Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark, ctd. 1

Stevan Davies' Second article about the Thomas tradition in Mark focuses on 5 sections of Mark, the first one being Mark 2:18-21. I'm quoting it in the NIV:

Mark 2:18-21 (New International Version)

Jesus Questioned About Fasting

 ¹⁸Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, "How is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?"  ¹⁹Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. ²⁰But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.
 ²¹"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.

Davies finds traces in this passage of Logia 104, 11, 18, 22, 47,  of which the Pursah version excludes 104, and has substantial edits in 22, 11, while her edition suggests hardly any change in 18, and 47. Just by eyeballing this story, and the Thomas Logia next to it, you would immediately appreciate that Mark is just using familiar sayings associated with Jesus to write a story in a way that suggest authenticity.
While you can see here that the story gets put together from various quotes, it does not seem to exhibit the level of distortion and misconstruction that we've seen in other examples of this kind. Meanwhile in terms of the authenticity, line 20 comes from Logion 104, which Pursah rejects, but it is hardly material to the argument here, though it introduces a theme, which indeed does not fit the teachings of Jesus, namely why the bridegroom would be taken from us, that does not fit the themes we know from the Course, which are clearly that it's always us doing the forgetting. The borrowings from 11 are hardly very explicit either, nor are those from 22, and Davies I think confuses here the theme of making the two into one, with the business of the bridegroom, which is rather about what the Course would call the holy relationship, choosing our True Self, or Jesus, and learning to see the face of Christ in all who we meet. The presence of Logion 18 seems not very overt, but might be there, it is really about the decision point, and 47 has the themes of sowing an new patch onto an old fabric. So again, on the whole, in the context of one of the central references of this site, Pursah's Gospel of Thomas, with the one exception of line 20, the way this story is construed seems not particularly at odds with the way Jesus speaks to us in the Thomas gospel, and it is merely curious to see the process at work of how these segments are put together in one place, and made into something new. Arguably, you would expect that the quote should be extended to line 22, so as to include all of Logion 47, which goes on about the new wine in old wineskins.

In the context of the Course what this whole passage seems to reflect, is the notions of "I need do nothing" (cf. ACIM:T-18.VII), and also "I am under no laws but God's" (cf. ACIM:W76). They are the parallel realizations that I cannot even save myself if I wanted to by any observation of man-made rules and regulations, particularly also my own rules which I impose on myself, because all that achieves is a reconfirmation of mental constructs of reality, which again do not bring us any freedom, but keep us confined in the vicious circles of the ego, and the way out is by placing my trust in God's laws, rather than the idiotic rules and regulations my ego keeps coming up with to protect its world order. Implied also is the notion that the choice of thought systems is all or nothing, and that really is an allusion to the opening lines of Logion 47, about the impossibility of mounting two horses or bending two bows. This is a very profound theme in the Thomas Gospel and in the Course, and evidently completely central to the thought system Jesus proposes.
As to Davies' article, I must admit that it confuses me a bit, because he construes the elements often times in a way that seems alien to me, because I'm coming from a Course standpoint, and just tend to read them differently. In other sections of his articles one sees a clearer transition from the pre-Christian (Thomasine) image to the Christian anecdote. This is not the case here, though evidently you'd read the whole thing a bit different coming from a predominantly Christian point of view, as opposed to from ACIM.

Logion 22 - the Intros and the Outros

As students of the Pursah version of the Thomas Gospel we noticed that she is skeptical of the authenticity of what I'm calling loosely the intros and the outros, the latter of which is really an insertion of some material in the actual logion itself.

In my earlier comment on this Logion, I therefore focused on the kernel of it, as Pursah presents it in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality. I want to add some comments here on the sections she leaves out. In terms of the introductory section which Stevan Davies calls 22a in his article on Mark's use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I it is extraordinarily interesting to observe how the older version (even if Pursah does not consider it authentic in the first place) of it speaks of being like a baby, but by the time we get to Mark it speaks of actual babies. The transition is thus from a purely abstract point that is being illustrated with a parable, towards the point where the story line seems to be in the specific, not the abstract point being made. In terms of the mode of expression in A Course in Miracles, this evolution is thus from Level 1 to Level 2, where we start mistaking the specifics for the point of the story, and begin to forget that abstract point that was being made. This is very plain in the Markan version, which sounds sweet enough, but risks losing the point, and represents the sort of evolution which is completely par for the course of the deterioration in the tradition:

People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them. (Mark 10:13-16 NIV)

The other add on, at the end of the kernel statement itself is the insertion of "when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image" at the end of the clause, which kind of does not fit with the statement about the healing of duality, which talks in terms of making male and female one.

When you read the whole of Logion 22 a few times, and you consider Pursah's edits, it will be blatantly obvious that her edits make complete intuitive sense, for the sections she takes out are evidently out of place, and have no relationship to the central point being made. This is one of the many reasons why my comfort with Pursah's version grew as I worked with the material. It really became a case of the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The other part which seemed really convincing to me, is that again it is always the ego's strategy to substitute specifics for the truth, which is always abstract, and which is our natural mode of being and thinking. The Course discusses this as follows:

Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. But part of it is now unnatural. It does not look on everything as one. It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.
Thus were specifics made. (ACIM:W-161.2-3:1)

The point being made here is that the purpose of perception with our senses is exactly the substitution of the abstract with specific. The ego wants us to see the trees, not the forest, for once we see the forest, the ego is out of business. Again, this demonstrates precisely why we resist Jesus' teaching, and therefore why these texts became so corrupted so quickly.

PS: Title chosen in the fond memory of Frank Zappa.

Logion 22 in Mark

This one gets really interesting... here we see full scale level confusion at work.

Logion 22 in the Pursah rendering (Gary Renard, Your Immortal Reality) reads as follows:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and want you make male and female into a single one, so the male will not be male and the female will not be female... then you will enter the Kingdom.

In more modern wording we could say: if we heal our dualistic perception, we awaken from the dream, awaken to the reality of who we really are in truth, namely spirit.

It should be noted that Pursah leaves off some material as unauthentic, which Davies goes on to analyze, particular the precursor clauses to Mark 9:43-8, about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin etc. which is a section which in and of itself has resulted in a lot of suffering and misconceptions.

As per usual I'm following Stevan Davies' article on Mark's Use of the Thomas Gospel, Part I , but skipping the sections which Pursah deems spurious anyhow. Next is the following well known passage:
Mark 10:2-9:
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
"What did Moses command you?" he replied.
They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."
"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied.
"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'^[a]
'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,^[b] 8and the two will become one flesh.'^[c] So they are no longer two, but one.
Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
As we can appreciate immediately this has been altered almost beyond recognition, and it is broadly reflective of the transition from Jesus to Paul and Peter, etc., namely an abstract teaching about the healing of duality in the mind, as the precondition for entering the Kingdom, here becomes applied to relationships in the world, and a moralistic teaching, directed at behavior in the world, which is not where Jesus' original teaching was focused at all. Rather, our special relationships in the world, with people, places, and things are the ego's substitute for the Holy Relationship, with our true self, the Christ in us. Jesus, rather than playing traffic cop in the world, is asking the apostles to follow him, out of this world, to his Kingdom not of this world, which is the Real World (in terminology of A Course in Miracles) which we find by living the Holy Relationship. To thine own self be true, as Shakespeare put it. That is what God has joined together, and which we cannot separate, although we do our best to lose ourselves in the world through special relationships.

Finally, an earlier part from the Nag Hammadi version which was also used again in Mark (10:13-16) is again left out by Pursah, apparently on the grounds that she cannot vouch for the authenticity of it, so it may well be another later addition, and I'll skip consideration of it here.

The bottom line is that in the later treatment of this saying we see the transition from a very abstract non-dualistic statement, which in A Course in Miracles we would consider a "level one" statement to a very definite "level two" statement which broadly acknowledges and reinforces some very plainly dualistic concepts, beginning with relationship outside of ourselves.