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.
The Saying in Three Parts
Marvin Meyer’s translation splits saying 108 into three numbered clauses. In the first, Jesus says that “whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me.” In the second, he adds, “I myself shall become that person.” And in the third, “the hidden things will be revealed to that person.”
That’s the whole saying. Bentley Layton’s version is nearly identical, though he offers “obscure” as an alternative to “hidden” in the last line. He also gives the saying a heading I can’t improve on: “Assimilation to Jesus.”
Notice what the saying doesn’t ask for. It doesn’t ask you to believe anything about Jesus, or to call him Lord, or even to follow him. It asks you to drink, and it tells you what happens after that.
Why a Mouth?
Drinking from someone’s mouth is an odd image, and it’s supposed to be. A mouth is where words come from. In a gospel made of nothing but sayings, drinking from the speaker’s mouth means taking his words in until they become part of your body, the way water does.
Meyer’s notes point to a few older texts in the background. One is the Wisdom of Ben Sira, where Wisdom herself speaks and says that those who drink from her will only thirst for more.
Jewish readers already knew the picture of wisdom as something you swallow. Thomas hands that picture to Jesus. The most important cross-reference, though, is inside Thomas itself.
“I Am Not Your Teacher”
In saying 13, Jesus asks his disciples to compare him to something. Peter says he’s like a just messenger, and Matthew says he’s like a wise philosopher. Thomas admits defeat: “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”
Jesus answers with a correction. “I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended.”
That’s saying 108 acted out in a scene. Thomas has drunk from the spring, and the result is that the usual titles stop fitting. You can’t be someone’s student once you’re drinking from the same source they are. Jesus then takes Thomas aside and tells him three sayings so dangerous that the other disciples would stone him for hearing just one.
The gospel’s opening line gives the disciple’s name as “Judas Thomas the Twin.” Read the two sayings together and the nickname starts to look intentional. The disciple who drinks becomes the twin.
How Close Is This to John?
The obvious comparison is the Gospel of John, where Jesus offers living water to a Samaritan woman at a well. In the NIV he tells her that “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
That’s closer to Thomas than people usually admit. In both gospels the water ends up inside the drinker and becomes a spring of its own. And later orthodox writers kept the idea of likeness alive too. Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, famously summed up the gospel by saying that God became human so that humans might become divine.
So the difference is one of emphasis, and it’s still a big one. John’s Jesus is the only Son who came down from heaven, and the life he gives flows through believing in him. Thomas’s Jesus wants you drinking from his mouth until the gap between you closes. The second clause of saying 108 goes further than anything in John. Jesus says he will become you.
Philip Says It Even More Plainly
The Gospel of Philip, another text from the Nag Hammadi library, builds a whole theory around this idea. In a passage on seeing, Philip writes, “People cannot see anything that really is without becoming like it.”
In this world, Philip explains, you can look at the sun without becoming the sun. In the world of truth it works differently, and “you have seen Christ and have become Christ.” Elsewhere the same gospel says that a person who receives the anointing “is no longer a Christian but is Christ.”
I wrote about Philip’s highest sacrament in On the Bridal Chamber, and it’s the same movement on a larger scale. Two become one. What you take in, you turn into. Philip uses the eye where Thomas uses the mouth, but they’re describing the same exchange.
The Hidden Things
The last clause of saying 108 ties back to the very first sentence of the gospel, which calls the whole book “the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke.” Saying 1 then promises that whoever discovers their interpretation “will not taste death.”
So the hidden things arrive once you’ve become the kind of person who can see them. This is why the Gnostics kept insisting that gnosis is different from information. You can memorize all 114 sayings and still be thirsty. The drinking is what changes you, and the seeing comes after.
Choosing What You Drink
If the Dublin effect is real, and I think it is, then you’re already becoming like whatever you drink from most often. For a lot of us that’s a phone. Hours of other people’s voices go into us every day, and they come back out in our moods and our opinions and the way we talk to the people we love.
Saying 108 suggests a simple experiment, and you can keep the phone. Pick one saying from Thomas, or from any text that has fed you, and take it in slowly every morning for a week. Read it aloud. Carry it in your head while you wash the dishes. Notice by Friday whether any of its words have started coming out of your own mouth.
You can also run the experiment in reverse. Before you open an app or a feed, ask whose mouth you’re about to drink from, and whether you’d want to become like them. That one question changes a surprising number of choices.
A Spring That Gets Shared
The Gospel of Thomas was copied, buried, and nearly lost, and one reason may be sayings like this one. A Jesus who wants twins instead of followers is hard to build an institution around.
Still, the image in saying 13 is generous. Jesus tends the spring the way someone keeps a well clear so the water keeps running for whoever comes thirsty. Thomas drank and went home changed, and every reader who picks up the book is offered the same cup.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), including his notes on saying 108. Layton’s wording and heading are from The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021). John 4:14 is quoted from the NIV. The passages from Ben Sira and Athanasius are paraphrased.
