This
is the third edition of this book. It was first published at Easter
1987 and is still in print. Its aim is to present the entire Gospel
of Thomas in the English language with the least possible coloration
or extraneous influence. Working in a spirit of discovery any
preconceived or personal bias, except a respect for each word
of Jesus, has been strictly avoided.
This
translation from the original text dug up from the sands of Egypt
makes much use of the pioneering work of the scholars of l'Association
Metanoia and, in particular, for this book, that of Phillipe de
Suarez. Thus it becomes apparent that the first written form of
the Gospel of Thomas in Greek came to Egypt where it was translated
into Coptic. This Egyptian language was modelled on Greek, and
is written with Greek letters. In fact, it was only a partial
translation: 60% of the words are Coptic but 40% remain untranslated,
these being the more complex like disciple and spirit. The solitary
ancient version we have can be seen to be a copy of that early
translation.
This translation was the first English one to follow and display
the inherent and crucial short-phrase pattern of Jesus' speech.
It is an idiom that survives in the New Testament Gospels only
in the Lord's Prayer.
A
substantial number of Notes are added, chiefly to make clear the
intended meanings of English words that might otherwise be misunderstood,
for example the Kingdom or chosen; or to indicate where a particularly
awkward literal translation has been more acceptably rendered. Some
Notes draw attention to specially important words or ideas in the
original.
Intentionally, no attempt has been made to prompt the reader or
to guide his self-discovery of the inner meanings of the sayings.
That is left solely to the Gospel itself. However, the experience
of using pre-editions of this book with study groups and the like
showed that some people might come up with far-fetched ideas of
the inner meanings. So, to help avoid these, in a special section
of the book a more liberal translation of some of the phrases in
certain sayings is offered in the form of Paraphrases.
These changes almost always involve merely the addition of extra
words, and it is made very clear when this is done in the Paraphrase.
