Andrew Mark Henry, welcome back to the show.

Alex, thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure to speak to you again.

Today we're going to be talking about the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the most famous of the non-canonical

early Gospels discovered in the Narkhamardi Library.

I imagine that most people listening will have at least heard of the Gospel of Thomas.

They'll be aware that there's this text that's floating around that is something that's a kind of

Da Vinci code vibe about it this sort of secretive gospel that was banned from

the Bible that kind of stuff. What is the Gospel of Thomas? Sure. I think for a lot of these

things the hype is overblown like some some things are just so over-exaggerated that you wonder why it's so popular, but when it comes to the gospel of Thomas, it honestly deserves the hype.

It is absolutely fascinating.

What I find so interesting about it is that it's a sayings gospel. It's pretty short, it's just

114 sayings. Most of them begin with the phrase Jesus said. So it's almost like a book of proverbs,

where Jesus says, you know, sometimes one, two sentence long sayings that convey hidden

knowledge in many respects. I think we can get a really good sense of what the gospel of Thomas is by the opening

sentence the prologue it basically says this is the gospel according to Thomas the

the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didamus Judas Thomas wrote down.

So right there we have Sangs Gospel, saying's gospel, but also we have this sense of hidden knowledge.

And then the name of the gospel,

the main figure here did a mystery to Thomas.

So 114 sayings, so no historical framework. So we say gospel, but they're really, it's really

nothing like the Gospels that we find in the New Testament where there's a historical

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