Does the Gospel of Thomas have the same parables as the Bible?

What the Gospel of Thomas is

It is not a story. There is no birth, no miracle, no trial, no cross and no empty tomb. The Gospel of Thomas is a list of sayings, most of them beginning simply “Jesus said.” Its opening line presents them as the hidden sayings of the living Jesus, written down by Didymos Judas Thomas. Modern editions number them 1 to 114.

The complete text came to light in December 1945, when farmers digging near the cliffs by Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, found a sealed jar holding twelve leather-bound books and part of a thirteenth. They are written in Coptic, copied around AD 350, and kept today in the Coptic Museum in Cairo; Thomas is the second text in Codex II. Three Greek papyrus scraps found earlier at Oxyrhynchus, in 1897 and 1903, turned out to be third-century copies of the same gospel.

Many scholars date its writing to the second century; others place an early core of sayings in the first. It never entered any church’s Bible; in the fourth century Eusebius listed a Gospel of Thomas among the books of heretics (Church History 3.25.6).

The parables they share

Parables found in both, with the number of Thomas’s saying:

• The net (saying 8; Matthew 13:47–50)
• The sower (9; Mark 4:3–8)
• The mustard seed (20; Mark 4:30–32)
• The weeds among the wheat (57; Matthew 13:24–30)
• The rich fool (63; Luke 12:16–21)
• The great banquet (64; Luke 14:16–24)
• The wicked tenants (65; Mark 12:1–9)
• The pearl (76; Matthew 13:45–46)
• The yeast (96; Matthew 13:33)
• The lost sheep (107; Luke 15:4–7)
• The treasure in the field (109; Matthew 13:44)

Some are nearly the same. Thomas’s sower loses seed on the road, the rock and the thorns, and the good soil yields sixty and a hundred twenty per measure, but nobody explains that the seed is the word. His mustard seed becomes a large plant that shelters birds, not a tree.

Same story, different point

Others change direction, like Matthew’s net:

Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some fish of every kind, which, when it was filled, fishermen drew up on the beach. They sat down and gathered the good into containers, but the bad they threw away.

Matthew goes on to angels separating the wicked from the righteous at the end of the age. In Thomas, a wise fisherman pulls up a net full of small fish, finds one fine large fish among them, throws all the small ones back and keeps the big one without hesitation. The point is no longer judgment but choosing the one thing that matters.

The lost sheep changes too. In Thomas the stray is the largest of the flock, and when the shepherd finds it he tells it that he cares for it more than for the ninety-nine. In Luke it is any sheep, and the joy is “over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7). Thomas’s buried treasure ends with its finder lending money at interest; Matthew’s finder sells everything “in his joy” (Matthew 13:44).

Scholars disagree about what this means. Some think Thomas keeps early forms of the parables, free of later explanations; others think its author knew the Gospels and reshaped them to fit his teaching about hidden knowledge.

Missing, and new

Several favorite parables are not in Thomas at all: no prodigal son, no good Samaritan, no ten bridesmaids. In their place are two found nowhere else. A woman carries a jar of meal home along a road; the handle breaks, the meal trickles out behind her unnoticed, and at home she finds the jar empty (97). A man who means to kill a powerful man first practices at home, driving his sword into the wall to test his arm (98).