In the past I’ve posted several articles on the structure of certain sayings and intermingling of several seemingly independent phrases within Gospel of Thomas. Sometimes I question whether (or not) some ‘helpful’ scribe or transcriber decided to include their interpretation of a saying or to add information to help the reader to understand what Thomas had written. In other instances I wonder if the entire saying is attributed to Thomas’ writing when it was not his contribution at all.
I’m not a forensic linguist and I don’t have a friggin clue on how to decipher Coptic. The only tools I am capable of leveraging to understand the Gospel of Thomas are my faith, my intuition and my intellect (as weak as this latter attribute may be) .
So I was plodding around in Thomas’ work and read his final saying (114) and here are my thoughts.
Saying 114 in Layton’s translation reads:
(114) Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
As is my want, I thought to bring some words forward within the saying and to send other words to the background. I came up with this:
Or
Jesus said “I am going to make her a living spirit that will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Now, along with the gazillion of other things I don’t know, I don’t know if this brushes away error and deceit and correctly captures what Thomas originally intended. However, my faith, intuition, and intellect leads me to believe that this is what Jesus would have us know.