The Gospel of Thomas

Discovery of the Gospel

One can only imagine the feeling of those first scholars who approached the crumbling manuscript, centuries old, and attempted to decipher it. As they read the fragile text word by word, they would have discovered something incredible:

These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

The four Gospels of the New Testament have been accepted for centuries as the authentic and complete record of the teachings of Jesus. The notion that there could be other, secret teachings, not included in the traditional Bible, remains profoundly shocking to many. As a result, the Gospel of Thomas has generated both enthusiasm and controversy since its discovery.

Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas written in Greek were first discovered in Egypt in 1897. However, these fragments were too short and damaged for scholars to understand their significance.

In 1945, a complete version of the Gospel of Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, along with a large collection of other ancient texts, which are now known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library. This newly discovered version was written in Coptic (a descendant of the Egyptian language), and as it was translated, scholars realized that the previously discovered fragments were in fact part of the same text.