Some Scholarly Stuff about Thomas

Occasionally it makes me bristle when Gary or anyone states that my work would be 'scholarly,' in my view it is not, strictly speaking. I find that epithet a bit off-putting in the sense that I neither produce college textbooks or original research, even if I am--at times at least--a keen watcher of what is developing in some of the literature surrounding Thomas. And some good stuff has been percolating for years now in the community that studies Thomas with an open mind. A very interesting discussion about Thomas in relationship to Mark (my favorite of the canonical gospels), can be found here: http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark1.htm and here http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark2.htm

The above material in essence documents in a formal, scholarly fashion, having recourse strictly to the form of the material, and the sequence and circumstance of its borrowing, the transformation of Jesus teachings in their raw, relatively unedited form in the Thomas gospel, towards the Pauline/Christian rendering of him, of which Mark is the first example. Clearly the dominant influence behind all this is Paul and his interpretation of Jesus, which progressively pulls him into this world, and puts all kinds of theological make-up on him, ultimately insisting that the resurrection and second coming are of the body, thus accomplishing what the ego always wants to do, namely to pull Jesus down into the muck of this world with us, and solve our problems here, instead of us learning to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, of which he speaks to us always. But which we do not want to hear about in the worst way. This last issue is of course the crux, and it is the reason why the Course spends so much time putting us in touch with our resistance to what Jesus teaches.

So, the simple thing to take away from it all is that the reason Jesus in Thomas does not sound like a Christian, is because Christianity is an ego-dominated, dualistic, distortion of his teachings, which fully makes the world real, and as such ensures that we do not hear what Jesus teaches in reality. And as Course students we may then always recognize that this is merely a very useful mirror of our own tendency to want to do all of these things with Jesus, thus compromising the Course. Our ways of doing so are often very subtle, but as we progress with our work they will become more and more clear and easy to recognize, and for many who are 'recovering Christians' forgiving Paul will be one way this process can take form, for different from what Dan Brown et al. believe, we were not duped into believing certain things while an evil church withheld the truth. The ego's conspiracy is always to set it up so that someone else can be blamed for our betrayal of our true Self, which in this Judaeo-Christian imagery is symbolized as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and we simply do not hear, and do not want to hear his message of forgiveness, the meaninglessness of the body and the fact that he does not believe in betrayal (ACIM:T-6.I.15:5) for those reasons, knowing us, as he does, as spirit. He is asking us to follow him and do the same, and we simply reinterpret him to make sure we don't, so that the ego stays firmly in charge. We simply resist, because we realize that if we are spirit, we didn't happen, and so we have to keep on killing Christ, as Wilhelm Reich fathomed in his own funny way (see his The Murder of Christ).