Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, a book with no story in it. You have had, in the first of the two special nights, the shape of this book, and I will give it back to you in a breath and then not again. No birth. No miracles. No cross. No tomb. A hundred and fourteen sayings, one after another, many beginning, Jesus said. There is little continuous story around them, though now and then a question or a brief scene gives the words a place to stand. I gave you three of them then. The kingdom spread out on the earth and people do not see it. Split the wood and I am there, lift the stone and you will find me. The kingdom is not in the sky, or the birds would be there first, and not in the sea, or the fish would, but inside you and outside you. Those three you have, and they are the three everybody has, and I am not going to tell them again except to touch them as we pass. What you do not have is the rest, and the rest is a hundred and eleven sayings, and tonight I am going to walk you through them the way you would walk through a house you had only ever seen the front of. Not in the order the book gives them, which is no order at all, a heap, the way a drawer of loose things is a heap. In rooms. The sayings that are about seeds and fields and fish, which are the farm. The sayings that are about the inside and the outside and the two becoming one, which are the strange room, the one at the back. The sayings that are about a light and a lamp. The parables that you know from elsewhere, told here a little differently, so that you can hear the difference. The ones that are only in this book. And the ones that are hard, and that I will give you once, plainly, because it would be a lie to leave them out, and then set down. And then, because it is the third room of the season and the book was found in a jar in the Nile valley, two more things. A rubbish heap in Egypt, where pieces of this same book were pulled out of the sand in Greek fifty years before the jar, and nobody knew what they were. And two other books that carry names you may know, one from the same jar and one from elsewhere, one of them a woman's, and I will report what they say, and what was said about them later, and move on, because this is a sleep story and not a debate. One thing at the door. This is a book of sayings attributed to Jesus, and a great many of them are also in the Gospels you know, and a great many are not, and I am not going to tell you tonight which of them he said. Nobody can. The book was written down in Greek, some time in the second century or perhaps the end of the first, by somebody who had a collection of sayings and no interest in a story, and it was copied into Coptic in the fourth, and it was hidden, and it was found, and it is in a case in Cairo. That is what it is. What it means is an argument that has run for seventy years and will not be settled tonight, and it does not need to be, because you are going to be asleep before the fish. We begin in Cairo. The third room. The museum inside the old walls, the thick walls, the traffic far off, the case, and in the case the books from the jar, and among them, near the front of one of them, this one, which has its title at the end and not the beginning, the way the old books do. The Gospel According to Thomas. There is a place for you, on the bench, in the cool. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night will be waiting for you when you need it. Nothing else is asked of you. You do not have to do anything now.
The object first, as always, and this one is a strange object, because it is a book we can read in a whole Coptic copy and in smaller Greek witnesses, and the older copies are the smaller. In the jar it is one book among several sewn into a single cover, the second book in the volume, after a copy of the Secret Book you heard last night. It is not long. Some twenty pages. And it begins, as the old books do, with a line that is really the title, these are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down, and ends with the title again, the Gospel according to Thomas, at the bottom, where a scribe put it when he had finished, the way you sign a letter at the end. Didymus is Greek for twin. Thomas is Aramaic for twin. So the man who wrote it down, the book says, was called Twin Judas Twin, which is either a joke or a very old habit of saying a thing twice in two languages so that everybody understood, and the book does not say whose twin, and later people decided, and I will leave that where it lies. The volume it sits in is the one the scholars call the second, and it is the richest book in the jar. After Thomas comes the one that carries Philip's name, which you will hear tonight, and after that the letter about the rulers you heard last night, with Norea in it, and then others, so that whoever bound this volume put the sayings gospel between the book that turned the sky over and the book with the bridal chamber in it, and thought they belonged together, and perhaps they did, for him. Coptic, on papyrus, fourth century, the same kind of hand and the same kind of page as the rest of the jar, and I told you last night what those pages are like, folded once into one great gathering and wrapped in leather with a flap. The words run on without breaks. There are no numbers. The hundred and fourteen is a modern count, made by the first scholars who read it, who went through and put a number wherever a new saying seemed to begin, and mostly agreed, and where they did not, a saying is sometimes two and sometimes one. So when I say a hundred and fourteen I am giving you the scholars' count, not the book's, because the book does not count. It just goes on, Jesus said, Jesus said, Jesus said, like rain. And here is another thing about Thomas. Its witnesses are not only the copy from the jar. Fifty years before the farmer, in the eighteen nineties, two young men from Oxford were digging in a rubbish heap in Egypt, a town's rubbish, centuries of it, dry as bone, and out of it they pulled a single leaf of papyrus, in Greek, with sayings on it, each one beginning, Jesus says. And then, some years later, two more pieces. And they published the first of them, and called it the Sayings of Our Lord, and had no idea what book it came from, because the book they came from had not been found yet. It was in a jar at the foot of a cliff, in Coptic, waiting. When it came out, in the nineteen fifties, somebody laid the Greek scraps beside the Coptic pages, and they matched. Not word for word. But saying for saying. The scraps from the rubbish heap were the same book, two hundred years earlier, in the language it had been written in. So the object is this. A Coptic copy, whole, fourth century, in a case in Cairo. And three Greek scraps, second and third century, in a library in Oxford, a library in London and a library in America, which are older and smaller, and which I will bring you to in their own chapter tonight, because they deserve it, and because it is one of the best stories in the season, a book found twice, once in pieces and once whole, with fifty years between, and nobody knowing the first time what they had. One more thing about the object, and it is the reason the argument started. Its fourth century copy was bound with the Secret Book of John and other works, evidence that one collector kept them together. Ancient church writers also objected to books bearing Thomas's name, though a title alone does not always tell us which Thomas book they meant. We do not know why this volume was put away. What we can follow is its return, and the Greek scraps whose source was still uncertain when they first came out of the rubbish. That is what it means for a book to be lost in this season. Not destroyed. Unnamed.
Now the sayings, and I am going to start with the ones that are easiest to fall asleep to, because they are about seeds, and they are the ones you already half know. There is the sower. You know him. He went out, the book says, and took a handful of seed and threw it, and some fell on the road and the birds took it, and some fell on rock and put down no root and made no ear, and some fell among thorns and was choked, and worms ate it, and some fell on good ground and gave good fruit, sixty to the measure and a hundred and twenty. That is the sower in Thomas, and if you know him from Mark or Matthew or Luke you will have heard two things. First that he is here at all, nearly the same, in a book that has no story. And second that there is no explanation after him. In the Gospels you know, the disciples ask what it means, and he tells them, the seed is the word, the rock is the shallow heart, and so on. In this book he tells the parable and stops. There is no key. Nobody asks. The next saying is about fire. Whoever wrote this book thought a parable did not need a key, or thought the key was your business, and that is the whole temper of the book, and you will feel it all night. There is the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, that falls on tilled ground and makes a great plant, and the birds of the sky shelter in it. There is the leaven, and here the book gives you a woman, which the book does not often do. The kingdom of the father, it says, is like a woman who took a little leaven and hid it in dough and made it into large loaves. There is the weeds among the wheat, the enemy who comes by night and sows them, and the farmer who says, leave them, if you pull the weeds you will pull the wheat with them, and on the day of the harvest they will be seen and pulled and burned. There is the fisherman, and this one is Thomas's own, not quite like the one in Matthew. A wise fisherman, the book says, cast his net into the sea and drew it up full of small fish, and among them he found one fine large fish, and he threw all the small fish back into the sea and kept the large one, without any trouble. Whoever has ears, let him hear. The net in Matthew is sorted on the shore, good and bad. The net in Thomas is one fish, and the rest go back into the water, alive. And there is a saying about the harvest that is not a parable at all, only a sentence, and it is not on the Greek scraps, but it is nearly the words of Matthew and Luke, and I will give it to you in my own words, because that I may do. The harvest is great, it says, and the workers are few. Ask the master of the harvest to send workers into it. And the ones about hands. Whoever has something in his hand, the book says, will be given more, and whoever has nothing will lose even the little he has. You know it. It is in Matthew and Luke almost to the word, and in Mark. Here it is in a book with no story, in Coptic, in a jar, with a grapevine on one side of it and become passers by on the other, a saying the two kinds of book agree on, and here it sounds less like a warning and more like a description of how a field behaves, which is what the room is for. And a saying about a vine that is Thomas's own. A vine has been planted outside the father, it says, and because it is not sound it will be pulled up by the roots and destroyed. A vine outside the father. The book thinks there are plantings that do not belong to the ground they are in, and that they do not last, and it says so as a farmer would, without any anger, the way you would say that a tree in the wrong soil will not take. Then two with a distinctive shape in Thomas, and they are the two I would keep from this room if I could keep only two. The kingdom, the book says, is like a woman carrying a jar of meal along the road, a long way from home, and the handle of the jar broke, and the meal ran out behind her on the road, and she did not notice. She did not know anything had happened. And when she got home she set the jar down and found it empty. That is the whole saying. A woman walking home with an empty jar and not knowing it. Nobody has ever been sure what it means, and the book does not say, and I have decided, at this hour, that it means exactly what it says, and that you can carry it down with you tonight, the road and the meal running out quietly behind and the not knowing. And the other. The kingdom is like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, and one of them went astray, and it was the largest. That is the difference. In Luke it is one sheep, any sheep, and the joy is that it was found. In Thomas it is the largest one, and when the shepherd has gone to all that trouble he says to it, I care for you more than the ninety nine. The largest. Nobody knows why the book says that either. It is the kind of thing this book does. It takes a story you know and moves one word, and the story tilts, and you cannot quite put it back.
Now the sayings that are in no other gospel, or in none the same way, and these sayings are a large part of the book, and a large part of what makes its return so striking, and I am going to give you the gentle ones here and save the hard ones for their own room. Some of them are one line, and they are the best. Become passers by. That is a whole brief saying, and nobody knows what it means, and everybody who reads the book remembers it. Become passers by. Not settlers. Not owners. People who are going through. And this. Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom. And this. The foxes have their holes and the birds their nests, and the son of man has nowhere to lay his head and rest. You know that one from Matthew. But here it comes right after a saying about how wretched a body is that depends on a body, and before one about angels and prophets, with no road under it, and it sounds different, alone. It sounds like a man who has been walking a long time. Some of them are questions, and the questions are the nearest the book comes to a scene. The disciples ask him, when will the rest of the dead come, and when will the new world come. And he says, what you are looking for has already come, and you do not recognise it. They ask him, when will the kingdom come. And that is when he says the one you already have, that it will not come by watching for it, and that it is spread out on the earth and people do not see it. They ask him to show them where he is, so that they can look for it. And he says, there is light inside a man of light, and he lights up the whole world, and if he does not shine, he is darkness. They say to him, twenty four prophets spoke in Israel, and every one of them spoke about you. And he says, you have left out the one who is alive in front of you and spoken only of the dead. They ask him, tell us how our end will be. And he says, have you found the beginning, then, that you look for the end. For where the beginning is, there the end will be. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning. He will know the end and not taste death. They ask him, who are you, that you say these things to us. And he says, you do not know who I am from what I say to you, and you have become like the ones who love a tree and hate what it bears, or love what it bears and hate the tree. And he says, elsewhere, the man old in days will not hesitate, and many who are first will be last, and they will become a single one. Every question in the book gets an answer like that. Not where. Here. Not when. Now. Not them. You. And some of them are about children, and these are the ones I would read to someone who could not sleep. An old man, the book says, will not hesitate to ask a child of seven days about the place of life, and he will live. A child of seven days. And this. He saw infants being nursed, and said to his disciples, these infants being nursed are like the ones who enter the kingdom. And they said, so shall we enter the kingdom as children. And he said, when you make the two one, and the inside like the outside, and the above like the below, then you will enter. And I will come back to that, because it is the strange room, but hear it first as what it is, which is a man watching babies being fed and saying, that, that is what it is like. And there are the scenes, the few the book has, and they are so short that you could miss them, and I would rather you did not. There is a Samaritan carrying a lamb on the road to Judea, and he says to the disciples, that man is round about the lamb, and they say, so that he may kill it and eat it, and he says, while it is alive he will not eat it, only when it is a corpse, and they say, he cannot do otherwise, and he says, you too, find yourselves a place of rest, so that you do not become a corpse and get eaten. That is a whole conversation about a man walking past with a sheep, and it ends in a place of rest. There is Salome, and she is the only person in the book who is given a table, and she says, who are you, man, that you have climbed onto my couch and eaten off my table, and he says, I am the one who comes from what is undivided, and she says, I am your disciple, and the saying continues into a difficult contrast between division, light and darkness. There is a bed. Two will rest on a bed, the book says, and one will die and the other will live. That is the opening of the same saying, Luke has a cousin of it, and it is one of the strangest in a strange book, two people lying down and only one getting up, and the book says nothing about which, or why, and then Salome speaks, as if she were one of them. And there is a promise, which is the kindest sentence in the book and is also in Paul, or near it. I will give you, he says, what no eye has seen and no ear has heard and no hand has touched and what has never come into the heart of man. That is a few sayings on from the lion and the fire, and it is the reason people kept the page. And there is the question about who will lead them when he is gone, and the answer is not Peter, and not Thomas. Go to James the righteous, he says, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being. James. His brother, the churches of the east said. The saying tells us how highly this book honours James. It does not by itself tell us the city where the book was written or read. And there is a saying about Adam that the copyist would want to argue with, and that I give you because it shows what the book thinks a person is. Adam came into being from a great power and a great wealth, the book says, and he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, he would not have tasted death. Not worthy of you. The first man, in this book, is beneath the reader, because the reader can do the thing he could not, which is to find the beginning and stand in it. On the hill, Adam is a father you are shown standing under a tree. In the jar, he is a man who did not measure up. Two readings of one old story, and neither of them unkind, exactly. And there are the trees. Five trees in Paradise, the book says, that do not move in summer or winter, and whose leaves do not fall, and whoever comes to know them will not taste death. Five trees. The book does not say what they are. The copyist on the hill, if he had this book, which he does not, would recognise the shape of that sentence at once, because his own book has a tree whose leaves do not wither on a mountain at the edge of the world, and I told you about it on the first night, and here is its cousin, in a jar in Egypt, five of them, unnamed. The same wish, in two different surviving books. A tree whose leaves do not fall. And one more, and then the strange room. Blessed is he who came into being before he came into being, the book says. If you become my disciples and hear what I say, these stones will serve you. These stones will serve you. Not the stones will cry out, which is Luke. Serve. Wait on you. It is a small change and it is the whole difference between this book and the others, which is that this book thinks the world is not against you. It is waiting to serve you, the stones and the trees and the fish, if you would only see it, and you do not, and that is the only sin the book really cares about. Not seeing.
Every house has a room at the back that is not like the others, and in this book it is the room where the two become one, and I am going to take you into it slowly, because it is the part of the book that people find hard, and it is not hard, only strange, and strange is a fine thing to be at this hour. The saying about the infants ends with it. When you make the two one, he says, and when the inside is made like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and what is above like what is below, and when the male and the female are made a single one, so that the male is not male and the female not female, and when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom. That is one of the longest sentences in the book and the strangest, and the whole of the back room is in it. Two into one. Inside like outside. Above like below. Male and female into one thing. New eyes for old. And it comes back. On the day when you were one, another saying says, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do. And, when you make the two one, you will become sons of man, and when you say to the mountain, move, it will move. And, if two make peace with each other in one house, they will say to the mountain, move, and it moves. And, blessed are the solitary and the chosen, because you will find the kingdom, because it is where you came from and where you will go back to. Solitary. The word in the Coptic is one the book uses over and over, and it means single, alone, one, unmarried, and none of those quite, and the scholars have argued about it since the jar came out of the ground, and what it seems to mean, when you read all the places it is used together, is a person who has stopped being two. Who has put the inside and the outside back together, and does not need a second thing to be whole. I want to give you the book's picture of where that person came from, because it is the answer to the question John asked in the desert last night, and it is one sentence, and it is beautiful. If they say to you, where did you come from, the book says, tell them, we came from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself and stood up and showed itself in their image. If they say, is it you, answer, we are its children, the chosen of the living father. And if they ask what the sign of your father is in you, tell them, it is movement and rest. Movement and rest. That is the sign. Not a mark, not a word. A way of moving and a way of being still. I have never found a better answer to that question in any book, and I have read the ones that try. Whoever wrote this had been asked, by someone, what the sign was, and had thought about it, and said that. Movement and rest. Which is also, if you notice, what you are doing now, on the bench, in the cool, with the traffic far off. Moving a little. Resting more. There is a saying in the back room that has travelled far beyond it, and translators do not all give its difficult warning the same shape. It links rescue with what a person carries within and can bring out. It sets beside that an inner lack that can destroy a person. That second part is not simply a promise that every hidden feeling will save you if you express it. The saying asks what is within, and what is missing. I hear a warning as well as a hope, and I would leave both on the page. There is something to bring to light, and something that must be found. The empty jar gives me a way to picture the question, but it does not settle it. Whatever you carry, do not suppose the vessel is full merely because you have carried it a long way. And the book has one more thing in the back room that is not strange at all, it is only true, and it is this. Whoever has come to know the world, it says, has found a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him. That is a hard way to put it and the book puts it that way twice. But listen to what is underneath it. The world is a thing that was alive and is not, the way a body is, and knowing that is not the end of you. It is the beginning. The one who sees that the world is a corpse is, the book says, superior to the world, which is to say, free of it, which is to say, able to become a passer by. It is the same thought as the empty jar. What you were carrying has run out on the road. You did not notice. Now you have, and you can set the jar down.
Out of the back room, into the one with the window, because a great many of these sayings are about light, and they are the ones the book is proudest of. There is the lamp. Nobody lights a lamp, the book says, and puts it under a bushel or in a hidden place. He sets it on the stand so that everyone who comes in and goes out sees its light. And what you hear in your ear, preach from your housetops. You know that. It is in Matthew. It is in Luke. And it is on one of the Greek scraps from the rubbish heap too, in the version the book had two hundred years before the Coptic, which is one of the reasons anyone believes this book is old. And there is the city. A city built on a high mountain and fortified, the book says, cannot fall, and cannot be hidden. That is on the Greek scrap too, next to the lamp, and in my own words from the Greek it runs, a city built on the top of a high hill and made firm can neither fall nor be hidden. You know it from Matthew as the city set on a hill that cannot be hid. Thomas adds fortified, and adds cannot fall, and then, in the Coptic, goes straight on to a saying about a lamp, exactly as Matthew does, so that whoever put these two books together had the same two sayings in the same order from somewhere, and the scholars have been trying to work out where for three generations, and the answer is a hill in Galilee and a great many memories, and the book does not care. And there is the mote and the beam. You see the speck in your brother's eye, the book says, and not the beam in your own. When you take the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's. That is on the Greek scrap too. Half the Greek scrap is sayings you know. That is what surprised the two young men in the rubbish heap. They expected something strange, and what they found was the Sermon on the Mount, in a different order, with a few things in it that nobody had heard. And on the third of the Greek scraps, the last one they found, there is a saying you know from the Sermon on the Mount that the Coptic has only in a short form, and the Greek has long, and I will give it to you from the Greek, in my own words, because it is the gentlest thing in the whole rubbish heap. Do not be anxious from morning until evening, nor from evening until morning, about your food, what you will eat, or your clothing, what you will wear. You are far better than the lilies, which neither card nor spin. And having no garment, what will you put on. Who could add to your stature. He himself will give you your garment. The lilies that neither card nor spin. On a scrap of papyrus from a heap of tax receipts, in Greek, in the third century, and the Coptic in the jar keeps only the first line of it, do not be anxious about what you will wear, and lets the lilies go. The older copy had the flowers. The later copy lost them. That happens, in this season, more than you would think. Then the light that is the book's own. I am the light that is over all things, one saying says. I am the all. From me the all came forth, and to me the all reached. And then, in the same breath, the one you have, split a piece of wood, I am there, lift the stone, you will find me there. That is where the wood and the stone come from. They are the end of a sentence that begins, I am the light over everything. The book is not saying that God is in the wood. It is saying that the light that is over everything is also under the stone, and that if you lift it you will find that out. It is the inside like the outside again. It is the back room, with a window in it. And a gentler one, that is only here. The images are visible to a man, the book says, but the light in them is hidden in the image of the father's light. He will be revealed, and his image will be hidden by his light. I do not know exactly what that means either, and I have read the people who say they do, and what I hear in it is a man looking at faces in lamplight and seeing that the light is not in the lamp. And then, when you see your likeness, you are glad. But when you see the images of you that came into being before you, that do not die and are not shown, how much you will have to bear. Your images that came into being before you. The book thinks there is a version of you that is older than you, and kept, and that seeing it would be more than you could bear, and it says so as a kind of comfort. Do not look yet. Rest first. And two more that belong at the window. Whoever is near me is near the fire, I gave you, and here is its pair. Where there are three gods, the Coptic says, they are gods, and where there are two or one, I am with him. And the Greek scrap has it differently, and older, where there are three they are without God, and where there is one alone, I say, I am with him, and then, straight on, lift the stone and there you will find me, split the wood and I am there. So in the older copy the wood and the stone are the end of a saying about being alone. When you are one, alone, I am with you, and if you doubt it, lift a stone. That is what it looked like in the third century, on a leaf that was thrown away. And this. He who seeks will find, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Seek and you will find, another saying says, and what you asked me before and I did not tell you, now I want to tell you, and you do not ask. The book keeps circling that. There was a time you wanted to know and I would not say, and now I would say and you have stopped asking. It is the saddest gentle thing in the book, and it is at the window, in the light. And the last light in this room is the one I would give a child. There is light inside a man of light, and it lights the whole world. That is the answer, remember, to the disciples asking him to show them where he was, so that they could look. He does not say where. He says, there is a light in you, and it lights the world, and if it does not shine, that is darkness, and that is all the geography you are going to get. It is a book with no story, and no place, and no map, because it thinks the place is you, and you are already in it.
Now the room I promised, and I am going to keep the promise, which is to give you the hard sayings once, plainly, in their own words as nearly as the rules let me, and then close the door on them, because a book is not honestly told with its hardest pages left out, and because you are safe here, and they are only words in a jar. There is one about a lion. Blessed is the lion that a man eats, the book says, so that the lion becomes man. And cursed is the man the lion eats, so that the lion becomes man. It is a riddle and it is old and nobody has solved it, and the guesses are about appetite, that the thing in you that devours is a lion, and that you can eat it or be eaten. That is the best guess. It is set down. There is one about fire and division. People think, the book says, that I have come to cast peace on the world, and they do not know that I have come to cast division, fire and sword and war. Five in a house, three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone. You know that from Luke, nearly. It is no gentler here. It is one saying among a hundred and fourteen and it is said and it is done. There is one about hating. Whoever does not hate his father and his mother cannot be my disciple, the book says, and whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters and carry his cross as I do will not be worthy of me. That is in Luke too, and it has troubled people since the day it was written, and in this book, a long way further on, there is another that says the opposite, whoever does not love his father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple, and the book does not reconcile them, and neither will I. Both are on the page. There is one about the things religious people do. If you fast, the book says, you will bring sin on yourselves, and if you pray you will be judged for it, and if you give alms you will do your spirits harm. And a few sayings earlier the disciples ask, do you want us to fast, how should we pray, should we give alms, what should we eat, and the answer is, do not lie, and do not do what you hate, for everything is plain in the sight of heaven. And then, near the end, they say, come, let us pray and fast today, and he says, what sin have I done, and where have I been beaten, but when the bridegroom has left the bridal chamber, then let them fast and pray. Three sayings about the same three things and they do not agree, and the book keeps all three, and I have given you all three, and I think the book meant you to sit with the disagreement and not resolve it. What goes into your mouth, another saying says, will not defile you. What comes out of it will. And a man in a crowd says, tell my brothers to divide my father's goods with me, and he says, man, who made me a divider, and turns to his disciples and says, I am not a divider, am I. That is the nearest the book comes to a joke, and it is in the hard room, and it makes the hard room a little easier. There is one about the body. Wretched is the body that depends on a body, the book says, and wretched is the soul that depends on these two. And its cousin, woe to the flesh that depends on the soul, and woe to the soul that depends on the flesh. The book does not think much of the flesh. It was written by people who did not, in a century that did not, and it says so, and it is not the whole of what it says, and I have given you the rest all night. Set it down. And there is the last saying in the book, the hundred and fourteenth, which is the one everybody argues about, and I am going to tell it to you exactly as it is and not pretend it is anything else. Simon Peter says, let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life. And Jesus says, I myself will lead her, and make her male, so that she also can become a living spirit, the way you men are. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. That is the last saying. It is a hard saying and it was hard when it was written, and the scholars have tried for seventy years to make it mean something kinder, that male means whole, or undivided, or the back room again, the two made one, and some of them may be right, and I want you to know, honestly, that it is there, at the end, and that it is the last thing the book says, and that a woman is being spoken of as a problem to be solved, and that Peter said it first. I will say one thing about it, and then the door closes. The same book has Mary asking a question, earlier, and being answered like anyone else. It has a woman with leaven, and a woman with a jar, and a woman in the crowd who blesses the womb that bore him, and is answered. It has Salome, at a table, asking who he is, and being told. The sayings do not all speak in one easy voice, and how their layers came together is still argued over, and the book is what it is, all of it, and the argument about the end of it is an argument worth having, in the morning. Not now. The door is closed. What is left of the night is the rubbish heap, and two more books, and the hill.
Now the story I promised, the book found twice, and it is the third layer's own chapter, and it is about a town in Egypt that threw everything away and kept it all by accident. The town is called Oxyrhynchus. I will say it once, slowly, and then call it the town. It sits on a canal west of the Nile, a hundred miles or so up from Cairo, and in the centuries after Alexander it was a Greek speaking provincial town of the ordinary kind, with offices and courts and schools and churches, and every office and court and school and church threw its papers away when it was done with them, out onto the heaps at the edge of the town, and the desert covered the heaps, and it almost never rained. For a thousand years and more, the sand held every bill and letter and tax receipt and schoolboy's exercise and page of Homer that the town had thrown out, dry, in layers, the way the copyist's leaves lie in the box, the oldest at the bottom. In the winter of eighteen ninety six, going into ninety seven, two young men from Oxford went there, because they had a grant and a theory that a rubbish heap in a dry country might hold books. Their names were Grenfell and Hunt, and I will say them once, and they were in their twenties, and they had workmen dig, and on the second day of digging, or near it, a workman handed up a single leaf of papyrus with Greek on it, and the Greek was sayings, and each one began, Jesus says. They published it in ninety seven under the title Sayings of Our Lord, and it was in the newspapers in England and beyond, and they went back the next winter, and the next, for years, and pulled out of those heaps a vast collection of Greek writing, tens of thousands of pieces, most of it accounts and letters and contracts, and among it two more scraps of the same book of sayings, and a good deal else that this season will come to. I should tell you what else was in that heap, because it is the reason the town is famous, and because it puts the leaf in its place. Out of it, over the years, came lost poems of Sappho, and lost plays of Menander, and pages of Homer by the hundred, and a chorus of Sophocles nobody had read since antiquity, and some of the earliest copies of a great many pages of the Gospels you know, and letters, thousands of letters, from sons to mothers and wives to husbands and tenants to landlords, and receipts, and a schoolboy's lines, and a complaint about a neighbour, and a list of what to buy, dry, in Greek, in layers, so much of it that the scholars are still publishing it, a volume at a time, a century and a quarter later, and are nowhere near the end. The leaf with the sayings on it was one piece among something like half a million. The town threw everything away, and the desert kept everything, and among everything was this. They did not know what the book was. They guessed. They thought it might be a lost gospel that the church fathers had mentioned, and they guessed several, and one of their guesses was Thomas, and they could not prove it, and they said so, and put the leaf in a case in Oxford, where it still is. And for fifty years that was that. A leaf and two scraps of sayings, some known and some not, from a book nobody could name. And then the jar. And in the jar, the Coptic Thomas, whole. And the first scholars who read it, in the fifties, went to the Greek scraps, as anyone would, and laid them side by side, and the sayings matched, saying by saying, in nearly the same order. The scraps were this book. Two hundred years older, in the language it was written in, from the other end of Egypt, from a rubbish heap instead of a jar. The book had been found twice and nobody had known the first time. I want to give you what is on the first leaf, the one from the second day of digging, in my own words from the Greek, because it is short and because a man can hold it in his hand. It has the speck and the beam. It has, if you do not fast from the world you will not find the kingdom, and if you do not keep the sabbath as a sabbath you will not see the father. It has, I stood in the middle of the world and in the flesh I was seen by them, and I found them all drunk and none of them thirsty, and my soul grieves over the sons of men. It has the lift the stone and split the wood, which in the Greek runs the other way, the stone first, and in the Greek it comes at the end of a different saying, one about God and the one who is alone, which the Coptic has changed, and nobody knows which is older. It has a prophet not welcome in his own country and a physician not healing the ones who know him. It has the city on the hill. It has, what you hear in one ear, preach from the housetops, and the lamp. Eight sayings, or seven, on one leaf, front and back, torn at the edges, and the last one breaks off in the middle of a word. The two young men were not done. They went back for the winter after, and the winter after that, and the fund that paid them published the finds a volume at a time, with a photograph and a transcription and a translation and a note, and in the fourth volume, some years on, two more scraps of the same book turned up, one with the opening of it, these are the sayings, and the names Judas and Thomas on it, so that for the first time the book had a name in Greek, and one with the lilies. Their work filled the early volumes, and other scholars carried the series forward. It continued beyond both their lives and is going on now, under the same name, more than a century later, which is the kind of thing that happens when you dig a rubbish heap and it turns out to be the memory of a town. That is the object I would put in front of you if I could put only one in front of you this season. Not the jar. The leaf. Because it was thrown away. Somebody in that town, in the third century, had this book, and read it, or their church did, and at some point the leaf ended up on the heap among discarded papers, though we do not know who put it there or why, and the desert kept it, without meaning to, for seventeen hundred years, and two young men found it in a week, and did not know what it was. Every book on the copyist's shelf was kept on purpose. This one was kept by accident, and it is older than the whole Coptic copy, and it says the same things.
I have given you the farm and the back room and the window and the hard room and the rubbish heap, and there are still sayings I have not touched, and I am going to give you a run of them now, quickly, the way the book gives them, one after another, without keys, because that is what the book is like to read, and because if you are drifting this is the room to drift in. Jesus said. Jesus said. Jesus said. Let them go by. Recognise what is in front of you, and what is hidden will be plain, for there is nothing hidden that will not be shown. Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for everything is plain in the sight of heaven. I have thrown fire on the world, and I am keeping it till it blazes. This heaven will pass away, and so will the one above it, and the dead are not alive, and the living will not die. Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death. Let the one who seeks keep seeking until he finds, and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all. Compare me to something, he says, and tell me what I am like. Peter says, a righteous angel. Matthew says, a wise philosopher. Thomas says, my mouth cannot say what you are like. And he says to Thomas, I am not your master, because you have drunk from the bubbling spring I measured out, and you are drunk on it, and he takes Thomas aside and tells him three things, and when Thomas comes back the others ask what was said, and Thomas says, if I tell you one of them, you will pick up stones and throw them at me, and fire will come out of the stones and burn you. The book does not say what the three things were. It is a book of sayings, and the three most important ones in it are the three it does not give. Love your brother like your own soul, and guard him like the pupil of your eye. Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom. Blessed is the one who has suffered and found life. Blessed are you when you are hated and driven out, and wherever you were driven out, they will find no place. Blessed are the hungry, for the belly of the one who wants will be filled. Give Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's, and give me what is mine. Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my rule is gentle, and you will find rest. If a blind man leads a blind man they both fall in the pit. Do not worry from morning till evening and from evening till morning about what you will wear. Do not give what is holy to the dogs. Why did you come out into the country, to see a reed shaken by the wind, or a man in soft clothes, like your kings and your great men, who wear the soft clothes and cannot know the truth. Among those born of women none is greater than John the baptiser, and yet whichever of you becomes a child will know the kingdom and be greater than John. Whoever speaks against the father will be forgiven, and whoever speaks against the son will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the holy spirit will not be forgiven, on earth or in heaven. If circumcision were any use, their father would beget them circumcised from their mother, but the true circumcision, in spirit, has been altogether useful. If you have money, do not lend it at interest, give it to someone who will not give it back. Whoever knows the all and still falls short of himself falls short of everything. Many are standing round the well, and nobody is in the well. When you undress without being ashamed, and take your clothes and put them under your feet like small children and tread on them, then you will see the son of the living one, and fear will have gone out of you. You read the face of the sky and of the earth, and you do not know the one who is in front of you, and you do not know how to read this moment. I will choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand, and they will stand as a single one. No man drinks old wine and at once wants new. Nobody puts new wine in old skins or old wine in new, and nobody sews an old patch on a new coat. Nobody rides two horses or draws two bows. Grapes are not picked from thorns or figs from thistles. A good man brings good out of his store, and a bad man brings bad out of the bad store that is in his heart. Why do you wash the outside of the cup. Do you not see that the one who made the inside made the outside too. Show me the stone the builders rejected. That is the cornerstone. There was a rich man who said, I will use my money to sow and reap and plant and fill my barns, and that night he died. Whoever has ears. And the longer ones, the ones with people in them. A man had guests coming and made a dinner and sent his servant to fetch them, and the first said, some merchants owe me money and are coming tonight, excuse me, and the second said, I have just bought a house and am needed for the day, and the third said, my friend is getting married and I am to make the feast, and the fourth said, I have bought a farm and am on my way to collect the rent, and the servant went back and told his master, and the master said, go out into the roads and bring in whoever you find, and the book ends the story with a line that is its own, buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my father. A good man had a vineyard and let it to tenants and sent his servant for the fruit, and they beat him, and the master said, perhaps they did not know him, and sent another, and they beat him too, and then he sent his son, and said, perhaps they will respect my son, and because they knew he was the heir they killed him. Whoever has ears. And this one, which is nowhere else and which the scholars did not expect. The kingdom of the father, the book says, is like a man who wanted to kill a powerful man, and in his own house he drew his sword and drove it into the wall, to find out whether his hand would go through, and then he killed the powerful man. A parable of the kingdom about a man practising on a wall. Nobody knows what to do with it. It is set down, with the rest. A man cannot enter a strong man's house and take it by force unless he ties his hands first. If the owner of the house knows the thief is coming he will keep watch and not let him dig through into the house. Blessed is the man who knows where the robbers will get in, so that he can get up and gather his household and arm himself before they come. The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them, and have not gone in themselves, and have not let in the ones who wanted to, and you, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Woe to the Pharisees, for they are like a dog asleep in the manger of the oxen, that does not eat and does not let the oxen eat. Many are standing at the door, but only the solitary will go into the bridal chamber. The kingdom is like a merchant with a load of goods who found a pearl, and was wise, and sold the load and bought the pearl alone, and you too, look for the treasure that lasts, where no moth comes and no worm eats. The kingdom is like a man who had a treasure hidden in his field and did not know it, and died, and left the field to his son, who did not know either, and sold it, and the one who bought it ploughed it and found the treasure. Whoever finds the world and grows rich, let him give up the world. Let the one who has grown rich be king, and let the one who has power give it up. There will be days, he says, when you will look for me and not find me. And, take heed of the living one while you are alive, in case you die and look for him and cannot. And, he who will drink from my mouth will become like me, and I will become him, and what is hidden will be shown to him. And, if the flesh came to be because of the spirit, that is a wonder, and if the spirit came to be because of the body, that is a wonder of wonders, and I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to live in this poverty. This great wealth in this poverty. That is you, in this book. The wealth is what you are. The poverty is what you are lying on. And the book is amazed at the arrangement, and says so, and moves on, and so do we.
Two more books, one from the jar and one that is not, briefly, and the rule I gave you at the door holds, report the lines, note what was said later, and move on. The first is the book that comes straight after Thomas in the same volume, and it carries the name of Philip. It is not a gospel either, in the sense you know. It is a collection, like Thomas, but of longer things, reflections, paragraphs, some of them about sacraments, and the one image that runs through it is a room. The bridal chamber. Thomas has the phrase twice, the solitary will go into the bridal chamber, and the bridegroom leaving it. Philip has it everywhere, and treats it as the greatest of the rites, above baptism, above the anointing, and never quite says what happens in it, and the scholars think it was a rite of union, the two made one, the back room of Thomas made into a ceremony, and that it was probably not what the enemies of these people said it was. That is the report. And there is one line in Philip that the whole world has heard, and I will give it to you in my own words and then tell you what was made of it. The book says that the companion of the saviour was Mary Magdalene, and that he loved her more than the disciples, and kissed her often, and that the disciples were offended and asked why he loved her more than them, and that he answered them with a question about a blind man and a sighted one in the dark. That is the line. The page it is on is damaged, and the word after kissed her often on the is a hole in the papyrus, and people have filled the hole for fifty years, and the scholars fill it with mouth, mostly, and note that in this book a kiss is how the perfect conceive, a thing done with the breath, and many read that as an image of teaching. The report is that Philip calls her his companion and says he loved her more than the others, and does not say a word about a marriage or a child, while later retellings go beyond what this damaged passage can tell us. That is the speculation, noted. And moved on. Philip has other lines worth having, and I will give you a few in my own words, because it is a book almost nobody reads and it deserves a minute. It is a book that thinks in pairs, light and dark, right and left, life and death, and says that they are brothers and cannot be separated, and that this is why the good are not good and the bad are not bad, and the living are not alive and the dead are not dead, and that only the ones who have gone above the world are truly what they are. That is the kind of book it is. It says that names are misleading, that when you hear the word God or the word father or the word life you think of something that is not the thing, and that the names in the world are there to deceive. It says God is a dyer, and that the good dyes go into the cloth and do not come out, and that is what God has done with his own. It says faith receives and love gives, and that nobody can receive without faith or give without love. It says the world came about through a mistake, because the one who made it wanted it to be imperishable and it was not, and that is the whole of last night's book in a sentence, said gently. It says that winter is the world and summer is the other age, and that you should reap in summer. It says that the ones who say the Lord died first and then rose are wrong, that he rose first and then died, which is a thing you can turn over for a long time in the dark without settling it. And it says that a person who is not yet what they will be is like an animal, and that the animals of the world are the ones that need a master, and that the master of the animals is love. What I would rather you kept from Philip is a different line, that nobody has made a novel out of. Truth did not come into the world naked, the book says, but came in types and images, and the world will not receive it any other way. That is why there are sacraments, in this book. Because truth cannot be handled naked, so it is handed to you wrapped in bread, or water, or oil, or a room with a door, and you take the wrapping and the thing comes with it. It is a very old idea and it is the idea under every book on the copyist's shelf, and Philip says it best.
The second book carries the name of Mary, and it is not in the jar. It is in the book that reached Berlin half a century before the jar, the one I promised you last night, and I am going to keep the promise properly on the ninth night, when the books the ground gave back have their own room. Tonight, only the lines, and only because Thomas and Philip have brought her to the door. And it is not only in Berlin. Two scraps of it turned up in Greek as well, one from the same rubbish heap as the Thomas leaf and one from somewhere near it, both from the third century, both small, and both matching the Coptic well enough to show that the book of Mary was being read in Egypt in Greek in the early centuries of its circulation, and that it was not one copy in one drawer but a book people had. That matters because the scraps show that more than one ancient copy was made. They do not, by themselves, tell us whether a community counted the book as scripture. It is short, and most of it is missing, the first six pages gone and four more from the middle, so that what is left is the end of a conversation and the beginning of a vision and the end of an argument. In what is left, the saviour has gone, and the disciples are afraid, and Mary stands up and says, do not weep, and do not grieve, and do not be in two minds, for his grace will be with you and will protect you. And Peter says to her, sister, we know that the saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the saviour that you remember, that you know and we do not. And she tells them a vision. I am not going to give you the vision tonight, because it is the heart of the book and the ninth night has the book, and a thing told twice is told worse the second time. I will give you its shape and no more. A soul goes up. At every step a power stops it and asks it where it is going, and the soul answers, and part of that vision is gone with the missing pages. And the last thing the soul says in the surviving vision is that it is going to its rest, in silence. In silence. That is where the vision ends, and then Mary stops speaking, and the room is quiet. And then the argument. Andrew says he does not believe the saviour said these things, because they are strange. And Peter says, did he really speak to a woman privately, and not openly to us, are we to turn round and all listen to her, did he prefer her to us. And Mary weeps and says, my brother Peter, what are you thinking, do you think I made this up in my heart, or that I am lying about the saviour. And Levi says, Peter, you have always been hot tempered, and now I see you arguing with the woman like the adversaries. If the saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her. Surely the saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us. And they go out, the book says, and begin to preach. That is the end. That is the report, in my own words. The later speculation is the same as Philip's, and it is noted, and it is moved on from. What the book says is that a woman had a vision, and told it, and two men did not want to hear it from her, and a third man told them to be quiet, and they went out. The book does not say she was married to anyone. It says she was not afraid when the others were, and that she remembered what they had forgotten, and that when she was doubted she cried, and that somebody stood up for her. You will have the whole of it, the Berlin book and how it got there and what else is in it, on the ninth night. Tonight it is a woman standing up in a room where everybody else is sitting down, and saying, do not weep. Which is, when you think about it, the whole of the sleep story in one line, and it is time to go home.
The third layer, and then the hill. Who read Thomas, and what they thought it was, and what it is. Somebody in Syria or Egypt, most scholars think, in the second century, or just possibly the end of the first, put a collection of sayings together and gave it Thomas's name, because in the east, in the churches of Syria, Thomas was the apostle, the one who had gone their way, and a book that came from him would be listened to. Whether the sayings in it came from an older collection that the Gospels you know also used, or were taken from those Gospels and reshaped, or both, is the argument, and it is a real one, with good scholars on both sides, and I am going to give you the shape of it in one sentence each way and then let it go. The people who think it is old point to the ones that have no story and no key and are shorter and rougher than Matthew's, the way an older thing is. The people who think it is late point to the back room, the two made one, which sounds like the second century, and to a few places where Thomas seems to know Luke's wording. Both are right about the thing they point to. The book is probably both. Old sayings, kept, and later sayings, added, in a heap, the way a drawer fills. A Syrian origin has often been proposed, though it remains debated. That is a region where Thomas was remembered as the apostle who went east, and where other books grew up around his name, a story of his travels to India, and a hymn about a pearl and a prince sent down to fetch it, which is one of the most beautiful things in early Christian writing and which another night may touch. And it was read, later, by the followers of a prophet from Persia whose own book of giants you met on the first special night, according to a fourth century church writer who names a gospel of Thomas among their books, though we cannot be certain from the title alone that he means precisely this surviving work, and the title is part of the ancient evidence we have to weigh with care. And then it was read, by Christians of a kind, in Egypt, alongside the Secret Book of John, and disliked, by bishops, and listed, and went into the jar and the rubbish heap, and was unnamed for fifteen hundred years, and came back twice. And when it came back it was, for a while, in the sixties and seventies, a much discussed lost gospel, because it was the one with a name everybody knew on the front of it and sayings everybody knew inside, and because it seemed, to people who wanted it to, like a door into a room the churches had locked. Some of that was true. Most of it was hope. The book is not a secret gospel that undoes the others. It is a collection of sayings, half of them familiar and half of them strange, made by somebody who did not care about the story, in a century when a great many people did not, and it tells you exactly as much about Jesus as a drawer of loose sayings can, which is a great deal and not enough, and it tells you a great deal more about the people who kept it, who kept a collection centred on sayings such as, the kingdom is inside you and outside you, rather than a continuous account of his life and death. An authentic book is not the same as a true event. Thomas is authentic. It is in a case in Cairo, and in cases in England and in America, and you can read it, and the Greek scraps belong to the early centuries of Christian copying. What it is evidence of is that, very early, some people collected his sayings without his story, and put sayings about seeds and lamps and children and light beside sayings about the two becoming one, and left witnesses both in discarded papyrus and in a preserved Coptic volume. Why one copy was discarded and the other put away is not something those copies tell us. Whether he said, become passers by, is not a thing a book can tell you. That somebody wrote it down and kept it, twice, is. And the copyist, on the hill, does not have this book, and never will, and would not know what to do with a gospel that had no story in it, because on his shelf the gospels are the story, told four times, and read on Sundays, and he has never once wanted the sayings without the road under them. That is not a judgment on either of them. It is what keeping looks like from two different hills. The Book of Enoch is scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church today, and the Gospel of Thomas is not, and the church that includes Enoch among its scriptures does not include Thomas in that list, and I find that I love them both, the way you love two people who would not understand each other, and go home.
The hill. The rain. The lamp. The copyist is where he always is, with the board across his knees, and the last gathering on it, more than half filled, and tonight he has written a column and a half, slowly, because the leaf was good and the ink was right and his hand, for once, did not ache until the end. Now it does. He sets the reed down. He sits with his hands in his lap, the way he does. I told you about a drawer tonight, a book that is a heap of sayings with nothing between them, and I want you to look at his shelf and see what the opposite of that is. The old Enoch, which is a story from the first leaf to the last, a man who walked with God and was not, and two hundred who came down, and a judgment, and a journey, and a dream of cattle, and a child who lit a room, all of it going somewhere, all of it in order. The heavy book of the years, which is nothing but order, every event in its jubilee. The Gospels, four of them, on the shelf beside those, each one a road with a man on it. And the rubbish heap has one more thing to say to the hill, and it is this. The town in Egypt kept its books by throwing them away, and the hill keeps its books by never throwing anything away, and both of them, in the end, kept. The desert did the town's keeping for it, without being asked. The copyist does the hill's keeping himself, every night, with a reed, and is asked, in a sense, by the old man under the stones, and by the child who will come. Nothing on this hill is a heap. Everything on this hill is a road, and he has been walking one of them, at the pace of a column a night, for longer than you have been listening. And yet. He has copied, this year, in the dry season, a page in the old Enoch where a man at the end of the east stands under a tree and says, how beautiful it is, and does not eat, and is not sent out. And he has copied a page where a tree on a hill has fruit like dates and leaves that never fall. And if you read him, tonight, the saying from the jar about five trees in Paradise whose leaves do not fall, he would not think it strange. He would think it was his. Not because it is. Because the same wish is in both, in two different traditions, that there be a tree somewhere whose leaves stay, and that a person could come to know it and not taste death. The book in the jar puts that wish in a heap and leaves it. The book on the hill puts it on a road and walks you to it. And you, on the bench, on the mat, wherever you are, have had it both ways tonight, and can choose, in the morning, which you prefer, and will not need to. And I will tell you the one saying from the jar that I would carry up the hill if I were allowed one, and lay beside his lamp, and I think he would let it stay. Not the wood and the stone. Not the passers by. The one about the old man and the child. An old man will not hesitate to ask a child of seven days about the place of life, and he will live. He is not old, the copyist, not yet, but he is not young, and he learned his letters from an old man who is under the stones on the slope, and he will teach them, some year, to a child, and the child will ask him something he cannot answer, and he will not hesitate. That is the saying. It is about a man on a hill, whether the book knew it or not. He does not know that a book with no story was ever written. He does not need to. He has the story, and the leaf, and the lamp, and a column and a half done, and the rain. He stands. He puts the board with the last gathering on it flat on the floor, where he will find it. He touches, on the shelf, the spine of the old Enoch, the way he does, and does not take it down, because he knows its place, and it will be there when he needs it. And he looks at the lamp, and lets it burn. Let the room be as it is. Let the rain go on. It was never asking anything of you. It was only there, the way it was there for the copyist, and for his teacher, and for every one of them, back and back, and the way the sand was there for the town that threw its books away, keeping them dry, without meaning to, for whoever came. In the morning somebody will open the door, and the light will come in across the floor, and the books will be on the shelf, each one a road, and the last gathering will be on the floor with a column and a half more on it than there was, and the box will be a little heavier, and nothing on the hill will have been thrown away. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. Sleep well. Goodnight.