The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?

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Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion which the man eats, and the lion becomes man.”

Jesus said, “Be passers-by!”

Jesus said, “For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This hardly sounds like the Jesus familiar to us from the New Testament. It is from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the earliest remakings of Jesus after the four canonical gospels. This gospel must have seemed to some ancient readers, as it does even to scholars today, as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill once said of Russia. The strange world of the Gospel of Thomas is of interest not so much because one can find authentic traditions from or about Jesus in it—it doesn’t have any real claim to historical veracity—but because it provides a fascinating window into some of the controversies in the Christian community around the middle of the second century C.E. when it was written.

We have known about the Gospel of Thomas for a long time. A number of Church Fathers mention it disparagingly, from as far back as Hippolytus and Origen in the third century C.E. In his Refutation of All the 051 052 Heresies, Hippolytus includes it in a list of writings used by Gnostics. Origen includes it in a list of false gospels that tried to write down the truth about Jesus but failed.

But don’t confuse the Gospel of Thomas with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, as scholars did until quite recently. Until the 20th century, most Christian writers down the ages, as well as early critical scholars, assumed that the Gospel of Thomas mentioned by the Church Fathers was actually a different work, what we now call the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a narrative account of periods in Jesus’ childhood, including legendary episodes in which Jesus strikes dead another boy who bumps into him, miraculously lengthens a wooden beam to help his stepfather, Joseph, with his carpentry, raises from the dead his friend who falls off a roof on which they were playing, and makes live sparrows out of clay. This Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written at roughly the same time as the Gospel of Thomas, but the name Thomas only got attached to the Infancy Gospel centuries later. The “real” Gospel of Thomas (though it is certainly not written by the apostle Thomas) is actually a collection of 114 dialogues and sayings in which Jesus utters statements 053 like those at the beginning of this article.

From the references I’ve mentioned by Church Fathers, we’ve known the title of the Gospel of Thomas for centuries, but the contents have only come to light quite recently. The first discoveries of the contents of the Gospel of Thomas came in the first season of digging in the ancient rubbish dump of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt—the place from which we get so many of the earliest fragments of Biblical and classical literature, as well as a host of everyday bills and letters.^a To the amazement of the Oxford scholars A.S. Hunt and B.P. Grenfell, who took part in the dig and published the texts unearthed, a Greek fragment of what they called the Logia (or “Sayings of Jesus”) was discovered in the very first season and published in 1897. To their further amazement, the second season (in 1903) yielded another Greek fragment, this one making the claim that the sayings in it were dictated by Jesus to his disciple Thomas. Scholars then began to suspect that this might be a “Gospel of Thomas.” Another Greek fragment, very badly damaged, was published in 1904. These three fragments, labeled by scholars Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1, 654 and 655, are now housed respectively in Oxford University, the British Library in London and Harvard University. According to scholars who have analyzed the handwriting, these manuscripts date from around the beginning of the third century to the middle of that century. (There has not been a detailed paleographical study of the handwriting of these fragments for a long time; this needs to be done.) So at about the same time that Hippolytus and Origen were making disparaging remarks about the Gospel of Thomas, others were making the copies of it that we now have from Oxyrhynchus.

Even with the discoveries of these three fragments, it wasn’t certain that they belonged to the Gospel of Thomas. But in 1945 or 1946, the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered, and in one of them was a complete translation of the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic!

It is an ingrained part of the mythology of scholarship on Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi codices that an Egyptian peasant named Mohammed Ali discovered the Nag Hammadi codices in a jar while he was digging for sabakh, a kind of fertilizer, shortly after the end of the Second World War. In the official account, the find-spot was by a cliff called Jabal al-Tarif, around 7 miles northeast of Nag Hammadi in Upper (i.e., southern) Egypt.¹ The story is told, for example, in Elaine Pagels’s best-selling The Gnostic Gospels.² The find is commonly dated to early January 1946. According to some accounts, 054 the discoverers remember that it was around the time of Coptic Christmas (January 7). It was then that Mohammed Ali and his brothers avenged the killing of their father, then cut out the heart of their father’s murderer and each ate a share.

Large parts—and perhaps the whole—of the story are mythology. Different tellings of the story have yielded different results: Mark Goodacre of Duke University notes that the height of the jar in question can range from 2 feet to 6 feet!³ Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount comment that finding the jar when digging for fertilizer in that area is hard to imagine, given that papyrus would be unlikely to survive for centuries of inundations of the Nile!⁴

Whatever the truth about the discovery, however, there has never been any doubt about the authenticity and antiquity of the Nag Hammadi codices, wherever they may have been found.

In what became known as the second of the Nag Hammadi codices, Thomas appeared in full (in Coptic)—sandwiched between a Gnostic work, the Apocryphon of John, and another apocryphal gospel, the Gospel of Philip. The Nag Hammadi text of the Gospel of Thomas at last proved that the three Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus are indeed from the Gospel of Thomas. From the Nag Hammadi codices, the world now has access to the full database of the Gospel of Thomas’s 114 sayings of Jesus.

Could these sayings shed new light on who Jesus was? Because of the enormous importance of this question, scholars began to investigate how close in time the Gospel of Thomas was to Jesus’ life on earth. Could the book be as early as—or maybe even earlier than—the New Testament Gospels? This question of when Thomas was written is intertwined with the questions of who originally wrote it and in what language (certainly not the Coptic of the Nag Hammadi Codex). Was it an early Aramaic gospel from the generation after Jesus’ ministry? Or was it—at least at its core—a product of Syriac Christianity around 200 C.E.? We already find suggestions close to these two extremes in the early church. Some may have thought it was really written by the disciple Thomas. On the other hand, Church Fathers who (rightly) could not believe that the apostle Thomas really wrote this gospel thought that it must have been written by a member of the Manichaean sect, because Mani had a disciple called Thomas. But Mani’s ministry did not begin until the mid-to-late third century, and so this would put the Gospel of Thomas into a time frame of about 275 C.E. at the earliest. This is impossible, however, because, as we have seen, the Gospel of Thomas was already known around 200–250 C.E. both among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and from references in early Church Fathers. In modern scholarship, some of the same arguments for Thomas having early Aramaic features are also used as evidence for Thomas being a much later Syriac production. (Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic; early in the history of Syriac the two might be hard to distinguish.) In fact, these apparently Semitic features of the language that we can see in our Coptic manuscript of Thomas from Nag Hammadi as well as in the Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus are fairly unremarkable and often just a matter of “Biblical idiom.” Thomas was almost certainly written in Greek sometime around the middle of the second century.⁵

What sort of vision of Christianity does the Gospel of Thomas propound? Is it “Gnostic,” as often supposed, or is it more likely just a mildly quirky variation on the orthodox theme? Again, neither of these supposed extremes work.

Of course, any discussion of whether or not a work is “Gnostic” depends on one’s view of Gnosticism, which includes the question of whether such a thing as Gnosticism even existed. The best recent scholarship on this topic, though, has seen that the Gnostics were actually an identifiable group in antiquity. We can deduce this from the fact that both early Church Fathers (like Irenaeus and Hippolytus) and pagan Platonist philosophers (like Porphyry) independently name a particular group “the Gnostics.” And both the Church Fathers and the Platonists also described the Gnostics as believing specifically that both the creator god of the world and the world itself are evil.⁶ This was a view that Christian and pagan critics alike thought outrageous!

Those who have thought that Thomas is Gnostic have seized upon the negative views of the body and the world evident in the book. And it is certainly true that the body and the world are seen in a negative light in Thomas. For example, in talking about the fact that the soul or spirit has come into the body, Jesus says: “I do marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty!” (Gospel of Thomas 28.3). The opposition of “wealth” and “poverty” shows up the sharp contrast between the precious soul and the worthless body. Jesus is similarly negative about the material cosmos: “Whoever 055 has come to know the world has found a corpse” (Gospel of Thomas 56.1). In Thomas, to be dead like a corpse is to be in the realm of ultimate perdition; to be classed as “dead” is about as bad an insult as can be hurled.

Nevertheless, it has always been something of an embarrassment for the “Gnostic” view of Thomas that there is no talk of an evil demiurge, a creation that is intrinsically evil, or of other familiar themes such as “aeons” (a technical term for the divine realms in the heavens). Properly Gnostic gospels such as the Gospel of Judas, and the Nag Hammadi Gospel of the Egyptians, have very complicated accounts of how multitudes of deities and aeons come into existence from a demonic power before the birth of the world. There is nothing of this in Thomas, though.

But neither does it work to see Thomas as simply a stone’s throw from the kind of Christianity or Christianities evident in the New Testament and in “apostolic fathers” such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp.

One of the most striking features of Thomas is that it condemns prayer, along with other traditional practices: “If you fast, you will give birth to sin in yourselves. And if you pray, you will be condemned. And if you give alms, you will do ill to your spirits” (Gospel of Thomas 14.1–3). We will come back to this condemnation of prayer in a moment.

Similarly, Old Testament Scripture is given short shrift in another saying:

His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets⁷ spoke in Israel. And did all of them speak about you?”

He said to them, “You have neglected the living one in front of you, and spoken of the dead” (Gospel of Thomas 52.1–2).

Here the disciples seem to reflect a traditional Christian view of Jesus’ fulfillment of Scripture, the same view we see in the canonical Gospels (e.g., in Matthew 5:17–20; Mark 9:12–13; Luke 24:25–27, 44–47; John 5:39). But Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question is a surprise: He denies any connection between himself and Scripture and dismisses the Biblical authors or prophets as simply “dead.” As with the world being a corpse, as already mentioned, this is not just a comment on their mortality; rather, in Thomas, “death” is a state of complete spiritual doom. The Gospel of Thomas portrays a Jesus and a body of teaching cut off from their Jewish origins. This distance from Judaism can be seen in Gospel of Thomas 53, where Jesus dismisses the practice of circumcision as unnatural.

We can return now to the theme of prayer. Thomas’s rejection of it is not just an antitraditional gesture, but rather gives an interesting clue to the theology of the book, in particular Thomas’s understanding of the “kingdom of God.” In the canonical Gospels, the “kingdom of God” is his reign; God remakes this world in conformity with his own plan—hence, the Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10; cf. Luke 11:2). God’s kingdom is his perfect will, coming to pass here specifically in the Gospels through Jesus’ reign as God’s messianic king. It is very much something that comes from outside, from God himself, to human beings through Jesus’ ministry.

In the Gospel of Thomas, however, the picture is quite different: The kingdom is something that indwells in elect disciples, a kind of “true soul.” In some ways, it can be regarded as a fragment of Jesus himself, or at least of the divine. We can see, therefore, why prayer is not just dispensable, but actually illegitimate: Prayer is an appeal to a transcendent God outside of oneself; for a Thomasine disciple to pray would be to deny that one is intrinsically indwelt by the divine.

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Some of the details are vague, because the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of often enigmatic sayings, but it is tolerably clear that this true soul is what needs to escape from this woeful world and from the physical body which binds the soul in the present. This is necessary because the body and the world are heading for death, and the whole purpose of the Gospel of Thomas is to provide the means to immortality. The first saying of Jesus in Thomas is “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Words for “knowing” or “understanding” (sooun, eime, gnōsis) appear 32 times in the Gospel of Thomas, which is an extraordinarily dense concentration when one considers that Thomas is much shorter than the New Testament Gospels; Thomas is roughly the length of Mark 1–6.

Finding true understanding and knowledge is of vital importance in Thomas: This knowledge comes exclusively through revelation from Jesus; “I will give you what eye has not seen, and what ear has not heard, and what hand has not touched, nor has it ascended to the heart of man” (Gospel of Thomas 17). A key aspect of this knowledge involves training the soul to regard this world and all its vanities as insignificant. Hence, although a number of worldly institutions are not necessarily condemned as evil, they are regarded as matters of complete indifference. These include money (Gospel of Thomas 95; 100), clothes (36), diet (14) and family (55; 99).

Knowing how to navigate one’s way through demonic interrogation as one ascends to the higher spiritual realms after death (and perhaps in mystical experiences during the present life as well) is vital—rather like going through customs and border control, where one has to present a passport and say the right words. Some ancients thought it necessary to pay the ferryman Charon to take the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to Hades. In Egypt it was thought that the “Books of the Dead” would equip the dead person with the necessary spells to pass the respective doorkeepers to the afterlife. A huge number of scrolls of the Books of the Dead have survived. Archaeologists have also discovered skeletons with coins in their mouths, in line with the myth of Charon.^b In Thomas, the interrogation goes as follows:

If they say to you, “From where have you come?”

say to them, “We have come from the light, where the light came into being all of its own accord and stood and appeared in their images.”

If they say to you, “Is it you?” (i.e., “Who are you?”)

say, “We are its children and we are the elect of the living Father.”

If they ask you, “What is the sign of your Father in you?”

say to them, “It is motion and rest.”

(Gospel of Thomas 50.1–3)

Thus, it is critical to say the right thing about one’s identity and origins (as is common in both Egyptian mythology and Valentinian and Gnostic writings), as well as having the right “sign,” namely the enigmatic “motion and rest.” The combination, then, of a rigorous attitude toward worldly institutions, an exclusive focus on Jesus’ revelation, and a knowledge of how to attain union with the divine by crossing the perilous, demon-infested limbo, is key to the soul’s escape from this miserable world.

Having the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas—even if only in a Coptic translation—affords us a fascinating insight into the diverse views about Jesus and salvation in the early decades of Christianity. Debates about key issues such as which texts gave the authoritative picture of Jesus, what status the Old 069 Testament and traditional Jewish practices should have in the church, what the relationship is between the soul and the body, what attitudes should be taken to money and family—these debates and many others are reflected in the Gospel of Thomas. In the midst of these controversies that characterized early Christianity, Thomas proposes a radical vision of an un-Jewish Jesus and of a rejection of the world and the body in favor of a focus on rigorous training of the soul to enable its escape to re-enter the divine. In these 114 short sayings, the compiler of the Gospel of Thomas insists that it is his gospel that at last provides the key to knowledge.

Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion which the man eats, and the lion becomes man.”
Jesus said, “Be passers-by!”