Highlights from the Gospel of Thomas, Part II
A continuation of last week's post.
Read Part I here. Follow along in the Lambdin translation or a parallel source here.
(19) Jesus said, “Blessed is he who came into being before he came into being. If you become my disciples and listen to my words, these stones will minister to you. For there are five trees for you in Paradise which remain undisturbed summer and winter and whose leaves do not fall. Whoever becomes acquainted with them will not experience death.”
That is, blessed is he who existed before he was born. This is all men and women, though most remain incognizant of it, unenlightened, and enslaved by sarkic concerns.
The stones and all material creation serve the enlightened in the sense Martin Luther describes:
First, as regards kingship, every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, in spiritual power, he is completely lord of all things, so that nothing whatever can do him any hurt; yea, all things are subject to him, and are compelled to be subservient to his salvation. Thus Paul says, “All things work together for good to them who are the called,” and also “Whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours; and ye are Christ’s…” This is is a spiritual power, which rules in the midst of enemies, and is powerful in the midst of distresses. And this is nothing else than that strength is made perfect in my weakness, and that I can turn all things to the profit of my salvation; so that even the cross and death are compelled to serve me and to work together for my salvation. This a lofty and eminent dignity, a true and almighty dominion, a spiritual empire, in which there is nothing so good, nothing so bad, as not to work together for my good, if only I believe. And yet there is nothing of which I have need—for faith alone suffices for my salvation—unless that in it faith may exercise the power and empire of its liberty. This is the inestimable power and liberty of Christians.
Compare the trees in Paradise to those in Revelation 22:2. They are trees of life and to be acquainted with them is life eternal—in this passage they represent the secret knowledge, the hidden gnosis that unites man with transcendence. The significance of the number five, according to a rabbi with a web page, is the completion of the natural order symbolized by four with one more unit representing the Divine; you thus have North, South, East, West, and God-ward, or Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and God-season.
(21) Mary said to Jesus, “Whom are your disciples like?”
He said, “They are like children who have settled in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say, ‘Let us have back our field.’ They (will) undress in their presence in order to let them have back their field and to give it back to them. Therefore I say, if the owner of a house knows that the thief is coming, he will begin his vigil before he comes and will not let him dig through into his house of his domain to carry away his goods. You, then, be on your guard against the world. Arm yourselves with great strength lest the robbers find a way to come to you, for the difficulty which you expect will (surely) materialize. Let there be among you a man of understanding. When the grain ripened, he came quickly with his sickle in his hand and reaped it. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Jesus’ disciples have the innocence of children, cast afield in the wicked world. The spiritual powers of the world will demand their exit—and the disciples will comply, for the kingdom will not at this time be of this world. See our discussion of logion 37 below for the meaning of the disciples’ undressing.
The image of a thief entering the house also appears in Matthew 12:29, but there it is Christ as trickster-god who binds the “strong man” Satan to despoil his house. Here instead the world is the thief and the disciples are enjoined to be on guard: “what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” The great strength with which they are to arm themselves is not worldly might, “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” but knowledge of spiritual realities—“let there be among you a man of understanding.”
When grain is ready for harvest, the prudent man reaps it straightaway, and so it is in higher matters. Higher self-realization is at all times at one’s doorstep. He who watches for it will always find it near and move towards it immediately.
(22) Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”
They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”
Compare Matthew 19:14. The Jesus of Matthew commands His disciples become as children; the Jesus of Thomas has a more esoteric doctrine. They are not to enter as children, exactly, but as self-united beings. The outside and inside are to be the same, without conflict.
The Gnostic reading is: the “below” fleshly self must be made to match the “above” spiritual self, and the male and female remain identically celibate and sexless (the male and female are to be treated much as the prepubescent boys and girls to whom Jesus compares the disciples). Fleshly eyes, hands, and feet must be replaced with capacities for spiritual vision, action, and motion, inasmuch as the flesh is inferior to the spirit and is to be scorned.
This is at odds with traditional Christianity, which holds a more positive and wholesome attitude towards the body—after all, the principal tenets of the religion are the Incarnation and the Resurrection of God in the flesh. Salvaging the traditional view from this logion, we read it as: the body and spirit must be brought into alignment, indeed, but not by shunning the body but by properly ordering its passions. The male and female lose their maleness and femaleness not singly but in each other, for “neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.” The eyes, hands, and feet are no longer the members of unregenerate man but become new creations when the initiate is reborn by baptism into Christ.
We will see the Gnostic idea of sex differences again in logion 114, where it is in an even stranger form. Look forward to it.
(27) <Jesus said,> “If you do not fast as regards the world, you will not find the kingdom. If you do not observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath, you will not see the father.”
As in (22), we see a push towards asceticism. The push for Sabbath observance will make more sense in the context of (50), which happens to be my favorite passage in the whole book.
(28) Jesus said, “I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent.”
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Jesus can find none that so thirst, unfortunately. Man’s sin is his blindness and unwillingness to see what is right before him, and he goes out of his way to leave the world without realizing the inner riches he possesses (see the next logion).
(29) Jesus said, “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.”
Jesus ridicules the notion that the soul of man comes into existence merely because two parents copulate and create a human body. It is surprising enough that body exists as a vessel for spirit, but it defies belief that the spirit would come into being for the body. This argument strikes at two groups. First, the materialists, those who today would argue that the “soul” (as it were) is merely an emergent property of the embodied mind; second, the Jew or Christian who denies the eternity of the soul and its temporal precedence over the body. The latter group encompasses most of mainline Christianity today and the former notion is implicitly held by most of the secular world; Christ articulates what is today a small minority position.
(30) Jesus said, “Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.”
This is obviously to be compared with Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Many scholars take issue with the Thomasine text here and assert that original text was something like: “where there are three individuals, they are without God, but where there are two or one, I am with him.” That is, the Gnostic text rejects community and rejoices in solitary worship.
(37) His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?”
Jesus said, “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid.”
Jesus is not fully revealed even to His disciples; He only shows His divine form to Peter, James, and John in the Transfiguration (compare also Krishna’s revelation of his divine form to Arjuna, the episode of the Bhagavad Gita).
With this context, Jesus responds that He will reveal Himself when His disciples reveal themselves. The message is twofold: first, the more mundane notion that only through willingness to open oneself to God can God reveal Himself, and second, the more esoteric notion (seen throughout this text) that the disciples are in the process of becoming little-Christs; to see the Son of the living God they might as well look in a mirror and see Him becoming real within themselves.
(42) Jesus said, “Become passers-by.”
Most translations read as above, though Schoedel’s older translation has the more Gnostic-sounding “Come into being as you pass away.”
The disciples are to be “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” The awful world around us is not our destination nor our home; we are to pass by its follies and troubles.
(50) Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’, say, ‘We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your father in you?’, say to them, ‘It is movement and repose.’”
This is the logion that sold me on Thomas. It struck me deeply as truth—not the entire thing, I don’t even like the first two-thirds of it—but the final question and answer resonate with me profoundly.
Jesus recites Gnostic cosmology. The Fulness, the Pleroma, came into being, the divine essence of its emanations being the same from which the human soul comes from. The flavor here is far more Gnostic than mainline Christian, and there’s really no salvaging a non-Gnostic interpretation of the first two phrases.
The final phrase, however, I love. “If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your father in you?’, say to them, ‘It is movement and repose.’”
What is the sign of divinity? In the beginning God Himself creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh. This is the sign, the mark, the calling-card of Deity. In (27) we read that “if you do not observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath, you will not see the father”—because the Sabbath is the Father’s very mark, the repose following movement, the rest following action. So too does the faithful one act and rest.
More than this—all humans bear the mark of the divine, rejoicing in the pattern of movement and repose in their innermost souls. The seasons are the mark of the Father upon the planet, music the peculiar human invention imposing movement and repose upon the motion of the air.
Movement is obviously necessary; God is dynamic, active, powerful. But so too is repose desirable even for the Almighty, bringing with it opportunity for reflection and the creation of meaning over activity’s works.
I cannot say enough about this passage, but that will do for now.
(51) His disciples said to him, “When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?”
He said to them, “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.”
At least one authority throws out the word “repose” and inserts “resurrection” on the grounds that the question then makes more sense. The actual Coptic text, however, definitely says “repose” and we’ll run with that.
Are not the dead already resting? The similitude between death and sleep is immediate. So it appears from the physical side of things, anyway, since a dead body and a sleeping body look much alike.
Implicit in the disciples’ question, then, is the assumption that for the spirit death is not restful. The separation of soul from body is an unpleasant tension. This notion seems at odds with our usual Gnostic theology in which the body is to be mortified and pure spirit celebrated. No, what we have here is the more traditional Christian view; the body and spirit belong together. The repose of the dead is, simply, the resurrection of the dead, when the spirit will again rest in its proper vessel.
The new world is effectively the resurrection of all Creation to its intended holy state. Christ says this and the resurrection of the dead have already happened—as usual this means the inward state of things for the enlightened believer. He or she who attains gnosis has already been resurrected from spiritual deadness into life, and for that individual the new world has already come. The disciples are not to look for outward signs or marvels but for inner knowledge.
(52) His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke in you.”
He said to them, “You have omitted the one living in your presence and have spoken (only) of the dead.”
Nothing especially Gnostic here, but it’s a nice pithy logion of Jesus that would fit right in anywhere in the canonical Gospels.
(56) Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”
Knowledge of the outwardly visible world is worthless compared to real spiritual enlightenment; the world is dead. He who finds this and realizes it is superior to the whole thing. Like most of Thomas, this has a strong ascetic flavor to it.
To be continued next week.