The Gospel According to Thomas

which, like the four that did get included in the "New Testament" (isn't it time that Christians dropped that Judaic-negative descriptor, and started calling it "The Christian Bible"?), generally has the "according to" dropped, and is known much more emphatically as "The Gospel of Thomas", a point I make only because it demonstrates how close to acceptance this must have come, before being rejected, but nonetheless remaining as by far the best-preserved of the early Christian collections outside the Canonical Gospels.

The manuscript was discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in December 1945. Alongside this "Gospel of Thomas", fifty-one other works were unearthed, including an excerpt from Plato's Republic, and a work claiming to be "The Gospel of Philip".

Why these manuscripts were buried, and why here, is an invitation to a short story, and one can easily imagine Jorge Luis Borges or Robert Louis Stevenson doing something profound and interesting but unread with it, or Dan Brown doing something entirely pointless and uninteresting, but widely read.

The tale told by the scholars is one of censorship and the destruction of non-conformist texts, a burying-in-sand rather than a burning-in-flames, which may have been a lack of fuel, or hopefully a moment of doubt: books consigned to the flames will never be recovered, while those buried in the sand can turn up a thousand years later, partially preserved, like these. The Inquisitor on this occasion was Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, whose episcopate lasted an astonishing forty-five years (circa June 8th 328 – May 2nd 373; I am not sure why these are rendered as "circa", given how precise they are, but this is the way I have found them in my researches), seventeen of them in five different exiles ordered by four different Roman emperors (his enemies called him "the Black Dwarf" though he was neither dark-skinned now particularly short; his supporters got him made a Saint).

Athanasius did not bury the books himself; he simply sent a letter requiring it to be done, as the canon of approved literature was now in place, and these works were not on it. It is entirely possible that he intended flames.

Sahidic text of the Gospel of Thomas (more detail here)

Thomas' Gospel is not a single work, but an anthology of fragments. One of these, written in a Coptic language called Sahidic, contains one hundred and fourteen sayings attributed to Jesus. About half of these are variants upon sayings that can be found in the Canonical Gospels; the remainder are believed to come from the Gnostic tradition, and it was precisely because of its Gnosticism that Irenaeus declared it heretical, and Anastasius therefore had it removed.

The introduction states: "These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down." "Doubting Thomas" as he is also known; Didymus is the Greek equivalent of the Aramaic Thomas, and the name is understood to mean "twin". Unfortunately this is incorrect; Didymus does indeed mean "twin", in Greek, but Thomas is merely a Greekification of the Yehudit "shemesh", which means "sun", or it may have been a Greekification of the Phoenician Shimshon, who we English call Samson, and who was their sun-god; earlier still there is the Babylonian Tammuz, whose honour-month to this day is at the height of summer sun in the Jewish calendar.

Some scholars suspect that the reference to the Apostle Thomas is anyway false, and that the true author is in fact unknown; by contrast, the reference to Tammuz in this way is entirely likely, and probably intended as a "codename" for the benefit of those early Christians who were followers of the cult of the Risen Lord - remember that Tammuz worship was the reason for the existence of Bethlehem in the first place - Beit Lechem Ephratah in full, "the shrine of the corn-god of the Euphrates", which is Tammuz; and Ezekiel 8:14 confirms that Tammuz was still worshipped at the north gate of the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im, right there on Mount Mor-Yah, adjacent to Calvary, on the very spot where the original Tammuz was "crucified" - the threshing-floor of Ornah (or Ornan, or Araunah, the texts vary) which David purchased as the site of the future Temple (2 Samuel 24:15ff).

All of which becomes still more significant as the scholarly debate moves on to discuss whether or not this gospel is actually a Gnostic work, for which the only argument is that it was found in Egypt, alongside other Gnostic works. So was Plato's "Republic" found there, but no one considers that Gnostic. The cult of the Risen Lord, which had been suppressed for centuries by the Jews, but emerged when the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and Judaism ceased to have authority in Judaea, was not a theology as such, and by no means Gnostic. The answer, as always, must lie inside the text itself.

At no point does "The Gospel of Thomas" claim that Jesus was divine; scholars have also pointed out that the text doesn't say that he wasn't either, and conclude, quite rightly, that this absence can neither prove nor disprove Gnosticism; however, the Christian scholars then continue, a sacred priest of the cult of the Risen Lord (a shorthand for followers of any of the many fertility cults: worshipers of Osher (Osiris), Attis, Tammuz, Adonis) would never have declared himself divine. When asked his identity in "The Gospel of Thomas", Jesus usually deflects, ambiguously asking the disciples why they do not see what is right in front of them - and again, a sacred priest of the Risen Lord could only have answered in this way, for in body he is merely human, but in his calling, and in the fact of being dedicated to the service of the shrine, he embodies the divine. Which is a perfectly valid Christian answer; but Jesus was also Jewish, and almost everything that he is recorded as saying is either a quote from Rabban Hillel, or a quote from scripture, so he could easily have answered, as YHVH did to Mosheh in Exodus 3:14, "EHEYEH ASHER EHEYEH", which means "I am whoever I am", and leave it to his listeners to determine whether he was being ironically irreverent or honest. The listeners to "The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit" would have known the answer to that - click on the link to find out why.

There are similar passages in the Canonical Gospels (John 12:16 and Luke 18:34 for example), from which it can be contended that Jesus in Galilee was a ministering priest of the Adonis version of the cult, Jesus in Bethany (Beit Anatot) of the Ba'al-Anat cult, Jesus in Yeru-Shala'im, as at his birth in Bethlehem (Beit Lechem Ephratah) of the Tammuz cult, and that three very different versions of the Risen Lord were brought together, and other traditions with them, such as the Eli-Yah (Elijah) and Elisha versions of the cult - in the writing of the various gospels. The fact that the text continuously refers to Jesus' sayings as "secret" and "mysterious" does not prove Gnosticism, but only the need for secrecy and mystery; as stated above, the Sanhedrin still ruled, and all forms of the Cult of the Risen Lord were anathema, persecuted mercilessly like Communism in America.

"The Gospel of Thomas" is very different in tone and structure from other "New Testament" apocrypha and the four Canonical Gospels. Unlike the Canonical Gospels, it does not offer a narrative account of the life of Jesus; instead, it consists of Logia (sayings) attributed to Jesus, sometimes stand-alone, sometimes embedded in short dialogues or parables. The text also contains a possible allusion to the death of Jesus in Logion 65 - the "Parable of the Wicked Tenants" - but makes no mention of the crucifixion, the resurrection, or a final Judgement Day; nor does it mention a messianic understanding of Jesus, all of which seem to confirm that this is neither the Judeo-Christian Messiah nor the Gnostic Adamas but, again, the Risen Lord.

After the Coptic version of the complete text was discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, scholars soon realised that three different Greek text fragments previously found at Oxyrhynchus, also in Egypt, were part of "The Gospel of Thomas". These papyrus fragments date between 130 and 250 CE. Prior to the Nag Hammadi library discovery, the sayings of Jesus found in Oxyrhynchus were known simply as "Logia Jesu".

Although it is still generally assumed that "The Gospel of Thomas" was first composed in Greek, there is growing evidence that the Coptic Nag Hammadi text is a translation from Syriac. The earliest surviving written references to "The Gospel of Thomas are found in the writings of Hippolytus of Rome (c. 222–235 CE) and Origen of Alexandria (c. 233). Hippolytus wrote in his "Refutation of All Heresies" that

"[The Naassenes] speak... of a nature which is both hidden and revealed at the same time and which they call the thought-for kingdom of heaven which is in a human being. They transmit a tradition concerning this in the Gospel entitled 'According to Thomas', which states expressly, 'The one who seeks me will find me in children of seven years and older, for there, hidden in the fourteenth aeon, I am revealed'." 

This is regarded by the scholars as being a reference to Logion 4 of Thomas, though actually the wording differs significantly. It also offers a significant allusion to the number 7, which is the sacred number of the sun-god in the cult of the Risen Lord, as it still is in the cult of Judaism, and the time-frame of the service of the High Priest (see Frazer's "The Golden Bough" for more detail of this), and the doubling to 14, which is reflected in Ya'akov's (Jacob's) two periods of service to the moon-god Lavan (Laban) as well as King David's priest-kingships at Chevron (Hebron) and Yeru-Shala'im, add further confirmation that this is neither a Judeo-Christian messianic, nor a Gnostic reincarnationist text.

Origen listed "The Gospel according to Thomas" as being among the heterodox apocryphal gospels known to him. In the 4th and 5th centuries. Various church fathers wrote that "The Gospel of Thomas" was highly valued by Mani, the founder of Manichaeism and supposed author of "The Gospel of Mani". Given his belief in the ever-dying ever-reincarnated Buddha and his sharing of the dualisms of Zoroastrianism, this should not surprise us; nor that he sent disciples to Egypt, establishing thereby the feasibility of this conjecture (and also the presence of a copy of Plato's "Republic": all Greek texts were lost when Julius Caesar ordered the burning down of the great Library of Alexandria; their survival in the world, later discovered by the Arabs of the epoch of Haroun al-Rashid, was due to the Manichaeans having made their own copies).

Amongst those 4th century church fathers was Cyril of Jerusalem, who mentioned a "Gospel of Thomas" twice in his Catechesis; actually, rather more than mentioned:

"The Manichæans also wrote a Gospel according to Thomas, which being tinctured with the fragrance of the evangelic title corrupts the souls of the simple sort... Let none read the Gospel according to Thomas: for it is the work not of one of the twelve Apostles, but of one of the three wicked disciples of Manes."

A suggestion then the Thomas Gospel may actually have been an attempt to surreptitiously filter Manichaean ideas into a Christianity that was only just beginning to decide which Jesus it wanted to believe in, what biography to accept, what teachings to ascribe, and what remainder to declare heretical and anathematise. Alas for them, the endeavour failed.

The 5th century "Decretum Gelasianum", whose final chapter is an inventory of prohibited works, includes "A Gospel attributed to Thomas which the Manichaeans use" - my link to the text is worth looking at for another reason besides this one: it provides one of the earliest Christian "contents pages" for the "Old Testament", not by any means the same as the "contents pages" of the Yehudit Tanach.

A full text of what remains of "The Gospel According to Thomas" can be found here, or here, as you prefer.


It is not to be confused with "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas", which is an entirely different text.

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