Última Cena, Leonardo da Vinci, Public Domain

The Gospel of Thomas Sayings

The Sayings or Logia are taken from the book Man, Temple of the Living God, referred to here under the heading THE BOOK. Page 36 reads (omitting footnotes):

… “As is well known, this gospel is one of the fifty-three treatises found in 1946 in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, some hundred kilometers to the north of Luxor, near to the ancient hermitage of Chenoboskion. Not without a certain undue hastiness, the entire library of Nag Hammadi was initially classified as Gnostic; subsequently, however, with the gradual publication of a number of works from the collection, it proved impossible to ascribe the entire diverse body of writings to any single current of Christian thought.

In regard to the Gospel of Thomas, the Coptic text of the manuscript, conserved today in the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo, was established by a group of five researchers, known today as the Brill Group, after the publisher of the translation made by these professors in 1959

The translators only explained that the treatise⎯a collection of logia or sayings of Jesus, which they themselves differentiated and numbered 1 to 114⎯is a translation or adaptation into Sahidic Coptic of a work the original text of which must have been written in Greek around the year 140, on the basis of even older sources.

Professor Philippe de Suarez, a Frenchman, presented in 1975 a direct translation from the Coptic texts, together with a parallel arrangement of the text into numbered verses, which permits of a scrupulous textual verification.

De Suarez draws attention to the attraction exercised on him by the archaic character of the examples to be found in the Gospel of Thomas. The sayings of Jesus appear in this text stripped of certain ornamental forms and seem to be even older than the composition generally present in the synoptic texts”.

Note: When writing his magnum opus, Roberto Pla drew extensively on the French translation of the Gospel of Thomas, together with commentaries, published by Philippe de Suarez (Métanoïa, 1974). However, a team belonging to the same Association Métanoïa, Gillabert, Bourgeois and Haas, was later to take the work of translation and commentary much further. Cfr. L’Evangile selon Thomas, Editions Dervy, 2009, ISBN 982-284454-575-6. This association, registered at Marsanne, 26740 Sauzet, France, is devoted to the spreading and study of the Gospel of Thomas.

INCIPIT

These are the hidden words which the Living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.

Saying 1

And he said: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death”.

Saying 2

Jesus said, “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be awestruck. When they are awestruck, they will become amazed, and will reign over the All.”

Saying 3

Jesus said: “If your leaders say to you ‘Behold, the Kingdom is in the sky!’
then the birds will be there before you are.
If they tell you that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are.
Rather, the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you understand yourselves, you will be understood and you will understand that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.”

Saying 4

Jesus said, “The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will be one and the same.”