The Gospel of Thomas...A Brief Reading

    [Note: A long time ago in a lifetime far, far away...a dear friend up in Boston asked me about my turn to what I told him was a secular Gnosticism. He knew my background as an evangelical youth, as well as my family of ministers, including my late father. I said to him that he might not be ready for this particular conversation! But he was, and it was a great, great conversation. Part of what follows was born during that conversation. The rest is from a lifetime of reading, talking to other people about their spiritual journeys, and trying to understand both secular and religious Gnosticism (I opt for the former) and the continuous search for myself “before the world was made.”]

    I think the growing popularity of the Gospel of Thomas among Americans is another indication that there is indeed “the American religion”: Creedless, Orphic, enthusiastic, proto-Gnostic, post-Christian. Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Judas Thomas the Twin spares us the crucifixion, makes the ridiculous fiction of a resurrection unnecessary, and does not present us with a god named Jesus. No dogmas could be founded upon this sequence (if it indeed is a sequence) of apothegms. If you turn to the Gospel of Thomas, you encounter a Jesus who is unsponsored and free. No one could be burned or even scorned in the name of this Jesus, and no one has been hurt in any way, except perhaps for those bigots, high church or low, who may have glanced at so permanently surprising a work.

    Reading The Gospel of Thomas, I became interested in the idea that everything we seek is already in our presence, and not outside our self. What is most remarkable in these sayings is the repeated insistence that everything is already open to you. You need but knock and enter. What is best and oldest in you will respond fully to what you allow yourself to see. The deepest teaching of this gnostic Jesus is never stated but always implied, implied in nearly every saying. There is light in you, and that light is no part of the created world. It is not Adamic. It is the light from before the world was made. I know of only two convictions essential to the gnosis: Creation and Fall were one and the same event; and what is best in us was never created, so cannot fall. The American religion, gnosis of our Evening-Land, adds a third element if our freedom is to be complete. That ultimate spark of the pre-created light must be alone, or at least alone with Jesus. What I mean by that is, Gnosticism tells us that we were created before the world was made; and that in each of us there is a spark that connects us with that beginning. Part of the journey for Gnostics, both religious and secular, is to find that spark deep within the rock of the self, using the Gnosis or knowledge...the ability that we all have to search for knowledge, the knowledge that can guide us in our search for that primordial spark and connect us with the transcendent. 

    So...of the verifiable texts of the sayings of a historical Jesus (if, in fact, there actually was a historical Jesus) we have absolutely nothing; not one first-person account of Jesus and/or his sayings. Everything written about Jesus of Nazareth is belated. It is, supposedly, remembered. Which, as I learned from the great professor of history, Dr. James R. Cameron...memory cannot be trusted. Presumably he spoke to his followers in Aramaic. Although scattered throughout the gospels, none of his Aramaic sayings have survived. I have wondered for some time how this could be, and wondered even more that Christian scholars/preachers have never joined in my wonder. I mean, if you believed in the divinity of Jesus, would you not wish to have preserved the actual Aramaic sentences he spoke, since they were, for you, the words of God? But what was preserved were Greek translations of his sayings, rather than the Aramaic sayings themselves. Were the originals lost, still to be found in a cave somewhere in Israel? Were they never written down in the first place, so that the Greek texts were based only upon memory? For a long time now, I have asked these questions to pastor friends of mine, and religion professors, and I receive only blank stares. Yet surely this puzzle matters. Aramaic and Greek are very different languages, and the nuances of spirituality and of wisdom do not translate readily from one into the other. Any sayings of Jesus, open or hidden, need to be regarded in this context, which ought to teach us a certain suspicion of even the most normative judgments as to authenticity, whether those judgments rise from faith or from supposedly positive scholarship. But enough of one gnostics skepticism as to the veracity of scripture. Let us move on. 

    Below are a few of my favorite lines/verses from The Gospel of Thomas. There are 114 lines in the entire Nag Hammadi text that was discovered. 

    

 Lines 1-2 

    And he said, “Whoever discovers the interpretations of these saying will not taste death.”

    Jesus said, “Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will reign over all.”

Line 18

    The followers said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”

    Jesus said, “Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Blessings on one who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death.”

Lines 49-51

    Jesus said, “Blessings on those who are alone and chosen, for you will find the kingdom. For you have come from it, and you will return there again.”

    Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established itself, and appeared in their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’”

    His followers said to him, “When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?”

    He said to them, “What you look for has come, but you do not know it.”

    If any of these sayings, dear reader, sound somewhat familiar, good for you. There is more than a hint of  Buddhism in these sayings. And who knows? Maybe Jesus was really a Buddhist, and the Apostle Paul just used Jesus’ name in order to spread his own teachings of Christianity! It’s not like there were any copyright laws in the Roman Empire. And Paul could always say, “Hey, these aren’t my ideas, they are Jesus of Nazareth’s!” But I digress...

    A friend once asked me about Gnosticism and rebirth, since the vast majority of religions are all about rebirth. As far as I can tell, rebirth, in the Gnostic sense, involves joining Thomas the Twin as a sharer in the solitude of Jesus, or being an observing passerby with Jesus. Here in the United States, this hardly requires commentary, since it is the situation of the Baptist walking alone with Jesus, whether he or she be black Baptist or moderate Southern Baptist or independent. The American Jesus, from the 19th century through now, is far closer to the wanderer of the Gospel of Thomas than to the crucified Jesus of the New Testament. The “living Jesus” of Thomas has been resurrected without the need of having first been sacrificed, which is the paradox of the American Jesus. 

    This Jesus is a watcher of men; he is a walker/traveler and someone who passes by and observes, not unlike Walt Whitman, who is, of course, the American Christ. The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas walks and talks with modern Christians like the Southern Baptists, which is completely unlike any of the 7 different Jesus’ in the New Testament. Jesus, whoever he was and whatever he was, appears in the Gospel of Thomas as a great verbal artist in the oral tradition. That was Oscar Wilde’s vision of Jesus, as well as the great literary critic G. Wilson Knight. I prefer Wilde’s and Knight’s vision of Jesus to all of those Jesus’ of the New Testament scholars, who are not exactly out to ruin the sacred truths as some in my family have accused me of doing. You see, sacred truths have a way of turning out to be either bad literary criticism or else coercion, whether open or concealed. 

    The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is not interested in coercion, nor can anyone coerce in his name. The innocence of gnosticism is its freedom from violence and fraud, something that historical Christianity cannot escape from. No one is going to establish a gnostic church in America, by which I mean a professedly gnostic church, to which tax exemption would never be granted anyway. However, we do have gnostic churches everywhere in America: the Mormons, the Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God, Christian Science, and most other indigenous American denominations and sects. They are all what Harold Bloom once called “the American religion”... involuntary parodies of the gnosis. The appeal of Thomas’ Jesus is to the mind alone, and yet his rhetoric demands a considerable effort of cognition if it is to be unpacked. 

    Like the poet William Blake, as well as the great philosopher/literary critic Jakob Boehme, this Jesus is looking for the face he had before the world was made; and he encourages us to do the same. That marvelous trope was first written by the great Irish poet and literary critic W.B. Yeats, at his most Blakean. My dear reader, if any of the above is part of your quest, then the Gospel of Thomas calls out to you.