The true words of Thomas

Almost 75 years ago, the Gospel of Thomas (Thomas) was discovered among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts unearthed in 1945. The first photographic edition appeared in 1956, and the first critical analysis followed in 1958 with Johannes Leipoldt’s Das Evangelium nach Thomas. Since then, thousands of attempts have been made to interpret Thomas, situating it variously in biblical, Gnostic, and even Buddhist or Zen contexts.

Thomas opens with the words:

these are the words which are hiding; IS who is living has said them, and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them - and he said: he who will fall onto the Interpretation of these words will not taste the death

The phrase taste the death raises a question: should it not read taste death? Interestingly, only Logia 18 and 19 contain that exact phrase, and it is a key to unlocking Thomas’ hidden layer. The omission of the definite article in Coptic introduces deliberate ambivalence, exploiting homonyms: the masculine ⲙⲟⲩ means death, while the feminine ⲙⲟⲩ means mother; anarthrous use of the noun allows for the possibility of both.

The reader is explicitly invited to seek the interpretation of “these words” because Thomas contains a hidden layer, intentionally inserted and retrievable only through precise textual analysis. This hidden meaning is constructed through several mechanisms:

1. Homonyms and the definite article: Many Coptic nouns are differentiated only by the article, allowing Thomas to embed ambivalence. In Logion 1, tasting the death appears with the masculine definite article, whereas Logion 18 refers to tasting death anarthrously, thereby permitting the alternative rendering tasting mother;
2. Dialectal and variant forms: Single words appear in multiple dialects or forms, creating homonymic ambivalence. For example, in Logion 4, ϫⲛⲉ- can mean either to cease or to question;
3. Scriptio continua: The continuous string of letters in the text, scriptio continua, is manipulated via the above mechanisms so that word segmentation becomes ambivalent. Logion 66 for example can be read in two ways, either as ⲛ̅ⲧⲟϥ ⲡⲉ ⲡ ⲱⲱⲛⲉ (the stone) ⲛ̅ ⲕⲱϩ or as ⲛ̅ⲧⲟϥ ⲡⲉ ⲡⲱⲱⲛⲉ (turn-around) ⲛ̅ ⲕⲱϩ. Moreover, the last word is homonymous, meaning either corner or envy;
4. Greek-Coptic twin words: Thomas also exploits subtle nuances between Greek and Coptic words with identical meaning, where the Greek term carries a higher metaphysical connotation.

These mechanisms are deliberate, exemplifying the principle of “making the two one.”

Existing translations frequently introduce words incompatible with major Coptic lexicons and unattested in any known semantic range. Given most editors’ extensive Coptic philological expertise, these renderings cannot plausibly be considered mere lexical errors. Examples include among others the colostrum in Logion 96, separation and sickness in Logion 74, the strangers of Logion 64, and the sows of Logion 93. Very often, harmonization with the canonical Gospels is given precedence over Thomas’ actual text.

While many readers are familiar with those superficial translations, only this translation reveals Thomas’ hidden layers—layers deliberately concealed, hidden for nearly two millennia, yet now visible and verifiable word by word with a simple click.