Saying 42: Be Passers-By
Be passers-by.
Commentary
The shortest saying in the book and among the most discussed. It has been read as a call to itinerancy, to detachment from the world, and — via a possible Semitic idiom — as “be transients”, people who do not settle anywhere.
Parallels
This saying has no close parallel in the canonical gospels. Roughly half of the Gospel of Thomas is material of this kind, found nowhere else in the early Christian record.
Sayings on the same themes
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