The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is the most significant and authentic piece of early Christian writing outside of the New Testament. It contains sayings and parables of Jesus that are not found in other texts, along with more original and more esoteric versions of well known sayings of Jesus. This is the first pocket-sized edition of the Gospel of Thomas in English, illustrated with Rembrandt etchings. An introduction offers a readable and colourful overview of what scholarship can tell us of the Gospel of Thomas—its discovery, dating, relationship to the other gospels, its authorship, and the figure of Thomas. A new translation from Coptic and Greek brings out the depth of Thomas' imagery and esoteric meaning in a clear and readable English. The final essay, "The Inner Meaning of These Sayings", offers an key to the inner meaning of the Gospel of Thomas, comparing it convincingly to the Fourth Way spiritual system developed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.