Marvin Meyer's Gospel of Thomas

Marvin Meyer's translation is without any doubt the leading translation of the Thomas Gospel and is available in numerous editions, both by itself and as part of larger collections. Before there was Pursah's kernel of the Thomas Gospel, as published in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality, Pursah at one point recommended  the Marvin Meyer edition to Gary as the best translation at that time. At the time Gary shared this information on the Yahoo-list for Disappearance of the Universe. I favor the separate edition, which has the Coptic text, Marvin Meyer's introduction and notes.

Meyer's introduction is succinct and to the point, and wonderfully insightful. I may not always agree with it in detail, but it is helpful, and his point of view is reasonable. He comes to the conclusion that evidently pieces of the Thomas Gospel go back to the early times, and that as a literary form the sayings gospels predate the narrative gospels. He feels however that the book as a whole probably congealed closer to the date of the Oxyrrhynchus Papyri, which he puts at 200 AD, but that is a detail since he clearly allows for an early origin, which is critical as I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog.

He cites some specific examples that make it insightful to the reader why, besides the general form of the sayings gospel being part of the early tradition along with Q, certain specific logia very evidently present an early form which was later embellished in the narrative gospels, thereby giving us strong clues about the historical relationship between the two. The example he gives is the parable of the sower in saying 9, which reappears in the synoptic gospels in an embellished form, making it seem very logical that Thomas has the "original" form. On the whole however he does allow for some disagreement among scholars, in terms of the relationship, which evidently do exist, and by the way are easier to accommodate with Meyer's position that some sayings are from the early days but the book as a whole from the second century. This particular aspect of his position might actually harmonize well with what Pursah does say in Your Immortal Reality, namely that the kernel of seventy sayings which she gives was together early on, and that the rest were embellishments which simply accrued over time, which would explain why by the date of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri, we might have an expanded Gospel of Thomas, of now 114 sayings, and a lot of internal contradiction.

Next he explores the position of the Jesus seminar which also is that the Thomas sayings have a high likelihood of going back to the original Jesus of history, noting along the way that this means the recently fashionable view of the apocalyptic figure of Jesus as portrayed by Albert Schweitzer, can no longer be supported based on the Thomas information. Jesus now appears more as a wisdom teacher, as a spiritual guide. One of the points of contrast with the traditional Christian view he cites is the obvious emphasis at the outset that by finding the meaning of these sayings we will be enlightened, and that is evidently a totally different Jesus speaking than anything Christianity has shown us. Another is in saying 113, the notion that the Kingdom is here now, except we don't see it. This comes close to the position of the Course, and the notion of our responsibility for sight, by choosing between ego and Holy Spirit. His notion of seeing Jesus more as a cynic philosopher, who is looking to awaken us from our mental rut is a very reasonable assessment of the new notion of Jesus. In all this introduction of 15 pages covers more worthwhile material than some entire books.

The text and translation are wonderful, meticulous, but nowhere forced. He chooses not to try and capitalize terms like Kingdom and Heaven, which is reasonable, though it would not be my preference. The argument for it is to remove it from Christian stereotypes. For readers who come at this material from a Course perspective, that risk seems less likely, and we might like to see the familiar capitalization. Printing the translation on facing pages next to the Coptic text is a pleasant arrangement, and simply beautiful, even if you can't read Coptic. The notes at the end are wonderful, and like the style of the introduction, succinct and to the point, which does not mean I always agree. In the notes to the prologue, Meyer argues that the "Living Jesus" probably does not refer to the resurrected Jesus, when I feel that this definitely is exactly what it would mean, i.e. that the resurrection which is an experience of the mind, predated the crucifixion and that for the time of his ministry on earth Jesus was an Awake from the dream, which is why he could teach the way he did. This is one of the arguments which raged in the early centuries between the "heretics" (gnostics and other dubious folk), and the emerging orthodoxy, which finally settled on the resurrection of the body, which takes place only after the crucifixion. With the Course we might look at that differently, simply realizing that advanced teachers could appear at will, and that the Christian focus on the body misses the point.

The book concludes with an essay from Harold Bloom, who has a particularly gnostic take on the Thomas Gospel. He certainly hits many interesting points, though for my money of course the Course perspective as given by Pursah carries the day, and we would hardly see Jesus as a Gnostic teacher, though we might notice with interest that many core notions of his teachings were developed in interesting ways by later Gnostics, such as Valentinus. Meyer on his end definitely tempers the currently fashionable trend of declaring the Thomas Gospel a gnostic book, and he alludes to all the uncertainties and confusion attached to the term. In all this book is, next to the edition of The Five Gospels by the Jesus Seminar, undoubtedly my favorite Thomas edition, though there are many other worthwhile editions around.