The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, presented in the prologue as “the secret words which the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” Where the canonical gospels weave Jesus’ sayings into a biographical narrative, Thomas presents them naked, one after another, with no story and no resurrection. It is the most contemplative of the recovered Christian gospels: the kingdom is not promised for a future age, it is “spread upon the earth, and men do not see it” (saying 113).
The text was unknown to the medieval West. In 1897 and 1903, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt unearthed three Greek papyrus fragments at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt that contained roughly twenty sayings overlapping with what we now know as Thomas, but the source-text remained unidentified. The complete Coptic Gospel of Thomas only emerged in December 1945, when an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman discovered a sealed clay jar at the foot of a cliff near the village of Nag Hammadi. Inside the jar were thirteen leather-bound codices containing fifty-two Gnostic and related texts in Coptic translation, most of them previously known only by name from the polemical writings of the Church Fathers. The Gospel of Thomas was the second tractate in Codex II.
The sayings are of several types. Some are close parallels to sayings in the synoptic gospels, often in earlier or shorter form (compare Thomas 14 with Matthew 6, or Thomas 64 with Luke 14). Others are sayings without canonical parallel that read as primitive wisdom-tradition (the parable of the empty jar in saying 97, or the man who killed a powerful man as a rehearsal in saying 98). A third group is more recognisably Gnostic in inflection, speaking of light and image, of stripping naked without shame, of the inner and the outer being made one (sayings 22, 37, 50, 70, 77).
What unites the collection is the consistent pointing toward an interior recognition rather than an external belief. “If those who lead you say, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realise that it is you who are the sons of the living father” (saying 3). The contemplative reads such a saying not as a doctrine to assent to but as an instruction.
The complete Coptic Gospel of Thomas was not discovered until 1945, so every complete English translation we have post-dates that find and remains in copyright. The standard scholarly translation by Thomas O. Lambdin appeared in James M. Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library (1977, revised 1988), and is the version widely circulated online and used in most popular editions today. Sacred-texts hosts a compilation of the Lambdin Coptic with the Grenfell-Hunt and Bentley Layton Greek fragments under their fair-use compilation policy.
Until a strict-public-domain complete translation becomes available, we link to the sacred-texts compilation rather than reproduce it here:
The Gospel of Thomas (Lambdin / Grenfell-Hunt / Layton compilation) at sacred-texts.com