The Gospel of Thomas

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Scholars have long theorized that collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated in the decades following his death and that therefore they would be among the earliest witnesses to his message. Modern critical scholars have even been able to reconstruct one of these collections of sayings —we’ll tell you how later. In the scholarly jargon, this collection of sayings is called simply “Q,” from the German word quelle, meaning “source.” But a copy of Q has never been found.

Now let your imagination roam. What if ? What if an ancient collection of sayings of Jesus were discovered? Suppose it had many parallels to Q, as well as some differences. That would certainly support the idea that collections of sayings of Jesus were in fact available to the authors of the canonical Gospels—provided, of course, that we could demonstrate that our imagined collection of sayings was an early composition, not something written in the second or third century.

Even more startling, such a collection would likely contain sayings plausibly attributed to Jesus that had not been otherwise preserved. In short, our imagined collection of sayings might allow us to recover sayings attributed to Jesus that have been lost for more than 1,000 years.

Is this beginning to sound like Indiana Jones?

A little before the rear 400, a group of monks from a monastery established by Pachomius, the founder of Egyptian monasticism, gathered their small library of 13 leather-bound volumes of religious writings and carefully placed them 029in a large earthen jar. They closed the mouth of the jar with a shallow red bowl, sealed it with bitumen and buried it at the bottom of a cliff face known as Jabal al-Tarif, which skirts the Nile as it bends its way past the modern town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt.

Why they buried this small library we cannot be sure. We do know that the books contained secret knowledge and told about heavenly journeys and mysterious rituals, liturgies and prayers. Such books could not be kept without risk. Athanasius, the powerful bishop of Alexandria and an uncompromising defender of orthodoxy had just (in 367 C.E. ^a) published an Easter letter in which he condemned certain unorthodox Christian books as heretical:

“They are fabrications of the heretics, who write them down when it pleases them and generously assign to them an early date of composition in order that they may be able to draw upon them as supposedly ancient writings and have in them occasion to deceive the guileless.”¹

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In December 1945, Muhammed and Khalifa ’Ali left their home in al—Qasr, a tiny village near Nag Hammadi, and drove their camels the few kilometers to the Jabal al-Tarif to search for deposits of nitrogen-rich soil that collects at the base of the cliff. The farmers of al-Qasr use this soil to fertilize their fields. That day, as the brothers dug and poked around the boulders that had broken from the cliff above, they came upon a large earthen jar, its mysterious contents sealed by a shallow red bowl. When Muhammed ’Ali smashed the jar with his mattock, out tumbled 13 books, which would soon prove to be the single most important archaeological find of the 20th century for the study of the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. In all, the 13 leather-bound volumes—known as the Nag Hammadi Codices—contained more than 50 Christian, Jewish and pagan tractates, most of them hitherto unknown, dating from the fourth century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E.

After years of being bought, sold, traded and smuggled,² the 13 codices were finally assembled in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where scholars began the laborious process of transcription, translation and publication of the texts.³

But earlier, in the spring of 1948, when 11 of the 13 codices were still in the hands of a Cairo antiquities dealer, a French scholar named Jean Doresse photographed some of the manuscripts. Among the pages he photographed was the second tractate in Codex II. At the end of this tractate, the following words had been inscribed in titular fashion in the middle of the page: Peuangelion Pkata Thomas—The Gospel According to Thomas. However, nothing of the tractate’s contents was made known at the time.

Political events frustrated attempts to organize a team of scholars to publish the codices. The ensuing years saw the assassination of the prime minister of Egypt, a revolution, the fall of the government and, finally, the Suez Crisis of 1956. It was not until 1970 that an international team of scholars was organized to publish all of the texts under the auspices of UNESCO.

But in 1957, Panor Labib, the director of the Coptic Museum in Cairo, published photographs of some leaves from the codices, among them the pages containing the Gospel of Thomas.⁴ Thus began the scholarly effort to understand this mind-boggling text.

Scholars had known of a gospel attributed to Thomas, whose legendary journeys to the East are still regarded as foundational by the old Christian churches of India. A snippet from this gospel is even quoted by a third-century Christian apologist and philosopher named Hippolytus. This reference indicates that the Gospel of Thomas was used by a suspicious heretical Gnostic group; therefore, most assumed that it could hardly have preserved words of Jesus from an early tradition.

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But when the full text of the Gospel of Thomas suddenly became available in Labib’s photographs, it was discovered that the Gospel of Thomas did not primarily contain mysterious Gnostic speculations. Instead it was a collection of sayings of Jesus, each introduced by the phrase “Jesus said”; moreover, many of the sayings had parallels in the canonical Gospels contained in the New Testament.

Scholars were also able to connect the Gospel of Thomas with three fragmentary texts⁵ found between 1897 and 1904 at another now-famous site in Egypt, Oxyrhynchus, where a huge hoard of ancient papyri was discovered. These three fragmentary texts, found among the Oxyrhynchus papyri, contained sayings of Jesus, but it was not clear whether they belonged to a particular gospel. When the photographs of the Gospel of Thomas were published, it became evident that the three fragmentary texts from Oxyrhynchus were actually portions of the Gospel of Thomas.⁶ The Oxyrhynchus fragments were written in the original Greek; the Nag Hammadi text was in a Coptic translation. The discovery of the full Coptic text, however, made it possible to reconstruct the entire Greek text of these fragments.⁷

In the years after the Gospel of Thomas was published, several scholarly positions were staked out. Some scholars said that it was a late composition and therefore worthless for the purpose of recovering material from the earliest traditions of sayings of Jesus. Other scholars, however, opted for an early date and argued that the Gospel of Thomas represented an early and trustworthy tradition. Such highly regarded scholars as Robert M. Grant of the University of Chicago⁸ and Ernst Haenchen of the University of Münster⁹ were among those who regarded the newly discovered gospel as a heretical fabrication, nothing more than an unoriginal attempt to distort the sayings of Jesus, whose more authentic voice was to be found in the 032canonical Gospels. Among those, on the other hand, who early saw in the Gospel of Thomas an independent witness for the tradition of the sayings of Jesus were the eminent Dutch scholar Gilles Quispel,¹⁰ the famous Alsatian Patristic scholar Oscar Cullmann¹¹ and, in England, Hugh Montefiore.¹²

In recent years, the trend has been toward the latter view. Increasingly, the Gospel of Thomas is seen as an independent, reliable witness to the tradition of the sayings of Jesus.

Before any of the gospels were created, and contemporaneously with the earliest written Christian documents, Christians knew and transmitted the words of Jesus orally. Later these sayings were written down in collections. Sometimes parts of a collection were embedded into a narrative framework, as in Matthew and Luke, and edited or altered in order to fit their new literary context.

Critical analysis has identified the peculiar features of each of the canonical Gospels’ editorial changes and alterations. If the collection of sayings that composes the Gospel of Thomas used a canonical Gospel as a source, we should be able to find in Thomas traces of these peculiar editorial elements in the wording, order or composition of sayings of Jesus introduced by the author of that canonical Gospel. For example, if the order of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas were the same as the order into which the author of the Gospel of Matthew had deliberately composed them, we could be sure that the author of the Gospel of Thomas had used the Gospel of Matthew. But scholars who argue that the Gospel of Thomas is dependent on the canonical Gospels have been unable to show that the Gospel of Thomas follows a canonical Gospel’s version of the tradition of the sayings. This at least raises the possibility that the Gospel of Thomas is quite early.

In the canonical Gospels, the sayings of Jesus are often embedded in a narrative, but there is no trace of a narrative framework in the sayings recorded in the Gospel of Thomas. This too suggests an early date for the Gospel of Thomas.

In many cases a saying or parable in the Gospel of Thomas is preserved without secondary expansion or allegorizing, that is, in a form that is not only shorter and more concise, but evidently also more nearly original than any of its canonical parallels. This suggests that the Gospel of Thomas not only represents an independent tradition, but that its sayings derive from a time even earlier than the composition of the canonical Gospels. Therefore, in any effort to reconstruct the historical beginnings of the religious movement initiated by Jesus of Nazareth, the Gospel of Thomas must be given equal weight with the canonical Gospels.

Let us look more closely at the contents of the Gospel of Thomas to illustrate these contentions and to flesh out the argument. Then we will consider some of the implications. The designation “The Gospel of Thomas,” by which we call the document, appears at the end of the manuscript. It was added later by the scribe who copied it. The heading at the beginning of the book says, “These are the Secret Sayings which the Living Jesus spoke, and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.” This is really the title of the work. The title designates the work as a book of sayings. There are no references to the story of Jesus, no mention of his birth, life, death or resurrection. He is referred to simply as the “Living One.” Occasionally disciples ask questions, to which the reply 033is a saying or a parable.

The author was certainly not trying to compose a “gospel” like the canonical Gospels. Simply stringing sayings together into a written document is, however, a kind of composition well known in “wisdom” literature. The Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible is one example. Other examples are the Wisdom of Ben Sirah and the Wisdom of Solomon, preserved in the so-called Old Testament apocrypha. There are also early Christian examples of this type of literature. The Epistle of James in the New Testament is one; another is the first six chapters of the early Christian manual known as the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. But the most important Christian collection of sayings is a composition we have already mentioned—Q, the reconstructed book of sayings that was an important source used by both Matthew and Luke. We will return to Q later.

The Gospel of Thomas fits nicely into the tradition of this Jewish literary genre as it was adapted by early Christians.

Wisdom books were customarily ascribed to a particular author, often to an ancient worthy, as in the case of the Wisdom of Solomon. But in the case of the Gospel of Thomas, the authority came from the ascription of the sayings to Jesus, rather than from the collector of the sayings, Didymus Judas Thomas, Who was he? Was additional authority— reliability—based on the name of the collector given in the title? The answer is clearly yes, but who he was is not entirely clear.

A person named Thomas appears in lists of the Twelve, or the Twelve Apostles, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), but none of these references says anything about him. A Thomas is also mentioned several times in the Gospel of John, twice asking questions (John 11:16 and 14:5), and again in the story of the Unbelieving Thomas (John 20:24–28). He is also listed as one of seven disciples in John 21:2. In three of the passages in John, the phrase “who was also called Didymus” is added.

Actually “Thomas” is not a proper name; it is a transcription of the Aramaic word for twin. The Greek word Didymus also means twin. So from the canonical Gospels we learn only that this fellow was a twin. The Gospel of Thomas, however, preserves his given name: Judas.

Several people in the New Testament are named Judas: (1) Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus by identifying him to the authorities with a kiss (Mark 14.44–45, (2) Judas, the son of James, who appears in a list of apostle (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13; Thomas also appears in this list, so Thomas and this Judas were two different persons); (3) Judas, the brother of Jesus (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55).

Whoever collected the sayings in what we call the Gospel of Thomas attributed them to Judas the twin undoubtedly as a kind of guarantee of reliability or authenticity. The most likely Judas would seem to be the third alternative listed above, Judas, the brother of Jesus.

If this is true, it may point to the Eastern Church as the source of the Gospel of Thomas, because in the Eastern Church there was a tradition that Judas, the apostle and brother of Jesus, was in fact the twin brother of Jesus (so stated in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas).¹³

The sayings collected in the Gospel of Thomas consist for the most part of aphorisms, proverbs, wisdom sayings, parables, prophetic sayings about the “Kingdom of the Father” and community rules. The sayings are delivered one after the other. Each saying is introduced by the formula “Jesus said.”

The general theme is wisdom. Wisdom sayings express the truth about God and about the essence of the human self. They speak about human nature and destiny and, by extension, about the nature of the world and about a person’s proper relationship to the world. The wisdom sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are typical of the early Christian-sayings tradition to which Thomas, together with Matthew, Mark and Luke, was heir.

Below, we have printed two examples of wisdom sayings from the Gospel of Thomas,¹⁴ which, like other Jewish and Christian sayings collections of this type, contains sayings that reveal what is fundamental about people and their behavior. Beside each is parallel saying from Q, as cited by the Gospel of Luke, The absence of the addresses “You Pharisees” and “You fools!” from sayings of the Gospel of Thomas may indicate that Thomas’s version of the second saying is earlier than the Lukan form of it.

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Other sayings in the Gospel of Thomas address the wisdom theme from a more mythological standpoint. In Judaism of this period, wisdom was not just a concept, but an actual being, a supernatural messenger sent from God. In sayings such as the one below (with its parallel from Matthew), Jesus speaks with the voice of this heavenly messenger, Wisdom, inviting people to take up his yoke.

Some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas contain a prophetic element:

“His disciples said to him, ‘Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you.’ He said to them, ‘You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken (only) of the dead’” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 52).

The reign of God in the Gospel of Thomas, in contrast to most of the New Testament books, is an event of the present time, not a future, catastrophic event. Yet, even though this view is not common in the New Testament, there are traces that show it was not a view that belongs only to Thomas. The following saying, with its parallel from Luke, illustrates the point:

However, Thomas sees this coming of the kingdom primarily as an event that takes place as the disciples gain a new understanding of themselves, and thus gives the concept a peculiar wisdom flavor.

“Jesus said, ‘if those who lead you say to you, “See, the kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. Rather the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3).

Let us look now at some parables, which, like those in the canonical Gospels, are stories that disclose a new reality to those who are willing to listen.¹⁵ They depict an unusual or problematic situation resolved in an often surprising way that opens a fresh understanding of the world into which the listener is invited.¹⁶ Comparing these parables with their counterparts in the canonical Gospels, one often finds that, in Thomas, the persons acting the parables abandon all common sense, ignore the dictates of prudence and lunge after a single object discovered at an unexpected moment.

Here is a parable that involves catching fish. Matthew, in his version, interprets the sorting of the fish as a symbol for the last judgment; in the Gospel of Thomas, however, it is the one highly prized fisherman chooses.

Here is a parable about a merchant who sells everything to buy one fascinating pearl, again with its parallel from Matthew. Discovering our true identity as “sons of the living Father” results in such enthusiasm, in such fixation on the newly discovered, highly prized thing, that the world and its normal values are suddenly and dramatically reduced in importance.

Some of the sayings tell of the “mysteries” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 62), which scholars refer to as Esoteric Wisdom. These sayings speak of hidden truths about human existence, heavenly origins, separation from the world and liberation of the soul from the body. In the sequence quoted below, devoted followers are told the truth about their divine origins and are given the secret passwords that will prove effective in their return journey to their heavenly home:

“Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the solitary and the elect, for you will find the kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you will return.’

“Jesus said, ’If they say to you, “Where did you come from?,” say to them, “We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established [itself] and became manifest through their image.” If they say to you, “Is it 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 movement and repose” ’” (Gospel of Thomas, Sayings 49–50).

The religious perspective represented in sayings like these is often associated with Gnosticism. Gnostics believed that both their origin and their destiny lay in the supreme deity who dwells in heavenly remove from the evil world; this evil world, on the other hand, is the creation of a rebellious angel or demiurge. Though this demiurge seeks to hold humans in ignorance of their true identity, in sleepiness and intoxication, a divine messenger will come and wake the initiates and relieve them from the bonds of ignorance by bringing to them true knowledge (gnosis) about themselves. In the following saying, Jesus speaks with the voice of this heavenly messenger:

“Jesus said, ‘I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in the flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the human beings, because they are blind in their and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent’ ” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 28).

However, this moment of return requires preparation. One must cultivate the proper understanding of the world in order to be ready to leave its confines when the time comes.

“Jesus said, ‘Whoever has come to understand the world, has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world’” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 56).

Understanding the world—a thing that is really dead—leads inevitably to a proper understanding of the body and corporeal existence. Becoming superior to the world involves deprecation of the flesh in favor of the spirit.

Separating the soul from corporeal existence does not mean that the soul would henceforth exist as a disembodied spirit, wandering abstractly through the cosmos without form and identity; rather, the soul freed from its prison would enter into a new kind of corporeal existence that awaits it in the heavenly realm. This new “body” is often spoken 036of as one’s heavenly “image” that awaits the soul, but remains guarded and enclosed in the safety of the godhead until it can be properly claimed. Thus, Thomas speaks of images, for the present concealed in the Father, but waiting for the time when their splendor will be revealed to the utter astonishment of those by whom they will be claimed.

“Jesus said, ’The images are manifest to man, but the light in them remains concealed in the image of the light of the Father. He will become manifest, but his image will remain concealed by his light.’

“Jesus said, ’When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much will you have to bear!’” (Gospel of Thomas, Sayings 83–84).

But Thomas’s rejection of the world is not a purely intellectual exercise. It has its practical side as well. At the heart of the Christian life-style, as reflected in the Gospel of Thomas, is a social radicalism in that rejects commonly held values. Much of the social radicalism in the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is of course shared with the canonical Gospels.

The Gospel of Thomas urges the Christian to reject the ideal of a settled life; instead the true Christian life requires itinerancy:

“Jesus said, ’Become passers-by’” (Gospel of Thomas Saying 42).

“Jesus said,’ [The foxes have their holes] and the birds have their nests, but the son of man (= the human, being) has no place to lay his head and rest’ ”(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 86; compare Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58).

Even family bonds are to be rejected:

“Jesus said, ’Whoever does not hate his father and his mother cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters an take up his cross in my way will not be worthy of me” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 55; compare Matthew 10:37–38 and Luke 14:26–27).

Shrewd business sense is also rejected, as in the canonical Gospels (see Matthew 5:42; Luke 6:34, 12:13–15):

“[Jesus said], ‘If you have money, do not lend it at interest, but give [it] to one from whom you will not get it back’ (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 95).

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Rejecting the world means accepting those whom the world has rejected. Thus, as in the canonical Gospels, the poor are blessed (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 54 = Luke 6:20), as are the suffering (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 58), the persecuted (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 68 = Matthew 5:11– Luke 6:22–23) and those who hunger (Gospel Thomas, Saying 69 = Luke 6:21).

As we noted earlier, some scholars have argued that the Gospel of Thomas is nothing but a compendium of sayings based on the canonical Gospels. In this view, Thomas’s interpretation of Jesus’ sayings is a deliberate attempt at gnosticizing the canonical tradition of Jesus’ words. However, the Gnostic element in Thomas cannot be used as basis for arguing that it is either late or derivative of the canonical Gospels. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the rise of Gnosticism must demonstrated much earlier than the second century C.E.; Gnosticism can no longer be viewed as a relatively late Christian phenomenon. Indeed, among the tractates discovered at Nag Hammadi, one finds number of texts that unfold a rich legacy of Jewish Gnosticism, which likely predates the beginnings of Christianity.¹⁷ Thus, Thomas’s religious perspective, even if it is “Gnostic,” can be right at home in the first century.

One of the striking features of the Gospel Thomas is that the sayings make no reference Jesus’ death or resurrection—the keystone of Paul’s missionary proclamation. Does this suggest a late date for its composition? The answer is clearly no. The collection of sayings known as Q, used as source by both Matthew and Luke, likewise does not consider Jesus’ death pan of the Christian message. Q, like Thomas, is not interested in stories and reports about Jesus’ resurrection and his subsequent appearances as the risen Lord. Reflections on Jesus’ death and resurrection may well have occurred in the early Church, as reflected in Paul’s letters, but the early Church was not unanimous in making the resurrection the fulcrum of Christian faith. For both Q and Thomas, Jesus’ significance lay in his words, and in his words alone.

Q, as noted earlier, is a reconstructed document. We have no actual copy of it. It is a critical element in the so-called two-source theory of the composition of the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The many parallels between these three Gospels indicate there must be a relationship between them. The most commonly held scholarly view is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark, the oldest and shortest of the Gospels, as one principal source. To this each added an account of the early life of Jesus and an account of his post-resurrection appearances. But scholars also noted that there were numerous parallels in Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark; these must have come from another common source—Q. The parallels that Matthew and Luke alone share (but that are not found in Mark) constitute what we know of Q.

Q, as reconstructed in this way, gives us a document that is primarily a collection of sayings. The Gospel of Thomas gives us an example of an actual collection of sayings like Q has hitherto been presumed to be.

Another striking feature of the Gospel of Thomas is an almost total absence of Christological titles, such as Christ/Messiah, Lord and Son of Man. In this it differs from Q; in Q, the title Son of Man plays a significant role as a designation of Jesus as the one who will appear from heaven at the end of time. But a recent study has demonstrated that Q was composed in two successive stages.¹⁸ In the earlier stage, the understanding of Jesus as the Son of Man was not yet present. In the earlier stage, Jesus was presented as a teacher of wisdom and as a prophet who announces the presence of the kingdom in his words.

In this, the early Q is consistent with the Gospel of Thomas and suggests an early date for the sayings collected in the Gospel of Thomas. Like the early Q, much of the material in the Gospel of Thomas—and especially those passages with parallels in the early Q—was probably written within ten or twenty years of Jesus’ death.

These parallel passages between Thomas and early Q are concentrated in the sayings of Q preserved in Luke’s Sermon in the Field (Luke 6:20–49) and in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). Interestingly enough, just those passages in the Sermon in the, Field and the Sermon on the Mount that scholars regard as the authentic core of these sermons are the passages that are also found in the Gospel of Thomas. Some of these remarkable parallels are given in the sidebar to this article. The sayings shared by Matthew, Luke and Thomas belong to those that circulated orally among Christians at a very early time, before they were collected to form the basis for the sermons now appearing in Matthew and Luke.

It is also striking that what is missing in the Gospel of Thomas from the materials now included in Luke’s Sermon in the Field (for example, the curses against the rich in Luke 6:24–26) are passages that scholars agree have been added by Luke to the materials that he drew from Q.

All of this suggests an early date for the original composition of the Gospel of Thomas. Indeed, its sayings derive from roots no less ancient than those of the canonical Gospels.

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Another similarity between Q and the Gospel of Thomas provides reinforcement for the conclusion that both were collections that must have circulated, during the very first years after the death of Jesus, among Christians for whom the words of Jesus had exclusive saving power. This similarity involves prophetic sayings. The sayings we have just looked at, involving parallels between Q and the Gospel of Thomas, were mostly sayings of secular wisdom. But both collections also contain prophetic sayings, and here the parallels are even closer and more complete.¹⁹ These parallel passages teach that salvation is in Jesus and his words. Here is but one example:

Thus, the materials that the Gospel of Thomas and Q share come from several oral or written collections of sayings of Jesus that included prophetic words and parables, as well as wisdom sayings, and that can be dated to the earliest followers of Jesus.

The Gospel of Thomas gives us insights into the beliefs of followers of Jesus in the first three decades after his death. These were the people who first collected Jesus’ sayings, because they believed that these very words of Jesus were the source of life and salvation. Jesus was dead, but he remained “the living One” even after his death; the understanding of his words of wisdom and of the prophetic announcement of the presence of the kingdom would continue to give eternal life.

By contrast, Pau1 not care at all what Jesus had said; for Paul, Jesus’ death and resurrection were the turning point of the ages, the first fruits of the coming of the kingdom. Had Paul been completely successful, very little of the sayings of Jesus would have survived. Only a few sayings are contained in Paul’s letters. But there were Christians other than Paul for whom Jesus’ words were the primary source of their understanding of salvation. They preserved and developed the tradition of his sayings. Most of these traditions were eventually incorporated into the Pauline concept, that is, they became sayings that the one who died on the cross for our salvation had uttered—important words, but not indispensable for the understanding of Christian faith.

The Gospel of Thomas is the most important surviving document of those followers of Jesus who did not share the Pauline message. What Jesus had said was the only thing that mattered to them, because here, and only here, could these followers find their true identity as “sons of living Father.”

The most surprising discovery of this analysis of the Thomas tradition is that this understanding of the message of Jesus is not a later development within the Christian communities, but perhaps oldest and most nearly original understanding of Jesus, dating back to the very beginnings of Jesus movement.

The Gospel of Thomas of course reinforces what we have learned from the reconstruction of Q. But the Gospel of Thomas also goes beyond Q. What know of Q is only what has been preserved by in corporation in Matthew and Luke. Thomas preserves parallels, as we have seen, but also other sayings and parables that may be equally old.

In fact, though it is notoriously difficult to prove that this or that saying in the Jesus tradition actually comes from Jesus himself,^b some have argued that several of Thomas’s sayings do have a claim to authenticity in this literal sense. For example, the famous parable scholar Joachim Jeremias²⁰ has argued has argued that Saying 82 of the Gospel of Thomas comes from Jesus: “He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom,”

The German scholar Johannes Bauer²¹ has argued that Saying 58 is an authentic Jesus saying: “Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the man who has suffered and found life.’ ” He also thought that Saying 52 may have come from Jesus:

“His disciples said to him, ‘Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke in you.’ He said to them, ‘You have omitted the one living in your presence and have spoken (only) of the dead.’”

Many have argued that Thomas’s parables have the best chance of having come from Jesus himself. It is true that many of the parables attributed to Jesus are preserved in Thomas in forms more primitive than their canonical counterparts, and thus may help us eventually to recover the voice of the historical Jesus. But there is a cluster of parables in Gospel of Thomas Sayings 96–98 that have no 039canonical parallels, but may nonetheless be just as old. Clustered together as they are, with no apparent thematic connection, they probably derive from an ancient parable collection known to Thomas:

“Jesus [said], ‘The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain woman. She took a little leaven, [concealed] it in some dough, and made it into large loaves. Let him who has ears hear.’

“Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of the [Father] is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking [on] a road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realize it; she had noticed no accident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty.’

“Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man.’”

No one has yet been able to offer much of an explanation for these parables. But the early Church knew what they meant and valued them as sayings of Jesus. Scholars have yet to decide whether these or any other sayings from the Gospel of Thomas do in fact come from Jesus. But one thing is certain, no current discussion of Jesus and the origins of Christianity will be complete without giving due consideration to the witness Thomas has to offer.

Scholars have long theorized that collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated in the decades following his death and that therefore they would be among the earliest witnesses to his message. Modern critical scholars have even been able to reconstruct one of these collections of sayings —we’ll tell you how later. In the scholarly jargon, this collection of sayings is called simply “Q,” from the German word quelle, meaning “source.” But a copy of Q has never been found. Now let your imagination roam. What if ? What if an ancient collection of sayings of Jesus were discovered? Suppose it had […]