Recently I read Elaine Pagel’s book Beyond Belief and reported on it for the study group that Tricia and I go to on Sundays. That lead to the group’s expressing a desire to learn more about the Gospel of Thomas. For today’s meeting I brought along Stevan Davies’ translation The Gospel of Thomas which has comments opposite each saying. We read and discussed about ten of the sayings. The group we take part in is rather varied and so were the reactions. A few found it interesting and one was delighted that it contradicted traditional teaching. Most just found the sayings weird or puzzling. One claimed not to see any difference between Thomas and traditional Christianity.
It seemed to me that the group felt let down. They did not doubt that the early church had suppressed opinion and documents concerning Jesus with which it disagreed but on the other hand they were not ready to acknowledge the same level of credibility for Thomas as for the more familiar writings. The lack of a narrative was a serious problem. But mostly I think the group felt let down because in Thomas they were hoping to find the pure and simple truth about who Jesus was. In that respect Thomas is just as faulty a document as the orthodox writings because it is equally obscure and pursues its own particular agenda as much as any of the others.
However for me the existence of Thomas demonstrates that the orthodox teachings are just opinions and not necessarily what Jesus taught. That makes it more comfortable to disagree with some or all of it and still be able to join in without feeling like an imposter or an anthropologist. Why would someone want to do that? Well, I don’t exactly know. Perhaps it’s just because I enjoy the music and the ritual. Maybe it’s nostalgia.
Then this afternoon in The Sideshow I came across a link to an interesting and wide-ranging interview with Elaine Pagels entitled The Politics of Christianity. Among many other things she touches on the question of why we have religions at all. Maybe it has something to do with brain function or the way in which groups organize. That’s a subject I want to learn more about.
Comments (3)
You might be interested in reading this article: “The Circle of the Way: Reading the Gospel of Thomas as a ChristZen Text” by Kenneth Arnold. I found it here: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2096/4_51/83744325/p1/article.jhtml
I think your point that part of the value of Thomas comes from the fact that it reveals a broader context for the development of Christianity than most Christians assume. When you read many of the non-canonnical materials it can be pretty obvious why they didn’t get in. Thomas is a different case. There is quite a bit of overlap with the gospels, but also some very interesting differences. And it raises all kinds of questions about the role of gnosticism in early Christianity.
All of this could be quite jarring for those encountering Thomas for the first time.
Kurt, Thanks for the comment and the reference. I read the article and not being very familar with Buddhism, I need to go over it again, but it made sense to me.
The Gospel of Thomas makes absolutely no sense. It isn’t even written in a coherent manner. I think that if this book does infact contains the means to which we can obtain gnosis, then I don’t want to reach gnosis. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall and chant my graditude of the early church fathers for throwing it out as heresy. The Jesus I worship has done more for me than the Jesus portrayed in the Gospel of Thomas ever could. This has been concluded through a great deal of study and I wouldn’t not recommend anybody torturing themselves by suffering through a reading of this text.