Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written.
If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit.
So let’s make the case for the slow, slightly old-fashioned thing. Pick a few sayings and learn them by heart.
Search Made Remembering Optional
In 2011 a team of psychologists led by Betsy Sparrow published a set of experiments in Science under the title “Google Effects on Memory.” People who expected to be able to look a fact up later remembered it worse. They did get better at remembering where to find it.
For most information that’s a sensible trade. I don’t need my brain holding the boiling point of water at altitude or the year a treaty was signed. Knowing where to look is a skill, and it frees up room.
A saying you hope will change your life works differently, though. It has to be there at three in the morning, or in the half second before you snap at someone, and in neither moment are you going to open a browser. A teaching you have to look up arrives after the moment it was meant for.
A Gospel Built to Be Carried
The Gospel of Thomas looks almost designed for memory. There’s barely any story in it. It’s a list of 114 short sayings, most of them a sentence or two long, and most of them open with the same two words, “Jesus said.” The first saying tells you what to do with the rest:
Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.
Look at the verb. The promise goes to whoever discovers the interpretation, and you can’t discover much about a sentence you’ve glanced at once. Richard Valantasis, a scholar Marvin Meyer quotes in his introduction, says the collection “demands a performance” and that it takes “work and toil” to reach its meaning. You perform a saying by saying it.
Saying 38 has an edge I missed for a long time:
Often you have desired to hear these sayings that I am speaking to you, and you have no one else from whom to hear them. There will be days when you will seek me and you will not find me.
The teacher is telling his students he won’t always be around. Read as advice, it’s pretty blunt. The days when you can’t reach the source are coming, so take the words with you now.
The Monks Who Learned the Psalms
Egypt’s early monks took that literally. Pachomius, who founded the first large communal monasteries along the Nile in the early fourth century, left a set of rules that survives in a Latin translation. According to those rules, a newcomer was handed twenty psalms or two of the apostle’s letters to learn, and nobody in the monastery was to be left unable to read or without some scripture by heart.
Picture what that does over years. A psalm learned that way stops being a page you consult and starts behaving like a tune you can’t get out of your head. It comes back on its own while your hands are busy with something else.
I wrote about the difference between gnosis and information a while back, and memorization is where that difference turns physical. Information sits on a server until you call for it. A memorized line lives in you, and it shows up in situations you’d never have thought to search.
A Book Written in the Heart
The Gospel of Truth, a Valentinian sermon from the second century, has a line about this that I keep returning to. When the Savior comes, it says, “in their hearts the living book of the living was revealed.” The book that saves is written inside the reader.
A little later the sermon describes the letters of that book. They “are not merely vowels or consonants, so that one may read them and think them devoid of meaning. Rather, they are letters of truth; they speak and know themselves.”
I think that’s an accurate description of what happens to a line you know by heart. For a while it’s syllables you can say on autopilot. Then one day, in traffic or halfway through an argument, it speaks, and you hear it as if for the first time. My walk through the Gospel of Truth covers the rest of the sermon if you want the context.
What Memorizing Does to a Saying
You can’t memorize a sentence without reading it twenty times, and somewhere around the twelfth reading you notice a word you’d been skipping.
Take Saying 2, for example. Most people remember it as “seek and you will find,” but in Thomas the finding is only the second step. After finding comes being troubled, then marveling, and only then does the seeker “reign over all.” I’d read that saying dozens of times before I noticed it had five stages, and I only noticed because I tried to say them in order.
Sayings you carry also start talking to each other. Saying 2 warns that seeking leads to trouble, and Saying 5 tells you to “know what is in front of your face.” Put them side by side in your head and the second one starts to sound like instructions for surviving the first.
And they get there first. A search engine is fast, but a remembered line is faster, because it arrives before you’ve decided what you need.
How to Start
You don’t need a monastery or the whole Psalter. Here’s a way in that fits around a normal week.
- Pick one short saying. Thomas 42, “Be passersby,” is two words in Meyer’s translation. Start there and you’ll have one by tonight.
- Copy it by hand onto an index card. Writing slows your eye down. Keep the card somewhere you wait, like next to the coffee maker or in your wallet.
- Say it out loud. Hearing your own voice gives your memory a second way in. Mumbling under your breath counts.
- Add one a week. Ten weeks gets you ten sayings. Run through the old ones each time you add a new one, the way the monks stacked psalm on psalm.
- Notice when one shows up uninvited. Jot down where you were and what it meant there. Over time those notes turn into a commentary nobody else could write.
If you want a list to choose from, The Gospel of Thomas: 114 Sayings You’ve Never Heard gathers a good starting set.
For your second card, I’d suggest Saying 5 in full: “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.” It’s nineteen words. Read it three times now and see how much of it you can say with your eyes closed.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Truth are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), and Richard Valantasis is quoted from Meyer’s introduction to Thomas. The Pachomian rule on memorizing scripture is paraphrased from the Precepts of Pachomius, which survive in Jerome’s Latin translation (Pachomiana Latina, ed. A. Boon). The memory study is Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333 (2011).
