Gospel of Thomas

Found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, in a papyrus codex in Coptic. Greek fragments of the same text had been found at Oxyrhynchus in the late 19th century without anyone knowing what they were. Composition is estimated between the late 1st and mid-2nd century AD.

It was never in any canon and was opposed early by the church fathers. It lacks what defined a gospel for the early church: a passion and resurrection narrative. Several sayings have a gnostic flavour, though many others are variants of lines found in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

• About half the sayings have parallels in the canonical gospels — sometimes in shorter form, which fuels the debate over which version came first.
• Saying 77: "Lift the stone and you will find me there; split the wood and I am there."
• The parable of the assassin who drives his sword into the wall of his own house to test his hand before going out to kill, found nowhere else.
• The closing saying, about Mary, is the most discussed line in the text and underlies much of the literature on women in early Christianity.

Did the apostle Thomas write the Gospel of Thomas?

There is no way to sustain that. The attribution to Didymos Judas Thomas is the work's own convention, a common practice in ancient literature. Its date and language point to a later community.

Why is the Gospel of Thomas not in the Bible?

Because it does not narrate the life, death and resurrection of Jesus — it is a collection of sayings. For the early church, a gospel without a passion was not a gospel. The gnostic-sounding sayings added to that.

How many sayings are in the Gospel of Thomas?

One hundred and fourteen, in the numbering used since the Nag Hammadi discovery.