Most books promise you something on the back cover. The Gospel of Thomas makes its promise in the first line, and it’s about as large as a promise gets. Figure out what these sayings mean, it says, and you won’t die.
I’ve written about a handful of individual sayings in this series, from the lion in saying 7 to the jar of meal in 97. I skipped the first one for a long time because it looked like a preface. It turns out to be the instruction manual for everything after it.
The Saying Itself
The gospel opens with a short prologue, and saying 1 follows straight on. Here are both in Marvin Meyer’s translation:
These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded. And he said, “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.”
That’s the whole thing, with no setting and no crowd. You get a label on the box and a warning about what’s inside.
A Greek fragment of the same opening survives on a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, catalogued as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654. It’s badly torn, and Meyer’s reconstruction reads “[Whoever finds the interpretation] of these sayings will not taste [death].” The Coptic has “discovers” where the Greek probably had “finds,” but the shape of the promise is the same in both.
Who Is Talking?
Here’s a small puzzle most readers pass right over. “And he said.” Who is he?
You’d assume Jesus, and Meyer’s footnote agrees, mostly. It reads, in full, “Probably Jesus, possibly Judas Thomas.” If it’s Thomas, then saying 1 is the editor stepping forward before the first saying and telling you what the collection is for. If it’s Jesus, then the first thing he says in the whole gospel is about how to read the rest of it.
I like the ambiguity. Either way, the voice that opens the book doesn’t talk about God or the kingdom or the end of the world. It talks about you, the reader, and what you’re about to do with the words.
The name matters a little too. Thomas comes from the Aramaic word for “twin,” and Meyer notes that the same nickname shows up in Greek as Didymos, which also means “Twin.” In parts of Syrian Christianity this Judas was thought of as Jesus’s own twin brother.
That’s an odd credential for a recorder, but it fits a gospel that keeps hinting the reader can become like the speaker. Saying 108 says it outright, and I wrote about that in Whoever Drinks From My Mouth.
Hidden in Plain Sight
In the prologue these are “hidden sayings.” The word restored at that spot in the Greek fragment is the one that gives us “apocryphal,” which today mostly means “dubious.” Back then it meant something closer to “secret” or “tucked away.”
Look at what happens next, though. The hidden sayings are written down, in order, for anyone holding the book. Nothing is locked in a vault. Some of them are things you’ve already heard in Matthew or Luke, like the mustard seed and the lamp that shouldn’t go under a basket.
So the hiding isn’t in the text. It’s in the meaning. You can read all 114 sayings in under an hour and come away with nothing, the same way you can stare at a magic-eye poster and see only static.
Interpretation as the Practice
The word Meyer translates “interpretation” is the Greek hermeneia, the root of “hermeneutics.” It’s a working word. Translators and dream readers did hermeneia.
Compare a line from the Gospel of John that sounds almost the same. In the NIV, Jesus says, “whoever obeys my word will never see death,” and his opponents throw it back at him a verse later as “never taste death.”
Meyer’s footnote points to this passage, and the parallel is close. The difference is the verb. In John, life comes from keeping the word. In Thomas, it comes from discovering what the word means.
Richard Valantasis, a scholar Meyer quotes in his introduction, calls this “a performative theology.” The sayings don’t hand you a doctrine. They hand you material, and whatever theology there is shows up in how you respond. As Valantasis puts it, “Knowledge emerges from an act of interpreting.”
I think that explains why Thomas has almost no story. There’s no birth in a manger, no trial, no empty tomb. A narrative tells you what happened and what it meant. A list of riddles makes you do the second part yourself.
The Disciple Who Couldn’t Say It
Thomas shows up by name in only one saying, number 13. It’s a good test of what saying 1 is asking for.
Jesus asks the disciples what he’s like. Peter says a just messenger. Matthew says a wise philosopher. Thomas says, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”
His reply is “I am not your teacher.” Then he takes Thomas aside and tells him three sayings he won’t repeat to anyone.
The disciple who gets the private teaching is the one who admitted he didn’t have an answer. Peter and Matthew offered tidy summaries, and the summaries were the problem. That’s a pretty useful warning for anybody who reads saying 1 and thinks “discovering the interpretation” means landing on the correct one-line explanation.
Not Tasting Death
“Taste death” is an old Semitic way of saying “die.” Mark uses it too, when Jesus says some standing there “will not taste death” before they see the kingdom come. So the phrase on its own isn’t exotic.
What’s unusual is the condition attached. Nobody in Thomas has to wait for a future event. Saying 18 makes the same promise to “one who stands at the beginning,” and saying 19 makes it to whoever knows the five trees in paradise. Every time, the thing that keeps death away is a kind of knowing that’s available now.
I don’t read that as a promise that your body won’t stop. Thomas seems to mean something closer to this. Whatever in you has actually understood isn’t the part that dies.
Saying 2 picks up right where saying 1 leaves off and describes the process, seeking until you find, being troubled, marveling. I walked through those stages in The Seeking That Does Not Cease.
Reading Like Your Life Depends on It
If saying 1 is a reading instruction, the most honest response is to follow it. Here’s how I’ve been trying to.
Pick one saying and stay with it for a week. Don’t read commentary first. Write down what you think it means on Monday, and then write it again on Friday without looking at Monday’s version. The gap between the two is where the interpretation is happening.
Keep track of the sayings that annoy you. Saying 7, with its man-eating lion, annoyed me for months. The ones that resist you are usually the ones doing work.
And when you catch yourself producing a neat summary, the way Peter and Matthew did, notice it. Sometimes the most accurate thing you can say about a saying is Thomas’s line, that your mouth can’t quite say it yet. If you’d like a place to start, the overview in The Gospel of Thomas: 114 Sayings You’ve Never Heard gives a sense of the whole collection.
Remember that the prologue calls him “the living Jesus.” The Greek fragments put every “Jesus said” in the present tense, “Jesus says.” The sayings were never meant to sit still on the page. Every time somebody reads one and wrestles a meaning out of it, the speaker is talking again.
The Gospel of Thomas, including the Greek fragment P. Oxy. 654, is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). Meyer’s notes and his quotations of Richard Valantasis’s book The Gospel of Thomas come from the same volume. John 8:51-52 and Mark 9:1 are quoted from the NIV.
