Gospel of Thomas

It opens by announcing that these are the hidden words the living Jesus spoke, written down by Didymos Judas Thomas, and that whoever finds their interpretation will not taste death. What follows is a list. There is no birth, no baptism, no miracles, no journey to Jerusalem, no arrest, no cross, no empty tomb. Sayings are introduced by little more than "Jesus said", occasionally with a disciple's question to prompt them, and they are not arranged by theme or by any evident argument.

About half have recognisable synoptic parallels: the sower, the mustard seed, the wicked tenants, the pearl of great price, the lost sheep, the blind leading the blind, a prophet without honour. Some sit very close to the canonical wording; others are shorter and lack the allegorical explanations that Matthew and Mark attach. A second group is unique, and includes two parables of loss that nobody else records, the woman whose jar of meal empties through a crack on the road, and the man who tests his strength by driving a sword through his own wall before killing.

The theology is a theology of recognition rather than of atonement. The kingdom is not chiefly future; it is spread out on the earth and people do not see it. Salvation comes through understanding the sayings and knowing where one came from, and the reader who finds the interpretation escapes death. Saying 77 is the clearest statement of the underlying idea: Jesus identifies himself as the light over all things, from whom all came and to whom all returns, and then says that he is present in the split log and under the lifted stone. In the Greek of P.Oxy. 1 that second half stands attached to a different saying, one of several signs that the collection's contents circulated in more than one order.

The final saying, 114, has Peter demand that Mary leave the group because women are not worthy of life, and Jesus reply that he will lead her so as to make her male, since every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom. It is the most discussed line in the book, and it reads oddly against sayings elsewhere that dissolve the male and female distinction rather than resolving it in one direction.

The Coptic text is one tractate in Nag Hammadi Codex II, part of the jar of thirteen codices found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945; the manuscript is of about the middle of the fourth century, and its Coptic translates a Greek original. Three Greek fragments had already been found at Oxyrhynchus: P.Oxy. 654, 1 and 655, recovered between 1897 and 1904 and published promptly by Grenfell and Hunt as unidentified sayings of Jesus. They are dated roughly between 130 and 250. Only after 1945 could they be matched to the Coptic and recognised as three separate copies of the same work, which is itself evidence that the book circulated widely in Egypt.

The dating question is the substance of the dispute, and it is not a matter of scholars hedging. One position holds that the collection, or a core of it, was assembled in the first century and draws on sayings traditions independent of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and that its shorter and less allegorised parables are sometimes closer to what was said than the canonical versions. Helmut Koester, Stephen Patterson, John Dominic Crossan and, for an early stratum with later additions, April DeConick argue in that direction. The opposing position holds that the parallels show knowledge of the finished gospels, including their distinctive editorial wording, and dates composition to the second century. Simon Gathercole, Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin argue this, Perrin on the further ground that the sayings order reflects catchword links in Syriac and so depends on Tatian's second-century gospel harmony.

The evidence genuinely cuts both ways, because a collection can preserve old material and still have been compiled late, and the two questions are routinely conflated. What can be said without controversy is that the Greek fragments put copies in circulation in Egypt by the late second century, that the three copies differ from each other and from the Coptic, and that the text was not fixed.

It is habitually called Gnostic, largely because it was found in the Nag Hammadi library alongside texts that plainly are. On its own contents the label sits badly. There is no demiurge, no fall of Sophia, no hierarchy of aeons, no cosmogony in which the material world is the botched work of an inferior maker, and no myth of any kind. What it has is a strong emphasis on hidden meaning, self-knowledge and the light within, which is compatible with second-century Gnostic systems but is not peculiar to them.

The wider problem is that Gnosticism has itself come under sustained attack as a category. Michael Williams argued in 1996 that it lumps together movements with little in common, and Karen King argued in 2003 that it was largely constructed by heresiologists and then inherited uncritically by modern scholarship. Whatever one makes of those arguments, applying the term to this text tells a reader less than describing what the text actually says.

Its relationship to Q, the hypothetical sayings source behind material shared by Matthew and Luke, is often stated too strongly. There is no literary dependence in either direction, and Thomas is not Q. The significance is generic: before 1945 the reconstruction of Q required believing in a kind of book of which no example survived, a collection of Jesus sayings with no passion narrative. Thomas is such a book, which made the hypothesis materially plausible. Koester pressed the further point that Thomas lacks the apocalyptic Son of Man sayings that Q contains, and drew conclusions about early Christian diversity that not everyone follows.

No church has ever treated it as scripture, and it appears in no canon, East or West. Its modern standing is scholarly and popular rather than liturgical: the Jesus Seminar printed it as a fifth gospel and voted on its sayings alongside the canonical four, and it is read widely outside any church by people who find in it a Jesus who teaches rather than dies. Both the scholarly use and the popular one should be described for what they are, and neither should be mistaken for a community holding it authoritative.