Abstract

The article contests the scholarly consensus that the text of "Gos. Thom." 61,5 as transmitted by NHC II needs emendation. On a strictly "old" philological basis, I argue instead that the Coptic reading "¨ēf" should be maintained as it is, and that it originated as a translational error from Greek. I suggest that this semantic diffraction proves that the whole saying probably circulated in Greek before being rendered into Egyptian. Some provisionary conclusions are finally drawn about the linguistic "facies" and the grammatical interpretation of the reconstructed "logion", leading to a new English translation of both the Coptic and the divined Greek texts.