Texts in Conversation
In Luke, Jesus says five in one household will be divided, then lists fathers, sons, mothers, daughters and in-laws. The Gospel of Thomas keeps the five but names only father and son, leaving out every woman in the household.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Luke 12:53
New Testament
51 Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 For from now on there will be five in one household divided, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
Gospel of Thomas 1:16
Nag Hammadi
15 Jesus said, “When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship him; that one is your Father.” 16 Jesus said, “People perhaps think I have come to cast peace upon the world, and they do not know that I have come to cast divisions upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: three will be against two and two against three, the father against the son and the son against the father, and they will stand as solitary ones.” 17 Jesus said, “I will give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has not arisen in the human heart.”
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Notes and References
“... 16.3 For there will be five in a house and three will be against two, and two against three; father against son, and son against father. Some have seen the reference merely to father and son here, when ‘five’ family members have been noted, as Thomas making a mess of the saying; Quispel by contrast remarked that mention of women was suppressed to leave the father and son unmarried. (‘Father’ may also function as a catchword connection to GTh 15.) The latter is not probable evidence for Thomas’s secondary character vis-à-vis Luke, though arguments for Thomas’s primitivity on the basis of its form-critical simplicity are not convincing either. ...”
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