Anyone who has given a two-year-old a bath knows the routine. The clothes come off, and before you can get the water running, the kid is gone, tearing down the hallway and shrieking with joy. The clothes stay in a heap on the bathroom floor, usually with a footprint on them.
That’s more or less the picture Jesus reaches for in saying 37 of the Gospel of Thomas. The disciples ask when they’ll finally see him, and the answer involves taking off your clothes and stomping on them like a little kid. I want to look at what that image meant to its first readers, and then at what it might mean for someone who isn’t standing at the edge of a baptismal pool.
The Saying Itself
Here it is in Marvin Meyer’s translation:
His disciples said, “When will you appear to us and when shall we see you?” Jesus said, “When you strip without being ashamed and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the child of the living one and you will not be afraid.”
The bracketed word is a restoration where the Coptic manuscript is damaged. A Greek fragment of the same saying also survives, on a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt catalogued as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655.
It’s full of holes, but one line comes through clearly enough: “When you strip off your clothing and are not ashamed.” So the stripping and the missing shame aren’t a late Coptic flourish. They were in the Greek too.
Notice the shape of the exchange. The disciples want a date, and Jesus hands them a condition. You’ll see me when something has happened in you, which puts the timing back in their hands.
Back in the Garden
Anyone who knew Genesis would have caught the echo at once. Before the fall, in the NIV’s wording, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Then they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened, and they sew fig leaves together to cover themselves.
The next scene is the one I think explains Thomas 37. God walks in the garden and calls out, and Adam answers, “I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” Shame and fear show up in the same verse, and the first thing a human does with them is duck behind a tree.
Saying 37 runs that sequence backward. Strip without shame, and “you will not be afraid.” The coverings Adam and Eve stitched together are the very things the disciples now take off and grind into the dirt. It’s Eden in reverse, with a happier ending.
The Children in the Field
Thomas has used this image once already. In saying 21, Mary asks what the disciples are like, and Jesus says they are “like children living in a field that is not theirs.” When the owners come and demand the field back, the children “take off their clothes in front of them in order to give it back to them.”
Read side by side, the two sayings treat clothing as whatever the world has lent you. The field was never theirs, and neither were the shirts. In saying 21 the children hand everything back without a fight. In saying 37 they go a step further and trample it, which is what kids do with clothes they’ve stopped caring about.
A Baptism Hiding in the Saying
In 1966 the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith published an essay called “The Garments of Shame” that changed how a lot of scholars read this passage. He picked out four elements in it: undressing, being naked without shame, treading on the clothes, and being like little children. All four, he argued, belong to early Christian baptism.
That fits what we know about the rite. Candidates undressed before going down into the water. In fourth-century Jerusalem, Cyril told the newly baptized that standing naked and unashamed had made them like Adam in the garden. The Gospel of Philip, bound in the same Nag Hammadi codex as Thomas, puts the moment plainly: “when one is about to go down into the water, one strips in order to put on the living human.”
So saying 37 may have worked a bit like a liturgical script. You strip, you go under, you come up, and you see. For its first hearers, “the child of the living one” might have been waiting on the far side of the water. I wrote more about this sacramental world in the walk through the Gospel of Philip, which treats baptism as the first of several mysteries.
The Garment of Shame
There’s one more witness, and it supplies the phrase I can’t stop thinking about. Around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria quoted a saying from a lost book he called the Gospel according to the Egyptians. Salome asks when the things she’s been asking about will be known, and the Lord answers that it will be when you have “trampled on the garment of shame,” and when the two become one and male and female are neither.
Clement is careful to say this saying isn’t in the four Gospels the church had received. He then reads it allegorically, taking the male and female as anger and desire. You don’t have to follow him there to see what the phrase does. It names the thing under your feet in Thomas 37, which is the shame the clothes were sewn to hide.
The second half of Salome’s answer should sound familiar to anyone who knows Thomas 22, where Jesus says you enter the kingdom when you “make male and female into a single one.” That saying sits at the center of what monachos really means, the Gospel of Thomas’s word for the undivided person. Shedding shame and becoming whole seem to be two descriptions of one event.
What Shame Has to Do With Seeing
Now back to the disciples’ question. They asked when they’d see Jesus, and the answer amounts to “when you stop hiding.” I don’t read that as mystical code.
Most of us know how shame bends our sight. When I’m ashamed of something, I can’t look straight at the person I let down, and I can barely look at the thing itself. I spend my attention managing how I appear, which leaves very little for seeing anyone else.
Adam behind the tree isn’t looking for God. He’s hoping not to be found.
The toddler in the hallway has no such problem. She hasn’t learned yet that a body is something to manage. Thomas asks adults to get back to that place on purpose, which is much harder than getting there by accident, and probably why the early church built a whole ritual around it.
Taking Off a Few Layers
Nobody’s suggesting you sprint naked down your own hallway. Here are some smaller ways to work with the saying:
- Find your fig leaf. Pick one thing about yourself you routinely cover. Then notice what you use to cover it, whether that’s a joke, a quick change of subject, or an apology before anyone asked for one.
- Say it out loud once. Shame does its best work in private. Tell the hidden thing to one person you trust, and pay attention to what happens to the fear afterward.
- Inventory the borrowed clothes. Job title, reputation, the version of you that exists online. Saying 21’s children give the field back without a fight. Ask which of your garments you’d hand over if the owner came knocking tomorrow.
- Catch yourself hiding in prayer. If you sit down to pray or meditate and immediately start arranging how you look to God, or to yourself, that’s Adam behind the tree. Stop arranging and sit there as you are.
Not Afraid
The promise at the end of the saying is smaller than most spiritual promises. It doesn’t offer bliss or enlightenment. It says you’ll see, and you won’t be afraid.
In Genesis, fear was the first thing a human admitted to after the fall. Thomas 37 closes by taking it away, and the price is a pile of clothes on the floor.
Which piece would you have the hardest time putting under your feet?
The Gospel of Thomas (including the Greek fragment P. Oxy. 655) and the Gospel of Philip are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). Genesis 2:25 and 3:10 are quoted from the NIV. Clement of Alexandria’s quotation of the Gospel according to the Egyptians is from Stromateis 3.13.92. Jonathan Z. Smith’s essay “The Garments of Shame” appeared in History of Religions 5, no. 2 (1966). For an introduction to Thomas itself, see The Gospel of Thomas: 114 Sayings You’ve Never Heard.
