The Hidden God

The Gospel of Thomas begins with a dangerous promise: whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.

Preserved in a Coptic codex found near Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Thomas is not a life of Jesus. It is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to the living Jesus, some familiar, some strange, many difficult to fit within frameworks that later became dominant in Christianity.

The Hidden God asks a more difficult question than whether Thomas is orthodox or heretical, early or late: what happens between a saying and the person who thinks he has understood it?

The book begins by clearing four layers that shape religious perception: interpretation, institution, fear and the mind itself. Then the sayings take the foreground. Drawing on published translations, critical editions and the surviving Coptic and Greek witnesses, it tests inherited assumptions about canon, authority, faith, self-knowledge, death, the kingdom, division, wealth, speech, identity and the figure of Jesus.

Every one of Thomas's 114 sayings enters the argument. But this is not a book that replaces one system with another. It keeps the text under pressure, marks uncertainty where the evidence does not settle the question, and turns its method back on itself.

For readers drawn to the historical Jesus, early Christianity, biblical interpretation, Christian mysticism, doubt, faith and the psychology of belief, The Hidden God is an inquiry into what we see before we ever begin to see clearly.

He was never hidden. He was looked through.