Gospel of Thomas

Gospel of Thomas, apocryphal (noncanonical) gospel containing 114 sayings attributed to the resurrected Jesus, written in the mid-2nd century. Traditionally ascribed to St. Thomas the Apostle, the Gospel of Thomas does not include any extended mythic narrative and consists entirely of a series of secret sayings ascribed to Jesus, several of which have close parallels in the New Testament Gospels. Although scholars are divided on the issue, some contend that certain elements of the Gospel of Thomas are among the oldest witnesses to Jesus’ words.

The Gospel of Thomas is grounded in gnosticism, the philosophical and religious movement of the 2nd century ce that stressed the redemptive power of esoteric knowledge acquired by divine revelation. Indeed, warnings against it as heretical were made by the Church Fathers in the 2nd–4th century. For the author, salvation consists of self-knowledge, and baptism results in restoration to the primordial state—man and woman in one person, like Adam before the creation of Eve (saying 23). Spiritual reversion to that state meant that nakedness need not result in shame. One passage (saying 37) allows it to be suspected that the early Christian followers of the Gospel of Thomas took off their garments and trampled on them as part of their baptismal initiation.

There are a few connections between this worldview and that of St. Paul and the Gospel According to John, but the overall theology of the Gospel of Thomas is so far removed from the teaching of Jesus as found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—in which Jewish eschatology is central—that it is not considered a major source for the study of Jesus. It is, of course, possible or even likely that individual sayings in Thomas or other apocryphal gospels originated with Jesus, but it is unlikely that it can contribute much to the portrait of the historical Jesus.

The Gospel of Thomas is known to have existed in Greek but, like almost the entire vast literature of gnosticism, was long believed to have perished with the exception of a few fragments. In 1945, however, it was rediscovered in a Coptic gnostic library near Najʿ Ḥammādī, Egypt, on the Nile about 125 km (78 miles) northwest of Luxor. The remarkable Najʿ Ḥammādī library also housed 13 codices containing Christian gnostic treatises in Coptic translations and thus richly supplemented modern scholarship.