Most sayings in the Gospel of Thomas survive in one place, a single Coptic manuscript dug up near Nag Hammadi in 1945. Saying 22 got around. A version of it turns up in a sermon preached by an ordinary second-century church leader, and another in a lost gospel that Clement of Alexandria quoted around the year 200.
So whatever “make the two into one” meant, Christians on very different sides of the later fights about orthodoxy were repeating it and arguing over it. I want to look at what they heard in it, and then at what I hear.
A Scene and a Riddle
The saying opens with something Jesus sees. Here is Marvin Meyer’s translation:
Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing babies are like those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Then shall we enter the kingdom as babies?”
I love the disciples here. They take him literally, the way they do all through the gospels, and you can almost hear somebody wondering if he’s supposed to shrink. Jesus answers with a riddle:
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”
The brackets mark a word restored where the manuscript is damaged. Everything else is there, and it’s a lot.
What a Nursing Baby Knows
Start with the image he chose. A baby at the breast has no idea where she ends and her mother begins. She doesn’t keep one face for the public and another for herself. She hasn’t learned the categories yet, male and female, mine and yours, up and down.
Thomas comes back to children again and again. In saying 4, an old man asks “a little child seven days old” about the place of life. In saying 37, which I wrote about earlier this week, the disciples trample their clothes like little children. The child in Thomas is someone who hasn’t split yet.
That’s why the disciples’ question misses. Nobody is asking them to go back to infancy. The baby is a picture of a wholeness the adult has to rebuild on purpose.
The Pairs
Then come the pairs, and each one names a seam most of us live along. There are four of them before the saying gets to the body.
Inner and outer is the easiest to feel. Most of us run two versions of ourselves, the one people meet and the one that’s actually thinking. The gap between them takes effort to maintain, and a lot of what we call stress is that effort.
Upper and lower sounds cosmic, and it probably was. Heaven and earth, spirit and body. In saying 3 the kingdom “is inside you and it is outside you,” so I read this pair as refusing to file God in one location.
Male and female is the hardest pair, and I don’t want to pretend it isn’t. The last saying in the collection, 114, has Jesus promising to “make her male” about Mary, which is a long way from the language here. Saying 22 says the categories stop applying altogether, so that “the male will not be male nor the female be female.”
Eyes in Place of an Eye
The strangest line comes near the end. You make “eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image.” It reads like a parts list for a body.
Scholars don’t agree on this one, and I’m not going to settle it. The reading I find most convincing hears Genesis behind it. Humans were made in the image of God, and something went wrong with that image. Here the old body parts get swapped out one by one, and finally the image itself is replaced.
So after all the merging, the sequence ends with a new kind of person, built from the eyes up. The word Thomas uses for that person elsewhere is monachos, the single one, and I’ve traced it through the gospel in On Becoming Solitary.
How a Second-Century Preacher Read It
The oldest Christian sermon that survives outside the New Testament is a text traditionally called 2 Clement, probably from the middle of the second century. Its author says the Lord was once asked when his kingdom would come, and answered in words very close to Thomas. In Kirsopp Lake’s translation:
“When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.”
His reading is surprisingly down-to-earth. The two are one, he says, “when we speak with one another in truth, and there is but one soul in two bodies without dissimulation.” The outside is the body and the inside is the soul, so let your soul show in your good works. Male and female means a brother looks at a sister without thinking of her as female.
You can call that a flattening of the mystery, and some people do. I think he caught something. For this preacher, making the two one starts with not lying to each other.
The Gospel of Philip’s Version
The Gospel of Philip, bound in the same codex as Thomas, tells the story behind the riddle. According to Philip, the original human was whole, and the trouble began when the halves came apart. Here’s the passage:
If the female had not separated from the male, the female and the male would not have died. The separation of male and female was the beginning of death. Christ came to heal the separation that was from the beginning and reunite the two.
Philip’s answer to that wound is the bridal chamber, the highest of its sacraments, where “those united in the bridal chamber will not be separated again.” Thomas gives the inner work, and Philip gives the rite. I tried to show how they fit in On the Bridal Chamber.
Read this way, saying 22 tells you what death is in this tradition. Death is division. Whatever splits you, the gap between what you show and what you are, or between the spirit you pray to and the body you live in, is the place it gets in.
Working the Seams
I don’t know how to make male and female into a single one by Thursday. But the pairs give me somewhere to start, and here’s what I’ve been trying.
- Pick one place where your inner and outer don’t match. Maybe it’s the meeting where you nod along, or the friend you tell you’re fine. Close the gap by one sentence this week, and say the true thing once.
- Take 2 Clement’s test for a day. In each conversation, ask whether you’re speaking “in truth” or managing the other person. You’ll probably catch yourself before lunch.
- Notice where you’ve filed God. If prayer only happens “up there,” pray once with your hands in dishwater or your feet on the ground. That’s the upper made like the lower.
- Look at someone the way the baby looks at the world, before the categories. Try it with a stranger on the bus, and see how long you can hold it before the labels come back.
An Image in Place of an Image
The list in saying 22 saves its oddest item for last. I keep rereading it. Two into one, inner and outer, male and female, eyes and hands and feet, and finally “an image in place of an image.”
You were made in one image and you live, most days, in another, the one you built to get through the room. The saying asks you to trade it in. The baby at the breast is there to show you what the new one looks like before anyone taught it to divide.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). 2 Clement 12 is quoted from Kirsopp Lake’s translation in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1912). For an introduction to Thomas itself, see The Gospel of Thomas: 114 Sayings You’ve Never Heard.
