Food for thought (is also Re: The Gospel of Thomas

[rj]

Interesting program on the Tube the other night dealing with just this
Gospel (fragments of this and other "heretical" Gnostic texts were found
in Egypt in the C. 19th; an almost complete version of the Gospel of
Thomas was discovered at Nag-Hammadi "library" in 1945-6, along with
fragments of a Gospel of Mary Magdalene and a Gospel of Phillip, but
none of these were translated until the mid-1950s, and the Egyptian
Coptic Church authorities still refuse to have them translate into
Egyptian and keep them under lock and key in a Coptic museum). Unlike
the "authentic" or "official" Gospels there is no narrative
contextualisation in Thomas's version. It is simply a collection of the
"secret" or suppressed sayings of Jesus -- proverbs, Zarathustrian
aphorisms almost, "the hidden sayings of the living Jesus" as it is
translated from the title page of the Gospel -- many with a far more
Gnostic (or "Cynic", a la Diogenes -- where's Terrance when you need
him!) bent to them than the Orthodox and Coptic Churches have ever been
happy with.

The program: A 1996 BBC/Das Erste co-production entitled 'Lives of
Jesus', Episode 4 'The Hidden Jesus', presented by Mark Tully.

The experts, theologians and historians who have translated and studied
the manuscripts, included Elaine Pagels and Marvin Meyer. They each
seemed to agree that the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is a vastly
different figure -- a homeless wanderer and storyteller, outspoken,
subversive, not practising Jewish rituals, something of a gourmand in
fact, an opponent to institutionalised religion, a truthseeker rather
than a Messiah who asked provocative questions and posed riddles about
God and who preached that God could be found within the self -- than the
one depicted in the "approved" Gospels of the New Testament.

Some choice bits: 

70: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will
save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not
bring forth will destroy you."

"Fortunate are those who are alone and chosen, for you will find the
Kingdom, for you have come from It, and you will return to It again."

Jesus said: "I am the Light that is over all things-- I am all-- From me
all has come forth and to me all has reached-- Split a piece of wood, I
am there-- Lift up a stone and you will find me there."

Sound familiar?

Many of these sayings, obviously, didn't sit too well with the Christian
bishops it seems, and so were quite probably suppressed from about the
2nd Century AD. Marvin Meyer conjectures that the "heretic" Gnostic
monks (who most probably saw themselves as functioning within the
auspices of Jesus's teachings and not as opponents of Christianity at
all at first) might have buried the texts for safe keeping. (The
parallels with the suppression of *GR*'s message by Fundamentalist
Godbods [like, well, we all know who we all are now, don't we?] since
1973 is extraordinary. Start digging, Murthy!)

The "most important conclusion" made by the program's narrator, Mark
Tully, "that the least historical article of Christian faith, the
Resurrection, must have happened", seemed to be quite at odds with the
rest of the program, and with the implicit verdicts on this subject of
the scholars he interviewed. For example, there is no reference to the
Resurrection in the Gospel of Thomas. Similarly, the 'doubting Thomas'
story (John 20:24-29) appears to be something of a fabrication, or
"polemic" in Elaine Pagel's terms, intended to discredit Thomas's
Gospel. She describes John's recount of Thomas's doubt, his need to put
his fingers into Jesus's wounds in order to believe in the bodily
Resurrection of Christ, as a political embellishment establishing and
sustaining the fledgling Christian faith as an institution, rather than
a "true" version of events. Peter's suppression of Mary Magdalene's
dream-vision (rather than direct experience) of the Risen Christ,
recorded in her Gospel, somewhat consolidates this premonition also I
think.

At the end of the program Tully reasoned that "if there'd been no
Miracle after Jesus's death there would have been no grounds for faith
in a failed life. No Resurrection, no Church. ...[I]f Jesus's companions
were prepared to die for their faith in the Resurrection then there's no
historical reason why we shouldn't live in that faith." This argument
was a little circumstantial for my liking, I'm afraid. I did like
another of his quips, however, that Thomas's Jesus was a more attractive
one than He of the other myths, and that he will hopefully/probably(?)
become "the Jesus of the next millennium".

Undoubtedly the derivation of the parodic fragment at GR 537, Mr
Pynchon, like his Cynic namesake, envisages a more human or
"historically accurate" Jesus than the politicised (and conflicting)
accounts recorded by Matt, Mark, Luke and John in their Gospels. It is a
Jesus revealed through his sayings rather than through the revisionist
myths of his life; the spoken Words rather than the stories selectively
shaped and concocted for political ends by his companions and their
followers.

Tchitcherine's failure to experience the Kirghiz Light, and the quests
of the other truthseekers in Mr Pynchon's novel, seems to hinge on this
notion expressed in the Gospel of Thomas, of "not believing in Christ
simply, but *becoming* Christ." (Pagels, paraphrase) The "whatever seas
you have crossed" passage is similarly in concert with this idea of the
personal Jesus within: the experience of Enlightenment, the discovery of
the divine in oneself.

Food for thought indeed ...

(NB: The Gospel of Thomas is *not* to be confused with the 'Infancy
Gospel of Thomas', a collection of miracle stories about the child
Jesus, as it once [deliberately?] was hereabouts.)