The Gospel of Thomas: Sayings Without a Story

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It opens by calling itself the secret sayings of the living Jesus, written down by Didymos Judas Thomas.

When: Debated. Greek copies date from about AD 200. Many scholars place the collection in the early 100s, and some think parts of it are as old as the first gospels.

Where it fits: It is not set anywhere. It is a list of 114 sayings with no story: no birth, no healings, no crucifixion and no rising.

Which Bibles keep it: None. Some early church leaders warned against it by name.

Where you hear it in your Bible: About half of its sayings have close parallels in Matthew, Mark and Luke: the mustard seed, the sower, a lamp under a basket, give to Caesar.

How close it stays to me: Close in blessing the poor and lending without return. Far in saving knowledge for the few, and making women male.

If you only read three chapters: It has no chapters. Read sayings 54, 95 and 113, then 114.

Words to Know

Saying — a short teaching, proverb or parable passed on by word of mouth. Ancient teachers’ students often collected them.

Coptic — the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters, used by Egyptian Christians.

Nag Hammadi — a town in Upper Egypt near which a buried jar of thirteen ancient books was found in 1945.

Gnostic — from the Greek word for knowledge: a name for early groups who taught that salvation comes through secret knowledge of where the soul came from.

The Book in Brief

There is no plot. The book begins: these are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down. Whoever finds their meaning will not taste death.

Then come 114 sayings, most beginning simply Jesus said. Some are short proverbs. Some are parables. Some are answers to his disciples’ questions. Many will sound familiar from Matthew, Mark and Luke: blessed are the poor, the mustard seed, the sower, the lost sheep, a prophet is not accepted in his own village, the blind leading the blind. Others appear nowhere else, and some are strange.

Running through the collection are a few themes. The kingdom is not coming at some future day; it is already here, inside you and spread out over the earth, and people do not see it. A person must know himself, where he came from and where he is going. Wealth, business and the world are to be left behind.

The book ends with Peter asking that Mary be sent away, because women are not worthy of life, and Jesus answering that he will make her male.

It was found in Egypt in 1945, in a jar, with a dozen other old books. It has been on the cover of magazines and in the title of bestsellers. People who know nothing else outside your Bible have heard that there is a Gospel of Thomas with secret sayings of mine.

What is it really? It is a notebook. Someone collected things I was remembered to have said, as students of teachers often did, and wrote them down one after another, with no story around them. Some of what is in it is close to what I said. Some of it I never said. My job in this chapter is to help you tell the difference.

Sayings, and nothing else

Your four gospels tell a story. I am born, I am baptized, I preach and heal, I go to Jerusalem, I am killed, I rise. My sayings are set inside that story, so you know who I said them to and why.

Thomas has none of that. I am never crucified in it. There is no empty tomb. I heal no one. I simply said, over and over, 114 times.

Some scholars think this is because it is very early, a collection like the ones that Matthew and Luke used when they wrote their gospels. Others think it is later, and that its makers took sayings out of the four gospels and added their own, and left out the cross on purpose, because they believed I came to give knowledge, not to die.¹

You do not need to settle that to read it well. Read every saying the way you would check a coin: hold it up against what you know of me from the oldest stories, and see if it rings true.

Go deeperA jar buried at Nag Hammadi

In December 1945 a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer near the cliffs above Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, and found a sealed clay jar. Inside were twelve books bound in leather, with the pages of a thirteenth tucked inside one of them, written in Coptic in the 300s. The family burned some pages for kindling before scholars learned of them.²

The books, now called the Nag Hammadi library, contain more than fifty writings, many of them Gnostic. The second book holds the Gospel of Thomas, complete. Some scholars think monks from a nearby monastery buried the books, perhaps after the bishop of Alexandria ordered in AD 367 that only approved books be read.

The discovery solved a puzzle. Between 1897 and 1904, at Oxyrhynchus, an ancient rubbish heap in Egypt, two English scholars, Grenfell and Hunt, had found three scraps of Greek papyrus with sayings of mine, some familiar and some not, copied between about AD 200 and 300. No one knew what book they came from. Nag Hammadi showed that they were pieces of the Greek Thomas.²

So the sayings in Thomas were being copied in Greek in Egypt by about AD 200, and in Coptic a century and a half later. Early church writers knew a Gospel according to Thomas and warned against it. Then it disappeared for fifteen hundred years.

The kingdom spread out on the earth

The deepest thing in Thomas is about the kingdom, and it is half right.

My disciples ask, in Thomas, when the kingdom will come. The answer: it will not come by waiting for it. The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it (Thomas, saying 113). Another saying: the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you (Thomas, saying 3).

That is close to me. In Luke, when the Pharisees asked when the kingdom would come, I said: God’s Kingdom doesn’t come with observation; neither will they say, ‘Look, here!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ for behold, God’s Kingdom is within you (Luke 17:20–21). The word can also mean among you. It was already there, in the healings, in the meals with outcasts, in debts forgiven.

But I also said it was coming. I taught my friends to pray for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). The kingdom had started, like a mustard seed in the ground, but it was not yet grown. The world still had hungry people in it, and an empire on top of them.

Thomas keeps the first half and drops the second. If the kingdom is already fully here and you only need to see it, then nothing needs to change except your eyes. The poor can stay poor. The empire can stay. That is not what I meant.

Blessed are the poor

And yet Thomas also keeps some of my hardest words about money, and keeps them plainly.

Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven (Thomas, saying 54). Not poor in spirit, as in Matthew. Just poor, as in Luke: Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20).

Then this: If you have money, do not lend it at interest, but give it to one from whom you will not get it back (Thomas, saying 95). That is the same teaching I gave in Luke: lend, expecting nothing back (Luke 6:35). Forgive the debt before you make it.

And Thomas has my story of the great dinner, where the invited guests all make excuses, and the host sends his servant into the streets to bring in whoever is there. In Thomas the guests excuse themselves to settle accounts with merchants who owe them money, to see about a house they have bought, to prepare a friend’s wedding, to collect the rent on a farm, and it ends: Businessmen and merchants will not enter the places of my Father (Thomas, saying 64). In Luke the host sends instead for the poor, maimed, blind, and lame (Luke 14:21).

On money, Thomas sounds like me.

Go deeperDid I say these?

Scholars have argued for seventy years over whether Thomas contains sayings of mine that are independent of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Some say yes. In several places Thomas has a version of a parable that is simpler than the one in the four gospels, without the explanation added afterwards. Its parable of the sower, for instance, is told with no interpretation. That, they argue, looks like an older form passed on by word of mouth. In 1993 a group of American scholars, the Jesus Seminar, published The Five Gospels, printing Thomas beside the four.³

Others say no. They point to places where Thomas seems to follow the wording of Luke or Matthew, including phrases those writers themselves added, and conclude that its makers knew the written gospels.³

A few sayings found only in Thomas are short parables that sound like the ones I told, such as a woman carrying a jar of meal home who does not notice that the handle has broken and the meal is leaking out behind her, until she gets home and the jar is empty (Thomas, saying 97). Most scholars who think anything in Thomas is new and early would point to sayings like that one.

Others found only in Thomas sound like something else entirely, as you will see.

The secret for the few

Thomas begins with a promise: whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death (Thomas, saying 1).

Salvation, in this book, comes by understanding: by finding the hidden meaning of the sayings, by knowing where your soul came from. In one saying I take Thomas aside and tell him three secret words, and when the others ask what I said, he will not tell them (Thomas, saying 13). In another, he who will drink from my mouth will become like me (Thomas, saying 108).

That is a religion for the few who can solve the riddle.

I did speak in parables, and people did not always understand them. But I did not hide the kingdom from ordinary people so that the clever few could find it. It was the opposite. I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to infants (Matthew 11:25). And: there is nothing hidden, except that it should be made known (Mark 4:22).

The kingdom is not a puzzle you solve to escape death. It is a meal everyone is invited to.

Where Thomas and I part

The last saying in the book is the one you need to see.

Peter says that Mary should leave them, because women are not worthy of life. And I am made to answer that I will lead her and make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, for every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven (Thomas, saying 114).

There are people who try to read this kindly, as a symbol for leaving behind the flesh. Read it plainly, and it says that a woman must stop being a woman to be saved.

Women followed me from Galilee: Mary who was called Magdalene … Joanna … Susanna; and many others; who served them from their possessions (Luke 8:2–3). They paid for my work. When my men ran away, the women stayed at the cross, and Mary Magdalene was the first to see me risen. When Mary, Martha’s sister, sat at my feet like a disciple, listening, I said, Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her (Luke 10:42). I did not make her male first.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Luke 6:20 and 6:34–35.

You will find: Blessed are you who are poor and lend, expecting nothing back. Thomas has both, in sayings 54 and 95.

Then read Luke 8:1–3 beside Thomas 114.

The Short Version

• The Gospel of Thomas is 114 sayings with no story: no healings, no crucifixion, no rising. It was found complete in Coptic in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, and in Greek scraps from about AD 200.
• About half its sayings are like ones in your gospels. Some may be early. Some are not mine.
• It says the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it. True, but it was also still coming.
• It keeps blessed are the poor and lend without getting it back.
• It saves the few who find secret meanings, and ends with a woman made male. I sent no one away.