Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is an early Christian text with strong parallels to the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, while the New Testament Gospels contain both sayings of Jesus and narratives of his life, the Gospel of Thomas is simply a collection of 114 sayings, most of which are introduced by the phrase “Jesus said.” Written largely without narrative, the Gospel of Thomas is the only surviving example of one of the oldest forms of Christian literature, namely, the sayings collection. Its discovery was important for the field of Christian studies because it proved that such a sayings collection was used in early Christian circles. Many scholars had posited for years that an unrecovered sayings Gospel, referred to as Q, was one of the two main sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, another sayings Gospel, lent credibility to the argument for Q and also helped demonstrate the many forms of early Christianity that existed in the ancient world.

Scholars had long known of the Gospel of Thomas, but the Gospel itself remained lost until the 20th century. In 1945, a copy of the Gospel of Thomas was found in a collection of fourth-century CE texts buried in a fifth-century jar near the city of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. The jar contained 45 texts written in Coptic, a form of the Egyptian language written with Greek and Demotic characters. Many of these documents were early Christian texts with a distinctly Gnostic flavor. Like most of the texts, the Gospel of Thomas was a Coptic copy of an earlier Greek text original written by at least the second century CE, most likely in Syria. The Gospel claims to be written by Didymos Judas Thomas; the first line reads, “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote.” Both Didymos and Thomas mean “twin,” however, so the document is claiming to be written by Judas “the twin,” possibly referring to Jesus' brother Judas (mentioned in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55).

Although it is not a true Gnostic text, the wisdom sayings, parables, and prophecies preserved in the Gospel of Thomas place a strong emphasis on knowledge similar to that found in Gnostic literature. According to the Gospel of Thomas, “The Kingdom of the Father” can be found by gaining knowledge (gnosis) of one's own self through the sayings of Jesus. This emphasis on knowledge rather than faith as the basis of salvation became an integral aspect of Christian Gnostic literature, exemplified in texts such as the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary.