Gospel of Thomas

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Gospel of Thomas
Thomasines were an early Christian sect that believed that all human beings were born with a divine competent and Jesus taught us how to rediscover our divine self with an emphasis on faith rather than following laws. The Thomasines are believed to have been ascetics who explored esoteric ideas, were open to women’s participation, rejected hierarchal structures and allowed personal expression.

The Thomasines primary text was the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus written in Coptic and found at Nag Hammadi. Some scholars consider it to be the 5th Gospel. Many of the sayings are similar to those in the Gospels but some have a more introspective twist and advocate seeking self-knowledge rather than finding answers through Jesus and Christian doctrine. Many Thomasines are believed to have been former Gnostics who were attracted to Thomas’s teachings because there were more democratic and less elitist.

The Gospel of Thomas does not tell the story of the life and death of Jesus, but offers the reader his “secret teachings” or "secret sayings" about the Kingdom of God. The "secret sayings" is a list of 114 of Jesus’s sayings, most introduced by "Jesus said...." Some of which are familiar to readers of the New Testament. Others are puzzling and strange. This gospel begins with the scribal note in the margin, "The Gospel According to Thomas." And the first sentence of that document says, "These are the secret words which the living Jesus taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote down."

Marilyn Mellowes of PBS wrote: “The Nag Hammadi Library, contained a complete manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas. A fragment of this gospel, written in Greek, had been found earlier at Oxyrynchos in Egypt. But it was only a fragment. The text found at Nag Hammadi, although complete, was written in Coptic, which was the form of the Egyptian language in use during later Roman imperial times. On the basis of this text, however, scholars were able to reconstruct the Gospel of Thomas in Greek, the original language of its composition. By this means, they were able to compare its contents with those of writings found in the New Testament. [Source: Marilyn Mellowes, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“The Gospel of Thomas is very different from the gospels that have become part of the New Testament. It contains no narrative material, nor is there any story of the birth, the life, or the death of Jesus. It consists only of sayings, 114 in all, each preceded by the phrase, "And Jesus said." The collected sayings of the Gospel of Thomas are designated by its author as "the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke."

“Some of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas are very much like those found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, for example:"Jesus said, 'Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my mastery is gentle, and you will find repose.'" (90) But others are puzzling: "Jesus said, 'Become passers by.'" (42). According to this author, salvation is achieved in the recognition of one's origin (the light) and one's destiny (the repose). And in order to return to his or her origin, the disciplemust separate from the world by "stripping off" the garment of flesh and "passing by" corruptible human existence.

“For New Testament scholars, one of the most interesting things about this gospel is that its author (who calls himself Didymos Judas Thomas) appears to have used sayings from the same collection used by Matthew and Luke. But for this author and his community, the meaning of these sayings was clearly very different. The Gospel of Thomas, therefore, provided exciting new evidence for the existence of an earlier collection of sayings used by a variety of Christian communities.”

Websites and Resources: Early Christianity: PBS Frontline, From Jesus to Christ, The First Christians pbs.org ; Elaine Pagels website elaine-pagels.com ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com ; Gnostic Society Library gnosis.org ; Guide to Early Church Documents iclnet.org; Early Christian Writing earlychristianwritings.com ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Christianity BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Candida Moss at the Daily Beast Daily Beast; Christian Classics Ethereal Library www.ccel.org ; Bible: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks; Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Book: “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Page (Random House, 2003)

Insights Into the Gospel of Thomas

Man of Sorrows by Andrea Mantegna

Professor Elaine H. Pagels told PBS: “This book opens with the lines, "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down." Then there follows a list of the sayings of Jesus. Now this raises all kinds of questions. Did Jesus have a twin brother? Actually the name Thomas Didymos — well, Thomas is Hebrew for twin. Didymos is Greek for twin.... The implication here is that he is Jesus' twin. But this character, of course, also appears in the Gospel of John, he's one of the disciples, the twin. Here he appears as if he's Jesus' twin, and he is one who knows secret teaching, which Jesus hasn't given to all other people. Some of these sayings are familiar. We know them from Matthew and Luke - Jesus said, "I have come to cast fire on the earth." Or "Behold, a sower went out to sow," and so forth.... Others are as strange and compelling as Zen koans. My favorite of these is saying number 70, which says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." The gospel opens as Jesus invites people to see.... [Source: Elaine H. Pagels, The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“The Gospel of Thomas also suggests that Jesus is aware of, and criticizing the views of the Kingdom of God as a time or a place that appear in the other gospels. Here Jesus says, "If those who lead you say to you, 'look, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds will get there first. If they say 'it's in the ocean,' then the fish will get there first. But the Kingdom of God is within you and outside of you. Once you come to know yourselves, you will become known. And you will know that it is you who are the children of the living father."

“In this gospel, and this is also the case in the Gospel of Luke, the Kingdom of God is not an event that's going to be catastrophically shattering the world as we know it and ushering in a new millennium. Here, as in Luke 17:20, the Kingdom of God is said to be an interior state; "It's within you," Luke says. And here it says, "It's inside you but it's also outside of you." It's like a state of consciousness. It's hard to describe. But the Kingdom of God here is something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means knowledge. But itdoesn't mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like "I know that person, or do you know so and so." So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you could call it insight. It's a question of knowing who you really are, not at the ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But knowing yourself at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.

Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

Professor Elaine H. Pagels told PBS: “The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas does appear rather different from the Jesus we encounter in the others. Because the Gospel of Mark, for example, depicts Jesus as an utterly unique being. This is the good news of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. The Gospel of John says that Jesus isn't even a human being at all, but he's a divine presence who comes down to heaven in human shape.... The Gospel of John says, "God sent his son into the world to save the world." If you believe in him, you're saved, if you don't believe in him you're already damned, because you haven't believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. [Source: Elaine H. Pagels, The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“Now, [in the Gospel of Thomas], this Jesus comes to reveal that you and he are, if you like, twins.... And what you discover as you read the Gospel of Thomas, which you're meant to discover, is that you and Jesus at a deep level are identical twins. And that you discover that you are the child of God just as he is. And so that at the end of the gospel Jesus speaks to Thomas and says, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I will become that person, and the mysteries will be revealed to him." Here, Jesus does not take the role of authority and teacher.

In the Gospel of Thomas, the disciples say to Jesus, "Tell us, what do you want us to do? How shall we pray? What shall we eat? How shall we fast?" Now if you look at Matthew and Luke, Jesus answers the questions. He says, "When you pray, say, 'Our Father who are in Heaven, hallowed be...' When you fast, wash your face, don't make a show of it. When you give alms do it privately and without being showy." In this gospel, this Jesus does not answer. He says, "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for everything is known before heaven." Now this answer throws you and me upon ourselves.... Here Jesus, in effect, turns one toward oneself, and that is really one of the themes of the Gospel of Thomas, that you must go in a sort of a spiritual quest of your own to discover who you are, and to discover really that you are the child of God just like Jesus.”

Know Thyself: A Central Theme in the Gospel of Thomas

Professor Helmut Koester told PBS: Some of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas “have parallels in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Some of these have not. Some of these sayings may go back to a very early period of Christianity, some of them may have been added later. The document itself comes from the fourth century.... As with all gospel text, with this one in particular, we have to remember that these texts were fluid, that scribes could add, that scribes could leave out things, that scribes could add comments, or add an interpretation. So we cannot with certainty reconstruct what did the Gospel of Thomas look like around the year 100 or earlier. But it is very likely that it existed at that time, and that a good deal of the material that's now in that manuscript was already in a Greek manuscript that dates back to the first century. Which of course, is very exciting because here we have a collection of sayings of Jesus, additional sayings of Jesus, that were not known before, and the whole beginning of a new field of studies has opened up.... [Source: Helmut Koester, John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History Harvard Divinity School, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Roman mosaic: Know Thyself

“Now what is typical about these sayings is that in each instance, these sayings want to say that if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have to recognize yourself. You have to know yourself, know who you are. It begins with a saying about the Kingdom of God, "if you seek the Kingdom of God in the sky then the birds will precede you. And if you seek it in the sea, then the fish will precede you, but the Kingdom is in you. And if you know yourself then you know the Kingdom of God." (The Kingdom of the Father, in fact, it always says in the gospel of Thomas. Normally the Kingdom of the Father, not the Kingdom of God.) "But if you don't know yourself, you live in poverty." And poverty is understood as the ignorance of a life in its physical existence. Knowledge is understood to be the knowledge of one's divine origin, of the fact that one has come from the Kingdom. That we are on this earth only in a sojourn....

“What does it mean really to know oneself? To know oneself is to have insight into one's own ultimate divine identity. You can go back to understand this to Greek models, which certainly exist. "Know yourself" is a very old Greek maxim... that is, you have to know that your own soul is divine, and then you know that you are immortal, whereas the body is the mortal part of human existence. Now this is radicalized in the Gospel of Thomas into saying that everything that is experienced physically and through sense perception, everything in this world that you can perceive in this way is nothing. It is, at best, chaos and, at worst, it doesn't even exist in reality. The only thing that really exists is your divine spirit or your divine soul, which is identical in its quality with God himself. And Jesus is the one who teaches that....

“[When one truly knows oneself], one understands that one is divine, but also one understands that one is mortal. In such a way, you recognize that this mortality is really meaningless, as physical existence is meaningless. And therefore, death is no longer a problem, but death is a solution, because in death finally all this mortality will fall away, and the true self will be liberated to an independent existence that's no longer dependent on physical existence. And on everything that goes with physical existence, sickness and poverty and so on. And so physical existence is often described as poverty. But when you know yourself you are no longer in poverty.

Beginning of the Gospel of Thomas

Nag Hammadi Codex II, End of Apocryphon John and the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas begins: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded. 1) And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death." 2) Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will rule over all." [Source: Translated by Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, from “The Complete Gospels” (3rd edition), edited by Robert J. Miller (Polebridge Press).

“3) Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) imperial rule 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 (Father's) imperial rule is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

“4) Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live. For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one." 5) Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed." 6) His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?" Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."

“7 Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human." 8) And he said, The human one is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen! 9) Jesus said, Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them). Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.

10) Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I'm guarding it until it blazes." 11) Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?" 12) The disciples said to Jesus, "We know that you are going to leave us. Who will be our leader?" Jesus said to them, "No matter where you are you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being."

Gospel of Thomas Excerpts

Gospel of Thomas Excerpts 13 Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I am like."
Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a just angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."
Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
Jesus said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."
And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.
When Thomas came back to his friends they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"
Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you."

14 Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits. When you go into any region and walk about in the countryside, when people take you in, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them. After all, what goes into your mouth won't defile you; what comes out of your mouth will."

16 Jesus said, "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: there'll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone.

Gospel of Peter

Gospel of Peter

Carl A. Volz wrote: The Gospel of Peter “was referred to by the early church fathers, and was quoted by the Bishop of Antioch in c.190, by Origen the historian of the early church c.250, and by Eusebius c.300. In the work "Religious Histories" (Theodoret, c.450) we are told that this was used by the Nazorenes (descendants of the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, led by descendants of the brothers of Jesus, living in Trans-Jordan after the Jewish Revolt of 66 ad.) New Testament scholars have long known that this work once existed, and that it appears to have been influential in the early church. [Source: Carl A. Volz, late professor of church history at Luther Seminary, web.archive.org, martin.luthersem.edu /~]

“According to Justin Martyr, this document was highly favored by many communities in the second century. It has been concluded by a few notable New Testament scholars that this was held in higher and more universal esteem that Mark and John, though this is of course debatable. How it was "lost" and why it was never included in the Canon remains a mystery, but this fragment is now available for the consideration of studious Christians today. /~\

The translation below “was made from the text of a fragmentary papyrus codex unearthed by the French Archaeological Mission in 1886 in the ancient city of Panopolis (modern Akhmim) in Northern Egypt. This codex was found in a grave of unknown antiquity, in which a monk had been interred. This narrative agrees in substance with the Canonical gospels, although it differs in some important details, and fills in some gaps in the Synoptic narrative. It also offers a few observations which lend a sense of imtimacy. /~\

Was the Gospel of Thomas Written by Jesus’s Twin.

As said before the Gospel of Thomas begins with the lines “These are the secret words that the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote them down.” Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: The Gospel of Thomas almost beats you over the head with the twinning language: the apostle is called Didymus Judas Thomas and both Didymus and Thomas mean twin in Greek and Aramaic, respectively. In other words, Jesus is calling him twin-twin. The scribe’s actual name is Jude but the scene envisions Jesus dictating special revelations to his “twin.” [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, February 07, 2021]

The language of twinship isn’t just found in this “lost” Christian text. Charles Stang, a Professor of Early Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School, told The Daily Beast that “The Gospel of John refers to the apostle Thomas as ‘the Twin’ (didymos) three times (11:16, 20:24, and 21:2) but never explains what exactly Jesus means.” According to Stang, some early Christians understood this to mean that Thomas was one of Jesus’ brothers and “for reasons that are not known, they landed on Jesus’ brother Judas” (this is not Judas Iscariot, the guy that betrayed Jesus).

While orthodox Christians deny that Jesus had any siblings at all, much less a twin, there was an ancient form of Christianity, known as Thomasine Christianity, which believed that Judas Thomas had a special relationship with Jesus. Just as Christians based in Rome might identify with the Apostle Peter, these Christians, who were largely based in the Middle East, traced their origins back to Thomas. There are a cluster of texts attributed to this Judas Thomas the Twin including the Gospel of Thomas and another text known as the Book of Thomas the Contender. A third text, the apocryphal Acts of Thomas tells the story of Thomas’s missionary activities after the resurrection. Thomas is sold into slavery by Jesus (and you thought your siblings treated you badly) and uses his skills as a carpenter as he travels East as far as India.

But was Judas Thomas Jesus’s biological twin from whom we could derive Da Vinci Code style genetic material, identify family members, and even create clones? No, this isn’t sci-fi. But the truth is that the divine twin is about something much more significant. “It seems to me,” said Stang, “that this is not about a literal, physical twin, but the name of some sort of special spiritual relationship between Jesus and Thomas.” If you’re rolling your eyes at the idea of a ‘special relationship with Jesus,’ then fingers off your cursors. The Gospel of Thomas, Stang argues, is about something more esoteric than you might find in church.

In his book Our Divine Double, Stang argues that the notion of Judas Thomas as Jesus’s twin is a reference to a deeper philosophical concept, that of the divine double. The divine double is the idea that as individuals our “selves” are not all that we are. There is another divine self, a double, if you will, that never descends from the transcendent realm into the material human one but that we can discover, if we try. There are a variety of different ways to describe this “double” we might call it a twin, companion, or alter-ego.

Image Sources: Wikimedia, Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); King James Version of the Bible, gutenberg.org; New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org , Frontline, PBS, Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024