Be that as it may, the subject here is "hidden things". One of those is something that didn't occur to me for a long time about the number 16800. Back in January, 2020, when Martyn Linssen and I came up with that count for the size of the main body of Coptic Thomas, I knew immediately that it was divisible by 210 (the value of IC, a nomen sacrum for IHSOUS) and 800 (the value of XC, a nomen sacrum for XRISTOS), but I failed to put two and two together until I wrote the FB notice, now two and a half years later. The key isn't that 16800 = 800*210 - it doesn't - but that the only numbers that are divisible by both 210 and 800 are multiples of 16800. So 16800 is the lowest number that can show veneration to both IHSOUS and XRISTOS. There can be no stronger proof of letter-counting by the authors of Coptic Thomas than that. And that in turn must necessarily lead to an entirely new way of looking at Coptic Thomas. It can no longer be regarded as other than carefully designed and inscribed.
Now as to "hidden things" implicitly referred to by the text itself, I'm convinced that they are all in the text. The prime example, I suppose, are the mysterious "three words" that IHSOUS spoke to Thomas (Th13). People have made all kinds of guesses as to what "words" (could be whole thoughts, BTW) external to the text these might be. But I think it's fairly clear that the three "words" in Th108 are those being referred to in Th13 (see Reflections on the "Three Words" of Gos.Thom.)
Consider what Coptic Thomas tells us about itself in Th5: "Know what's in front of your face and what's hidden from you will become clear to you." This is one of the few places where the singular "you" is used. We don't have that distinction in English, but the Coptic reader would have taken this as referring to him/herself personally and singly. What was it telling him/her? As usual, there would or could have been both extra-textual and intra-textual meaning to it. I believe that the intra-textual message was that whatever was hidden in the text would be revealed to the reader if he/she would just pay close attention to it, understood in the right way (Th1).
There's a lot I don't know yet. I don't know, for example, what the textual "five trees in Paradise" might be, but I'm pretty sure they're there - or will be, when the puzzle is completed. Recently, however, I have identified what I believe to be the "treasure hidden in the field" mentioned in Th109. You'll notice in the second line of the image up top that there's a gap after the letters 'CW'. It's actually a gap within a four-letter word that starts with 'CW' and means 'field'. Could be an imperfection in the papyrus, of course, but it's very suggestive that (1) the gap occurs in the word 'field' and (2) that the gap separates the four-letter word into two two-letter words that are meaningful in themselves. I suspect that this is the literal textual "treasure in the field".
