It is obvious enough that translation into another language can change the meaning of a text, despite the best efforts of the translator to be “faithful” to the original. But even the copying process which has brought most ancient scriptures to their readers in the original language can change the original text.
Just as dissipative systems produce entropy, sense-making systems can actually introduce errors of transmission, especially when a text makes uncommon sense. The transcriber may misperceive the sense as something more familiar, and alter the text accordingly, whether intentionally or not. This creates problems with a text like the Gospel of Thomas which has gone through several generations of transcription (and probably of oral transmission before it was written down) even before it was translated.
What does the scribe do when he comes across a text that makes no sense to him? He can assume that the text is sacred and has a sense higher than any he can make, and then he will copy it ‘faithfully’ letter for letter, as it were. Or he may assume that the text is corrupt because of some copying mistake made by a prior scribe, and ‘correct’ it by writing down what he feels the original must have been. But what if it’s his reading that’s corrupt? Then he will be corrupting the text himself by trying to correct it. And then any ‘faithful’ scribes following him in the copying sequence will preserve the error – or quite possibly make it worse, because a text that doesn’t make sense is much more difficult to copy accurately than one that does.
If you accept that even sacred texts are corruptible in tramsmission, it is always possible to reject parts of them as inauthentic. For instance, the last saying in Thomas is rejected by many scholars and readers because it seems ‘tacked on’ at the end, and because it seems incompatible with others (especially Saying 22).
Simon Peter said to Him, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’
— Thomas 114 (Lambdin)
Mary might well have retorted to this, like the famous nun Moshan in a story told by Dogen, ‘I’m not a fox spirit; why would I want to change?’ (‘Raihai tokuzui’, tr. Weinstein). On the other hand, the Lotus Sutra, Chapter 12 (Hurvitz 1976, 199-201), tells of an eight-year-old ‘dragon girl’ who turns instantly into a male and achieves Buddhahood. But why would she, or Mary, need to take this detour through maleness in order to ‘enter the kingdom’? Perhaps the superiority of the male is simply taken for granted here – although this is not the case elsewhere in Thomas – and Jesus concedes it in order to resolve the tension between Peter and Mary. Tension between these two is also evident in the Gospel of Mary, where it seems to reflect not only male chauvinism but also jealousy, on the part of Peter and other disciples, over the special attention given to Mary by Jesus. This does not seem to be the case in Thomas, however; in this Gospel as a whole, Peter seems rather obtuse but not especially jealous of Mary. Hence the suggestion that this final saying does not belong to Thomas at all but was tacked on at the end by some scribe. DeConick places it with other ‘encratic’ sayings, the point being that women should ‘resemble males’ by not having children. Or perhaps the point is that it’s easier for a woman to become a man than for a male chauvinist to become impartial.
The interpretive problem here is really no different from that of reading Ephesians 5:22-32 (‘Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord …’) – in which Paul himself says that he is speaking symbolically ‘concerning Christ and the Church’ (see Pagels 1975, 126).
The lack of context does make some sayings in Thomas difficult to ‘decode.’ Saying 105, for instance: ‘Whoever will come to know father and mother, he will be called son of a whore’ (5G). DeConick takes this as an accretion attacking marriage, which was considered to be ‘an institution of prostitution’ by ‘Alexandrian encratic Christians’ (2007a, 284). Possibly ‘father and mother’ have a symbolic sense, as in the Gospel of Philip 52. Or perhaps this saying is in line with others urging a separation from family life, such as 55 and 99. This last option seems most plausible to me, but this is certainly a cryptic saying.
Actually that remark by Paul about women being submissive to their husbands is widely thought these days not to have been written by Paul at all! There is a whole series of letters that don’t fit in content or style (I can find that book and identify them, I think) which would fit in to the attitudes of the times. Which just reinforces what you were saying: there are times when you scratch your head and say, “What the heck was THAT supposed to mean??”