The Acts open at a wedding in the city of Andrapolis, and its first miracle is not a healing but a persuasion. Jesus, in the appearance of Thomas, comes to the bridal chamber that night and tells the couple that if they give up the act of marriage for a life of holiness, they will be freed from the cares of children and from bodily corruption. The bride and groom agree before the marriage is consummated, and the king is furious to learn his daughter now refuses her own wedding night. The scene sets the tone for the whole work, an encratite theology in which continence, not martyrdom, is the highest imitation of Christ, argued in a text that ends with an actual martyrdom.
The confusion of Jesus with Thomas at that bedside is not incidental. Elsewhere in the Acts the text calls Thomas the twin, and more than one episode trades on people mistaking the two men, appearing at the same time in different places or standing in for each other. Read alongside the Gospel of Thomas's own opening line, attributing its sayings to "Didymos Judas Thomas," Didymos itself meaning twin, the identification looks less like an isolated flourish and more like a settled idea across the wider body of literature gathered under Thomas's name.
None of this recommended the work to the wider church. The Decretum Gelasianum names it directly among the writings not to be received, and its ascetic sexual ethic, treating ordinary marriage as an obstacle to holiness rather than a permitted good, put it further outside the mainstream than its miracle stories alone would have.