Suppose someone hands you a page with the title torn off. There’s a mustard seed on it, and a speck in somebody’s eye while a beam sits in the speaker’s own. A blind person leads a blind person into a hole, and a prophet gets no welcome in the prophet’s own town. You’d say Matthew, or maybe Luke, and you’d feel pretty confident about it.
Then, a little further down, Jesus says, “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves.” Now you’d want to know what you’re holding.
It’s the Gospel of Thomas, and this is the third stop in Arcs Between the Canons, the series that sets Gnostic texts on one line with the Bible and draws the links between them. No other text on the map shares this much with the gospels of the New Testament. Let’s put some of its sayings beside theirs, because I’ve come to think the gaps tell you more than the overlap does.
Thomas sends out 21 arcs here, and that’s only a sample. Thirteen are blue, meaning the saying uses the passage the way the Bible does. Six are gold and two are red. For a book with this reputation, that’s a lot of agreement.
Same Sayings, Different Words
The count depends on how strict you are with the word “parallel,” and tallies I’ve seen run from about half of the 114 sayings to somewhat more. Yet Bart Ehrman, in his Lost Christianities course, says there are “so few actual verbal parallels” that Thomas doesn’t look like it copied from the New Testament. The sayings are often the same, and the wording usually isn’t.
Who came first is still disputed. Marvin Meyer, whose translation I’m using, treats Thomas as independent of the New Testament gospels and thinks a first collection could reach back to the first century. Ehrman’s best guess for the book is the first half of the second century, although he grants it preserves important early sayings. Mark Goodacre has argued that Thomas knew Matthew, Mark and Luke (the Synoptics, as scholars call them).
I went through that fight in Are the Gnostic Gospels Just Late Forgeries?. Below I’m describing differences, and I won’t claim to know who changed what.
The Sower With Nobody to Explain It
Start with the blue arcs. In Mark 4 (I’m quoting the NIV throughout) a farmer scatters seed on the path, the rocks, the thorns and the good soil. Thomas 9 has the same four landings with small changes. Worms show up among the thorns, and the good soil yields “sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure,” where Mark has thirty, sixty and a hundred.
The big difference comes after the story ends. In Mark the Twelve ask about the parable, and Jesus decodes it piece by piece, starting with “The farmer sows the word.” Thomas has no such scene. The parable stops, and the next saying is about fire.
Meyer takes this as a mark of an older form. He says Thomas keeps parables “simply as stories,” while the New Testament gospels “may append allegorical interpretations.” Mark hands you a key, and Thomas leaves you out in the field.
The tenants in the vineyard work the same way. In Mark 12 Jesus says the owner will come and kill the tenants, then quotes the psalm about the rejected stone to drive it home. Thomas 65 stops at the murder of the son with “Whoever has ears should hear.” The stone turns up as saying 66, sitting next door with no bridge between them.
Even less changes in the mustard seed. It’s the smallest seed and it ends up sheltering birds, just as in Mark. Thomas adds only that it has to fall on “prepared soil,” and I can’t read those two words now without wondering who did the preparing.
The Largest Sheep
Gold is where Thomas gets interesting. Here’s how Luke finishes the parable of the lost sheep:
“I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
And here’s Thomas 107:
“One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine and sought the one until he found it. After he had gone to this trouble, he said to the sheep, ‘I love you more than the ninety-nine.’”
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Matthew’s shepherd is also “happier about that one sheep,” although Matthew’s sheep stands for one of the “little ones.” In Luke, Jesus tells the story to answer Pharisees grumbling that he eats with sinners. Both canonical tellings are about mercy toward the small and the wayward.
Thomas gives a different reason for the love. This sheep was the biggest. The fisherman in saying 8 does something similar, throwing back his little fish to keep “a fine large fish,” and in saying 76 a merchant sells his whole stock for a single pearl. Thomas seems to love this shape of story, where one thing is worth more than everything else you’ve got.
So Luke’s parable is about being found, and Thomas’s is about what’s worth looking for.
Small Turns at the Last Second
Several gold arcs bend only in the final line. In Luke 14 the dinner guests cite a field, some oxen and a new marriage. Thomas 64 has four excuses, and three of them are about money, including merchants who owe the guest and an estate with rent to collect. Luke ends with the host saying that “not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.” Thomas ends this way:
“Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father.”
The brackets are Meyer’s, marking a gap in the manuscript. Luke’s closing line is about people who said no, and Thomas’s is about a line of work.
Then there’s the coin. Mark 12 ends with “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Thomas 100 keeps that and adds a third clause, “and give me what is mine.” It never tells you what that is.
Thomas 113 and Luke 17 start out nearly together, with nobody saying “Here it is” or “There it is.” Thomas then says the Father’s kingdom “is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it,” and Luke’s Jesus says it’s in your midst. But Luke goes on within a few verses to the Son of Man flashing like lightning, and Thomas has no lightning.
Elaine Pagels notes that all three Synoptics expect the kingdom soon, while also holding passages that say it’s already here. Thomas keeps the second idea and lets the first one go.
Two Red Arcs
Only two of these arcs turn red. The first is that line about fasting, from saying 14. In Matthew 6 Jesus assumes you’ll fast and tells you how to do it without showing off: “put oil on your head and wash your face.” Thomas’s Jesus tells you it’ll bring sin on you, which I looked at more closely in When Jesus Called Fasting a Sin.
The other is saying 52. The disciples point out that twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, all of them about Jesus, and he answers, “You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence and have spoken of the dead.” Set that beside Luke 24, where the risen Jesus walks two friends through Moses and all the Prophets to show what they said about him. In one gospel the old scriptures are the proof, and in the other they’re a distraction from the person standing in front of you.
The Biggest Difference Isn’t on the Map
An arc can only show what’s there, so the map misses the largest gap of all. As Meyer puts it, in Thomas “nothing is said of a cross with saving significance or an empty tomb.” There’s no birth, no trial and no Easter morning. Jesus talks, and that’s the whole book.
In the sayings it may be the closest text on this map to the first three gospels. In the story those gospels are built to tell, it’s nowhere. That’s why “close to the canon” and “agrees with the canon” aren’t the same claim.
Where Thomas Becomes Thomas
Now take away everything with a parallel. Sayings 7, 42, 77, 97, 98 and 114 have nothing to match them in Matthew, Mark or Luke, and Meyer’s notes show how far you have to wander to find their relatives. For the lion that eats the human, he points to Plato’s Republic, and for “Be passersby,” to an Arabic inscription at a mosque site in Fatehpur Sikri, India.
Saying 77 borrows a little light from John, but “Split a piece of wood; I am there” belongs to Thomas alone. The woman with the leaking jar and the man who tests his sword in the wall are, in Meyer’s words, “known only here in early Christian literature.” I wrote about that pair in Thomas 97 and 98.
I’d rather not skip saying 114. Peter says Mary should leave because “females are not worthy of life,” and Jesus promises to make her male. Meyer reads the intent as liberating, with “male” and “female” standing for the heavenly and the perishable. It’s still a hard way to end a book.
Try It With a Pencil
- Put Thomas 9 beside Mark 4:1-20. Cover Mark’s explanation and write your own in two lines. Then uncover Mark and compare.
- Read Luke 15:4-7 and Thomas 107 out loud, one after the other. Ask yourself which sheep you’ve been in the last year, the one that got lost or the one somebody thought was worth the trouble.
- Open the map above, tap Thomas, and switch off the blue arcs. Read only the gold and red ones in order, and notice how many of them are about where the kingdom is or what religious practice is for.
Thomas opens with a promise that “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Read beside Mark’s private explanation, that sounds a lot like a job description. Mark’s disciples got to ask. Thomas’s readers are told the answer is worth their lives, and then the book hands them the seed.
The Gospel of Thomas and Meyer’s introduction and notes are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). Matthew, Mark and Luke are quoted from the NIV. The Ehrman material is from his Lost Christianities course. Pagels’s point comes from The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979). Goodacre’s argument is in Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Eerdmans, 2012).
