Questions · Straight Answers
Gospel of Thomas vs. Infancy Gospel of Thomas
They are two different books that happen to share one apostle's name. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings with no story in it, preserved complete in Coptic in Nag Hammadi Codex II,2 and recovered in December 1945. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a nineteen-chapter Greek narrative about Jesus between the ages of five and twelve, and it was never lost at all — its earliest near-complete Greek manuscript, Hagios Saba 259, is an eleventh-century codex held in Jerusalem.
Are they the same book?
No. Two entirely separate ancient books carry the apostle Thomas's name, and they have almost nothing in common. The Gospel of Thomas is a list of 114 sayings with no plot, no miracles and no childhood. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a story cycle in nineteen chapters about Jesus between the ages of five and twelve.
The confusion is understandable, and it is very old. Both books were written in Greek, both attach themselves to the same apostle, and both were excluded from every canon list that survives. But one is a wisdom book and the other is an adventure story, and no ancient reader would have mistaken them. What follows sets them side by side, with each book quoted from its own manuscript rather than summarised.
What are the differences, point by point?
The two books differ in genre, in setting, in the age of the Jesus they describe, in the manuscripts that carry them, and in how they reached the modern world. The sayings gospel was buried in Upper Egypt and recovered in December 1945; the infancy gospel was never buried, and was copied continuously through the Middle Ages in at least six languages.
| Gospel of Thomas | Infancy Gospel of Thomas | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Sayings collection — a prologue and 114 numbered sayings | Childhood narrative — 19 short story-chapters |
| Jesus in it | An adult voice, with no setting and no chronology | A boy of five to twelve, in Nazareth and Jerusalem |
| Events | None. Nothing happens; a few sayings have a one-line frame | Curses, healings, resurrections, three schoolteachers |
| Composed | Disputed — proposals run from c. 50 to c. 140 CE | 2nd century CE |
| Principal manuscript | Nag Hammadi Codex II,2 — Coptic, copied mid-4th century | Hagios Saba 259 — Greek, 11th century, Jerusalem |
| Other witnesses | Greek fragments P.Oxy. 1, 654 and 655 (c. 200–250 CE) | Later Greek copies; Syriac, Latin, Georgian, Ethiopic and Slavonic versions |
| How we got it | Sealed in a jar, lost for roughly 1,600 years, recovered 1945 | Never lost; copied and read for a thousand years |
| Earliest ancient notice | Hippolytus (c. 225 CE) cites a Gospel of Thomas used by the Naassenes | Irenaeus (c. 180 CE) reports the alpha-and-beta schoolroom story |
| Called gnostic? | Genuinely disputed among scholars | Rarely now — current specialists say no |
How does each book introduce itself?
Each opens by claiming Thomas, and each claims him differently. The sayings gospel presents him as a scribe taking down words he does not explain; the infancy gospel presents him as a reporter of deeds, addressing an audience outside Judaea. Both openings are quoted here in full from Mark M. Mattison's public-domain translations.
The Gospel of Thomas, prologue, from the Coptic of Nag Hammadi Codex II,2:
These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, chapter 1, from the Greek of Hagios Saba 259:
I, Thomas the Israelite, thought it necessary to make known to all the Gentile brothers (and sisters) all the things done by our Lord Jesus Christ in the village of Nazareth, after he was born in our region of Bethlehem. This is the beginning:
The difference is already complete in those two sentences. One promises sayings, and calls them hidden. The other promises things done, and names two villages. A reader who wants aphorisms and a reader who wants stories are being addressed by different books.
What does each one actually sound like?
The sayings gospel is compressed to the point of severity: its shortest saying is two words in English, offered without setup or explanation. The infancy gospel is the opposite — scene, dialogue, onlookers, consequence. Saying 42 of the Gospel of Thomas reads, in full:
Jesus said, “Become passersby.”
That is the entire saying. No parable, no crowd, no explanation of what it means to pass by. Now the most famous episode of the other book, chapter 2, in which a five-year-old makes birds out of mud on the Sabbath (the accusation in verse 3 is elided here):
(2) Then, having taken soft clay from the mud, he formed twelve sparrows from it. But it was the Sabbath when he did these things, and many children were with him.
…
(4) And Joseph went and rebuked him (Jesus), saying, “Why are you doing these things on the Sabbath?”
But Jesus clapped his hands, ordering the birds with a shout in front of all, and said, “Go, take flight like living beings!” And the sparrows, taking flight, went away squawking.
Sparrows that squawk as they go. That detail — unnecessary, visual, faintly comic — is the signature of the infancy gospel and is nowhere in the sayings gospel, which never once describes a thing happening. The same chapter cycle also contains the passages in which the child kills, which is why that question keeps being asked of the wrong book.
Why do they share the name Thomas?
Because Thomas was the patron apostle of a whole literature. His name is a nickname twice over: Didymos is Greek for twin and Thoma is Aramaic for twin, so “Didymos Judas Thomas” means, roughly, Judas the Twin, the Twin. Syriac-speaking Christianity took the epithet literally and made him the twin brother of Jesus.
An apostle who is the Lord's double is an unusually attractive author to borrow. At least four ancient books ended up under his name: the sayings gospel, the infancy gospel, the Book of Thomas the Contender (Nag Hammadi Codex II,7), and the Acts of Thomas, the Syriac romance that sends him to India and that contains the Hymn of the Pearl. None of the four was written by the same hand as any other.
This creates a genuine problem for historians, and it is worth knowing about. When Origen around 233 CE lists a Gospel according to Thomas among books the church does not receive, and when Cyril of Jerusalem warns catechumens away from a Gospel according to Thomas around 350 CE, we cannot always tell which book they mean. Some ancient condemnations of “Thomas” may have been aimed at the childhood stories rather than the sayings.
How did each book reach us?
By opposite routes. The sayings gospel disappeared for roughly sixteen centuries and came back whole in one find; the infancy gospel never disappeared and came down in pieces of a long, messy manuscript tradition. Neither was hidden by anyone: one was buried, and the other was simply never authoritative.
The Gospel of Thomas is the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, one of the thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices unearthed at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff in December 1945. There is a neat footnote to that: three Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus — P.Oxy. 1, 654 and 655, dug up and published between 1897 and 1904 — had been sitting in print for four decades as unidentified sayings of Jesus. Only when the Coptic Thomas surfaced could anyone see what book they had been reading.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas needed no rediscovery. It circulated in Greek and was translated early into Syriac, Latin, Georgian, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic; its clay-sparrow story travelled far enough to be echoed in the Qur'an. The trade-off is textual chaos: the Greek survives in several competing recensions of different lengths, and even the best Greek witness, Hagios Saba 259, lacks chapters 17 and 18 entirely, which have to be supplied from later copies. That gap is marked in our edition rather than smoothed over.
Is either of them gnostic?
The Infancy Gospel almost certainly is not, and the Gospel of Thomas is the most argued-over case in the field. Neither book contains the machinery that defines gnostic myth: no demiurge, no aeons, no Sophia, no fall of a divine spark into matter. The labels come from the company each book kept, not from their contents.
Thomas was found bound between the Secret Book of John and the Gospel of Philip, which is about as gnostic a neighbourhood as a text can have, and its programme of self-knowledge — along with the promise in its first saying that understanding these words defeats death — sounds at home there. Scholars remain split: April DeConick reads a later gnosticising layer over an early core; others read it as a Jewish-Christian wisdom book that gnostics later adopted. The honest verdict is contested.
The infancy gospel was called gnostic by nineteenth-century editors, largely on the strength of the boy's cryptic lecture on the shape of the letter alpha, which sounded to them like arcane doctrine. That reading has been abandoned. Tony Burke, who produced the modern critical edition of the Greek, argues that it is ordinary popular Christian storytelling with no esoteric system in it at all. Its strangeness is a matter of tone, not theology.
Which one should you read first?
Read whichever answers the question you actually arrived with. If you came for what Jesus is supposed to have taught — the kingdom already spread on the earth, the light within a person of light, split a log and I'm there — the sayings gospel is the one you want, and it takes about twenty minutes.
If you came because a video showed you a child Jesus striking someone dead, that is the infancy gospel, and it deserves to be read in order rather than in clips: the curses are front-loaded, every one of them is undone in chapter 8, and the back half is almost entirely healings. Both books are short, both are public domain, and both are on this site in full — which is the only way to settle an argument about what a text says.
Common questions
What is the difference between the Gospel of Thomas and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas?
Genre, above all. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus with no narrative at all — no birth, no miracles, no death. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a nineteen-chapter Greek story about Jesus between five and twelve, full of miracles, curses and schoolroom arguments. They share only a name.
Are the Gospel of Thomas and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas by the same author?
No. Both are anonymous works attached to the apostle's name by later attribution, and they come from different milieus. The sayings gospel belongs to an early tradition of Jesus-sayings collections; the infancy gospel belongs to popular Christian storytelling about the hero's childhood. No scholar treats them as one author's work.
Which Gospel of Thomas has the clay birds?
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, chapter 2. A five-year-old Jesus shapes twelve sparrows from mud on the Sabbath and claps his hands so they fly away. The sayings Gospel of Thomas contains no events whatsoever, so it has no birds, no Sabbath and no childhood.
Is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas part of the Nag Hammadi library?
No. Nag Hammadi Codex II holds the sayings Gospel of Thomas as its second tractate, along with the Gospel of Philip and other texts. The Infancy Gospel was never buried and never found in Egypt in 1945; it survives in Greek manuscripts copied continuously, the earliest near-complete one dating to the eleventh century.
Which of the two is older?
Probably the sayings gospel, though the margin is disputed. Proposals for the Gospel of Thomas run from around 50 to around 140 CE. The Infancy Gospel is second-century: Irenaeus, writing about 180 CE, already knows its schoolroom story of the boy Jesus arguing over the letters alpha and beta.