I skipped saying 7 for years. Every time I read through the Gospel of Thomas, I’d hit the lion, shrug, and move on to the fisherman in saying 8, who at least made sense. It read like a riddle with a line missing, or a copying error somebody forgot to fix.
It turns out the saying makes a lot of sense once you know what a lion meant to a reader in the second or third century. Two other texts help, one by Plato and one from the Gnostic library itself, and both were sitting in the same pile of books buried near Nag Hammadi. Read with them, Thomas 7 becomes one of the most practical sayings in the collection.
The Saying Itself
Here it is in Marvin Meyer’s translation:
“Blessed is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human.”
Meyer notes that “cursed” could also be rendered “foul.” Bentley Layton, translating the same Coptic, uses “devour” in place of “eat” and gives the saying a plain heading, “The lion and the human being.”
The first half is tidy. A human eats a lion, and the lion’s substance turns into human flesh, which is simply how eating works. The second half is where readers stall. Logic says it should end with the human becoming lion, and instead the lion becomes human again.
Is the Text Broken?
That was my first guess, and it’s a reasonable one. Thomas survives complete only in a Coptic translation from the fourth century, and scribes do make mistakes. A few fragments of the older Greek version turned up at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and one of them contains saying 7.
Unfortunately that Greek fragment is mostly holes. Meyer prints it as a “possible restoration,” with square brackets around nearly every key word. It confirms the saying existed in Greek with a lion, a human, a blessing, and a curse. It can’t settle the ending.
So we have the text we have. I’ve come to think the odd ending is deliberate, and the reason comes from Plato.
Plato’s Lion
In Book 9 of the Republic, Socrates asks his listeners to picture the soul as a composite creature. Inside is a many-headed beast, then a smaller lion, then a still smaller human. Wrap all three in the outer shape of a man, he says, so that anyone who “is not able to look within” will take the whole thing for a single person.
The many-headed beast stands for the appetites, the hungers that sprout new heads as fast as you feed them. The lion is the spirited part of the soul, the seat of anger and courage and pride. The little human is reason. A just life, in Socrates’s argument, gives “the man within him” mastery over the other two, keeping the lion as an ally.
Meyer’s note on Thomas 7 points straight to this passage, and he reads the lion as “what is passionate and bestial in human experience.” Here’s the detail I find remarkable. Codex VI of the Nag Hammadi library contains a Coptic version of this exact section of the Republic, buried in the same jar as Thomas. Someone in that community thought Plato’s lion was worth copying.
The Lion-Faced Ruler
The Coptic version of Plato doesn’t match the Greek very closely, and Meyer suggests the translator sometimes misunderstood the original. Where Socrates wants the lion trained, the Coptic wants it defeated. What profits a person, it says, is “to cast down every image of the evil beast and trample them along with the images of the lion.”
A Gnostic reader had an extra reason to be wary of lions. In the Secret Book of John, Sophia’s misbegotten offspring takes “the figure of a snake with the face of a lion.” That creature is Yaldabaoth, the ruler of this world, and this site has written about him and his fellow archons before. Meyer’s note on the Coptic Plato connects the dots directly, citing Thomas 7 and the lion-faced ruler side by side.
So for the people who read Thomas at Nag Hammadi, the lion carried two meanings at once. It was the raw passion Plato described, and it was the family resemblance of the rulers inside you. Your rage has a lion’s face because the power that shaped the body has one too. The Secret Book of John goes further and names the demons behind each passion, which makes this a consistent psychology, even if a strange one.
When You Eat the Lion
Now the first half of the saying opens up. The lion gets eaten, and the result is more human, because the passion has been taken in and changed into something that serves the person.
Eating is an interesting choice of image. You can’t eat something while keeping it at arm’s length, and you can’t digest it by pretending it isn’t there. The saying pictures an encounter where the human is the one doing the consuming, fully aware of what’s on the plate.
Plato’s lion was courage as well as anger, and I think that’s the point. The same heat that makes you snap at your kids can carry you through a hard conversation you’ve avoided for a year. Eaten, the lion becomes the strength behind reason. That’s why it’s the lion who is blessed here, since being eaten is how it gets to become human.
When the Lion Eats You
The second half reverses the meal. The human gets devoured, which is to say the passion takes over, and then comes that puzzling line, “the lion will become human.”
Go back to Plato’s image of the soul wrapped in the outer shape of a man. From outside, the creature looks like a person no matter which part is in charge. When the lion eats the human, the lion now wears the human shape. It walks around in your clothes and answers to your name, and people who only see the outside think it’s you.
That’s my reading, and other readings exist. But it takes the text as written and explains why the ending repeats instead of reversing. The curse is that nobody notices, including you.
You’ve probably met this lion. It’s the version of yourself who sends the email at midnight and then defends it for three days as a matter of principle.
Ways to Eat Your Lion
Some small ways to put the saying to work this week:
- Name the lion when it shows up. “That’s anger” or “that’s wounded pride” is enough. You can’t eat what you haven’t caught, and naming is the catch.
- Ask what it’s good for before you ask how to get rid of it. Anger often means something you care about is being threatened, and knowing what that is gives the heat somewhere useful to go.
- Wait one meal. When the urge is strong, put a delay between it and the action, even just until after dinner. A lion that has to wait is easier to digest.
- Look at the outside. Ask someone you trust whether you’ve been acting like yourself lately. The person wearing the clothes is often the last to know who’s inside them.
The Blessing Goes to the Lion
What strikes me most, after all those years of skipping it, is who gets blessed. The saying doesn’t bless the human for winning. It blesses the lion, the passion itself, for ending up inside a person who knows what to do with it.
That’s a gentler picture of the inner life than the Coptic Plato’s trampling or a lot of later Christian advice about the passions. In Thomas, your anger and your hunger are closer to food than to enemies. Somebody is going to eat somebody tonight, and the saying would like it to be you.
The Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, and the Excerpt from Plato’s Republic are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), including his notes on Thomas 7 and the Excerpt. Plato’s Republic, Book 9, is quoted from Benjamin Jowett’s translation as reprinted in Meyer’s introduction to the Excerpt. Layton’s wording is from The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021).
