109: “The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. “
When you consider how many times chance played a role in the survival of the Gospel of Thomas, you may begin to believe that a some Higher Power was involved. Why that Power chose to resurrect the volume when He did gives me pause.
It all started in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. A young peasant and his two brothers who were searching for fertilizer to use on their crops and fuel their family’s cooking fires when they dug up and smashed a large clay pot. Inside the jar was a cache of old leather books. They gathered them up and took them home and dumped them near their mother’s oven; she began using them to start her fires.
Somehow many of the books escaped from the mother’s hands (and fire) and found their way into collections of various antiquities dealers and private individuals. Egyptian authorities eventually tracked down and gathered the remaining manuscripts and placed them in the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo
An international team of scholars photographed the manuscripts, published the facsimiles and then began transcribing and translating the texts. The first English translation of the entire Nag Hammadi collection was published in 1979, thirty-four years after the original find.
In 1988, a completely revised edition of the translation was made available to the public. In total, there are thirteen separate books containing forty previously unknown texts from the early Christian period, literature written almost 2,000 years ago and lost for the last 1,600 years.
Quite by chance a scholar, Henri-Charles Puech, made the connection between fragments of Greek text found in the 1890 and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi. Because the Coptic is a translation is from an earlier Greek version of the Gospel, and the Greek papyri had been dated to 200 CE, there is manuscript evidence that the Greek fragments are 150 years older than the Coptic. This means that Thomas can be dated to the late first or early second century but no later than 140.