Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

Introduction
In December of 1945 two Muslim Egyptian farmers, Muhammad ‘Alí al-
Sammán and his brother Khalífah ‘Alí, found over 1100 pages of ancient
papyrus manuscripts buried by the east bluff of the upper Nile valley. The
texts were translations from Greek originals into Coptic, the Hellenistic
stage of the ancient Hamitic language of the Pharaohs (Gen 10:6). This
dialect evolved after the invasion of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and
was subsequently replaced by Arabic as the Egyptian vernacular following
the Muslim conquest of 640 AD. Coptic was thus the tongue of the
primitive Egyptian Church, and remains its liturgical language unto the
present day.
The site of this discovery, across the river from the modern town of
Nag Hammadi, was already famous as the location called in antiquity
ΧΗΝΟΒΟΣΚΕΙΟΝ (‘Goose-Pasture’), where in 320 AD Saint Pachomius
founded the earliest Christian monastery. Less than a half-century later in
367 AD, the local monks copied some 45 diverse religious and
philosophical writings— including the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth,
as well as part of Plato’s Republic (588A-589B)— into a dozen leather-
bound codices. This entire library was carefully sealed in an urn and
hidden nearby among the rocks, where it remained undetected for almost
1600 years. These papyri, first seen by scholars in March of 1946 (Jacques
Schwarz & Charles Kuentz, Codex II, in a Cairo antiquities shop), have
since 1952 been preserved in the Coptic Museum of Old Cairo. The earliest
photographic edition of the manuscript of the preeminently important
Codex II was edited by Dr Pahor Labib (Cairo: Government Antiquities Dept,
1956).
The author of the Gospel of Thomas is recorded as Thomas the
Apostle, one of the Twelve. The text is a collection of over one hundred
sayings and short dialogues of the Savior, without any connecting
narrative. A few Christian authors in antiquity quoted one or another of
its logia as Scripture— for example Sayings 2 22 27 37 by Clement of
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