Thomas 22: When You Make the Two One
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. ...