How to Read the Gospel of Thomas: The Manuscripts and the Translations

So you want to know how to read the Gospel of Thomas, and the honest first answer is that you cannot read it in the way you read a novel, because it is not one object. It is a Coptic manuscript, three older Greek scraps, and a set of modern translations that disagree. This page is the apparatus rather than the interpretation: what survives, who turned it into English, which edition to open, and how to test a wording somebody sends you.

It is a reference-desk page. For a worked reading of four sayings on one subject, see Fasting in Gnosticism: What the Texts Actually Say. For where the collection sits in the wider library, see the cosmology guide.

What it is: one Coptic codex and three Greek scraps

The whole collection survives once. ●Documented The complete text is the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, a Coptic papyrus book that the Gospels.net manuscript list describes as "Coptic; papyrus codex; 4th/5th century; preserves essentially the complete Gospel of Thomas". ☿Gospels.net (2023). Manuscript Information. Gospels.net, ed. Mark M. Mattison.Read full source: Manuscript Information →☿¹ That is the book found near Nag Hammadi in 1945, sitting immediately before the Gospel of Philip in the same codex.

Parts of it survive three more times, in Greek, and those copies are older. ●Documented The earliest is Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1, listed as "Greek; papyrus codex; late 2nd/early 3rd century; preserves most of Gospel of Thomas 26-30+77, 31-33". ☿Gospels.net (2023). Manuscript Information. Gospels.net, ed. Mark M. Mattison.Read full source: Manuscript Information →☿¹ ●Documented A second Greek piece, P.Oxy 654, is listed as a Greek papyrus roll of the middle or late third century that "preserves parts Gospel of Thomas Prologue+1-7", and a third, P.Oxy 655, carries fragments from the middle of the collection. ☿Gospels.net (2023). Manuscript Information. Gospels.net, ed. Mark M. Mattison.Read full source: Manuscript Information →☿¹

The Greek leaves came out of the ground first, and nobody knew what they were. ●Documented Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt published P.Oxy 1 in 1897 with the parent text left an open question, calling it "The document in question is a leaf from a papyrus book containing a collection of Logia or Sayings of our Lord", and they judged that "the papyrus was probably written not much later than the year 200". ☉Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt (1897). Sayings of Our Lord from an Early Greek Papyrus. Henry Frowde for the Egypt Exploration Fund, London.Read full source: Sayings of Our Lord from an Early Greek Papyrus →☉² The question stayed open for forty-eight years, until the Coptic collection surfaced and the leaf could be placed inside it. The whole story of the Oxyrhynchus papyri is worth knowing before you trust any single wording.

Two structural facts follow from this, and both change how you read. The collection has no narrative: 114 numbered sayings, each one a logion, in an order that carries no argument. And the text you will read in English is almost always the Coptic, which is itself a translation from Greek, so you are reading a translation of a translation unless the saying falls in one of the Oxyrhynchus stretches.

Who translated it

Three English translations of the Coptic are open on the web, and each is credited to named scholars, so the work can be checked line by line.

The Lambdin translation (1977) is the one printed in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, and it is hosted in full at Early Christian Writings. ☽James M. Robinson, ed.; Thomas O. Lambdin, trans. (1977). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Harper & Row; text hosted at Early Christian Writings.Read full source: The Nag Hammadi Library in English →☽³ It is the oldest of the three and the most literal in its sentence shapes, which makes it the useful one when you want to see the Coptic syntax showing through.

The Scholars Version (1992), trans. Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, is also hosted at Early Christian Writings. ♃Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, trans. (1992). The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas. Early Christian Writings.Read full source: The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas →♃⁴ It is the one that shows its working: restorations and supplied words are marked, and material from the Greek fragments is printed where it belongs.

The Mattison translation (2015) is a modern-English rendering of the Coptic of Codex II, and it costs nothing to use. ●Documented The note above the text says the translation is "committed to the public domain and may be freely copied and used, changed or unchanged, for any purpose". ♄Mark M. Mattison, trans. (2015). The Gospel of Thomas. Gospels.net.Read full source: The Gospel of Thomas →♄⁵ That licence matters practically: you can quote it at length, reprint it in a study group handout, and never wonder whether you have permission.

Those are the three editions this page relies on, credited to the scholars who signed them. Nothing here is a claim about any of those scholars.

Which edition to read: start with the prologue

The fastest way to see why one translation is never enough is to read the same sentence in all three. Here is the prologue, which is the text telling you what it thinks it is.

These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.

— trans. Mark M. Mattison (2015), from the Coptic of NHC II,2

These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.

— trans. Thomas O. Lambdin (1977)

These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.

— trans. Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer (1992)

●Documented The three renderings of one sentence differ at two points: the sayings are hidden or secret, and Thomas wrote them down or recorded them. Neither difference is an error. They are three defensible readings of the same Coptic words, and the gap between hidden and secret is exactly where most popular interpretation of this gospel is built.

○Legendary Note also what the sentence itself claims. According to the prologue, the living Jesus spoke these sayings and Didymos Judas Thomas set them down, a name that says twin twice, in Greek and in Aramaic. No document outside the text supports that attribution, so it belongs to the collection's account of itself rather than to the record.

For a first read, take the Mattison translation: modern English, public domain, free. Then keep the Scholars Version open beside it, because that is the edition which shows where the manuscripts fight.

How to read it: how to read the Gospel of Thomas without being fooled

Three steps, in order, and they take about ten minutes each time.

One: find the number. Every quotation from this gospel has a logion number, because that is the only address the text has. A quote presented without one is a quote nobody has looked up.

Two: read it in two translations. Open the same number in two of the three editions above. Where they agree, you have a stable reading. Where they diverge, you have found an interpretive decision, and you now know it was a decision rather than a fact.

Three: read the brackets. This is the step everyone skips, and it carries the most information.

Saying 2 is the clearest case in the whole collection. In the Coptic translations the sequence ends with reigning. The Mattison translation has it as "Whoever seeks shouldn't stop until they find. When they find, they'll be disturbed." ♄Mark M. Mattison, trans. (2015). The Gospel of Thomas. Gospels.net.Read full source: The Gospel of Thomas →♄⁵ The Lambdin version closes the saying with "he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All." ☽James M. Robinson, ed.; Thomas O. Lambdin, trans. (1977). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Harper & Row; text hosted at Early Christian Writings.Read full source: The Nag Hammadi Library in English →☽³

The Scholars Version does not stop there. ◐Debated Where the Coptic ends at reigning, that edition prints "will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]" ♃Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, trans. (1992). The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas. Early Christian Writings.Read full source: The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas →♃⁴ That bracketed clause comes from the Greek, where P.Oxy 654 carries this part of the collection, and the two witnesses genuinely disagree about whether the sequence ends in rule or in rest. The two Coptic translations are following their own manuscript; the Scholars Version is showing the Greek one. Whether seeking ends in reigning or in rest depends on which manuscript you are reading, and that is a fact about the text rather than a problem with the translators.

The round brackets do a different job. ●Documented In saying 3 the Scholars Version prints "Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky," where the parentheses mark words the translators supplied to make the Coptic read as English. ♃Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, trans. (1992). The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas. Early Christian Writings.Read full source: The Scholars' Translation of the Gospel of Thomas →♃⁴ Square brackets mean a gap or a restoration from another witness. Round brackets mean an insertion for sense. Learn those two conventions and the apparatus stops being furniture.

And the case the whole method exists for: a wording that appears in none of the three editions. It happens constantly with this gospel, in memes, in course handouts, in books. The right conclusion is not that the quote is fake and the person repeating it is a liar. The right conclusion is narrower and more useful: the earliest documented source for that wording is not a manuscript of Thomas, and whoever repeated it was reading a paraphrase. Find the paraphrase if you can, and then say where it came from.

Verdict: documented, and checkable in an afternoon

●Documented The Gospel of Thomas is a documented text. Its manuscripts are catalogued and photographed, its Coptic copy is complete, its Greek fragments were published in 1897 with plates, and three independent translations of it are free to read right now. There is nothing to take on trust about its existence.

What the sources do not give you is a single authoritative wording. They give you witnesses that differ, translators who chose, and an apparatus for seeing both. That is not a defect in the record; it is what every ancient text looks like when you stop reading it through one edition.

The practice this page is for is small and repeatable. Pick a saying. Read it twice, in two translations. Read the brackets. Then, when you repeat it, say which edition you read.

FAQ

Where can I read the Gospel of Thomas online free? All three open translations are free. The 2015 version, trans. Mark M. Mattison, is at Gospels.net and is public domain, so you may reuse it without permission. The 1977 Lambdin translation and the 1992 Scholars Version are both hosted in full at Early Christian Writings. Read two of the three, not one.

What does the Gospel of Thomas say? It records 114 sayings attributed to Jesus with no story around them. Roughly half have parallels in Matthew, Mark and Luke; the rest turn inward, placing the kingdom within the seeker rather than in a future event. The prologue promises that whoever finds the meaning of the sayings will not taste death, which ties the text to interpretation rather than belief.

How many sayings are in the Gospel of Thomas? 114 in the Coptic manuscript, numbered by modern editors rather than by the scribe. The Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus cover only parts: the prologue and the first seven sayings, a stretch from 26 to 33 together with 77, and fragments of 24 and 36 to 39. Every citation uses that numbering.

Which translation of the Gospel of Thomas is best? There is no single best one, and that is why the method above uses two. The Mattison translation is the most readable and the freest to reuse. The Lambdin version keeps the Coptic sentence shapes visible. The Scholars Version marks restorations and Greek readings in brackets, which makes it the right second window for any saying you intend to quote.