In December of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer looking for fertilizer at the base of a cliff struck something hard in the soil: a sealed clay jar. That, at least, is how the story is usually told. Inside were thirteen books bound in leather, their pages covered in Coptic. One of them opened with a line that reads like a dare down the centuries: whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.
The book was the Gospel of Thomas, arguably the most important buried gospel ever recovered. It carries no manger, no walking on water, no empty tomb. It is a list of one hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus, most of them opening with the same two words, Jesus said, with nothing else to hold them together. Some are familiar from Matthew and Luke, while others had not been read by anyone for well over a thousand years.
Almost everything about this text is contested: when it was written, whether it is older or younger than the gospels in your Bible, why it was in the ground, and even the story of how it came out of the ground. That last dispute may be the strangest of them, because it means the discovery of an apocryphal gospel produced a legend of its own, and that legend is now being taken apart by the same scholars who built it.
A gospel with no story
Open a New Testament gospel and you get a narrative: a life that runs to a death in Jerusalem and a claim about what happened after. Open the Gospel of Thomas and the floor is gone. There is a one-line preface, then a hundred and fourteen numbered sayings strung together with almost no order anyone has been able to explain. In shape it sits closer to a book of proverbs than to Mark.
The preface sets the terms: “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” Both halves of that name mean the same thing twice over. Thomas is Aramaic for twin and Didymos is Greek for twin, so the writer is presented as Judas the Twin, the apostle our companion entry on Thomas the Apostle follows from the empty tomb to a royal court in India. The gospel that bears his name is built on the idea that Jesus left behind hidden words, and that decoding them, not believing a story about a death and a rising, is what saves.
The content is often startling. Asked when the kingdom will come, this Jesus says it is already here and unseen: “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you” (saying 3). Elsewhere the divine is folded into ordinary matter, with no temple required: “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there” (saying 77). Some lines are close cousins of things in the New Testament, the mustard seed, the lost sheep, rendered at a slight angle. The famous last saying, in which Simon Peter demands that Mary be sent away and Jesus answers that he will make her male so she can enter the kingdom, has generated a shelf of competing interpretations and no agreement. (Quotations here follow Thomas O. Lambdin’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Library in English; other translators render the opening promise as “will not taste death.”)
The Gospel of Thomas was one book in a haul of thirteen leather codices that also held the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, and a battered Coptic paraphrase of a passage from Plato’s Republic. A whole banned library came up in one jar, which is why scholars speak of the Nag Hammadi codices as a collection, not a single find.
Found once before, and not recognized
The first twist is that the Gospel of Thomas had already been dug out of the Egyptian sand almost fifty years before 1945, though nobody knew what they were holding.
In the winter of 1897 two young Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, were sifting the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a provincial town far down the Nile. On the second day of digging they turned up a single leaf of a papyrus book covered in sayings of Jesus. They rushed it into print that same year as a slim pamphlet with a Greek title, Logia Iesou, and an English one: Sayings of Our Lord. It caused a sensation; the little book ran through tens of thousands of copies and put previously unknown words of Jesus in the newspapers.
Grenfell and Hunt were careful men, and they said plainly that they did not know what the leaf belonged to. They ruled out the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews. Their own best guess, printed in 1897, was that this was “a collection of some of our Lord’s sayings,” possibly older than the canonical gospels and independent of them. In 1904 they found two more fragments of the same lost text. One of them, its opening line torn, seemed to name the disciple who had recorded the sayings, but the crucial word was missing.
And here the story leaves a footprint that only makes sense in hindsight. A colleague, the New Testament scholar Kirsopp Lake, proposed filling the gap with “Judas, who is also Thomas,” comparing the double name in the ancient Acts of Thomas. Grenfell and Hunt printed his suggestion as one option among several and moved on. There was a known “Gospel of Thomas” in the old catalogues, but they set it aside as the legendary infancy gospel about the boy Jesus, not a sayings book. Lake had quietly guessed the answer. It took the jar at Nag Hammadi, and a Coptic preface reading “Didymos Judas Thomas,” to prove him right, and by then he had been waiting for over forty years.
The identification came in the early 1950s, when Henri-Charles Puech matched the old Oxyrhynchus fragments to the new Coptic gospel from Nag Hammadi. Three separate Greek copies had turned up in the trash of a single Egyptian town, dated across the second and third centuries. Whatever else the Gospel of Thomas was, it had once been common enough to be read, copied, and thrown away like any other book.
How old is it, really
The honest answer is that the field is split down the middle, and a lot rides on it. If the Gospel of Thomas preserves a stream of Jesus tradition as old as the New Testament, or older, it becomes a witness that bypasses the four gospels entirely. If it is a second-century reworking of texts already in the Bible, it is a fascinating tributary rather than a separate source.
One camp reads it early. Helmut Koester argued that Thomas draws on an independent sayings tradition, with a core that could reach back into the second half of the first century, the same decades as the gospels themselves. Stephen Patterson put “a date for Thomas in the vicinity of 70 to 80” of the common era, alongside Mark and ahead of Luke and John. Elaine Pagels went further into the texture of it, arguing in Beyond Belief that the Gospel of John was written in part to answer the kind of theology Thomas teaches, the idea that, as she puts it, “God’s light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone.” If John is arguing against Thomas, then Thomas has to be there first. On that reading the doubting-Thomas scene in John, the one carved onto the choir screen of Notre-Dame, is one early Christian community writing down its rival, with the stubborn apostle standing in for a whole competing theology.
Others read it late. Nicholas Perrin argued that Thomas was composed in Syriac and depends on Tatian’s Diatessaron, a gospel harmony from around 172, which would push the text past the middle of the second century. Mark Goodacre made the case that Thomas knows Matthew and Luke directly, pointing to what he calls diagnostic shards: the small editorial fingerprints that Matthew or Luke left on a saying, turning up again inside the Thomas version as if copied along with everything else. On separate grounds, Simon Gathercole argued that Thomas is Greek from the start and shows the influence of those same two gospels. The Thomas they describe belongs to the second century, downstream of the canon it seems to rival.
Both cases are built by serious scholars on real evidence, and they cannot both be right. Datings in the literature run from the 50s to the 250s, a spread of two centuries for a single short book. We are not going to settle it in an article, and we are not going to pretend the question is closed. What can be said is that the text sits at exactly the seam where the history of Christianity is least visible, the decades when the sayings of a Galilean teacher were being collected, sorted, and fought over, and some collections were kept while others were buried.
A gospel that is only sayings, with no story wrapped around them, is not a freak. New Testament scholars have long argued that Matthew and Luke both drew on a lost sayings source they call Q, a document of exactly this shape that no one has ever found. When the Gospel of Thomas came out of the ground, it proved that early Christians really did make books that were nothing but the words of Jesus. Q suddenly had a cousin you could hold.
Why it was in the ground
Someone put these books in a jar and buried them at the foot of a cliff, and the reason has become its own argument.
The best-known explanation points to a letter. In the year 367 the powerful bishop Athanasius of Alexandria sent out his annual Easter letter, and in it he did something new: he listed the twenty-seven books that make up the New Testament today, exactly, and drew a hard line around them. Everything outside the list he called an invention of heretics, “who write them when they choose, bestowing upon them their approbation.” The books inside were “fountains of salvation.” The scholar James Robinson proposed that monks in one of the great monasteries near Nag Hammadi, ordered to purge their shelves, could not bring themselves to burn the forbidden books and buried them instead. It is a clean story: the canon closes, and the losing texts go into the sand rather than the fire.
The evidence is messier than the story. The scraps of waste papyrus used to stiffen the leather covers of the codices, the cartonnage, carry dated documents running into the 340s, and names and place-names that cluster around the Pachomian monasteries. That fixes when and roughly where the books were made, in the middle of the fourth century, near those monasteries. It does not prove the monks owned them, and the papyrologist who edited the scraps concluded they could just as easily have come from a town rubbish dump. Athanasius, moreover, was aiming his 367 letter mainly at the Arian and Meletian factions inside the church, not at gnostic gospel-readers, a point our entry on Arianism turns on from the other side.
Then there is the sharper alternative. Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Blount argued that the codices were never a monastery’s suppressed library at all, but private books, made for well-off Egyptian Christians with antiquarian tastes, and buried the way Egyptians had buried texts with their dead for three thousand years, as grave goods. The cliff at Nag Hammadi was an ancient cemetery, still in use in late antiquity. Comparable codices have come out of graves elsewhere in Egypt; a Homer roll was once found tucked under the head of a buried woman. On this reading the Gospel of Thomas was not hidden from the church. It was a book someone loved, sent into the ground with its owner, a Christian version of a very old Egyptian instinct that the newer entry in this compendium on the Tibetan Book of the Dead shows running in another culture entirely. A rebuttal defending the monastic story followed, by Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, and that argument is still live.
The legend of the jar
The last buried layer, the one this article treats as a claim rather than a settled fact, is the discovery itself.
Almost everything the world knows about that December morning in 1945 comes from one man’s fieldwork: James Robinson, who tracked down the finder and his relatives and reconstructed the scene. The trouble is when he did it. The interviews that produced the famous account, the farmer Muhammad Ali al-Samman, the fear that the jar held a jinn, the mother who burned some of the pages as kindling in her oven, a blood feud in which the family avenged their murdered father, were mostly gathered from the mid-1970s onward, three decades after the event, in a village where, by Robinson’s own description, cooperation was secured with a bottle of whiskey and a ten-pound note.
The New Testament scholar Mark Goodacre laid the versions side by side and watched the story grow. In one telling two men are present at the find; in another, seven; in another, ten. The jar starts at about sixty centimetres and swells, across successive retellings, to a full six feet. A skeleton with elongated fingers and teeth appears beside it in one account and is flatly denied in another. In a 1987 television interview the farmer said he had smashed the pot alone, contradicting every version in which a crowd was there. Even the celebrated detail of the pages burned in the oven had been called a rumour by the first scholar on the scene, back in 1950. The editors of the official facsimile edition put it bluntly: the only thing they considered assured was the core, the general location and the approximate date; the rest had “the value of stories and fables that one can collect in popular Egyptian circles thirty years after.”
None of this means the books are fake. They are spectacularly real, and the earliest hard evidence in the whole affair is dry and solid: one of the codices was registered at the Coptic Museum in Cairo on the fourth of October 1946, and by early 1948 the find was announced in an Egyptian newspaper. What dissolves under examination is the storybook around the object, the jar and the jinn and the oven, assembled long after the fact and polished in the retelling. A gospel that promised hidden knowledge to whoever could read it correctly came back into the world wrapped in exactly the problem it is about: a set of sayings everyone quotes, behind them a story that will not hold still.
That is the honest shape of the Gospel of Thomas. It is a book of sayings with no cross, dug from a jar we cannot fully vouch for, once thrown away in a rubbish heap and not recognized, dated by careful people to anywhere across two hundred years. Someone buried it, either monks hiding from a bishop or a mourner burying the dead, and we do not know which. It opens by promising that its reader will not die, and sixteen centuries in the ground have not stopped that sentence from working. It makes you want to know what the words mean, which is the one thing the book will not tell you.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- The Gospel of Thomas, Nag Hammadi Codex II, tractate 2 (Coptic, codex c. 340 CE); English translation by Thomas O. Lambdin in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill / San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990)
- B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, ΛΟΓΙΑ ΙΗΣΟΥ: Sayings of Our Lord (London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1897)
- B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel from Oxyrhynchus (London, 1904)
- Athanasius of Alexandria, 39th Festal Letter (367 CE)
- James M. Robinson, ‘The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices,’ Biblical Archaeologist 42.4 (1979): 206-224
- Mark Goodacre, ‘How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35.4 (2013): 303-322
- Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, ‘Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices,’ Journal of Biblical Literature 133.2 (2014): 399-419
- Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM Press, 1990)
- Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003)
- Nicholas Perrin, Thomas and Tatian: The Relationship between the Gospel of Thomas and the Diatessaron (Atlanta: SBL, 2002)
- Mark Goodacre, Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012)
- Simon Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
- J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne and J. C. Shelton, Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers (Leiden: Brill, 1981)
- Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015)
