A note about abbreviations in the English:
The English translation of a Coptic word or phrase is often very much longer than the
Coptic. In order to retain the Coptic line structure, it was necessary to use some
abbreviations in the English translation. Some of these are natural, others not. In the
case of the name 'Jesus', the Coptic original already uses the abbreviations 'IC' and
'IHC' (with superlinear strokes) for 'IHCOYC', making it natural to use 'JS' and 'JES' for
the English equivalents, thus keeping the number of letters in the English morpheme the
same as in the Coptic. (An added benefit of this particular abbreviation is that it serves as
a corrective to the natural tendency to ignore what is actually before us, in
favor of what we believe must be before us.)
(For further details, see the Dictionary of Abbreviations.)
A note about sayings numbers:
Every English translation of Thomas with which I am familiar, is organized by sayings
numbers, or logoi. I have included these in the text for reference purposes only, but I
must warn the reader that these numbers do not appear to be any help at all as
indicators of the hidden structure of Thomas. In fact, they probably do more harm than
good, in that they tend to obscure some divisions in the text, and to suggest others that
are not in fact present. Because of this, I am debating as to whether to remove them
entirely. The reader's viewpoint on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
A note about the font:
The font I am currently using is coptic2.ttf, available for free from The Yamada Language
Institute at the University of Oregon. Although I like it for its simplicity, and have been
able to get around its limitations, the use of it does require many manual operations.
If the reader can direct me to a better non-ornate font, please do! -MWG