Here is the version you’ve probably seen, on a poster or a quote site or tucked into a book on creativity:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
It’s a beautiful sentence. The two halves mirror each other perfectly, and the message is easy to carry around. Express what’s in you or it will eat you alive. Write the novel, start the business, say the thing you’ve been holding back.
That wording comes from Elaine Pagels’s 1979 bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, which quotes it twice. The trouble is that when you open the two standard scholarly translations of the Gospel of Thomas, the saying doesn’t read that way. The first clause survives. The rest shifts in a direction that makes it stranger, harsher, and in my view a lot more useful.
What the Translators Actually Print
Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures gives saying 70 like this:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.”
Bentley Layton’s in The Gnostic Scriptures is close to it. “If you produce what is in you, what you have will save you. If you do not have what is in you, what you do not have [will] kill you.” The brackets in both mark a spot where the manuscript is damaged and the editors have filled in the missing word.
Put them side by side with the popular version and one verb keeps changing. Pagels’s rendering repeats “bring forth” four times. Meyer and Layton use it once, in the opening condition, and after that the key word is have. What saves you is what you have. What kills you is what you don’t have.
Pagels wasn’t careless. Her endnote cites the 1977 Nag Hammadi Library in English, and she was writing for a general audience at a moment when almost nobody outside a few universities had read these sayings. But her smoothing turned a saying about possession into a saying about expression, and that is a bigger change than it looks.
Two Different Diagnoses
In the popular version, the danger is repression. You have something inside, a gift or a grief or a truth, and if you keep it in, it festers. Pagels made the connection herself, calling this a saying that few psychiatrists would disagree with. That’s a reasonable teaching, and plenty of people have been helped by it.
The translators’ version names a different danger. The second half isn’t about someone who has a gift and hides it. It’s about someone who does not have “that” within them at all. The lack itself is what kills.
So the saying sets up two people. The first brings forth what is within, and discovers that what they have is enough to save them. The second has nothing to bring forth, and the emptiness does the damage. The hinge between them is the word “that,” which points back to something the reader is expected to recognize.
What “That” Is
Thomas never defines it here, which is typical of the gospel. But Meyer’s notes point to two other sayings, and they help.
Saying 41 reads, “Whoever has something in hand will be given more, and whoever has nothing will be deprived of even the little that person has.” Saying 67 is sharper still: “One who knows everything but lacks in oneself lacks everything.” You can know every fact in the library and still come up empty, because the thing that matters isn’t information. This site has made that argument before in the post on gnosis versus information, and saying 67 might be the cleanest statement of it anywhere.
Then there’s saying 3, the one that opens the whole gospel’s teaching on the self. “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty.”
Read these together and “that within you” starts to look like the recognition saying 3 describes, the knowledge of where you come from. Having it means being rich. Lacking it means you are poverty, in the saying’s blunt phrase. Saying 70 adds a darker word for the same condition. Poverty, pushed far enough, kills.
Why the Harder Version Is Better
The popular version puts all the weight on output. Salvation becomes something you produce, and if you aren’t producing, you are failing. That’s a very modern message, and it can turn into one more demand on people who already feel they never do enough.
The translators’ version flips that around. The first clause says “what you have will save you,” and the tense matters. You don’t make the saving thing by bringing it forth. You already have it, and bringing it forth is how it becomes active and how you find out it was there. The work is excavation rather than manufacture. That’s a kinder saying than the poster version, even though its second half is far more frightening.
It is also more honest. Anyone who has tried to “express themselves” out of a hollow season knows the attempt can be exhausting and produce very little. The saying doesn’t pretend otherwise. If there’s nothing there yet, it says, then the work is to come to have it, which is what the whole gospel is about. The Gospel of Thomas opens by promising that whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death, and saying 70 is the same promise run in reverse.
One more detail. Layton marks the “you” in this saying as plural. Jesus is speaking to a group, which fits a gospel written for a community. What you all have will save you. It’s a small point, and I wouldn’t build a theology on it, but it softens the picture of a solitary person digging in the dark.
Trying It Out
A few ways to live with this saying for a week, in the version the manuscript actually supports:
- Swap the verb. Each time you catch yourself thinking “I need to produce something,” try asking “what do I already have?” instead. The first question sends you to your to-do list. The second sends you inward, which is where the saying points.
- Read sayings 3, 41, 67, and 70 in one sitting. They take two minutes together. Notice how differently 70 reads once its neighbors are in your head.
- Name the poverty honestly. If a part of your life feels empty, which is a different thing from blocked, don’t try to force expression out of it. The practice of becoming solitary might serve better than another project. Quiet can be how you come to have something.
- Check your quotations. When a saying circulates in a perfectly symmetrical form, look it up in a scholarly translation. The rough edges are often where the meaning lives.
The poster version will keep circulating, and it isn’t a bad sentence to live by. But if you’ve ever felt that there’s nothing in you worth bringing forth, the manuscript’s version has news for you that the poster doesn’t. It starts from what you have.
The Gospel of Thomas is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010) and Bentley Layton’s in The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021). The popular rendering of saying 70 is quoted from Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979).
