The Gospel of Thomas and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are two distinct early Christian texts that share only a name and a purported author, the apostle Didymos Judas Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas (discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945) contains 114 sayings of the adult Jesus with no narrative framework. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (known from sixth-century manuscripts) recounts miracles and troubling episodes from Jesus’ childhood between ages five and twelve. They belong to different genres, centuries, and theological worlds.
What is the Gospel of Thomas?
The Gospel of Thomas (Coptic: p-euangelion pkata Thomas) opens with the line: “These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.” Didymos (Greek) and Thomas (Aramaic) both mean “twin.” The text is a logion gospel — a collection of sayings without narrative framing, organized into 114 numbered sayings.
The Coptic manuscript (Codex II, tractate 2 of the Nag Hammadi library) dates to approximately 340 CE. Scholars date the original Greek composition to between 100 and 140 CE, with some (like Helmut Koester) arguing for mid-first-century layers containing material independent of the Synoptic Gospels.
The Gospel of Thomas portrays a Jesus who teaches through riddles, parables, and paradoxes. He performs no miracles, heals no sick, and raises no dead. Salvation comes through self-knowledge: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you” (Logion 70).
What is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas?
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Greek: paidika tou kyriou Iesou, “the childhood deeds of the Lord Jesus”) survives in no complete copy before the sixth century. The earliest Greek manuscript (Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus) dates to the fifth or sixth century. The church historian Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 180 CE) alludes to a text about Jesus’ childhood miracles in Against Heresies (Book I, chapter 20), calling it “spurious” writing used by the Gnostic sect of the Marcosians.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas portrays a five-year-old Jesus who kills. He curses a boy who runs into him, and the boy withers “like a dry branch.” He strikes a second child dead when accused of breaking the Sabbath. He blinds the teachers who try to instruct him. When Joseph pulls his ear, Jesus warns him: “Do not provoke me.”
Later Byzantine recensions toned down the violence, adding episodes where Jesus heals rather than kills. In Syriac and Arabic versions, Jesus becomes a model child who raises classmates from the dead and saves his father Joseph from carpentry mistakes.
How were they discovered and transmitted?
The two texts share nothing in transmission history.
The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, bound in leather with twelve other codices. It was buried with a Gnostic library, likely by a monastic community that valued direct access to Jesus’ words. The text was not read liturgically and appears in no known lectionary or church calendar.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas circulated widely in Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Georgian. It was copied by orthodox monks for popular reading, used in sermons for the feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28), and adapted for children in multiple vernacular translations.
The only thing they share is the name Thomas.
What do they say about the body and matter?
The Gospel of Thomas has been called Gnostic because of its negative attitude toward the body. The famous final logion (114) says every female must become male to enter the kingdom. The body is a garment to be shed. The text distinguishes sharply between the living Jesus and the flesh-and-blood Jesus: “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have measured out” (Logion 13). Knowledge supersedes worship.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas treats the body as the site of divine display. The child Jesus shapes clay birds on the Sabbath. When accused of breaking the law, he claps his hands and the birds fly away alive. Matter itself is made holy by his touch. The text insists on the physical reality of the incarnation: a real child with real spit and real clay, doing real things.
This reflects two competing theologies. The Gospel of Thomas locates salvation in escape from matter. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas locates salvation in matter being transformed by divine presence.
Common misconceptions, clarified
They are not two versions of the same text. They belong to different genres (sayings collection vs. infancy narrative), different periods (second century vs. late second or early third century), and different theological camps (Thomasine Christianity vs. popular orthodoxy).
The “Thomas” of both texts is not necessarily the same apostle. The Gospel of Thomas names Didymos Judas Thomas explicitly. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is anonymous in its oldest forms; the attribution to Thomas is secondary and may reflect the later association of Thomas with the East (Syria, India) where the Infancy Gospel was particularly popular.
The Infancy Gospel is not Gnostic. It has no interest in the Gnostic cosmology of aeons, the Demiurge, or the knowledge that saves. It is a miracle story collection written in the same genre as the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The violence of the child Jesus is not a Gnostic trait. It is a narrative solution to the theological problem of the incarnation: how do you show that a human child is God?
What do they mean for the study of early Christianity?
The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most important textual discoveries of the twentieth century. It offers a window into a form of Christianity that did not center on the crucifixion. Jesus in Thomas is a wisdom teacher, not a sacrificial lamb. The text reshapes the search for the historical Jesus by showing that not all early Christians believed in the passion narrative as the core of faith.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is less theologically weighty but culturally significant. It shows how ordinary Christians imagined the childhood of God. The text answers a question the canonical gospels leave open: what did Jesus do as a child? The answer is uncomfortable. The child Jesus is not sweet. He is powerful, vengeful, and terrifying. This is not a pastoral image. It is a portrait of divine justice untempered by mercy, and it reflects a real anxiety in early Christianity about how the divine could be contained in a growing body.
FAQ
Was the Gospel of Thomas removed from the Bible? No. It was never in the canonical Bible. The Church fathers (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen) knew of it and considered it heretical. It was not suppressed. It fell out of use.
Is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas the same as the Protoevangelium of James? No. The Protoevangelium of James tells the story of Mary’s birth and Jesus’ infancy up to the slaughter of the innocents. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas picks up when Jesus is five and covers his childhood up to age twelve.
Are there modern groups that use the Gospel of Thomas? Yes. The Ecclesia Gnostica and the Thomasine Church of the Eternal Light use the Gospel of Thomas in liturgy. Some New Age and esoteric traditions treat it as a wisdom manual. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has no organized modern following.
Closing
The two gospels of Thomas are not siblings. They are strangers who share a name. One looks inward for a kingdom already present. The other looks outward at a child learning to become the king. The difference between them is the difference between a riddle and a story.
For a deeper look at other texts that stood outside the canon, read our guide to apocryphal gospels and the Nag Hammadi library. The full collection of non-canonical Christian writings is cataloged in our gnosis hub. Related symbols and terms are defined in the glossary.