The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated & Explained

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To Sally Augusta Watkins Davies

The Gospel of Thomas:

Annotated & Explained

2009 Quality Paperback Edition, Seventh Printing

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© 2002 by Stevan Davies

Foreword © 2002 by Andrew Harvey

Photo on page vi courtesy of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davies, Stevan L., 1948–

The Gospel of Thomas : annotated & explained / translation & annotation by Stevan Davies ; foreword by Andrew Harvey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-893361-45-4 (quality pbk.)

ISBN-10: 1-893361-45-4 (quality pbk.)

1. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel)—Commentaries. I. Gospel of Thomas (Coptic Gospel). English. II. Title.

BS2860.T5 A3 2002

229'.8—dc21

2002005765

10 9 8 7

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Title page of the original Coptic Gospel of Thomas.

Contents

Preface

Foreword by Andrew Harvey

About the Gospel of Thomas

Introduction

Cast of Characters

Sayings of the Gospel of Thomas

Suggested Readings and Resources

About SkyLight Paths

Copyright

Preface

When the Gospel of Thomas was first discovered it was considered of major importance only by specialist scholars of earliest Christianity’s history. Over the past half century, however, more and more people have come to discover Thomas and the teachings of Jesus it contains. It is entering the consciousness of wisdom seekers from all faiths—not the most conservative of them to be sure, but others—those who are open to the notion that Jesus may have communicated ideas not often found in the canonical scriptures.

An internal search for divine truth and reality is a new direction for Christianity, one existing outside the structures of denominational and evangelical religion. Instead of turning only to the canon, many people look toward alternative ancient scriptures that were left out of the canon. Both the shelves of local bookstores and our television listings testify to a growing demand for information about these other scriptures. Of those scriptures the Gospel of Thomas is certainly the most important for Thomas has a strong, historically supported claim that it contains a considerable number of Jesus’s authentic sayings. Those who possess an interest in mysticism will discover through Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel of Thomas that Jesus authorized this form of religion.

Instead of adopting the judicial view of Jesus as the God who judges in the Last Judgment, or the more liberal view of Jesus as a teacher of social justice, many people today are looking toward a more mystical pathway and seeking the discovery of divine secrets hidden within themselves and the world. To such people Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas, speaks quite clearly: Jesus said: ‘One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing’ (saying 67); Jesus said, ‘If your leaders say to you Look! The Kingdom is in the sky! Then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather, the Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you’ (saying 3a); They asked him: ‘When is the Kingdom coming?’ He replied, ‘It is not coming in an easily observable manner. People will not be saying, Look, it’s over here or Look, it’s over there. Rather, the Kingdom of the father is already spread out on the earth and people aren’t aware of it’ (saying 113). Such sayings, dismissed as worthless by conservative preachers and their scholars, appeal to people who follow the advice of Jesus given in Thomas’s saying 2: The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.

The Gospel of Thomas is a set of spiritual exercises, not a book about Jesus. The point of the Gospel of Thomas, announced in the very first saying, is to provide a set of sayings that are sufficiently obscure and challenging enough that the effort exerted to understand them will result in spiritual excellence. Through your effort to decipher their underlying meaning you can advance to the point where, it is hyperbolically said, Whoever finds the correct interpretation of these sayings will never die (saying 1).

In addition to increased public interest in alternative sources of the Jesus tradition, the enormous popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has spurred curiosity about the ancient non-canonical books. As most people know, The Da Vinci Code presents the theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and their union produced a daughter, Sara, whose lineage gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty of medieval France. Although historians find this theory ludicrous, those who take popular culture seriously find quite significant the extreme fascination engendered by these ideas. It appears that people hunger for a Jesus who falls in love and has a normal, human, sexual relationship. The notion, popular for a thousand years, that God loves virginity best has disappeared in the Christian religion; also disappearing is the image of a Jesus who lived his whole life a virgin.

Many people are eager to know more about Mary Magdalene, an intriguing historical personage, the woman who, apart from Jesus’s mother, is mentioned most prominently in the New Testament. Recently, several books have been published about the surviving fragments of the late-second-century text called Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Those fragments show Mary, with Jesus’s support, teaching the male disciples what Jesus had taught her; they also show Mary facing opposition as a woman teacher from the other disciples, especially Peter. In its final saying, 114, the Gospel of Thomas similarly shows Mary affirmed by Jesus and attacked by Peter. Thomas’s saying 21 may hint at the same social situation. Mary asks Jesus about his disciples, and he describes them as children who have stolen a field, which they will eventually be forced to return to its proper owners. That field may be an allegory for the Christian movement. Much of the Gospel of Thomas is critical of Jesus’s disciples insofar as it shows them repeatedly asking the wrong kinds of questions but nothing in Thomas’s Gospel is critical of Mary.

The Gospel of Thomas presents a vision of all human beings as potential children of God within whom already, unbeknownst to them, the divine light is shining. In her recent book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University, argues that the Gospel of John was written in part to present the orthodox position that Jesus was absolutely unique, that he alone is divine light (John 8:12, 9:5) and that John did so in dialogue with the Gospel of Thomas. In Thomas’s Gospel, Jesus’s sayings indicate that everyone has divine light within them and everyone will potentially know that God is their Father. John, and subsequently the western Christian churches, reserved that status for Jesus alone. In Pagels’s opinion, the dialogue between the two points of view took place toward the end of the first century.

Risto Uro’s Thomas: Seeking the Historical Context of the Gospel of Thomas is another important new book on the Gospel of Thomas. Professor Uro, in a series of interesting essays, situates Thomas in the context of Syrian Christianity of the late-first-century, where, as he puts it, Salvation is not described in metaphors taken from judicial or sacrificial language, but rather as a return to the original condition of the paradisiac state which humanity has lost in the Fall. Moreover, the Syrian writers did not see a radical break between God and humankind. Living in the world of death and corruption, a human being is encouraged to seek and to find his or her true divine self. Syria was immediately adjacent to Galilee on the north (Judea was separated from Galilee by Samaria) and it is nearly common sense to assume that Syrian Christianity might be more representative of Jesus’s own points of view than European Christianity came to be. Richard Valantasis’s book The Gospel of Thomas interprets Thomas’s Gospel from a Syrian Christian point of view. My own book, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, now in a new revised edition, similarly situates the Thomasine sayings in their contemporary intellectual settings.

The quest for the historical Jesus, which is the attempt to find out how Jesus lived and what Jesus taught before he was re-created by Christian authors, now includes the use of the Gospel of Thomas. By including Thomas as a legitimate source, we may well find that the historical Jesus was not who we have been taught to think he was but, in fact, he was a more mystical and inner-light-oriented teacher than we have ever before imagined.

Foreword

Andrew Harvey

It has always seemed to me far more than a vivid coincidence that in 1945 should occur both the first lethal explosions of nuclear boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the discovery in a small desert cave near Nag Hammadi, in upper Egypt, of a lost gospel, now known as the Gospel of Thomas. It is as if, at the very moment when humanity was brought face to face with its most extreme capacities for horror, evil, and destruction, so also, in Jesus’ astonishing, incandescent vision of the Kingdom in