Imagine you’re living in the second century.

Christianity is spreading, but not all followers of Jesus agree on what he really taught.

One group treasures a secret gospel, believing it holds the true words of Christ.

For centuries, this lost gospel remained buried in the sands of Egypt, hidden from the world.

But in 1945, a discovery shattered the silence.

The Gospel of Thomas.

Unlike the New Testament accounts, this ancient text claims to reveal the true words of Jesus.

Words that challenge everything we thought we knew.

That gospel is the gospel of Thomas.

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But why was it cast aside? Why was it suppressed? Who wanted it forgotten? And more importantly, what secrets does it hold? That is what you are about to find out.

And spoiler alert, the revelation is [Music] worrying.

The Gospel of Thomas, which is also called the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, is a Sayings Gospel that is not part of the canon or the Bible.

It was founded in 1945 near Nagamadi, Egypt with a group of other books, which is now called the Nagamadi Library.

In December 1945, two Egyptian farmers were looking for a type of crumbly nitrate rock that could be used as fertilizer.

They were far up the Nile Valley when they came across a big jar during their search, which was about a meter tall and hidden behind a boulder.

Being curious, they looked inside the jar and found a collection of ancient leatherbound books or cotices.

Not only that, but it turns out that a few miles from where the books were found is the site of an early abbey that Piccomius himself built, the very founder of Christian synabic monasticism in Egypt.

The collection was later named after a nearby village called Nagamadi.

The Nagamadi library has 52 books or tractates written in Coptic on papyrus and put together in 13 volumes.

12 of the volumes are bound separately in leather.

But most of the books that were found had some sort of gnostic theme except one which was the gospel of Thomas.

I will explain whatnosticism means later in the video, but for now I just want to explain how strange the Gospel of Thomas is.

The book of Thomas is different from every other book in the sense that it only recorded what Jesus said.

That’s it.

There’s no context.

There’s no background story, no birth or crucifixion story.

Only the words of Jesus were recorded.

It has 114 sayings.

And what makes this gospel one of the most controversial books I have read or covered is that unlike the book of Enoch or even the Ethiopian Bible, both of which I have covered extensively on this channel, the Gospel of Thomas content is very similar to the four canon gospel in the New Testament, which are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

In such about 80% of these sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are very similar to the canonical gospels.

That’s a lot of similarities.

For instance, this one from the Gospel of Thomas is in the Bible.

Same as this and a lot more.

Despite these similarities, the Gospel of Thomas is not included, which makes it look like someone certainly didn’t want it in the Bible.

Because here’s the thing.

One reason that is usually given when some books are not included in the Bible, such as the book of Enoch, is that the similarity with other established works isn’t there or it goes against everything already established, like someone saying the earth is flat despite proof.

So works like that are not included in the canon, and some are even outright banned.

Like for example, the book of Enoch is the only book that talked about fallen angels in detail.

So most people didn’t see it as inspired and believed it could be fiction.

So they didn’t want to risk including a fiction into something factual.

But that’s not the case with the Gospel of Thomas.

And yet it was sidelined.

Why? Because here is another secret most people don’t know.

Some scholars, and I mean intelligent, established scholars who have been doing this all their lives, believe that the Gospel of Thomas predates the four important gospels in the New Testament, which are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Especially the Gospel of Mark, which is said to be the oldest.

So if Mark can be influenced, what’s to say the rest aren’t? So it is believed that the gospels were influenced by the Gospel of Thomas.

And if not that, that there was a central source known as the Q source that had the sayings of Jesus which all the writers were able to use in their own version of the gospel, including the gospel of Thomas.

For some of us who don’t know, it is believed that because of the similarities among the gospel, that was a hypothetical central source known as the Q source, which was basically a note someone wrote about whatever Jesus said, kind of like someone taking notes in a meeting.

So there is a theory that this source known as Q source was used by everyone in their own version of their story like a reference.

In such the author of the gospel of Luke said many people had already written gospels before he decided to also write his.

Many people have tried to tell the story of what God has done among us.

They wrote what we had been told by the ones who were there in the beginning and saw what happened.

So I made a careful study of everything and then decided to write and tell you exactly what took place.

Honorable Theophilus, I have done this to let you know the truth about what you have heard.

And from that passage, we can see there were many versions out there that were really confusing new believers, which I will get to in a moment.

So, stick with me.

But I brought this up because despite these various suspicious and very obvious false accounts of Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas was never included in it.

And even the early church fathers studied it as well as thought of it as scriptures.

So much so that some of them quote it saying 52 of the gospel of Thomas is found in the writings of St.

Augustine.

Saying 113 turns up in the writings of St.

Marius of Syria.

As the Lord has said, the kingdom of God is spread out on the earth and people do not see it.

Macarias quoted other Thomas Jesus verses as well.

Lots of people think of the Gospel of Thomas as a Gnostic Gospel, but it is a lot more complex than you think because you see the Gospel of Thomas actually lacks a lot of Gnostic features.

There is no mention of an evil demiurge, which is a common theme.

There’s no mention of eons or archons like what we see in the Gospel of Judas.

We just have a few sayings that sound esoteric.

And the fact that the gospel was found with other gnostic gospels made it look like it was gnostic.

So the book was judged by association.

To me, it passed all the tests.

So the book not being included or at least mentioned as a sort of further reading makes it sound like something was actively going on behind the scenes to hide this book.

Because the truth is that not everything was known about Jesus or the Old Testament.

But here’s the thing.

There were books listed for you to read further to either add to your knowledge or give you the complete picture of everything.

The Bible itself references several books, both canonical and non-cononical, including the book of Jasher, book of the wars of the Lord, and even the book of Nathan the prophet.

So even though they were not included in the Bible, their existence was never in doubt.

And these books were allowed to be read or studied so that one could read them to understand more about that time or get the big picture.

But with the Gospel of Thomas, there’s no such thing.

It was just outrightly rejected.

And there is a good reason for it.

[Music] Once again, unlike the book of Enoch, where most people don’t know that it wasn’t written by Enoch himself, everyone knows the book of Thomas wasn’t written by Jesus’s disciple, whose name is also Thomas.

The book’s author is either Ditimos Judas Thomas or an unknown.

Either way, we all agree that the book was written 50 to 100 years after the death of Thomas.

And crazy enough, that’s not what discredits the book.

Now, this is where it gets even more interesting.

You see, I did say the Gospel of Thomas is 80% in sync with the other gospel, but that remains 20%.

And this is where the problem comes in which I will go into now and which is why most people don’t believe in it.

You see in the book there were lots of inconsistencies.

Even though 80% were similar to the canon gospel 20% were not.

And this wasn’t the case of being a glass empty kind of thing where we’re looking for faults.

No, that’s not it.

Even though 20% was original, that is, it can’t be found anywhere else, it’s what it says that makes everything fall apart.

It’s like building a house where it has all the best things, a smart home and all that, but the very foundation of such house is weak.

So, it doesn’t matter if your house has the latest installation of whatever.

If the foundation is weak, it’s all going to fall.

And that’s what happened with the Gospel of Thomas.

In here, Thomas is given a kind of important role, which according to the four gospels didn’t happen.

But I’m willing to overlook that because even within the four gospels, there were still some stories that didn’t match 100%.

Some writers explained more, some writers explained less, some cleared out misunderstandings.

The book of John didn’t even talk about Jesus’s birth.

And some writers even called out or should I say snitched on their friends like how John snitched on Peter.

So I could make a case of this as Thomas’s representation.

But some other things just didn’t track like this.

Jesus never discriminated in such that’s why people drew to him because while the preachers and teachers of that time would give preferential treatment to the rich and healthy Jesus welcomed everyone.

You could have a disgusting illness and he would touch you which of course pissed off the leaders of that time but you get my point.

Also the lack of apocalyptic themes was a cause of concern.

Even if the book is just attributed to Jesus’s sayings alone, Jesus preached about the end of the world and his apocalyptic beliefs are recorded in the earliest Christian documents which are the mark and the authentic Pauline epistles.

Early Christians fully believed Jesus would come back soon.

And these ideas can be found in the earliest Christian works.

I mean if you see someone die and come back or raise the dead to life certainly if he tells you he is coming you believe.

But there are no end of the world themes in the gospel of Thomas.

Instead it even goes further to say that the kingdom of God is already here for those who understand the secret message of Jesus.

This contradicts Jesus explaining the rapture about two people working on a farm and one will disappear while one will remain.

And Jesus’s message was never a secret.

In such he took extra measures to dumb down his preaching so that even the illiterates and uneducated could understand what he was saying.

That’s why he was always telling stories.

Meanwhile, the Gospel of Thomas talks about the kingdom of God not as a place to go to heaven, but as a way to find out more about yourself.

Another thing that the Gospel of Thomas says is that Jesus made fun of people who thought of the kingdom of God as a real place.

There is a higher emphasis on knowing yourself rather than knowing God.

Spiritual practices like prayer and generosity are said to be harmful and sinful.

You’ll find several sayings which imply that Jesus is very mysterious or incomprehensible.

There are fundamental foundational things that never changed.

But in the Gospel of Thomas, they changed drastically.

When you add all these together, you start to see why it is believed that the Gospel of Thomas was probably written by a Gnostic in the early 2nd century.

This brings me to the major reason why it was included and that isnosticism.

Gnosticism was a teaching that emerged out of Christianity in the second and third centuries which taught that there was secret knowledge about Jesus, God, salvation, and reality that Jesus shared with only a select group of individuals, including his disciple Thomas.

Reading the Gospel of Thomas, you’ll often see that it begins with Jesus saying something that sounds similar to what you’ll find in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

but then trails off to teachings that sound gnostic.

The writing effectively pulls an unsuspecting Christian in by bridging the gap between the known teachings of Jesus and the way ofnosticism.

The way I see it,nosticism is kind of like a mix of Christianity and other religions.

The closest that I can think of is Buddhism or Platoninism.

A lot of Christian schools agreed with Plato’s ideas and view of the world.

According to Plato, God or the highest good was perfect and lived outside of the material universe.

Because of this, he would not have made a world that was not perfect.

He suggested that there was a second power called the demiurge that made matter, which is what the physical world is made of.

This view was supported by most Gnostic schools.

And this was the issue back then.

You see, the problem is that before Constantine the Great became a Christian in 312 CE, there was no central power in the first 300 years of Christianity.

A lot of different ideas were taught in Christian groups and a lot of them were wrong.

This again was what Luke was talking about by referring to many accounts written.

You see, Jesus didn’t just come to preach and save souls.

Jesus broke the status quo.

He changed everything about how we should worship God.

A lot of people had never seen such a level of intellectual prowess on display because Jesus was so intelligent that he always left people dumbfounded.

So everyone was writing what they thought or how they felt.

Some might be true, some could be true but embellished.

And of course, some would be outrightly false.

like the so-called infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James that are filled with fanciful accounts of miracles supposedly done by Jesus in his childhood.

But the whole effect of the picture they drew of him is to cause Jesus to appear as a capricious and petulant child endowed with impressive powers even causing the death of another child.

The apocryphal acts known as the acts of Paul in the acts of Peter lay heavy stress on complete abstinence from sexual relations and even depict the apostles urging women to separate from their husbands.

Thus contradicting Paul’s authentic council at 1 Corinthians 7 of loving their husband.

There is also the acts of Thomas book of Thomas the contender or infancy gospel of Thomas which I mentioned earlier.

It’s like how social media is and how people share stories and also how some people would take that story and twist it into their own version.

Basically, everyone wanted to feel and be among what was trending at the moment and Christianity was the latest trend.

So in the 2nd century CE, there were groups of people who together as gnostic Christians said they had secret knowledge about the world, Christ, and what it meant for Christians that he came to earth.

And because it still contains Christian themes, it was kind of hard to know if it was a lie or not.

And some believers fell for the Gnostic themes just like how some so-called pastors today pray on people by saying they should give all that they have.

The thing is and why people do that is because in the Bible there are scenarios like that.

And God always blessed the person more than they expected.

So it’s a well-grounded truth.

But these people twist the truth and use it for their ill-gotten gains.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 2nd century CE that a group of Christian leaders known as the church fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertellian, and others started fighting these Gnostic themes.

After I was done researching this topic, I began to see why the Bible was created.

Say what you want about conspiracies of certain books and all that, but trust me, early Christians had it worse trying to figure out the best way to serve God, especially combing through authentic materials and deliberately false materials.

In such, Apocrypha was such a huge problem during the disciples period that we find a number of warnings about an imminent apostasy that would corrupt the Christian congregation.

In fact, this apostasy had already started in the first century, but the apostles restrained its spread.

These are some of the Bible verses where you can find such warnings.

Such warnings shed light on writings that began to crop up after the death of the apostles.

Writings that contradicted Jesus’s teachings.

One event that perfectly describes this is in Acts 19:1 when the sons of Saba tried to cast out demons without even knowing Jesus.

They saw some apostles do it and thought, “Hey, if these guys could do it, how hard can it be?” That was why they said, “Come out in the name of that same Jesus that Paul preaches about.

” Well, the demon had to be like, “Excuse me, who the heck are you?” and gave them a beating of a lifetime.

Basically, everyone wanted to cash in on the new hot thing.

The only thing these books are important for is providing an insight into the culture, governance, and belief system of that certain period, just like we do with books about World War I or two.

Heck, World War II is why we have James Bond.

And that was because that was an era of great spying and taking dangerous suicidal missions.

Tracing that line of thought also helps us understand what World War II was like for everyone.

But saying James Bond existed because it was written during World War II is where the problems lie.

And that’s what most people do with the Apocrypha books.

Granted, such documents may appear old and venerable to some scholars and historians, but consider what if scholars were to collect a pile of dubious writings printed today, perhaps gleaning them from gossip magazines and the publications of radical religious cults and then were to seal the papers in a vault.

Would the passage of time render those writings truthful and reliable? After 1700 years, would the lies and nonsense in those papers become true simply because the documents were very old? Of course not.

Now, some of you always say conspiracy this, conspiracy that.

I read the comments and I have to disagree with you.

In many respects, the canonization of the New Testament was an organic process that took centuries before making what we know as the Bible today.

And one of those reasons for that is because of things like this.

And trust me, the Gospel of Thomas is milder and better compared to some of the heinous and outrageous things some people wrote that Jesus or his disciples did.

Plus, even back then, the Gospel of Thomas wasn’t as popular as the four gospels.

So, even back then, people knew it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Certain books gained huge popular followings and circulated more widely like the book of Matthew which was one of the most popular gospels of early Christianity.

We found the remnants of about a dozen manuscripts of Matthew that date to the 2 and 3rd centuries and 16 of the Gospel of John but only one Thomas manuscript.

And even then, this manuscript is from the 4th century, which was long after Christ and his disciples.

So when you take all these into consideration, you start to see why the Gospel of Thomas is false.

And to be honest, I believe everything you need to serve Jesus is in the Bible.

On the other hand, we have one of the most controversial books ever found, the Ethiopian Bible, often referred to as the most complete version of the Bible because nothing was taken out since its inception.

If the Gospel of Thomas is found there, then that changes everything.

Here is a video on it, and you’ll see why it’s no longer allowed by the powers that may be, despite it being the only Bible that was never touched.

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