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“The Gospel of Thomas – Treasure, Trouble or Trash?”
The Gospel of Thomas isn’t required reading in Divinity School. My knowledge of the so-called “lost gospels” was zero when I came into this pulpit as your minister. My decision to put the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, on my sabbatical reading list came after I bumped into quotation #77 somewhere. I recognized these words as almost familiar, but not quite. See if you do.
“I am the light that is above all things. I am all things. All things come forth from me. All things return to me. Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the rock and you will find me.”
My familiarity with these words came from the last part – “Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the rock and you will find me.”. Now let me read to you the preface to Lifetides, by my predecessor here, the Reverend Elizabeth Tarbox.
"I thought I heard the voice of the spirit cry: Come and find me. You won't have to look hard. Come to where the ocean touches the shore; find me in the bright-light promise of morning on the waves; look carefully at the bubbles breaking on the wet sand-there I am. Turn over the glistening rock, slippery with its cushion of seaweed-here I am. Hear the gulls crying news of the endless ocean-that is my news, my voice. Lie with me in the tall, green marsh grass; see my footprints in the sand you have walked upon. Do not say I am lost, for you have found me. I am here.” -- Elizabeth Tarbox
Clearly my predecessor, my mentor, my inspiration toward ministry had read and been inspired by the Gospel of Thomas. This passage by Elizabeth has played a role in my life. When I first began to contemplate ministry as a career, the choice wasn’t simple –the lovely words in this preface to Elizabeth’s book became a touchstone and I would reread them again and again. “Come and find me – you won’t have to look hard. Turn over the glistening rock – here I am…Do not say that I am lost, for you have found me.” For me there was no better or more compelling invitation to ministry or to our human search for the divine, the spirit of life, than these words.
A little background on the Gospel of Thomas. The story began in 1945 when an Egyptian peasant named Mohammed Ali al-Samman Mohammad Khalifa, rode his camel to the base of a cliff near Nag Hammadi, hoping to collect fertilizer to sell. I assume he found the dung, but, in addition, he found a large, very old, sealed pottery jar buried in the sand. He said later he hoped it would contain a treasure, but he feared it might contain a genie or something that could cause him trouble. There was only one way to find out –he smashed the jar open. He found no money or jewels, just twelve very ancient-looking books. He sold them for a modest sum. Today those books are known as the Nag Hammadi library.
Trouble or treasure? The answer depends on your perspective. Among those ancient books are volumes now known as the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, and the Secret Book of John. They range in age from the second through the middle of the fourth centuries A.D. The most significant of the twelve is the Gospel of Thomas, our subject today, important because it consists of 144 sayings that are attributed directly to Jesus. They are early and in rough form. What I imagine, having read them, is a group of people who had known Jesus throwing up some newsprint and brainstorming everything they could remember that Jesus had said. It’s that basic. But it’s rich. Among the sayings recorded in Thomas, 47 have parallels to existing passages in Mark, seventeen have parallels in Matthew, four in Luke, and five in John. And then, about sixty-five more are unique to Thomas. The Nag Hammadi find, and especially the Gospel of Thomas, is widely considered to be the most important archeological discovery of the twentieth century.
But again, whether it all adds up to trouble or treasure depends on your point of view. Until the find at Nag Hammadi the only sources for learning about Jesus and his teachings were the canonical scriptures. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As it is, they vary in their details and their theological emphasis – and it has been from these texts alone that we have come to know all we know of Jesus. With the Gospel of Thomas, a new source from that era has appeared. Do we include the new perspective found here into our understanding of who Jesus was – do we allow our theology to shift? or do we ignore this find? For Christian churches this is no minor question.
Let me give you a sampling of the negative reaction to the Gospel of Thomas. The following is from Catholic Insight magazine, written by Leonard A. Kennedy this past November:
“For Catholics the question has been settled. The New Testament books we accept were written in the second half of the first century. By about the middle of the second century, acceptance of the majority of them was generally agreed on, but it was not until the fifth century that there was great agreement on the whole. And the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, closed the matter by stating definitively that [only] the twenty-seven books we have [in the canon] today are those inspired by God.
The answer to this question is, of course, is very important for our faith, our morality, and our relationship to God. We need not therefore be surprised that God has settled this question with an infallible teaching. Without infallibility the Church could never be fully sure that the inspired books were the right ones, or whether there were not other inspired books not yet known to be such.”
In a Time magazine article entitled “The Lost Gospels” the Catholic historian Raymond Brown dismissively calls the Nag Hammadi writings “the rubbish of the second century.”
But for Elaine Pagels, a religion professor at Princeton University, they are treasure. In an interview on National Public Radio she gave a different reason for the disappearance of the Nag Hammadi writings for 2000 years. Pagels is a conspiracy theorist:
“Well, we know what the actual circumstances are, that in the year 367, the Archbishop of Alexandria, who was trying to consolidate all Christians in Egypt under his authority, sent a letter out at Easter and told the monks to destroy all the illegitimate secret books that they had. And he said, `You can keep 27, but destroy all the rest.' And it's very interesting that 27 is the first list we have of what we call the New Testament collection; there are 27 books. And apparently the monks took all these other books… and hid them in a huge jar and buried them. This is, of course, contrary to the archbishop's order. But that is what saved these texts, so that we now can begin to read a completely different side of early Christianity.”
Easy for her to say. Pagels is not trying to run a coherent church. There is a different theological perspective in the sayings of Thomas. Throughout Thomas the voice of the spirit cries out from within the world, to be discovered and experienced now. Listen for yourself. In saying 3a. Jesus is making fun of the idea that the Kingdom of God is up above or in the future. Here it is:
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3a. Jesus said: If your leaders say to you “Look! The Kingdom is in the sky!” then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather, the Kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
The theology in Thomas is expanded in 3b.
3b. When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.
In Thomas then, knowledge of the divine and self-knowledge are inseparable. And therefore, the appropriate quest for a follower of Jesus is self-knowledge rather than belief in Jesus. Thomas presents a very positive view of human nature.
Here is saying #113 which is found toward the very end.
113. They asked him: When is the Kingdom coming? He replied: It is not coming in an easily observable manner. People will not be saying, “Look, it’s over here” or “Look, it’s over there.” Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is already spread out on the earth, and people aren’t aware of it.”
This idea that the Kingdom is here, now and we have only to awaken is compatible with Buddhism. It runs absolutely counter to the theology of today’s Christian church where heaven is a reward and believers conquer their sinful nature through belief in Jesus. In Thomas, Jesus presents as beloved teacher: there is no mention, of crucifixion or resurrection, no mention of Jesus as Messiah or Christ; no virgin birth or miracles.
Conspiracy theorists, like Elaine Pagels believe that the Gospel of Thomas was rejected from the canon because seekers are too strongly encouraged to seek and find on their own. She says, “My own guess… is that if we have God’s image in us, we can find access to God by ourselves. That might suggest you don’t need a bishop, you don’t need a priest, you don’t –you might not even need Jesus.”
But, to be fair, we don’t know. We can’t conclude that Thomas was deliberately excluded because right now we have no idea whether those who decided to include the canonical four – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, had even heard of the Gospel of Thomas. We only know that someone had to choose, and they did. The story took an odd turn when the books were buried and another when they were dug up in the modern age. That brought us into this fascinating story.
My own sense of Thomas is that it is a working list, a mishmash –including it in the canon would have been a stretch because these sayings range so much in quality and content. At best these sayings might have served as an appendix – but the Bible, if understood to be the explicit word of God should require no appendix. Thomas is a quick read if not an easy one. Here are seven more – you may want to shut your eyes – I’ll read them slowly - remember, the voice in each of them is believed to be Jesus:
14c For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth can defile you.
42. Jesus said: Be one of those who pass by.
56. Jesus said: Whoever has known the world has found a corpse; whoever has found that corpse, the world is not worthy of him.
67. Jesus said: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.
69b. Blessed are those who are hungry in order to fill the bellies of the needy.
70. Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.
And finally,
114. Simon Peter said to them: Mary should leave us because women are not worthy of the life. Jesus responded: Look, I’ll lead her in order to make her male so that she can become a living spirit as you males are. For each woman who makes herself male will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
I’d like to circle back to our original question. Is the Gospel of Thomas, treasure, trouble or trash? My own feeling is - all three! It’s a treasure, certainly. It belongs, after all, to the same period of Christian writing that produced the canonical gospels. But taken as a whole, is it of the quality of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? No. Some of the sayings are magnificent, beautifully rendered and inspiring, like the fragment that so inspired Elizabeth Tarbox. But others are poorly expressed sentiments – and some, like the idea of women entering the Kingdom of Heaven by becoming male… no comment!
More to the point for us, as Unitarian Universalists we don’t let others decide their worth for us. The theological imperative that seekers need to search for individual meaning is compatible with Unitarian Universalism as is the belief in the goodness of humanity.
Our statement of Principles and Purposes acknowledges that we draw from many sources. So we are invited by that to spend some time with these sayings - which ones are worthy of the Biblical Jesus you have already come to know? I found reading them carefully a fascinating exercise as did Elizabeth Tarbox, and I encourage you to consider doing the same. (My copy – library) Which ones would you throw out? Which ones would you keep and why? Even if you were to throw them all out as was done two thousand years ago, (which I doubt) the process would be illuminating – it will be time spent in very good company.