing: The Gospel of Thomas

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One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel of Thomas. I rose and began to sing the announced hymn with the rest of the congregation. Then, right there in the third stanza of this early-20th-century hymn, I saw: “Lift the stone and you will find me, split the wood and I am there.” I only made it through the first phrase before my jaw dropped wide […]

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Footnotes

Coptic is the common tongue of ancient Egypt written in Greek characters. Christian missionaries created this hybrid literary language for the purpose of translating Christian texts for Egyptians in about the second century C.E.

See Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson, “The Gospel of Thomas—Does It Contain Authentic Sayings of Jesus?” BR 06:02.

See “Read All About It,” in Strata, BAR 23:05.

Endnotes

See James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).

Charles W. Hedrick and Paul A. Mirecki, Gospel of the Savior: A New Ancient Gospel (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1999).