Course of the Narrative.

        Although the Acts of Thomas abounds in long speeches, prayers, and hymns, there is a good deal of lively narrative, as a summary of its action will show.

        1. The apostles draw lots for their mission fields. Judas Thomas draws India but refuses it. Jesus then sells him to a merchant from India who wants a carpenter for the Indian king Gundafor, and gives him a regular deed of sale. (A king of this name, called Hyndopheres in Greek, is known to have reigned over part of India in the first century). The merchant claims Thomas under the deed of sale and takes him to India. At Andrapolis the king's daughter is being married. At the wedding Thomas utters a mystic bridal song. He persuades the bride and groom to renounce marriage (chaps. 1-16).

        2. Gundafor commissions Thomas to build him a palace and provides the necessary money. Thomas gives it to the poor and later explains to the king that he has built him a palace in heaven. The king is angry, but his brother dies and sees the palace in heaven. He is restored to life and tells the king about it.

        3. A serpent has killed a woman's lover. Thomas makes the serpent confess this and all his crimes and also restore the man to life. He kills the serpent and converts the youth. The people of the city repent.

        4. A colt blesses the apostle, who utters a hymn of praise to Christ (rather like the Oxyrhynchus Isis litany). He then converses with the colt and dismisses it. The colt drops dead.

        5. A woman long tormented by a lustful devil begs the apostle's help. He rebukes the devil, and it departs in fire and smoke. Thomas utters a prayer to Christ and baptizes the woman and her companions and then administers the communion to them, marking the bread with a cross.

        6. A young man confesses having murdered his mistress. The apostle restores her to life, and she tells of the punishments of the lost (chaps. 55-57), in words drawn from the Revelation of Peter. The apostle calls upon the people to repent, and they do so.

        7. A captain asks Thomas to come and cure his wife and daughter who are harassed by devils; he sets off with him.

        8. As they travel, the animals drawing their car gives out, and the apostle summons four wild asses to take their places. On reaching the house, Thomas sends one of the asses in to call the demons out. The women come out, and the apostle assisted by the wild ass completes their cure. The apostle sends the four wild asses back to their pastures.

        9. A woman of position named Mygdonia is converted and leaves her husband, Charis (or Charisius). He is incensed and has Thomas imprisoned. In prison Thomas utters the Gnostic Hymn of the Soul, or of Redemption, the finest and most perplexing of the many liturgical pieces that distinguish the Acts of Thomas: a prince goes down to Egypt to recover a pearl, but, once there, he forgets his errand, until a letter from his own country rouses him to obtain it, to resume his royal attire, and return home.

        10. The apostle leaves the prison long enough to baptize Mygdonia. The king Misdai (or Mrsdaeus) releases him with orders to reconcile Mygdonia to her husband.

        11. But now Misdai's wife Tertia is converted and decides to leave her husband.

        12. The king's son, Vazan (or Iuzanes),joins the disciples of Thomas and follows him back to prison, where the apostle preaches and prays. (But the great prayer, chaps. 144-48, probably belongs in the martyrdom, after chap. 167, where some manuscripts have it.).

        13. Thomas' leading converts join him in the prison. They all go to Vazan'shouse, and Vazan and the others are baptized and are given the communion.

        These thirteen Acts are followed by the martyrdom of Thomas. Misdai condemns Thomas to death. He is taken up into a mountain and killed with spears. Misdai himself is afterward converted.

        The Acts of Thomas probably belongs to those Acts which Efrem says were written in Syriac and Greek by the followers of Bardesanes, and it is possible that it was put forth in both languages, as Harnack suggests. The conception of the work seems to be Greek, while some parts of it, like the Hymn of the Soul, are in all probability of Syriac origin. Its use of the Revelation of Peter, in chapters 55-57 and of the Acts of John (chap. 22), in chapter 53, rather favors a Greek original, for we do not know that these works were so anciently known in Syriac versions. The long series of honorific titles piled up in the prayer in chapters lo and 39 recalls the style of the Isis litany discovered at Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrhynchus Papyri xi. 1389) and of the hymn near the end of Clement's Tutor. There are traces of the use of the Gospel ofthe Hebrews (“they do rest, and resting do reign,” chap. 136) and of the Gospel of the Egyptians (“him that was inward have I made outward and the outward inward,” chap. 147)-or more probably of the Gospel of Thomas, which contains both sayings.

        There are even touches of humor in the Acts of Thomas, as when Thomas refuses to obey Jesus and go to India, and so Jesus without his knowledge sells him into slavery to the Indian merchant (chap. 2); or when Thomas draws a plan for a palace for the king but gives the money to the poor and explains to the king that he has built him his palace in heaven (chap. 21). When Thomas' ascetic habits were reported to the king, “he rubbed his face with his hands and shook his head for a long time” (chap. 10).

        This can hardly be the Acts of Thomas that Eusebius intimates Origen knew, for it described Thomas' field as Parthia, not India. The Acts was used by the Gnostics and, according to Epiphanius, by the Encratites and the Apostolics (Heresies 47, 61). Augustine says it was used by the Manicheans, and Turribius, by the Priscillianists. It entered into the Manichean corpus of apostolic Acts described by Photius (Bibliotheca cod. 114) and into the Apostolic History of Abdias. It was also revived in a paraphrase by Nicetas of Thessalonica in the twelfth century.

        The ascetic ideal of the Acts is presented in the description of Thomas himself: “He continually fasts and prays, and eats only bread, with salt, and drinks water, and wears the same garment in fine weather and winter, and accepts nothing from anyone, and gives what he has to others” (chap. 20). This, with Thomas' renunciation of marriage, sums up the monastic ideal of later days. Indeed it goes beyond it in its abstinence from meat and wine. The estimate of the length of the Acts (“Travels”) of Thomas in the Nicephorus list as r,6oo lines accounts for hardly more than half our present Acts of Thomas and is either a mistake or represents an abbreviated form of the work.