Additionally, Hippolytus mentions it, alluding to "these various changes of the soul, set forth in the Gospel entitled according to the Egyptians," and connects it with the Gnostic Naassene sect.
Later, Epiphanius of Salamis, a 4th-century collector of heresies, asserts that the Sabellians made use of this gospel, although it is unlikely he had firsthand information about Sabellius, who taught in the early 3rd century.
The known fragments of text takes the form of a discussion between the disciple Salome and Jesus, who advocates celibacy, or, more accurately, "each fragment endorses sexual asceticism as the means of breaking the lethal cycle of birth and of overcoming the alleged sinful differences between male and female, enabling all persons to return to what was understood to be their primordial and androgynous state" (Cameron 1982).
provoking Jesus' famous answer "As long as women bear children"— has echoes in other 2nd and 3rd century apocrypha and is instanced by Theodotus of Byzantium as if it were commonly known: "67.
Another comparable verse appended to the Gospel of Thomas, probably in Egypt, reads: The Second Epistle of Clement (12:2) closely paraphrases a passage that was also quoted by Clement of Alexandria (in Stromateis iii): The trope appears in the Gospel of Thomas, saying (37): For a somewhat later Gnostic work assigning a prominent role to Jesus' female disciples, see Pistis Sophia.