The Gospel of Thomas is rarely read by traditional Christians, and for good reason? Here is a Jesus, as Janet S. Everhart notes, who “constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs gender with the result that the gospel supports multiple possibilities, without arriving at a fixed notion of gender.”

I consider it, at least in part, a set of advanced teachings that Paul, likely, has in front of him, and is trying to break down for his readers.

In saying 22, for example, Jesus is asked when he’ll return.

“When you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below, and that you might make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be female . . .”

Let’s think about that.

When you make the two one . . .

The ‘one flesh’ concept of Genesis 2:24, as Paul notes in Ephesians 5:31, does not in fact concern human marriage, but “a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church.”

The marriage of Jesus and humans. The marriage of heaven and earth.

The two become one when we accept Jesus as husband, when we become ‘one’ with him . . . which is accomplished through the difficult step of loving fellow humans (John 13:34).

All of them. Male and female. And everything in between. Let’s continue with the Gospel of Thomas:

you might make the male and the female be one and the same

Humans, male and female, are to become ‘one and the same’.

Note 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

Paul is just elaborating, explicating, Jesus’ mysterious language. The teaching is: become ‘one’ with each other. By this, we become ‘one’ with Christ.

so that the male might not be male nor the female be female . . .”

This is the marriage Jesus and the Bride. He is the ‘male’, she is the ‘female’. In their interweaving, neither become male or female.

They become ‘married’.

Note the dispute over Mary Magdalen in the Gospel of Thomas, saying 114, which is typically read very incorrently.

“Look, I will gather her in so I may make her male, so she may also be a living spirit resembling you males: for any woman who makes herself male will enter the Realm of Heaven.”

Jesus is not diminishing Mary or saying that maleness is the key. He is adding a ‘male’ spiritual energy to the human female — bringing her into an androgynous perfection.

He does the same with the disciples !— adding in femaleness to the maleness they have. The prompt for he human is to be both.

They’d enter, together, a dynamic, multivalent—I am tempted to say Tantric—engagement with the divine.