The Coptic Gospel of Thomas: What's in it for a Christian?

For my purposes in this post, a Christian is at the very least someone who believes in Jesus and is a disciple of Jesus, who willingly learns from Jesus. There is more that goes into being a Christian for most Christians, but it starts there: with that connection to Jesus, the real one who walked this earth, and his actions and teachings as best we know them. So how well do we know them, and where do the alternative gospels fit into that picture?

It's been many years ago now that I took my first interest in the alternative gospels. The claims I had seen about them suggested that they were alternative gospels of Jesus, kind of like the claims made for the Book of Mormon which I had also looked into. (Some readers may be thinking, "What, are you totally gullible?" No, no, I'm just someone who likes to form my own opinions based on my own assessments, that's all. So, yes, I'll look at all kinds of things even if I have it "on good authority" or "prevailing opinion" that it's not as advertised. I'd never ask someone to skip looking into something for themselves based on my word, and likewise won't skip looking into something for myself when the time and interest are there.)

After I'd read various alternative gospels -- they go quickly, generally being fairly short -- the Coptic Gospel of Thomas distinguished itself on several counts. For one thing, the material actually pertained to Jesus. (Some of the alternative gospels have only a tangential connection to Jesus.) It contained words attributed to Jesus (again, not something to take for granted in these alternative gospels). In fact it contained very little besides words attributed to Jesus. And it lacked a lot of the false notes I'd seen elsewhere: it didn't have the marks of being a puff piece of a self-important narrator, or an overly-dramatic thing where the author is formulaic and contrived. Based on my preliminary survey of the alternative gospels, this seemed the most likely of the non-Biblical gospels to actually contain some material derived from someone who had known Jesus. It had all the signs that the author was interested in Jesus, and had tried to collect certain sayings of Jesus (though may have had some criteria in mind for selecting which sayings). The presentation was fairly artless and raw.

The material is so artless and raw that it poses challenges to understanding it. The sayings are given with typically no introduction other than "Jesus said"; we do not know the time or place or surrounding events. Most quotes are presented without any information on the conversation in which they occurred. There are some exceptions where we have some background, for example that someone had asked a certain question, but having even that piece of information is the exception not the rule. If there is a risk in interpreting a quote that is out of context, the problem here is that most of the quotes lack any context at all.

A good number of the sayings in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas are recognizable (or partly so) from the Biblical gospels -- often as alternate renditions of them, after the style of things that are repeated by word-of-mouth and then translated a time or two. It interests me to see known sayings in a different wording, even if that's not the type of thing that's going to add much to our understanding of Jesus' teachings. What interests me more are the saying that are partially or wholly unique to this document. I've chosen some examples of different kinds of sayings to give the reader here some idea of the types of material found.

Example Sayings

New

One of the better-known sayings is #42 from the Gospel of Thomas:

#42 Jesus said, "Become passers-by".

This particular saying has garnered its fair share of mention from Thomas scholars and the spiritually curious; it may be the most understandable and thought-provoking of the sayings that we didn't already have from the Biblical gospels. We can see some call to detachment (though from what is left to interpretation). We can place it against Jesus' comment that he had no place to lay his head (which is also saying #86 from the Gospel of Thomas), and see "passers-by" as freedom from certain attachments (e.g. the worries of this world and the deceitfulness of wealth). Or we could see it against the background of the parable of the Good Samaritan where the story contrasts different people who are passers-by of different kinds: the first two who passed by a person in need for their own purposes, and then the Samaritan who was a passer by to his other priorities when he came across the injured traveler and showed compassion. This particular saying contains a good balance of having enough clarity and direction to engage the mind, but not so much as to leave us as spectators. From the Biblical gospels, it's one of the familiar characteristics of Jesus' teachings that he expects his listeners to participate in adding to their own understanding.


Familiar

Here is a saying that is familiar to anyone acquainted with the Biblical gospels, again known from the Gospel of Thomas:

#86 Jesus said, "The foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head and rest."

Jesus' identity

Sometimes the popular interest in the alternative gospels seems to come from hoping to find an alternative Jesus. In the Gospel of Thomas, saying #77 is to this point, which begins in a way that is partially familiar from the Gospel of John:

#77 Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

 The Gospel of Thomas, whatever else it may or may not be, shows that the divine-cosmic-eternal perception of Jesus was considered to be part of the original Jesus.


Where's Peter when you need him to ask for more detail?

There are sayings where more context would be helpful in understanding them or evaluating their authenticity:

#7 Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."

Are we sure that's the same person from the Biblical gospels?

There is also a disrespect for women that seemed jarring to me, out-of-step with the Biblical gospels:

#114 Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

What to Make of Coptic Thomas?


Even to take the document at face value, the reader would not come away with a radically different understanding of Jesus, and would at times find themselves leaning on familiarity with similar sayings from the Biblical gospels to gain more context to place a saying in perspective.

The Coptic Gospel of Thomas is very short, but consists almost entirely of sayings attributed to Jesus. The intriguing part, and the appeal, is to see an understanding of Jesus at a very raw stage, and to see some sayings that are not recorded elsewhere. Even then it contains some sayings that are so unfamiliar that, without more context, it's doubtful that we have enough information to understand clearly what they mean or to assess whether they're genuinely from Jesus. Still, as mentioned in a previous post, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas alone has more sayings attributed to Jesus than the combined total of 7 other of the non-Biblical gospels. Of the non-canonical gospels, it's possibly the best of the set as far as having material that seems to have bearing on the historical Jesus.