8. The Gospel of Thomas

one of the themes of the course may be the main theme of the course is the diversities of early Christianity in fact a lot of scholars like to talk about not Christianity in the first 100 years but Christianity's there this is one of the themes also of Bart Ehrman's textbook so you should have picked up on this there's lots of different kinds of Christianity's and we were talking about those kinds right today we get to one of the most interesting differences to most people because most modern people are not at all familiar with the Gospel of Thomas and so this the Gospel of Thomas not in our Canon for several reasons but we can talk about that at some point at the end of the lecture if you want to know the gospel Thomas has become very famous though in the 20th cent last part of the 20th century because it was rediscovered and published and created something of the sensation according to the tradition according to the Gospel of Thomas Jesus had a twin brother and his name was didymus Judas Thomas now didymus is simply the Greek word for twin it's also used as the Greek word for testicles for obvious reasons there are usually two of them so didymus is the Greek word for twin and Thomas is from a Semitic word either Hebrew or Aramaic or Syriac which are all three similar languages Thomas would look like twin and those so the guy's name is Judas the Hebrew version would be Judah the Greek were to be Judas and the English version is Jude so you sometimes see it in English translations to didymus Jude Thomas but there's the same word Judah or Judas so his real name is Judah or Judas and he's didymus and Thomas are his nicknames one Greek and one Semitic or Aramaic he was the twin brother of Jesus according to early Christian tradition now just one strand of early Christian tradition that is Thomasine Christianity the forms of Christianity popular especially in Syria and the East which traced their existence back to the Apostle Thomas so there really was in a Apostle Thomas among the twelve of Jesus disciples and and and having the nickname twin traditional traditional Orthodox Christians don't believe he was Jesus's twin brother they just believe that he had a nickname twin because he was somebody else's twin brother but in Thomas in Christianity he was connected to Jesus himself as Jesus's twin according to some forms of Eastern Christianity therefore especially the early forms in Syria Mesopotamia and India and yes there was very very early forms of Christianity in the west coast of India they CH and if you meet an Indian person who's from that part of India and who considers themselves Christian and they've been Christian for generations in generations they will tell you yes Thomas was the Apostle who brought the gospel to India the first time so there are ancient traditions about this and modern Indian Christians still trace their their church back to the Apostle Thomas there are all kinds of Thomas literature from the ancient world it's a it's not all like it doesn't all represent one kind of Christianity or one church or even one region but among besides the Gospel of Thomas we know of the infancy Gospel of Thomas this is a wonderful documentary took my historical Jesus class you get to read the fragments of the infancy Gospel of Thomas that we still have it shows you everybody wonders well what was Jesus like as a kid you know what gangs did he play did he play cops and robbers did he play with dolls you know what did Jesus do as a kid well Thomas tells you it tells you for example that he made a bunch of clay pigeons and when this Juke it's kind of an ante Jewish document this Jew comes up and says you're not supposed to be doing that on the Sabbath so Jesus claps his hands and the pigeons all fly off the clay pigeons fly off or when one of his buddies get that he gets mad as when the buddies so he strikes the kid dead and then has to raise the kid up again when one of his teeth when one of his teachers criticizes him he says what do you know you bimbo and strikes the teacher dumb and blind or something you know so Jesus has a little kid in the Gospel of Thomas and the infancy Gospel of Thomas is kind of a little rat but that's the way people imagined him as a child so there's the infancy Gospel of Thomas there's the Acts of Thomas which are very interesting Thomas comes across as very anti-marriage anti-family there's the hymn of the pearl or the hymn as it's also called the hymn of Jude Thomas the Apostle in the country of the Indians same document we tend to call it the hem of the pearl there's the book of Thomas The Contender writing to the perfect so all of these different texts sprang up in early Christianity most of them in the second century the second century was a time of a lot of Christian literature arising in different places that didn't make it into the Bible before the discovery though of the Nog Hammadi codices you probably already know how to spell naga hamadi because you've seen it in your textbook it's just the name of a village in modern Egypt I don't remember how many eyes and DS and M's and DS it has but it's something like that that's that right Dylan who is our one of our teaching assistants he's an expert on all this stuff so he can correct me nod commodity is a village in Egypt and in 1945 while they were digging for some clay and that sort of thing some Egyptian peasant found a 13 large books remember the word codex or codices I talked about in the one of the early lectures means the kind of book that has the pate has pages and on all sewn up on one side to distinguish it from a book that's in a scroll form so this by this time he found these books they had been buried there probably sometime in the fourth century so in the 300s and they'd probably been hidden there because that's about the time that certain forms of Christianity were being outlawed and declared heretical there are 13 of these big books and right is right along the Nile River and we call these the NAG Hammadi library or the NAG Hammadi corpus the NAG Hammadi texts that's just because the modern village near where they were found is not coming before this 1945 discovery and the Gospel of Thomas is one of many many different texts they were discovered in this library of material before this we knew that there was a Gospel of Thomas because early Christian writers would talk about it usually to condemn it and we did we had a few papyrus fragments three papyrus fragments that had Greek versions of just parts of the Gospel of Thomas just pieces of it from unser Oxyrhynchus Egypt but the naga hamadi discovery was really a very very exciting because it greatly increased our knowledge of some forms of christianity that the only thing we had known about them was by orthodox writers condemning it and you know when orthodox when one kind of writer is condemning another a bunch of people you can't necessarily trust what they say orthodox writers for example claims that Gnostics who they took to be these heretic they were we would talk about Gnosticism in this lecture they said oh they have these wild sex orgies and they they drink blood and they have cannibalism well regular Christians were accused by their enemies of doing it precisely the same thing so we don't believe everything but when we found these Nagas body text we had sort of first-hand texts from these people who understood Christianity differently than what would come to be Orthodox Christianity now the modern study of Gnosticism therefore has been completely revolutionized by this study because it brought to light a complete version of the Gospel of Thomas although it was in Coptic translation of the Greek it was originated in Greek translated into Coptic which is an ancient Egyptian language but it also brought to light all these other texts not all by the same people not all reflecting the same views some of them for example are just pieces of Plato or parts of the Bible and that sort of thing these Texas I said were the the texts we actually have an automatic codices were written around the time 350 and we know this because the cardboard that was used to bind these things was made out of papyrus fragments and paper fragments they were older so by by dating some of the the pieces of paper that were used to make the cardboard that bound these things we can tell when at least these books were put together but we think that a lot of these texts were actually written in the second century and the Gospel of Thomas most scholars would say is written for the year 200 some scholars believe that the Gospel of Thomas goes all the way back to the first century and may even be as early as Mark or Q or even earlier I think probably majority of scholars don't believe that I think the majority of us believe that the Gospel of Thomas was probably first written in Greek in the first half of the second centuries between 100 and 150 but we don't really know it's a just a complete guess some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas look actually older Bart Ehrman talks about why you would think a certain saying in one form might be older than a saying in another form and that's debatable but some of us if we just compare the same side-by-side those in the Gospel of Thomas - some people would say well that's exactly like an older version of this saying of Jesus or an older version of a parable of Jesus that we find in Matthew or mark and so some people have said even if the Gospel of Thomas itself comes from the second century it may well contain what are more ancient versions of sayings of Jesus this is why when people do historical Jesus research that is trying to figure out from the multiple Gospels that we have what did the historical Jesus really say and really do historically determined people will use the Gospel of Thomas sometimes to say well this is actually more likely what Jesus actually closed it what Jesus actually said and the canonical Gospels have edited it up a bit so that's it's very debatable about that but that's a part of the value of the Gospel of Thomas is that for a lot of scholars we believe it takes us back at least a close to the time of Jesus in some of its sayings but not necessarily in all of its sayings there are 114 sayings as you by now known the Gospel of Thomas and as I said last time scholars like to use two bit words when one bit words would do just as well so instead of calling these sayings you will often see them called logia that's the plural low Guillen is the singular Logan is just Greek for a saying so logia is just Greek for sayings so often in scholarship in your textbook sometimes you'll say Logie on 114 from the Gospel of Thomas and that just means saying 114 there are 114 of them and in fact there introduced the Gospels introduced by just the words these are the obscure or the hidden sayings that the living Jesus uttered and which didymus Jude Thomas wrote down so it gives you sort of a little title right there at the beginning notice there's no passion narrative there's no description of the death of Jesus there's no resurrection and actually most people think that Jesus speaks as if he's already been resurrected so does this author intend us to think that this is the post resurrection Jesus or didn't he just assume that even in before his death Jesus just talked this way you have to use your imagination because the author doesn't really tell us much now comparisons with other Gospels get out your text your Gospel Thomas and read with me through some of these things look at Logie on 9 this is the parable of the sower jesus said listen a sower came forth took a handful and cast now some fell on from the pathway and the birds came and picked them out others fell on a rock but they did not take root in the soil and did not send up ears others fell upon the thorns and they choked the seed and the grubs devoured them and others fell upon good soil and it sent up good crops and yielded 60 per measure and 120 per measure that's actually an example of when you have a saying that sounds on more primitive perhaps in this gospel because notice how that saying is shorter and a bit simpler than the same parable would be in either Matthew or Luke an example of why some people say well maybe it's more primitive that one sounds very very much like what you've got Paul writing the canonical Gospels so it should sound sound familiar to you look at the number 8 right above that what human beings resemble is an intelligent fisherman who having cast his net into the sea pulled up the net out of the sea full of little fish the intelligent fisherman upon finding among them a vine large fish through all the little fish back into the sea choosing without any effort the big fish whoever has ears to hear should listen now this translation I'm reading from Bentley Layton's translation he's a professor in our department he's very famous as one of the top colleges in the world and I'm using his translation of this and but that whoever has ears to hear should listen even though the translation makes it sound slightly different that's just exactly the same thing as you see in the Gospels let him who have ears to hear hear light and just decided to translate it in a bit more colloquial English version so that's just like what you would find practically in the other Gospels look in xxx saying 30 Jesus said where there are three divine beings they are divine where there are two or one I myself dwell with that person that sounds a bit more odd doesn't it it sounds a bit like a saying of Jesus in the Gospels that says wherever two or three are gathered together I am there in the midst of them but what is this about divine beings where there are three divine beings they are divine where there are two or one I myself dwell with that person it's puzzle you can tell how it's similar but not exactly like this the synoptic Gospels look at saying 48 jesus said if to make peace with one another within a single house they will say to a mountain go elsewhere and it will go elsewhere doesn't matter what the synoptic version of that saying says anybody know your Bible well enough yes sir that's right if you have faith the side of a mustard seed the size of a mustard seed you can tell them out to remove yourself and they'll go so it's a it's been this thing about - making peace again with one another within a house so that it's the peacemaking that seems to give the power 86 jesus said foxes have their dens and birds have their nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head and gain repose now that sounds funny up into the last couple of words it sounded just like the synoptic Gospels but this at least Layton is translated in his dungeon say and get rest and rest lay his head in rest professor layton has for some reason translated this to sound a bit odd and gain repose I think what that means is he's trying to signal that this these last two words have some kind of special meaning for this author in this text what kind of special meaning would that be and in 113 these are just examples of sayings that look very much like what we already have seen in the Bible his disciples said to him when is the kingdom going to come now we've got this the Gospels also in the Bible Jesus said it is not by being waited for that it's going to come they are not going to say here it is or there it is rather the kingdom of the Father is spread out over the earth and people do not see it this is not the kingdom coming in the future as we've seen it in mark and Matthew and Luke this is the kingdom is already here around the earth and if you don't know that is just because you aren't recognizing it there are though really interesting peculiarities are the Gospel of Thomas and let's look at some of those first look at 13 these are some sayings that look more odd to us jesus said to his disciples compare me to something and tell me what I resemble this starting off sounding like what we've seen already Simon Peter said a just angel is whom you resemble Matthew said to him an intelligent philosopher is what you resemble Thomas said to him teacher my mouth utterly will not let me say what you resemble Jesus said I am NOT your teacher for you and notice he Layton's letting you know are you using the same translation that I am that's right I thought I gave you the same translation Layton says lets you know because you can't tell in english whether that your teacher is singular you or plural you and he tells you it's singular in the cop dick I am NOT your teacher so Jesus is directing this not to all the Apostles but to Thomas in particular right here for you have drunk and become intoxicated from the bubbling wellspring that I have personally measured out but what the hell does that mean and he took him des took Thomas withdrew and said three things to him now when Thomas came to his companions they asked him what did Jesus say to you Thomas said to them if I say to you plural one of the things that he said to me you will take stones and stone me and fire will come out of the stones and burn you up sort of an ancient version of I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you look at 29 jesus said it is amazing if it was for the spirit that flesh came into existence and it is amazing indeed if spirit came into existence for the sake of the body but as for me I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty what does that mean look at the very last saying I hope some of you noticed this when you're reading over this before he came to class Simon Peter said to them Mary should leave us he's talked about Mary Magdalene probably from females are not worthy of life jesus said see I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males for every female that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven okay look at 24 I'm just picking out some sayings that are rather mysterious his disciples said show us the place where you are for we must seek it he said to them whoever has ears should listen there is light existing within a person of light and it enlightens the whole world if it does not enlighten that person is darkness the previous saying had this duality of male and female that was somehow significant in some mysterious way this one shows us there's also a duality of concern to this author of light and darkness so there's dualisms and especially a light darkness dualism male/female dualism and a soul body dualism we've already seen that there's also this word that latent translates as the entirety and some modern translations we'll just leave it they'll just transliterate the Greek that it's from play Roma play Roma is a Greek word that comes important in some philosophy in the ancient world in some intellectual and it just means the all or the fullness but it comes out an abstract weird meaning full or fullness but it comes to be some kind of technical term that refers to I don't know all of existence or the fullness of being or like think of German philosophy with fullness with a being with a capital B or existence with a capital e so that word is often occurs here and when you see the word entirety in Layton's translation he's translated that that wordplay roman jesus said and this is 67 if anyone should become acquainted with the entirety the play roma and should fall short at all that person falls short utterly several other places saying seventy seven has another reference to that notice we've already seen that this text does not take the kingdom of God as something existing in the future in fact this text is not at all eschatological remember we encounter this word in previous lecture which me just means something having to do with the end eschaton in greek meaning the end this author is not eschatological he doesn't think Christianity is I didn't think Jesus's teachings are about the future at all they're about now they're about the present so there are several sayings in Thomas unlike the sayings in the Gospels in the Canon that are not eschatological they very much point to the present there's also something else one of this disc this author is concerned about something like integration look at saying 61 jesus said to will rose repose on a couch one will die one will live Salome II said who are you oh man like a stranger you have gotten upon my couch and you have eaten from my table jesus said to her it is I who come from that which is integrated I I come from that which is one I come from that which is not divided I was given some of the things of my father she apparently there's a lot of holes in the text where you see those dot dot dots and that's showing that there are lacunae that has just holes in the actual document that Layton is that we get this from so they're gaps in the text I am your female disciple she seems to say to him at some point and then eventually he seems to answer therefore I say that such a person once integrated will become full of light but such a person once divided will become full of darkness so there's a divided integrated dualism that's going on in this text also the kingdom is invisible I think I've already pointed this out the idea is that the kingdom is not something you say look it's over there look it's here 1:13 I've already read that the kingdom of thought is spreaded over the earth but most people don't see it and then look at saying three right at the very beginning jesus said if those who lead you say to you see the kingdom is in heaven then the birds of heaven will precede you if they say to you it is in the sea then the fish will precede you but the kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you when you become acquainted with yourself now the word acquainted here means when you become really knowledgeable and it comes from the greek word here is gnosis where we get the term Gnostics that greek word means gnosis but it does it means gnosis you know you know in some kinds of a technical way in these document which is it's not something you just know with your head it's something you really really know and so to express that professor layton usually translates this word as acquaintance or becoming acquainted with it when you become acquainted with yourselves then you will be recognized and you will understand that it is you who are children of the living father but if you do not become acquainted with yourself if you don't have gnosis of yourself then you are in poverty and it is you who are the poverty what is all this going on these things are things that sound a bit familiar and we might be able to figure them out because these are themes you can tell that there are things of light and darkness poor and riches inside and out soul and body spirit and body male and female but there are some sayings that are just really inscrutable look at saying seven Jesus said blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human and curse it is the human being that the lion devours and the lion will become human what does that mean I have no clue and that's really honest look at 15 jesus said when you and here's a plural you see one who has not been born of women fall upon your faces and prostate just prostrate yourselves before that one it is that one who is your father someone not born of women is your father 97 now you see aren't you glad that I didn't make you do an exegesis paper of these things Jesus said what the kingdom of the Father resembles is a woman who is conveying a jar full of meal when she had traveled far along the road the handle the jar broke and the meal spilled out after her along the road she was not a aware of the fact she had not understood how to toil when she reached home she put down the jar and found it empty how profound Jesus she lost her meal and she found her jar empty when she got home okay 98 right below that Jesus said what the kingdom of the Father resembles is a man who wanted to assassinate a member of court at home he drew the dagger and stabbed it into the wall in order to know whether his hand would be firm next he murdered the member of court that's what the kingdom is like now you know exactly what the kingdom is like right 105 jesus said whoever is acquainted with the father and the mother will be called the offspring of a prostitute all right what's going on here this document has called and still causes all kinds of debate among scholars you could go online right now and you will see tons and tons and tons of stuff written about the Gospel of Thomas some by real scholars and intelligent wise people like me although I've actually never written by the Gospel of Thomas because I don't want to go that get in that mess but I have good scholarly friends who publish on the Gospel of Thomas and argue their theories others by just absolute Kooks who are using the Gospel of Thomas for all kind of experimental spirituality and religion and you know mind stuff I'm trying to watch my language so but then you'll also have even if you took very reputable scholars you will have wide differences of opinion and one of the big difference of opinion right now when the Gospel of Thomas first became published people are sort of talking about it is oh this is a Gnostic gospel it represents a form of Gnosticism which I'll explain in a moment other people have said no it's not Gnostic it doesn't have all the main things we look for in fact they've even said we should even use this term Gnosticism anymore because it doesn't refer to anything we can actually locate in the ancient world it refers to a whole buncha different inks and nobody can come up with a good definition of Gnosticism or the Gnostic church so scholars right now some scholars will say let's get rid of the term entirely and call it something else whatever it is this thing is others continue to use the term Bart Ehrman wrote your textbook if you'll notice he goes ahead and sort of takes the Gospel of Thomas as representing some kind of Gnosticism but maybe not all of whatever we called Gnosticism any admits that there's a big debate now I'm going to a little bit of terminology I've already told you what nos the term Gnostic comes from this word gnosis and the word Gnostic cause was used by some people in the ancient world to refer to themselves but they didn't necessarily mean by that that they were in some kind of sect called Gnosticism for example clement of alexandria who wrote around the year 200 a very famous early christian scholar considered by later christianity to be perfectly Orthodox he talked about Gnostic Christians and thought he was himself a gnostic Christian and what he meant by that apparently was just that he was one of the more knowledgeable he was one more wise Christians he was in the know and he seems also to have had an idea that there were two kinds of Christian knowledge there's public knowledge that all Christians have and then there's special kind of hidden knowledge esoteric knowledge that only certain kinds of Christians have and so this idea that you have esoteric knowledge would be called a gnostic kind of notion so there are even Orthodox Christians who might use the term Gnostic in the second century to refer even to themselves so that's just what that were the word Gnostic often meant it would have looked a bit weird to an ancient Greek speaker but it would have been it would have been understandable as simply a knowing person there are other terms though that I want to talk about I've already mentioned I believe the term proto Orthodox the word Orthodox of course just means right thinking right opinion ortho from Greek right or true or correct or straight doxa meaning opinion or thoughts are then it comes mean doctrine - the problem with using the word Orthodox is that the opposite of Orthodox is usually heresy in this and eventually through different church councils in the 4th and 5th and 6th centuries what counted as Orthodox Christianity became more clearly defined and then anything that wasn't that could be labeled heretical Christianity and it was even outlawed at different times in Late Antiquity so for example the Nicene Creed that proclaims that the Trent that doctrine of the Trinity becomes Orthodox doctrines that say that the Trinity is not true or that there's not the Holy Spirit and angeas and the father are not Orthodox they're heretical or sometimes you'll see the term heterodox hetero just means other so it's it's not ortho it's other so Orthodox though the problem is we can't retro checked that term easily back into the second century because in the second century that there are tons of different Christians and tons of different churches that had many different views and they didn't all agree for there some people heads were started experimenting with the doctrine of the Trinity but a lot of Christians wouldn't have recognized the doctrine of the Trinity in the second century some people believe that Jesus was fully divine other please that people II know he was fully human but not divine some people believed he was both some people he was a mixture of both some believe that sometimes he was one sometimes it was the other we'll come back to this issue of of what did people believe Jesus was and that's the doctrine of Christology what do you believe about Christ but right now I'm just going to tell you that the protocol we call Christians in the second century in the first century proto Orthodox because we don't we know that calling them Orthodox is anachronistic in this time because there wasn't a to clearly delineate Doc's and heretical groups or churches proto just means earlier than or the first so a lot of scholars Bart Ehrman is one of them uses this term proto Orthodox and all it means is those Christians living in the 1st or 2nd century who whose views happen to win out eventually they happen to hold views that would eventually be the winners in the fight between orthodoxy and heresy and be declared Orthodox or correct Christianity so proto Orthodox there was no Christian running around in the second century calling himself a proto Orthodox Christian they didn't know they were proto Orthodox yet they but their views eventually won out so these different terms will come over and over again proto Orthodox just means someone who sort of had correct Christological views that is correct by later standards but they held them before these standards had and out in the debate ancient Gnosticism if you want to call it that does not seem to bin one church what I'm going to call Gnosticism is an intellectual movement that seems to been around beginning in the second century certainly and becomes important through the second third and fourth centuries it's not a church and an institution in the sense that we doubt that you could have walked into say the town of Antioch and looked for the the Gnostic church it seems like the people who wrote these documents and collected these materials that we find in the NAG Hammadi texts in the Gospel of Thomas they seem to have been intellectuals who are impressed with Jesus impressed with the Jewish scripture in a lot of cases impressed with a lot of the teachings of Christianity but they interpreted them through the eyes of a certain popular platonism at the time that is they seem to been influenced by different philosophical views and also just different intellectual views so when they read the book of Genesis for example they would read the book of Genesis but read it as if they were reading it through the eyes of Plato's Timaeus the great platonic dialogue in which Plato puts forth his own sort of cosmology in his own view of the gods and the world so it sounds some of their writings sound like they were reading basically good scripture but reading it through the eyes of certain kinds of philosophy and so what we've come to call Gnosticism in the ancient world is a range of ideas that may have been actually embodied in particular people or it may have been that some of these just intellectuals are playing around with ideas and writing them up in books and having reading clubs where they got together every Monday night you know and drank some beer and talk about their Gnostic ideas Platonism itself might be called proto Gnostic that is Gnosticism before Gnosticism for example in Platonism especially of this time you have a strong emphasis of a dualism of body and soul or body and spirit and in that dualism often the body or the materiality the fleshly existence the harder matter of things becomes less good sometimes even probably bored around evil and some people thought and spirit or the soul or the mind is the good thing so you have a mind-body dualism of body and soul dualism and often there's a deprecation of the body and a deprecation of matter as morally inferior now why would matter be considered inferior to non material substance because what happens to your body eventually you all have gorgeous bodies now but eventually you're going to look like me your hair is going to fall out your ears going to get too big your nose won't stop growing and then eventually you'll get even get beyond me and you'll die and you'll rot and you'll disappear the body is material and the ancient thinkers all knew that matter passes away anything that is material is going to pass away and be destroyed and be gone but things that are not material like ideas an idea the great thing about an idea is that it never need died so the spirit of the soul and platonic theory was superior to material stuff because and it was the only thing that could live forever being the infinite they also sometimes you see especially in later Platonism the idea that not only is the is the body temporary not eternal and passing away but the body is also a prison because your spirit they believed wants to get out of the body aren't you frustrated that you can't just escape your body and and go off and go someplace else for a while and and zoom out of your your body and and go to Argentina for the weekend you know not have to pay for airfare or you know so the idea was that the body imprisons your spirit and your soul and this has come to be a part of politeness at the time so what scholars will call basic Gnosticism include some basic themes that they hold in common first the world itself which is material is evil Salvation therefore from the world must be escape from this physical world into something else gross materiality is not only temporary in some texts but even bad it's evil and salvation therefore must be the knowledge of how you that is the real you your brain your up me not your brain your mind or your soul or your spirit not your body that real you is existing in this material body but salvation will be if it can learn how to escape the body and escape materiality that not salvation will become by knowledge and that knowledge is a secret not everybody knows it so only a few people know it the content of this knowledge is related to human origins and destination so sometimes you get this a lab these elaborate myths developed in some of these texts let's say that the supreme supreme supreme supreme god is fact has no name is not a particular thing it's this thought is just thinking it's just abstract thinking that thinking thinks well what does a thinking thing think the thinking thinks thoughts those thoughts start becoming emanations out of the thinking and in those emanations think and emanate and those become lesser being still and these so the different divine beings there are lots of divine beings that exist in universe and they thinking and being they emanate inferior forms of being after themselves and eventually what happened is those inferior forms of being get less good and less like the most ultimate being and one of them according to one myth Sophia which means wisdom it's a female name but it also means wisdom Sophia decides she wants to emanate and she's supposed to do that with a male consort because by this time these beings have male and female versions of themselves she's supposed to only emanate or procreate by doing so with her male consort she decides she wants to be like the Supreme God and be able to emanate on her own so she puts out of being on her own and for in other words she sort of gives birth without needing a man just the TVM principle well of course when you do that you end up with a monster so the being that came out of Sophia ended up being a clumsy maybe evil God these all these are I'm beings that God decided at some point he wanted to create things and so he didn't really do it very well so he made our earth he made the world as we know it he made little human beings like you just out of dirt and clay and that's why you know we were we were all creation not of the supreme god who would do nothing imperfect but of some stumbling or evil at least clumsy God who made us that explains why you know things go wrong why is it my arthritis except all the time couldn't God have made a human body that didn't have arthritis well it's because the Supreme God didn't make this body the evil clumsy God made the body this happened and so the world that we created when you read in Genesis it says God created the world that's not the highest God that's some clumsy God down further on the hierarchy of divine beings in the universe that God created what we are now what happened was at some point either Sophia or some other beings they got sorry for all of us clay like mud mud people and somehow a little spark of the divine itself either fell down or got cut up or put in our bodies or God placed in our bodies or blew it into our bodies but at least some human beings all all human beings in fact human beings are in different categories there's you know they're really low human beings like undergraduates then there are beings who are a little bit higher like graduate students and then you have the supreme beings Gnostics like professors so the true gnostic so you can't you don't know it's not really like undergraduate and graduate stuff because some of you could be Gnostics you would be the ones who really have a real spark in you a spark of the divine that spark of the divine wants to escape the mud body that is trapped in but you probably don't even know that you're a really a spark trapped in a mud body until somebody comes along and tells you and that's the job of the Redeemer that's what Jesus did Jesus was a redeemer from the supreme God who comes in to find those people who have a spark of the divine in them to blow on that spark to get it going and to get you to remember where you came from you're not a mud body after all the real you came from God self God's various the Supreme God so the true message of Christianity according these guys is to learn who you are where you came from it is it you can escape the body and get back to your true origin that is you will become one with God again and this was expressed in a poem by Theodotus it went like this who we were what we have become where we were whither we were thrown whether we are hastening from what we are redeemed what birth is what rebirth is okay now you answer the riddle it's a poem riddle who we were if you're an ass - who were you answer Divine Being thank you see it's not hard I'm not asking questions I'm just trying to you'll remember this better if you answer what have you become mud entrapped in a dead body a trap - materiality where were you heaven with the divine father with God whether we were thrown where have you been thrown into the earth into the world into materiality where are you hastening where are you going in a hurt in such a hurry back to the divine God what are you redeemed from your doing from Jesus the material world you're redeemed from being embodied what is birth in this system what is birth damnation death when you're born your spark is entrapped in your body that's not a good thing you should be celebrating your birthday for crying out loud that's like celebrating when you were thrown in prison and what is rebirth death are learning your true self learning that you the true self won't die at all so this learning is your rebirth so the little poem is a riddle that contains these doctrines within itself so here's the true self the spark of light is trapped in an alien body with all its sensual passions sex therefore sensual desire erotic desire is a bad thing as an evil thing because that you're just to trap more sparks into more mud bodies you're just creating more sparks trapped in mud bodies when you have sex evil powers exist all the different gods that were emanated a bunch of those are evil and they fly around the sky in the heavens and night it they try to keep the true-self asleep or drunk in order to keep the evil world together in other words they don't want you to learn and they don't want your spark to be able to fly through but really wise guys like me we have the secrets and I can give you words clues secrets that if you know those things you can use these secrets to unlock the gates that lead back to God so this is kind of a common storyline or myth there's a hymn of the pearl that I mentioned before which basically tells this that a king of the east sends a Royal Prince by way of the region of the sea named to Egypt in order to get a precious pearl which is being guarded by a fierce dragon yeah yeah yeah it's like a like a video game right the prince is poisoned or actually drugged would be a better accurate translation and made intoxicated by the Egyptians but he the prince is awakened by a message from the king he the prince takes the pearl by defeating the dragon with the name of his father and returns to the east where he puts on a robe of knowledge gnosis and ascends to the king palace entering the realm of peace and living happily forever after it's a nice little fable about a prince who goes to a foreign land finds the thing of value defeats the evil purposes and goes back so some people therefore have read the Gospel of Thomas as being precisely this kind of that some of the sayings the Gospel Thomas makes sense if you presuppose these mythological structures and ideas and again some scholars would say well you're just putting together as a modern scholar a bunch of disparate kind of texts and ideas and putting it in an assistant well yes that that's where I disagree with some people because I want to say I believe that there's enough commonalities between enough documents then we can say that there people who had these kinds of common ideas and this basic structure that I've called the Gnostic structure the Gnostic myth certainly influenced ancient writings of some sort and it's and there was some kinds of Christianity they were heavily influenced by this so for example look at back to Thomas for our last closing minutes and let's read some of these sayings that sound puzzling to us and if we understand we assume this myth maybe we'll read them differently look at 21 Mary said to Jesus what dear disciples resemble he said what they resemble is children living in a plot of land that is not theirs when the owners of the land come they will say surrender our land to us they for their part strip naked in their presence in order to give it back to them and they give them back their land an alec Nick could be an allegory who are the owners of the land the evil powers that rule the earth who are the children who are the real disciples of Jesus those people who know enough to say when the earth is demanded of you when your body is demanded of you by these evil powers give it up just give it it's not valuable anyway look at 24 his disciples said show us the place where you are for we must seek it he said to him whoever has ears should listen there is a light existing within a person of light and in enlightens the whole world if it does not enlighten that person is darkness remember how I said some people are just dark people they're just mud people but some people have a light in them and what it means to become a true Gnostic is to note to learn that you are one who has that light 37 his disciples said when will you be shown forth to us and when shall we behold you jesus said when you strip naked without being ashamed and take your garments and put them under your feet like little children and tread upon them then you will see the child of the Living and you will not be afraid okay what's the Gnostic interpretation of that stripping the material world off yourself when you strip your soul your spot your spark of the body when you realize that it's not the real you and you come to know the real you that's what's going to happen 56 jesus said whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse the world is just a dead body so all of these there several of the sayings if you go back through the Gospel of Thomas with some of this background information I've given you of these ancient myths and ideas some of these sayings seem to fit that myth and fit that notion there are other things though about what I've just told you that you don't find in the Gospel of Thomas and those are the things emphasized by people who say the Gospel of Thomas shouldn't be called Gnostic for example there's no mention in here of an evil God that creates the world like you find in some of these naga hamadi texts you have the father you have apparently the good guy you have Jesus but there's not there's no emphasis on creation here as being a bad thing so some people said that's that's one of the fundamental things about the Gnostic myths and it's not in the Gospel of Thomas therefore the Gospel of Thomas is not Gnostic they're also simply no string of myths and evil God's names which you often find in the text nag Hammadi so some scholars would say the Gospel of Thomas may have some things in common with Platonism of the time maybe in something coming with certain Gnostics but it itself is not but if you take the Gospel of Thomas as representing those ideas then Jesus comes across the Christology of the Gospel of Thomas becomes something different from the Castella G of the other texts or at least Matthew Mark and Luke as we'll see the Gospel of John looks a lot more like this than the synoptic Gospels did but Jesus becomes this Redeemer figure this Gnostic Redeemer figure who comes into the world of materiality in order to find those who have sparks of life to blow on their spots of light to transmit hidden knowledge of them so they can get back and if you'll stay with me in the rest of semester maybe I can give you those secrets and you can escape your mud bodies - all right you have your your sections this week by tomorrow they'll be up the way online classes server and the different instructions for the rest of the sections and you'll need to look at that because at your section on 30 or Fri you'll need to choose which day and which topic you'll do your paper for so that will be online by tomorrow morning thank you see you next time

Channel: YaleCourses

Views: 295,560

Rating: 4.4803147 out of 5

Keywords: The Gospel of Thomas, Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, Gnosis, Hymn of the Pearl, Thomasine literature, Platonism, Timaeus, Proto-orthodox, Heresy, Heterodox, Orthodox

Id: Oxi5-6LdSpE

Length: 50min 29sec (3029 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2009