Some sayings in the Gospel of Thomas appear ‘cryptic’ at first – that is, difficult to decode, which serves to remind us that the message is coded.
Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.’
— Thomas 7 (5G)
Patterson offers a key to unlock this code:
This odd image fits into the religious environment one finds among the ascetic monks of upper Egypt in the second century and later, where the lion had come to symbolize the human passions those ascetics fought to resist.
Like a ‘code,’ a ‘symbol’ generally comes to your attention as such only when you are not familiar with it. As far as its semiotic function is concerned, every noun and verb in every language is part of a symbol system. The connection between a linguistic symbol and the experience it ‘stands for’ is conventional. Historical evidence indicates that the ‘lion’ symbol in Thomas 7 had a conventional meaning in second-century Egypt which was quite different from that of, say, nineteenth-century England. Reading the saying along those lines allows us to make more sense of it than reading it according to our more habitual conventions. This sense-making in turn confirms the reading of the ‘lion’ symbol, and as the hermeneutic circle turns, this symbolism tells us something about the whole text. If this saying represents a second-century addition to what is mainly a first-century text, as the scholarly consensus has it (5G, 44), then the Gospel of Thomas is a collection bringing together the work of multiple authors addressing various readers in various situations. In this it is like a microcosm of the Bible.