Gospel of Thomas Saying 70: Bring Forth What Is Within You

What Saying 70 actually says

Saying 70 is one sentence with two halves that mirror each other, and it survives in Coptic in Nag Hammadi Codex II,2 — copied in the mid-fourth century, buried in a sealed jar, and recovered in December 1945. It has no parallel anywhere in the New Testament. In Mark M. Mattison's public-domain translation:

Jesus said, “If you give birth to what's within you, what you have within you will save you. If you don't have that within [you], what you don't have within you [will] kill you.”

The square brackets are not decoration. They mark words the translator supplies where the manuscript does not plainly carry them, and we leave them in place rather than smoothing the sentence into something more quotable. Saying 70 is among the harder passages in the collection: the Coptic is compressed, translators diverge over the second clause, and every English version you will meet is an interpretation of a genuinely difficult line.

Why the famous version reads differently

The wording most people know — bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you — is the same saying in a different translator's English. Coptic to English admits real latitude here, and the version that went viral belongs to modern copyrighted translations, chiefly Thomas O. Lambdin's in the 1977 Nag Hammadi collection and Marvin Meyer's from 1992. We do not reprint those, so this site carries Mattison's public-domain text instead.

The difference is not cosmetic. Mattison's verb is a birthing image: something gestating inside you that has to be delivered. The familiar bring forth is broader and, in English, drifts toward production and performance — what you make, what you show people. One phrasing suggests you carry something already alive; the other suggests you generate something new. The Coptic supports the first reading more comfortably than the second, which matters a great deal for what the saying is asking of you.

A third complication: the version circulating on quote sites is often a smoothed hybrid matching no single scholarly translation exactly, with the halves tidied into a symmetry the manuscript only approximately has. It usually travels with no manuscript, no translator, and no number attached — sometimes credited vaguely to “the gnostic gospels,” sometimes to the Bible, where it has never been.

The quote card vs. the manuscript

Most of the distance between the popular saying and the ancient one is a matter of what gets cropped. Set the two side by side and the edits become legible.

What “within you” means in Thomas

Thomas never defines the thing inside you, but it circles it constantly, and the surrounding sayings make the sense reasonably clear: what is within is the light, the origin, the knowledge of who you are and where you came from. Saying 3 states the alternative in the bluntest terms the collection has:

“When you know yourselves, then you'll be known, and you'll realize that you're the children of the living Father. But if you don't know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

That is Saying 70's logic in different clothing. What saves is not an achievement but a recognition, and its absence is not misfortune but destitution — a condition you not only suffer but are. This is the family of ideas the word gnosis names: knowledge as rescue, and specifically knowledge of oneself. It is also why Saying 1 can promise what it promises:

And he said, “Whoever discovers the meaning of these sayings won't taste death.”

Read in that company, Saying 70 is not about unrealised potential. It is about whether the thing that constitutes you is actually there, and whether you have brought it out where it can do its work.

The half people leave off

The second clause is a threat, and it is the reason the saying is rarely printed whole. What you do not have within you will kill you: not disappoint you, not limit you — kill you. Thomas is symmetrical about salvation throughout, and Saying 70 simply states both sides in one breath.

The clause is also strange, and worth sitting with rather than explaining away. A thing you do not possess is credited with the power to destroy you. That is an odd sentence in any language, and the bracketed restorations in our text sit precisely here, which is candid about how much weight the wording can bear. The most defensible reading is that absence is itself lethal in Thomas's scheme — the same move as Saying 3, where not knowing yourself does not merely cause poverty but constitutes it. What you lack is not a gap in an otherwise intact life. It is the life.

Is this the same as “be your true self”?

It overlaps more than sceptics allow and less than quote cards suggest. Both readings locate what matters inside the person rather than in an institution, and both treat self-knowledge as the instrument rather than a preliminary. That is a genuine continuity, and there is nothing embarrassing about an ancient sayings collection speaking to someone in a therapist's office or a recovery meeting — texts are allowed to be useful.

The divergence is in the object and the stakes. Modern usage tends to make the inner thing a capacity — a gift, a vocation, a suppressed preference — and the outcome a life better lived. Thomas makes the inner thing an identity, something you came from rather than something you have, and the outcome is salvation or death. And the collection is emphatic that the process is unpleasant. Saying 2 lays out the sequence:

Jesus said, “Whoever seeks shouldn't stop until they find. When they find, they'll be disturbed. When they're disturbed, they'll be […] amazed, and reign over the All.”

Disturbance is a required stage, not a side effect. Any reading of Saying 70 that promises comfort has left out the road Thomas says the promise sits at the end of. The bracketed gap in that quotation, by the way, is damage in the manuscript — we show gaps as gaps.

Did Jesus actually say it?

Nobody can demonstrate it either way, and the honest answer is that scholarship is split on the whole collection. The dating question divides roughly into two camps: Helmut Koester and Stephen Patterson have argued for an early core, possibly as old as the 50s to 70s CE and independent of the canonical gospels, while John P. Meier and Nicholas Perrin place Thomas in the later second century and see it drawing on gospel material already in circulation — Perrin arguing for a Syriac composition indebted to Tatian's harmony.

Saying 70 is an awkward witness for both sides, because it has no canonical parallel at all. There is no Synoptic version to prove it was copied from, and equally no independent attestation to weigh it against. What can be said with confidence is narrow and worth saying plainly: the sentence is genuinely ancient, it is genuinely attributed to Jesus by an early Christian collection, and that collection was condemned and left out of the Bible. It is not a modern invention wearing a robe.

Which is the case for reading it in situ rather than on a graphic. Take Saying 70 in its place among all 114, with Saying 77's split log and Saying 114's quarrel over Mary nearby, and decide for yourself what one of the most-shared sentences in the gnostic gospels is actually asking.