The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, preserved in a Coptic manuscript found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945. Unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke and John it contains no narrative: no birth, no miracles, no passion and no resurrection. It is a sayings gospel — a list of teachings introduced by little more than "Jesus said".

The text attributes itself to "Didymos Judas Thomas", the disciple traditionally associated with the mission to Syria and India. Virtually no scholar accepts that attribution as historical. Both "Didymos" and "Thomas" mean twin, and the name most likely signals the Syrian Christian tradition in which the text circulated rather than a single author.

There is no consensus. One camp dates a first edition to roughly 50–80 CE, making it as old as or older than the canonical gospels, on the grounds that its parables lack the allegorical explanations found in the synoptics. Another dates it to about 100–140 CE, treating it as a later work that draws on Matthew and Luke. The surviving Coptic manuscript was copied around 340 CE, and the Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus date from around 200 CE.

In December 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman dug up a sealed jar containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. The Gospel of Thomas is the second tractate in Codex II. Three Greek fragments of the same work — Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1, 654 and 655 — had already been excavated in Egypt between 1897 and 1904, but no one could identify them until the Coptic text appeared.

It was never accepted into the canon that formed during the second to fourth centuries. Church writers including Hippolytus and Origen name it as a text used by groups they considered heretical, and its emphasis on secret knowledge, its lack of a passion narrative and its indifference to the resurrection put it at odds with the emerging orthodox account of salvation. There is no record of a council debating and rejecting it; it simply fell outside the developing consensus and then out of circulation.

It is usually filed under "gnostic" because of where it was found, but the label fits loosely. Thomas has no creation myth, no evil demiurge, no elaborate hierarchy of aeons — the machinery that defines developed gnostic systems. What it does have is salvation through knowledge, particularly self-knowledge, and a suspicion of the material world. Many scholars now prefer to describe it as a wisdom text with mystical leanings.

One hundred and fourteen, plus a short prologue. The numbering is a modern editorial convention introduced when the text was first published; the manuscript itself simply runs the sayings together, most of them opening with the words "Jesus said".

Its central claim is that the kingdom of God is not a future event or a distant place but a present reality that most people fail to see — "spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it" (saying 113). Salvation comes through recognising your own origin in the light, and through overcoming division: between inner and outer, above and below, male and female. Whoever understands the sayings, the text promises in saying 1, will not taste death.

Substantially. Roughly half its sayings have a parallel somewhere in Matthew, Mark or Luke — the sower, the mustard seed, the great banquet, the wicked tenants, the lost sheep and many more. The remainder, including the parables of the jar of meal and the assassin, are found nowhere else.

It is a genuine early Christian document and a serious source for the study of the Jesus tradition, but it is not a biography and makes no attempt to be one. Its value to historians lies in preserving sayings independently of the canonical gospels, which lets scholars compare wordings and test how the tradition developed. Whether any given saying goes back to the historical Jesus is judged case by case, exactly as it is for Matthew, Mark and Luke.