Although Jesus' agony in the garden (Matt 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; Luke 22:40–46) may be powerful and even inexpressibly poignant to modern readers, it was a plague and embarrassment to patristic and medieval interpreters. Few narratives in the New Testament were so inimical to received christological assumptions. Ancient and medieval interpreters, at least those ultimately judged to be orthodox, ascribed to the Incarnate Word the qualities of divine consubstantiality, omnipotence, omniscience, obedience, and impassibility. The pericope, at least in its Markan and Matthean versions, however, presents a figure who appears in utterly human form—powerless, ignorant, recalcitrant, and passible.

Among the best-known of Jesus sayings is the “worry” saying of Q (Luke 12:22–31):

“Therefore,” [Jesus] said to his disciples, “I bid you put away anxious thoughts about food to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body. Life is more than food, the body more than clothes. Think of the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have no storehouse or barn; yet God feeds them. You are worth far more than the birds! Is there a man among you who by anxious thought can add a foot to his height? If, then, you cannot do even a very little thing, why are you anxious about the rest?

In the opening of Gos. Thom. 37, the followers of Jesus ask, “When will we see you?” Jesus answers, “When you strip without being ashamed and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then.…” At this point the manuscript is damaged and the published reading is problematic. An examination of photographs of the manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas at logion 37 supports a continuation of “then you will come to,” not “then you will see,” which is printed in the published versions of Guillaumont, Layton, and Meyer.