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Jesus said: “If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’ say to them, ‘We came from the light,’ (the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established [itself] and became manifest through their image). If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say ‘We are its children, and we are the elect of the Living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is movement and repose.’” His disciples said to him: “When will the repose of the dead occur? And when will the new cosmos come?” He said to them: “This thing which you expect has come, but you do not recognize it.” (Logia 50-51)

Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas is the heavenly Savior and image of the Father who is not begotten. His resurrection had already happened and so had the resurrection of those who believe in him (Logia 50-51). But Jesus is never described as the messiah of Israel in The Gospel of Thomas. Instead, he is a revealer-savior who utters magnificently puzzling antinomies, paradoxes, and dilemmas. Unlike the parables in the Synoptic Gospels, which a few resemble outwardly, these Logia are genuinely puzzling; their purpose was apparently to demarcate those with gnōsis (knowledge) and, perhaps, those who had been taught or learned how to understand the parables from those who were outside the group and hence were totally puzzled by them.

The Logia seem to function somewhat like Zen koans, whose purpose is to bring the believer beyond the superficial antinomies of the world to greater hidden truths of vision and knowledge. No one Logion revealed the whole Thomasine tradition, but taken together and read together they slowly reveal a mystical whole, like the pieces of the puzzle. The experience of reading this gospel is very much like reading Jewish mystical literature like Sefer Ha-Bahir or The Zohar.23 According to The Gospel of Thomas, then, humans come from the light and are destined to return to it if we but realize our heavenly origins. This interest in light as the source of saving knowledge is found in Philo and was characteristic of late pagan Neoplatonism as well as its stepfather Hermeticism, where light is the first created principle of the universe, synonymous with life, logos, and spirit. We also see similar notions in the Syriac Odes of Solomon.24

These mystical speculations about light can be made understandable in a Jewish context from the Genesis 1 creation account, which was possibly the catalyst that connected all these ideas.25 As translated into Greek, this supernal light, the first light of all creation, which God called into being on the first day without use of stars or moon or sun, was Phōs, a double-entendre in Greek because it can mean either “light” or “man.” Jesus therefore, also firstborn himself, could be equated with the human manifestation of the hidden light and truth in the universe. In other guises, this group of ideas is much like the Prologue to the Gospel of John where the creation is understood as having proceeded from the logos, which was divine in itself. But here, there is a further explicit step: those enlightened by Jesus became Sons of Light themselves. The notion is similar to the terms used by the Qumran community, who thought of themselves as the běnē ’wr, the Sons of Light, and felt that they were pure enough to be a single company with the angels.26

But the document did not retreat into a complete docetism (the doctrine that Jesus only “seemed” to be human). Logion 28 states this: “Jesus said: ‘I took my stand in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh…’” Yet it is not the fleshly appearance that is critical: “Jesus said, ’When you see the one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your Father’” (Logion 15). Jesus showed the way to the spiritual Father.

So there is a deep ambiguity between actuality and the appearance of flesh. The Thomasine traditions parallel Paul in taking the spiritual nature of the resurrection body (sōma pneumatikon)