Saying 114: Making Mary Male

What saying 114 actually says

Saying 114 is the final saying of the Gospel of Thomas, standing at the foot of page 51 in Nag Hammadi Codex II, with the title The Gospel According to Thomas written underneath it. Simon Peter demands Mary's removal; Jesus refuses the demand and answers in terms that have troubled readers ever since. Here it is whole, in Mark M. Mattison's public-domain translation:

Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, because women aren't worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “Look, am I to make her a man? So that she may become a living spirit too, she's equal to you men, because every woman who makes herself manly will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Two facts about the evidence should be on the table before any interpretation is. First, this saying survives in exactly one manuscript: the Coptic of Codex II, copied around 340–350 CE. The three Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655) preserve the prologue and roughly sayings 1–7, 24, 26–33, 36–39 and part of 77 — nothing of 114. There is no second-century witness to check the wording against. Second, the saying is a dialogue, not a maxim: the offensive proposition in it belongs to Peter, and Jesus contradicts him. Whatever else 114 is doing, it is not endorsing Peter's premise.

Why Peter wants Mary gone

Peter's outburst arrives without setup in Thomas, but it is not without context in the wider literature. In a cluster of second- and third-century texts, a Mary who receives teaching becomes the flashpoint for a fight about who is allowed to speak, and Peter is consistently cast as the objector. Thomas gives the fight one line; other texts give it a whole scene.

Inside Thomas itself, women are not silent bystanders. Saying 21 opens with Mary asking the question that triggers three parables — “Mary said to Jesus, ‘Whom are your disciples like?’” — and in saying 61 Salome, after interrogating Jesus about who he is, tells him flatly: “I'm your disciple.” Peter, for his part, is the one who compares Jesus to a just angel in saying 13 and is quietly outclassed by Thomas. The collection is not building a case against women.

The fullest parallel is the Gospel of Mary, preserved in the Berlin Codex (BG 8502,1), bought in Cairo in 1896. There Andrew doubts Mary's vision, Peter asks whether the Savior really preferred a woman to them, Mary weeps, and Levi delivers the rebuke:

“Peter, you've always been angry. Now I see you debating with this woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you then to reject her?…”

The structural resemblance to Thomas 114 is exact — Peter objects, a higher authority overrules him, Mary stays — which is why many scholars read both scenes as arguments inside the early movement about women's authority rather than as reports of a conversation in Galilee. Whether the Mary in Thomas is Magdalene is an inference, not a statement: the Coptic gives only a name. What that inference rests on, and where the “repentant prostitute” version came from centuries later, is a separate tangle; the question of whether she functioned as an apostle is its own argument.

Reading 1: “male” means the undivided human

The majority reading takes “male” in 114 as shorthand for a state, not a sex: the restored, undivided human being that Thomas elsewhere makes the condition of entering the kingdom. The controlling parallel is saying 22, where the goal is explicitly the abolition of the pair — male stops being male and female stops being female — not the promotion of one over the other.

Jesus saw some little children nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing children can be compared to those who enter the kingdom.”

They said to him, “Then we'll enter the kingdom as little children?”

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and so make the male and the female a single one so that the male won't be male nor the female female; when you make eyes in the place of an eye, a hand in the place of a hand, a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image; then you'll enter [the kingdom].”

The same program runs through the collection. Saying 106 compresses it to a sentence: “When you make the two into one, you'll become Children of Humanity, and if you say ‘Mountain, go away!’, it'll go.” Saying 4 ends with the first and the last becoming one; saying 11 asks what you will do when you have become divided. Read against that, 114's “living spirit” is the target term, and “male” is the ancient vocabulary for reaching it — a vocabulary Thomas did not invent. In Greek and Hellenistic-Jewish moral writing, male stood for the rational and active, female for the passive and bodily; Philo of Alexandria uses the pairing constantly. On this reading an ancient audience could hear a claim about the soul where a modern audience hears an insult about women.

The weakness of this reading is plain and should not be smoothed over: saying 22 is symmetrical and saying 114 is not. In 22, both terms dissolve. In 114, only the woman has to move.

Reading 2: male and female as Valentinian code

A second reading takes the pair as technical vocabulary from the Valentinian system, where “female” names the deficient element left over from Sophia's fall and “male” or “angelic” names the perfected spirit it must be reunited with. On that reading 114 is not about women at all; it is about the soul's incompleteness, using the standard sexual metaphor of the school.

The codex itself makes this reading available. In Nag Hammadi Codex II the Gospel of Thomas is bound immediately before the Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian text that builds an entire soteriology on the separation of the sexes:

When Eve was [in] Adam, death didn't exist. When she separated from him, death came into being. If he [enters] again and receives it for himself, there will be no death.

Philip's answer to that separation is the ritual of the bridal chamber, where the two are reunited. Anyone reading Codex II straight through in the fourth century met Thomas 114 at the foot of page 51 and Philip's Adam and Eve some seventeen pages further on, and could easily have read the first through the second. The caution is chronological: Thomas is not a Valentinian composition, and most specialists resist classifying it as gnostic at all. So this reading may describe how 114 was understood by its late-antique copyists rather than what it meant when the saying was first collected.

Reading 3: 114 was added later

The third position sidesteps the meaning question by arguing that 114 does not belong to the original collection. Thomas reaches its natural climax at saying 113, where the kingdom is declared already present and simply unseen; 114 then appends a rule about admission, in a register found nowhere else in the book. Several scholars treat it as an accretion.

April DeConick's rolling-corpus model — an early kernel of sayings that grew by stages as the community's situation changed — assigns 114 to the later accretions rather than the earliest layer, on the grounds that its concern with a specific community conflict fits a later stage. Others have argued the same point on purely literary grounds, treating 114 as an appendix to a finished book. The honest counterweight: no manuscript anywhere lacks saying 114. The Greek fragments do not happen to cover the end of the collection, so their silence proves nothing, and the case rests entirely on internal argument. That is real evidence, but it is not the same kind of evidence as a copy without the saying.

The three readings side by side

Does the translation change the meaning?

Yes, at one hinge. The Coptic sentence turns on a verb meaning to draw or lead, followed by a clause about making her male, and the manuscript carries no punctuation to tell a translator whether Jesus is declaring an intention or throwing Peter's premise back at him as a question. Most published translations render it as a declaration. Mattison punctuates it as a question.

That single choice changes the temperature of the saying. Read as a declaration, Jesus concedes Peter's framework and offers Mary a transformation as the fix. Read as a question — am I really to do that? — Jesus is rejecting the framework and the sentence pivots on the clause that follows: she is equal, and the kingdom is entered by a woman who makes herself so, with the agency hers rather than his. Both are defensible constructions of the same Coptic letters, and the site quotes Mattison because his translation is in the public domain, not because the question reading is proven. Readers should know the pivot exists, and that no translator can hide it.

How to read 114 honestly

The disciplined position is that saying 114 cannot be settled from the evidence we have, and that pretending otherwise — in either direction — is the only real error available. It is not a proof text for an ancient feminism: the language it uses is hierarchical, and the burden it places falls on the woman. It is also not the misogynist punchline it is quoted as online: the misogyny is Peter's, it is overruled, and Mary is still there in the last line of the book.

What can be said is that the collection ends with a woman's place among the disciples being contested and defended, and that the defence is put in the mouth of Jesus. That is a striking way to close a gospel — and it is the same argument the Gospel of Mary stages at length. For the sayings that make 114 intelligible rather than merely shocking, keep reading in the collection itself: saying 22 sets the terms, saying 70 names the stakes of what you bring out of yourself, and all 114 sayings are here in full, gaps and all.