From the GGU Library: The Gospel of Thomas

Two millennia old and right on time

May 20, 2025

Hello, friends —

Here’s a deep dive into one of my favorite texts to quote on the show. I hope you read, enjoy, and share this essay with friends as well as your thoughts on the subject with me!

Love to all, Tom

The Gospel of Thomas

Before I get into the particulars of this extraordinary apocryphal (that is to say, non-canonical) document, I sincerely encourage you to read it in its entirety (as translated by Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer1).

The Provenance of a Non-Canonical Text

Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas (hereafter referred to as GTh), known as Logia Iesu, had already been found in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of early Christian manuscripts — before a complete Coptic version was discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of Gnostic scriptures hidden away in Egypt because they were not considered part of the emerging orthodox Christian canon. Mostly because it was found among their number, Thomas is often considered a proto-Gnostic text2.

Regardless, Thomas was on the canonical outs by the third century. The earliest attestation to the GTh is a condemnation written by Hippolytus Romanus in The Refutation of All Heresies:

But [the Naasseni] assert that not only is there in favour of their doctrine, testimony to be drawn from the mysteries of the Assyrians, but also from those of the Phrygians concerning the happy nature — concealed, and yet at the same time disclosed — of things that have been, and are coming into existence, and moreover will be — (a happy nature) which, (the Naassene) says, is the kingdom of heaven to be sought for within a man. And concerning this (nature) they hand down an explicit passage, occurring in the Gospel inscribed according to Thomas, expressing themselves thus:
He who seeks me, will find me in children from seven years old; for there concealed, I shall in the fourteenth age be made manifest.
This, however, is not (the teaching) of Christ, but of Hippocrates, who uses these words:
A child of seven years is half of a father.
And so it is that these (heretics), placing the originative nature of the universe in causative seed, (and) having ascertained the (aphorism) of Hippocrates, that a child of seven years old is half of a father, say that in fourteen years, according to Thomas, he is manifested. This, with them, is the ineffable and mystical Logos.

Obviously, this quote differs significantly from the GTh text provided above, but it’s impossible to know if Hippolytus was distorting Thomas for effect or simply had access to a lost version. As with all early Christian writings, there were multiple versions of Thomas in languages ranging from Coptic, Syriac, and Greek. There’s also evidence that some material from the GTh was added at a later date.

There are several extraordinary things about the GTh. First, it differs from the synoptic gospels because it’s a collection of sayings (logia is Greek for “sayings”; logion is the singular) rather than a narrative account of Christ’s life. It also likely appeared very early in the Christian tradition — early enough to have been briefly considered to be the so-called “Q source” (an as-yet-undiscovered, theoretical logia which all four canonical gospels drew from). Because Thomas is a sayings gospel (less fleshed out and therefore likely earlier than narrative gospels), many scholars believe Thomas could have been written as early as 60 AD, which would have made it more or less a contemporary of Paul’s writings. (It’s interesting to note that, of the two-thirds of GTh logia which are also found in the canon, some are more “primitive” — that is, longer and less cleaned up — than their Synoptic counterparts. Details like this suggest earlier authorship.)

Other scholars place the origin of GTh in the second century (around the year 130), because they believe it to be dependent on the canon rather than the other way around. The debate rages on.

Jesus the Blasphemer

The roughly one-third of Thomas which does not correspond to canon contains some startling, if not subversive, differences. In the GTh, the apostle Thomas is unable compare Jesus to anything, thus operating from a place of faith rather than certainty — making him eligible for gnosis, or secret knowledge. Compare this characterization to the hyper-materialistic Thomas of the Gospel of John:

But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
The other disciples therefore said unto him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said unto them, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace be unto you.”
Then saith he to Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.”
And Thomas answered and said unto him, “My Lord and my God.”
Jesus saith unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

I’ve always found it weird that this Thomas gets called out for requiring proof of his senses, when the other apostles believed Christ had risen because they’d already freakin’ seen him!

In logion 77, Christ says, “Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” To me, this implies a kind of panpsychism — the view that all things have a mind; that the entire universe is conscious. You might believe Jesus is singling himself out here as the one and only divine intercessor, if you hadn’t already read logion 13:

Jesus said, "I am not your [singular, to Thomas] 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."

First-century Jewish law prescribed death by stoning for blasphemy (the term was birkat hashem — the disrespect or desecration of the divine name or sacred things). From Leviticus:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
^“Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.
And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin.
And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.”

Therefore, we can conclude that what Christ told Thomas in secret would have been considered blasphemous by his observant Jewish apostles. In my opinion, one of the things he said was, in so many words: “I am God and so are you.”3

The Kingdom Within You

Logia 3 & 113 are also significant, because they clearly assert that the kingdom of heaven is not a post-death spiritual experience, but rather a potential internal and external reality available right here and now:

Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom 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) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"
"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

And the thing necessary to attain the kingdom, according to the Christ of the Gospel of Thomas, is not to believe in him as messiah and savior; it is to know yourself and therefore be aware of your own potential:

“Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking.”
“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.”

Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels also sees Thomas as a rejection of materialism and ignorance. “Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God,” she wrote in her book The Gnostic Gospels. “This is the secret of gnosis.”4

Therefore, the You inside of you — what Mal calls The Witness and I term The Observer — is imminent and knowable. This sheds light on one of the GTh’s more enigmatic admonitions: “Be passersby.” I believe this to be consistent with the Buddhist doctrine of detachment.

My takeaway is that the Jesus of Thomas has become Christ in much the same way that Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, and is telling his disciples that the same is available to them. It’s little surprise, then, that it begins by calling these the “secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke.” By the third century, Christian canon had crystalized around the idea that Christ was the only pathway to salvation and that the only choice for the rest of us — mere mortals preemptively condemned by original sin — is to either believe, or perish.

Dualism and the Principle of Polarity

Speaking of the “living” Jesus, there are constant distinctions throughout the GTh made between living things and dead things5:

"Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."
"Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy."
“The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.”

In fact, the GTh is shot through with duality: hidden/disclosed; soul/body; living/dead; knowledge/ignorance; male/female (yeah, logion 114 is an odd one!). There’s another example that’s not immediately apparent, though — in many early Christian accounts, Didymos Judas Thomas was Jesus’ twin brother!

It starts with the name. “Thomas” is the Aramaic word (תְּאוֹמָא) for twin, just as “Didymos” is in Greek (Δίδυμος). Moreover, Mark 6:3 identifies Jesus’ twin as Juda; a name which also belongs to our putative author.

Another Nag Hammadi text is explicit about Thomas being a twin. The Book of Thomas the Contender Writing to the Perfect is a Gnostic revelation dialogue between Jesus and Thomas, likely composed in the early third century. In it, Jesus lays it all out from the jump:

The savior said, "Brother Thomas while you have time in the world, listen to me, and I will reveal to you the things you have pondered in your mind.
Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. Since you will be called my brother, it is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself. And I know that you have understood, because you had already understood that I am the knowledge of the truth. So while you accompany me, although you are uncomprehending, you have (in fact) already come to know, and you will be called 'the one who knows himself'. For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all. So then, you, my brother Thomas, have beheld what is obscure to men, that is, what they ignorantly stumble against."

It’s the very idea that Jesus and Thomas were twins which explains — at least to me — why Thomas was chosen as the narrator of the GTh. To explain, I’ll need to quote another book from the GGU Library, The Kybalion6 — specifically, its Fourth Great Hermetic Principle of Polarity:

Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.

Once you reject the exclusionary binary of absolutes and accept the principle of polarity, you can get down to the business of transmuting mental states: evil can become good; hate can become love; that which is hidden can be revealed; negative can turn positive; poverty can become gnosis. The fact that Thomas and Jesus are twins is a primary example of two things (in this case, persons) identical in nature but different in degree, and therefore of the transformative potential of not only this gospel, but your very essence.

The Gospel of Thomas, then, is the good news of self-knowledge, empowerment, human potential, rejection of the purely material, participation in the present moment, and reconciliation of apparent opposites. It’s about persisting in the perfect, even as the imperfect passes away.

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