The Gospel According to Thomas was discovered in 1947 amongst the Nag Hammadi manuscript in Egypt. Whilst the entire library of long lost codices sheds new light on the origins of the Christian tradition, this brief gospel might well be the earliest record of the utterances of Jesus. Accessible to the agnostic as well as the mystic, these one hundred and fourteen stanzas are compellingly rendered by Pico Iyer in the spirit of the original Coptic. The aphoristic texts is illuminated by additional selections from Gnostic Christian sources.