The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most important texts recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, a library of fifty-two Gnostic works sealed in the Egyptian desert around the 4th century CE. Unlike the canonical gospels, it contains no narrative of the nativity, miracles, Passion, or resurrection. Instead, it is a sayings gospel, preserving 114 logia attributed to Jesus, some paralleling synoptic material and others with no canonical counterpart. The Coptic manuscript dates to the 4th century, but linguistic analysis suggests a Greek Vorlage from the 2nd century, with fragments already found at Oxyrhynchus. Scholars debate the dating: many situate the final redaction between 100–140 CE, but others identify a primitive stratum of sayings possibly transmitted orally as early as 50 CE, contemporaneous with Pauline epistles. This has led to arguments that Thomas may preserve pre-Markan traditions. The text ascribes authorship to “Didymos Judas Thomas” (Aramaic t’oma = twin, Greek didymos = twin), remembered in John as “the doubter,” though modern scholarship views the attribution as pseudepigraphal. The theological orientation of Thomas diverges sharply from proto-orthodoxy. It reframes Jesus not as the sacrificial redeemer but as a revealer of hidden wisdom. Salvation is not mediated through atonement but through gnosis—direct, experiential insight into the divine ground of reality. Human estrangement is not defined as sin but as ignorance. The cure is awakening to the divine light already present. This reflects a cosmology akin to panentheism: God is both transcendent and immanent, pervading creation. In logion 77 Jesus declares, “I am the light that is over all things… Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.” Key logia emphasize self-knowledge as soteriology: “When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the Living Father” (logion 3). The Kingdom of God is realized, not apocalyptic: “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it” (logion 113). The text also advocates non-dualism, as in logion 22: “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner… then you will enter the Kingdom.” This emphasis contrasts with canonical trajectories. The Gospel of John constructs Thomas as a foil—the incredulous disciple demanding proof of the resurrection (John 20:24–29)—a literary strategy interpreted as delegitimizing Thomasine communities. Where John insists salvation is secured by faith in the risen Christ, Thomas insists it is attained through penetrating the sayings and realizing one’s divine identity. By the late 2nd century, Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons condemned Thomas and related texts as heretical, aligning them with Valentinian and other Gnostic sects. Councils such as Laodicea (c. 363–364 CE) and Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 progressively established the canonical corpus, rejecting apocryphal gospels as spurious. Subsequent edicts urged the destruction of heterodox scriptures, accounting for Thomas’s disappearance until its recovery at Nag Hammadi. The Gospel of Thomas now stands as a critical witness to the pluriformity of early Christianity. It demonstrates that the Jesus movement was not monolithic but contested, with rival soteriologies: one centering on Christ’s death and resurrection mediated through ecclesial authority, the other on immediate access to divine knowledge through introspection and interpretation of sayings. Whether or not it is the “first gospel,” Thomas preserves an early stream of tradition in which the Kingdom is internal, timeless, and accessible, making Jesus less a redeemer through sacrifice and more a teacher of transformative wisdom. #christiantiktok #gnosticism #history #hidden #jesus - @sovereigntruth27