Gospel of Thomas ca. 50–180 CE

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 logia (utterances) that are alleged to be from the “living” or “life-giving” Jesus. Many of the sayings, or parables, begin with the words, “Jesus said” or “He said,” while others are brief conversations between Jesus and his disciples initiated by questions or situations. The document was lost in antiquity until the discovery of a cache of codices (bound books, as opposed to scrolls) in the Egyptian desert near the modern-day town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. The story of the discovery of what has come to be titled the Nag Hammadi Library and its impact upon early Christian studies is both exciting and profound. The collection, written in Coptic, a late Egyptian language, includes thirteen codices in varying condition, in which forty-six individual writings (tractates) are found. Some of these documents were entirely unknown or known only by title, and they include several gospels, creation mythologies, tracts related to various apostolic figures, commentaries on metaphysical thought, and a few Hermetic writings along with a portion of Plato's Republic. The Gospel of Thomas is in Nag Hammadi Codex II and is among the best-known, most celebrated, and most studied tractates of the collection.