Gospel of Thomas

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

— John 1:14

The Gospel of Thomas is a Coptic text of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945.¹ It has no birth, death, or resurrection narrative, some sayings resemble material in the four canonical Gospels, and others introduce sharply gnostic ideas about the body and salvation not found there.¹ Scholarly consensus dates it to the mid-second century, later than the first-century canonical Gospels and dependent on them, written by an unknown author rather than the apostle Thomas.¹

Content and Form

Thomas departs from the four canonical Gospels’ narrative shape. Rather than telling the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, it strings together sayings and brief dialogues, many “cryptic and esoteric,” with no connecting narrative.¹ Michael Kruger notes that some of its material parallels the canonical Gospels while other sayings are unique to it, and that the collection displays a “strong Gnostic flavor throughout, advocating a Jesus less concerned with showing that he is divine and more concerned with teaching us to find the divine spark within ourselves.”¹

That Gnostic outlook governs the text’s view of the body. Meagan Stedman observes that Thomas depicts spirit and body as fundamentally at odds: “If spirit came into being because of the body, it is a marvel of marvels. Indeed I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.”² The same logic shapes the text’s treatment of sex. An earlier saying holds up the erasure of sexual distinction as the condition for entering the kingdom, “when you make … the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, … then you shall enter [the kingdom],”² and the collection’s final saying makes womanhood itself something to be overcome:

Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom.²

Stedman reads the two sayings together as teaching that “the properly spiritual person is one who transcends their sex and their enslavement to the divisive categories of male and female,”² the same pattern of thought she finds in the Gospel of Philip’s account of salvation as the reunification of a divided Adam and Eve.²

Historical Development

Thomas left little trace in the early church’s own reading of Scripture. Kruger states plainly that it “is never mentioned in any early canonical list, is not found in any of our New Testament manuscript collections, never figured prominently in canonical discussions, and often was condemned outright by a variety of church fathers,” citing Hippolytus, Origen, and Eusebius by name among those who addressed and rejected it.¹ Eusebius’s own fourth-century classification placed Thomas among the “heretical” books alongside the Gospel of Peter, not among the disputed-but-useful writings some other early Christian circles debated.¹

Kruger elsewhere gives a structural reason the early church had for excluding books of this kind. The Old and New Testament canon, on his argument, forms one continuous story of redemption running from Israel to its fulfillment in Christ; a book fails to belong to that story if it does not, and cannot, continue it. Quoting D. Moody Smith’s judgment that Thomas “is not a narrative; it could not, I think by intention, be construed as continuing the biblical story,” Kruger concludes that “it is precisely for this reason (among others) that books like the Gospel of Thomas must be rejected.”³

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as those “given by the inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life,” and states of writings outside that list that they are “no part of the canon or rule of the Scripture” and “of no authority to the church of God.”⁴ The confession does not mention Thomas, or Gnostic writings, by name. Its governing principle is that inspiration, not age or popularity, is what makes a book canonical, the same principle later scholarship applies when it excludes Thomas from the canon on historical and theological grounds.

Objections and Responses

Isn’t a text this old still a valuable independent witness to Jesus’ authentic teaching, even if it never entered the canon? Kruger’s dating argument answers this directly: the Gnostic worldview pervading Thomas is itself evidence against an early date, since, as John Meier puts it, “a gnostic world view of this sort [in Thomas] was not employed to reinterpret Christianity in such a thoroughgoing way before sometime in the second century AD,” which rules out “the Gospel of Thomas … being a reliable reflection of the historical Jesus or of the earliest sources of 1st-century Christianity.”¹ On this reading Thomas is a later theological reworking dependent on the canonical Gospels, rather than an earlier, uncorrupted source standing behind them.

Related Doctrines

References

Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Meagan Stedman, “‘Ancient Gnosticism in New Garb?’ Gnostic Anthropology, Transgenderism, and a Response from Tertullian,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 28-40. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” paras. 2-3. ↩