Top 6 theological takes from Senate candidate James Talarico: 'Dumb and blasphemous'

1. 'Jesus was a feminist': Cites heretical Gospel of Thomas

Talarico has taken particular flak in recent days for a resurfaced 2022 sermon in which he buttressed his claim that "Jesus was a feminist" by citing the Gospel of Thomas, despite its status as a discredited Gnostic text written at least a century after the apostles.

"In the Gospel of Thomas, which was later omitted from the Bible by church officials, the Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying, 'When you make the male and female one and the same; when the male is not male, and the female is not female, then you will enter the Kingdom of God,'" he said.

Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate, James Talarico of Texas, quotes the Gospel of Thomas to suggest that one must become non-binary to enter the Kingdom of God.

The Gospel of Thomas was an apocryphal gospel written in the late-2nd century, according to New Testament scholar… pic.twitter.com/p6Cijl8E2o

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 5, 2026

Typically dated to the mid-second century A.D. and sometimes even later, the so-called Gospel of Thomas is not a coherent narrative, but instead contains 114 secret "sayings" attributed to the risen Jesus that most scholars dismiss as fake, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

"It's hard enough to write when you're alive; it's very difficult when you're dead," New Testament scholar Brant Pitre said of allegedly "lost gospels" like the Gospel of Thomas. "Even skeptical scholars recognize that these documents are too late to be authentic."

Church fathers Hippolytus of Rome and Origen, both of whom were born in the second century, spoke negatively of the Gospel of Thomas, and the fourth-century church historian Eusebius described it as among the texts the Church had rejected as "absurd, impious, and heretical fictions."

The full text was considered lost until being rediscovered in 1945 amid the Coptic Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, which contained other texts steeped in Gnosticism, the first major heresy the Church faced.

Gnosticism, from the Greek word "gnosis" for "knowledge," generally taught that salvation was found in secret, esoteric knowledge and that the physical world was not redeemed by the Resurrection, but rather something to be escaped. Gnostics disagreed with each other over gender, though many saw the biological sex of the physical body as inferior to the genderless soul.

Gnostics believed the Resurrection was not a physical reality, but rather something purely spiritual or symbolic, which is a teaching the Apostle Paul rebuked in 1 Corinthians 15:14-19 when he argued such would mean Christians "are of all people most to be pitied."

Talarico's lifelong pastor, Jim Rigby, echoed the Gnostic view in a 2015 Facebook post that claimed the Resurrection was simply "a poem about the whole life process" and mocked Christians who believe otherwise. Talarico has touted Rigby as one of his most influential mentors, claiming he played a role in convincing him to go to seminary and get into politics.