The Gospel of Thomas ranks among the most important manuscript discoveries in the last two hundred years. The debate it unleashed in the 1950s, when scholars first got a glimpse of the new gospel, continues unabated today. It has reshaped the discussion of Christian origins by introducing students of early Christianity to a new set of ideas and practices that, a generation ago, one could hardly imagine as deriving from the words of Jesus. And the words of Jesus themselves have fallen under renewed scrutiny in view of Thomas’ new witness to the shape and scope of the Jesus tradition. Scholars now find themselves debating basic aspects of the mission and message of Jesus because of the way the Gospel of Thomas presents the sayings of Jesus. It consists entirely of sayings of Jesus arranged in a simple list. There are no miracles here, no stories of Jesus’ birth, death, or resurrection from the dead. It presents itself as the secret teaching of the living Jesus. For some, the new gospel has become the holy grail of all we ever thought, or wanted to believe, about Jesus. For others it is nothing but a deviant cast-off from the more reliable main-stream of canonical voices enshrined in the New Testament itself. Controversy has courted it from the day it was discovered.
It was discovered in 1945 as part of a larger collection of ancient books known as the Nag Hammadi Library, so-named for the modern-day city of Nag Hammadi, which lies close to the site of this remarkable discovery. An Egyptian peasant happened upon this collection of books while rummaging around in the talus at the base of the cliffs that line the Nile River in Upper Egypt. There they had lain, sealed in a large, rough clay jar, for more than fifteen centuries, until time and the shifting of rocks and sand had exposed them to view. Scholars would eventually learn that the jar contained thirteen papyrus books, or codices, dating to the fourth century, C.E. They are written in Coptic, a form of the ancient tongue of Pharonic Egypt in use when Christians first came to Egypt in the late first or early second century. These early Christians used the Greek alphabet (together with a few characters unique to Coptic) to create a written form of this language, into which Christian works composed in Greek could be translated for use among the local population. The Nag Hammadi texts all share this history: they are Coptic translations of Greek originals made by Christian scribes for use in Egypt.
Within the thirteen volumes of the Nag Hammadi Library were found almost fifty previously unknown or lost texts. Most of them are Christian tracts, though there are a number of Jewish texts, and at least one Greek philosophical text – a section of Plato’s Republic. Thus, the Nag Hammadi Library ranks among the major manuscript discoveries of the twentieth century of relevance to biblical studies. But by far the most important of the Nag Hammadi texts is the second tractate in Codex II of the Library: the Gospel of Thomas. Its discovery was quite astonishing, for here was a gospel known to have existed in antiquity, but long lost in the deep mists of history, presumably never to be heard from again. And yet here it was. Before, its content could only be guessed at. Now scholars could see that it contains approximately one hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus, usually presented in the form of a brief chreia – that is, a short vignette in which Jesus speaks a word of wisdom. A good number (about half) of these sayings were already known, since they are found also in the canonical gospels, principally in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Of the remaining sayings, a few were known from an occasional reference or odd quote from Thomas found scattered in the literature of early Christianity. But the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas brought to light dozens of new sayings of Jesus – and with them the question: could any of these sayings also be authentic sayings of Jesus?
This was not the first time a manuscript discovery had brought to light new sayings of Jesus. Fifty years earlier, about 120 kilometers southwest of Cairo, two young British archaeologists made what should be considered one of the most remarkable finds in the history of archaeological discovery. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt were in their twenties, and labouring through their first season at Oxyrhynchus, where a dry climate and some ancient trash heaps made it a promising place to look for ancient payri. Indeed it was. A young Bernard Grenfell managed to capture a little of the excitement and romance of their expedition when he penned the following account for an 1897 issue of McClure’s magazine:
On January 11th we sallied forth at sunrise with some seventy workmen and boys, and set them to dig trenches through a mound near a large space covered with piles of limestone chips, which probably denotes the site of an ancient temple, though its walls have been all but entirely dug out for the sake of the stone. The choice proved a very fortunate one, for papyrus scraps began to come to light in considerable quantities, varied by occasional complete or nearly complete private and official documents containing letters, contracts, accounts, and so on; and there were also a number of fragments written in uncials, or rounded capital letters, the form of writing used in copying classical or theological manuscripts. Later in the week Mr. Hunt, in sorting through the papyri found on the second day, noticed on a crumpled uncial fragment written on both sides the Greek word KARFOS (“mote”), which at once suggested to him the verse in the Gospels concerning the mote and the beam. A further examination showed that the passage in the papyrus really was the conclusion of the verse, “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye;” but the rest of the papyrus differed considerably from the Gospels, and was, in fact, a leaf of a book containing a collection of sayings of Christ, some of which, apparently, were new. More than that could not be determined until we came back to England.1
Later that year, back in Oxford, Grenfell and Hunt were able to examine the leaf more carefully. What they found, in addition to the familiar saying from the Sermon on the Mount, were what appeared to be a series of sayings of Jesus, some of them unknown until this chance discovery. They read: J(esu)s says: “If you do not fast to the world, you will not see the kingdom of God; if you do not observe the Sabbath as a sabbath, you will not see the f(athe)r.” And then further: J(esu)s says: “I stood in the midst of the world and appeared to them in the flesh. I found them all drunk. I found none of them thirsty. And my soul ached for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight…”. In all, there turned out to be eight sayings of Jesus inscribed on the front and back of this papyrus scrap, originally a page from a papyrus book or codex. Six of them had not been read for fifteen centuries. This was Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1. When Grenfell and Hunt published a popular account of their find later that year it would sell more than 30,000 copies.2 In subsequent seasons Grenfell and Hunt would discover other papyri containing previously unknown sayings of Jesus, including Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654 and 655. Until the 1950s they were known simply as “the unknown sayings of Jesus.” But that all changed with the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, for it turned out that Grenfell and Hunt’s unknown sayings were in fact bits and pieces of the Gospel of Thomas. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1 contained parts of what we now know as Gospel of Thomas 26–33, 654 contained fragments of sayings 1–7, and 655 contained sayings 36–39.
The Oxyrhynchus papyri notwithstanding, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas from Nag Hammadi remains to this day our only complete version of this gospel. Thus, when one speaks of the Gospel of Thomas, it is usually to the Coptic version that one is referring. The first critical edition of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas appeared in 1959, just in time for the Christmas rush3, and promptly sold over 40,000 copies. This very popular version of Thomas became the scholarly standard for many years to come, even though it was produced before scholarship had advanced very far in understanding the textual problems in the manuscript and the many translational difficulties posed by the text. Since then, scholars have continued to study Thomas, and theiradvances have made it possible to produce new and improved texts and translations of this important document of early Christianity.
We are pleased to offer, within the present volume, a translation of Thomas that we believe represents the culmination of the best scholarship on Thomas, gathered over many years in the same centre of research that produced the initial edition of Thomas, Berlin. Out of that early flurry of activity there emerged a team of scholars with the disarming self-designation: The Berlin Working Group for Coptic Gnostic Writings. Originally founded by Hans-Martin Schenke, it is led today by Schenke’s former student, Hans-Gebhard Bethge. The Berlin Working Group continues to be one of the most important centres for the study of the Nag Hammadi texts. It is therefore not surprising that, as the fruit of more than a generation of concentrated work, they have produced a critical Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas that is superior to any previously available. Furthermore, their translation into German and English provides the most reliable access to the sayings themselves. Their original Coptic text and translations are available in the newer editions of Kurt Aland’s Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum, published by the German Bible Society.4
In the 1990s we decided to make the work of the Berlin Working Group available to a wider audience in the first edition of this book. In that volume, published in 1998, we used the text and translation of the Gospel of Thomas that appeared in the 1996 edition of Aland’s Synopsis. Since that time, the Working Group has continued to revise and refine its translation for various publications, including subsequent editions of the Synopsis, the standard German-language translation of the Nag Hammadi Library, the Nag Hammadi Deutch, and the latest edition of Hennecke and Schneemelcher’s Neutestamentliche Apokryphen. In addition, important studies have emerged, such as Uwe-Karsten Plisch’s recent commentary, from which helpful insights into the text and translation might be gleaned.5 All of these developments are reflected in the latest updated version of the Working Group’s text and translation, printed in the most recent edition of the Aland Synopsis.
As in 1998, our intention in issuing this revised edition of The Fifth Gospel is to offer the scholar and layperson alike a tool for the study of the Gospel of Thomas that reflects the best work of the Berlin Working Group through the years. The text and translation are taken from the Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum (15th edition, 3rd corrected printing, 2001, revised 20096), with a few noted improvements from the authors. As in the original edition, the following standard sigla will alert the reader to problems and editorial decisions reflected in the text:
( ) Parentheses surround words not in the Coptic text itself, but those which an English reader needs in order to catch the tone of the original.
< > Pointed brackets surround a word or words where the translation involves the correction of an error in the manuscript.
[ ] Square brackets indicate places where a hole in the manuscript had led to the loss of one or more letters. Often the team is able to supply the missing letters by conjecture; other times they must be left blank. In such cases a series of dots may indicate approximately how many characters are missing.
{ } Curly brackets indicate that the translators have omitted something that occurs in the original manuscript on the suspicion that it is in error.
In addition to the revised translation of Thomas, we have once again provided two essays for those who may be unfamiliar with this new gospel, or with the events that led to its discovery and publication. The first (by Patterson) is a revised version of the essay that first appeared in this volume in 1998, “Understanding the Gospel of Thomas Today.” It is intended to provide a general introduction to current scholarly thinking on the interpretation of this gospel. The second (by Robinson) is unchanged from the original 1998 edition. It tells the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, recounts the subsequent work of bringing the new gospel to light, and assesses how the Nag Hammadi discovery has changed the landscape of New Testament scholarship. As before, it is hoped that these essays will initiate the general reader to the discussion of this new text, and indicate avenues for further investigation. For those who are interested in reading more about Thomas and the Nag Hammadi Library, we have also provided a brief annotated list entitled “Further Reading.”