Gospel of Thomas

note: Edition and primary annotations by Paul C. Dilley, with annotation and metadata contributions by Caroline T. Schroeder, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, and Amir Zeldes. The following is Dilley’s description of the editorial principles and process: This new edition of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas is based on my examination of the images in The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices: Codex II (Leiden: Brill, 1974); scanned negatives from this publication are now available at the Claremont College Digital Library’s Nag Hammadi Archive. It is not intended to provide a more accurate text than previous editions, especially Layton 1989, which is noteworthy for its impressively thorough consultation of multiple photographic sources in combination with autoptic examination. The goal of this new edition is instead to provide a reliable open-license, born-digital version of the text, with extensive linguistic annotation, which can thus be used for computational text analysis and other forms of digital research. The grammatical annotation, including tokenization, POS-tagging, lemmatization, and normalization, are based on the initial output of Coptic Scriptorium, which I evaluated across the 6,842 tokens. This process led to hundreds of revisions, with some of the errors resulting from the text’s fascinating dialectical mixture, the particularities of its orthography, and occasionally scribal errors or lacunas. I have noted Lycopolitan forms, and provided “normalized” Sahidic equivalents, which will improve the possibilities for computational text analysis of the Gospel of Thomas in combination with Sahidic texts such as the Synoptic Gospels. I also hope that the annotations in this edition will prove useful to students of Coptic learning the Sahidic dialect who want to practice by reading this important and influential text. I have given conjectural restorations if there are relatively few letters missing, up to about a quarter of a line; in these cases, I reference the two most recent editions for comparison: Layton 1989 (Bentley Layton, ed., “The Gospel of Thomas,” in idem, ed., Nag Hammadi Codex II, 2-7, together with XIII, 2* Brit. Lib. Or. 4926(1) and P. Oxy. 1, 654, 655. NHS 20 [Leiden: Brill, 1989], 52-92) and Bethge et al. 1996, (Hans-Gebhard Bethge et al., eds., “Evangelium Thomae Copticum,” in Kurt Aland, ed., Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum. 15th ed. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1996], 517-546). I have largely refrained from conjectural emendations and additions. This cautious approach is in keeping with my immediate objective of publishing a working edition faithful to the manuscript, with detailed grammatical markup, for the purpose of computational text analysis. This edition is a work in progress; future versions will include markup for the Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank, and a new English translation, in dialogue with the many previous modern language translations, as well as the NRSV translation of parallel synoptic passages. In the longer term, I plan to add lists of possible emendations and restorations for relevant passages. Finally, my thanks to Itamar Shalev, a 2025 graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA in Translation program, for our numerous discussions about interpretations large and small as he produced his own translation of the text.

objectType: codex

origDate: between 301 and 400

origDate_notAfter: 400

origDate_notBefore: 301

origDate_precision: medium

origPlace: Nag Hammadi

pages_from: 32

pages_to: 51

parsing: automatic

paths_manuscripts: 663

paths_works: 658

people: Adam, James, brother of Jesus, Jesus, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Matthew the Apostle, Saint Peter, Salome (disciple), Thomas the Apostle, Tiberius

places: Judea, Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy)

project: Coptic SCRIPTORIUM, Dilley

redundant: no

repository: Coptic Museum Cairo

segmentation: checked

tagging: checked

title: Gospel of Thomas

translation: none

version_date: 2025-11-25

version_n: 6.2.0

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