I can’t remember the last time I was bored for longer than a minute. Waiting for coffee, stopped at a red light, standing in the hallway while the kettle boils, my hand finds the phone before my mind has registered that nothing is happening. Boredom used to be weather. Now it’s something I can switch off. That sounds like progress, and in some ways it is. But nearly every contemplative tradition I know of treats the dull stretch as a door you’re supposed to walk through, and I’ve been wondering what happens to a person who never gets near it. ...

Anyone who has given a two-year-old a bath knows the routine. The clothes come off, and before you can get the water running, the kid is gone, tearing down the hallway and shrieking with joy. The clothes stay in a heap on the bathroom floor, usually with a footprint on them. That’s more or less the picture Jesus reaches for in saying 37 of the Gospel of Thomas. The disciples ask when they’ll finally see him, and the answer involves taking off your clothes and stomping on them like a little kid. I want to look at what that image meant to its first readers, and then at what it might mean for someone who isn’t standing at the edge of a baptismal pool. ...

The Secret Book of John has a detail that’s easy to read past. After the rulers of this world fail to control humanity by force, they meet again and try something cleverer. In Marvin Meyer’s translation, “They created a contemptible spirit similar to the spirit that had descended, in order to adulterate souls through this spirit.” Similar to the spirit that had descended. The rulers didn’t build a monster. They built a copy of the good thing, close enough that people would take it in without a fight. ...

Pick up a used book and sometimes a stranger’s notes fall out of it. A line copied from a sermon, half a recipe, a question underlined twice. You can’t reconstruct their life from the scraps, but you can tell what they cared about. Reading the Gospel of Philip feels a lot like that. It has no story and no clear outline, and it jumps from baptism to donkeys to the price of pearls without warning. It’s also the most quotable book in the Nag Hammadi library, and once you know how to read it, the jumps start to make sense. Here’s a guided walk through its best images. ...

The King James Bible carries 63,779 cross references. Those are the small notes in the margins that send you from one verse to another, and Pastor Christoph Römhild had gathered them into a single digital dataset. In 2007 he and the researcher Chris Harrison drew every one of them as an arc over a line of the Bible’s chapters, Genesis at the far left and Revelation at the far right. ...

Spend two years working in Dublin and there’s a good chance you’ll come home calling everything “grand.” You won’t decide to. Nobody will sit you down and teach you Irish slang. You’ll just hear the same voices every day until their words start coming out of your mouth. Most of us know this effect from the inside. We pick up the phrases of the people we live with, and after enough years we start to sound like our parents whether we like it or not. Saying 108 of the Gospel of Thomas takes that ordinary fact and turns it into a promise about Jesus. It’s short, it’s strange, and I think it marks the clearest line between Thomas and the church that left it out of the Bible. ...

Put your hand flat on the table and look at it for a few seconds. Knuckles, a scar or two, the veins that show more every year. Somewhere behind those fingers is the one doing the looking, and nobody has ever explained to anyone’s satisfaction how the two got together. Saying 29 of the Gospel of Thomas is about that exact puzzle. It gets quoted as proof that the Gnostics hated the body, because it ends by calling the body “poverty.” Read the whole thing, though, and the word that keeps coming back is “marvel.” Let’s look at what the saying actually claims, and how the wonder in it outweighs the insult. ...

“Demiurge” sounds like the name of a monster. In Greek it was an ordinary word for a craftsman, somebody who made things for the public, like a potter or a carpenter. Plato picked that humble word for the maker of the world, and he meant it kindly. Five or six centuries later, Gnostic teachers used the same word for a blind and jealous ruler who had trapped the soul in a body. They didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They had read Plato closely, and they kept almost everything he said except his opinion of the craftsman. That one change is the most useful key I know for reading Gnostic myth, so let’s follow it through Plato’s two most famous images. ...

The Gospel of Mary starts on page 7, in the middle of a question. Someone is asking the risen Savior whether matter will be destroyed, and we never learn who, because the first six pages of the only Coptic copy are gone. Four more pages vanish right when Mary starts describing her vision. What survives is short enough to read over a cup of coffee. It’s also one of the most dramatic texts from early Christianity, and it ends with an argument that never really got settled. I wrote about who Mary Magdalene was in the Gnostic tradition back in January. This time I want to read the gospel itself, holes and all, because the argument at the end means more once you’ve seen what comes before it. ...

I skipped saying 7 for years. Every time I read through the Gospel of Thomas, I’d hit the lion, shrug, and move on to the fisherman in saying 8, who at least made sense. It read like a riddle with a line missing, or a copying error somebody forgot to fix. It turns out the saying makes a lot of sense once you know what a lion meant to a reader in the second or third century. Two other texts help, one by Plato and one from the Gnostic library itself, and both were sitting in the same pile of books buried near Nag Hammadi. Read with them, Thomas 7 becomes one of the most practical sayings in the collection. ...