Sayings of Jesus

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. ...

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. ...

Spend two years working in Dublin and there’s a good chance you’ll come home calling everything “grand.” You won’t decide to. Nobody will sit you down and teach you Irish slang. You’ll just hear the same voices every day until their words start coming out of your mouth. Most of us know this effect from the inside. We pick up the phrases of the people we live with, and after enough years we start to sound like our parents whether we like it or not. Saying 108 of the Gospel of Thomas takes that ordinary fact and turns it into a promise about Jesus. It’s short, it’s strange, and I think it marks the clearest line between Thomas and the church that left it out of the Bible. ...

Put your hand flat on the table and look at it for a few seconds. Knuckles, a scar or two, the veins that show more every year. Somewhere behind those fingers is the one doing the looking, and nobody has ever explained to anyone’s satisfaction how the two got together. Saying 29 of the Gospel of Thomas is about that exact puzzle. It gets quoted as proof that the Gnostics hated the body, because it ends by calling the body “poverty.” Read the whole thing, though, and the word that keeps coming back is “marvel.” Let’s look at what the saying actually claims, and how the wonder in it outweighs the insult. ...

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. ...

You’ve probably carried a grocery bag with a small tear in the bottom. Somewhere between the car and the kitchen, a thin trail of rice follows you across the driveway, and you feel nothing. You find out when you set the bag on the counter and it slumps over, half as full as when you left the store. Jesus tells almost exactly that story in the Gospel of Thomas, and it appears in none of the four gospels in the Bible. Right after it comes a second parable missing from the canon, about a man who practices a murder before he commits it. Sayings 97 and 98 make a strange pair. Read together, they describe two ways a spiritual life can go, and they’re worth a slow look. ...

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. ...