The Words of the Master

In Gary's books there is reference to the other sayings tradition, which has been known since 1832, and which goes under the name of Q, for the German word for "source," which is Quelle. Gary's teachers refer to that collection of sayings as The Words of the Master, and they suggest that it was indeed in circulation right alongside the Thomas Gospel. In this way we get the completely sensible impression that the first manifestation of the Jesus tradition was in effect that these two collections of sayings were circulating, well ahead of the storybooks which became the canonical gospels, so that the sayings collections as a literary form are indeed more primitive and more original. For the Thomas gospel we have an incomplete collection of Greek fragments which dates from ca. 140 CE and we have the Nag Hammadi edition of 114 sayings which dates ca 200 years later, but clearly lines up well with the Greek manuscript which we have in fragmentary form. It is again by internal evidence, of who quoted whom, that scholars have come to think that the Thomas Gospel must have existed as a book before the canonical gospels of the New Testament. We do not have a manuscript for The Words of the Master (Q), but courtesy of the book I'm discussing here, we do have an insight in the proces of how the scholars have conducted their pearl-diving expedition in the existing texta, to recover a convincing outline of what the text of Q might have looked like. Having the Thomas text for comparison undoubtedly has helped this process, for again it now simply becomes clear who was quoting whom and how.

These days, we can find the text of the Thomas gospel in a wide variety of translations, some of which I've already reviewed here. Marvin Meyers edition remains a favorite, if only because of the support from Pursah, but Stevan Davies runs a close second in my book, in particular also because of his scholarly work on how the sayings were lifted from their source and molded into the then emerging Christian context of the first narrative gospels, some 40-80 years after Jesus's death. Of course Pursah's edition remains my real favorite, because it leaves out a lot of ambiguity.

As to the text of Q as well as other extra-canonical gospels, these days you can't beat the edition from the Jesus Seminar, edited by Robert J. Miller, The Complete Gospels, which I have reviewed here earlier. You really don't need anything else. Fundamentally, the impression you get from Q, similar to Thomas, is again that the Jesus who speaks here is not a Christian because the typical elements are absent, such as the absence of discussion of his death, and the presumed meaning of it, as well as really all other key theological notions that made Christianity what it is. This is why some scholars refer to it as pre-Christian. In form however, it seems to be a bit more extensive than Thomas, because there are complete dialogues here. Overall, the logical sequence of events now is seen to be that by and large the Thomas and Q traditions existed side by side and flowed into Mark, and Luke and Matthew quoted both Mark and Q, as well as Thomas. Because of the overlap it can sometimes be hard to tell which comes from Q or from Thomas, except if there are elements in common between both Luke and Matthew which are not in Thomas, then by a process of elimination they must come from Q. Now an example:

Can one blind person guide another? Won't they both end up in some ditch? Students are not above their teachers. But those who are fully taught will be like their teachers.

Q:(Luke 6:39-40)

They are blind guides of blind people! If one blind person guides another, both will end up in some ditch. Students are not above their teachers, nor slaves above their masters. It is appropriate for students to be like their teachers adn slaves to be like their masters."

Q:(Matthew 15:14; 10:24-25)

These two quotes were from Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels, p. 259.

Now, here is how the Critical Edition merges these two by interpolation into a hypothetical Q source:

Can a blind person show the way to a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not superior to one's teacher. [ It is enough for the disciple that he become] like his teacher.

Q 6:39-40

For good measure, here is the parallel tradition from the Thomas gospel, Logion 34, in Pursah's rendering:

J said: If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole.

And there you can hear a Jesus before Christianity, once you lift it out of the context of later narratives. The Jesus who speaks here (implicitly he is the teacher), is the same one who in the Thomas gospel says (Pursah's rendering):

Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person.

PGoTh, Logion 108

Here we find none of the tendency of putting Jesus on a pedestal and making him different from us, which is so prominent in the Christian rendering of him. It is instructive to compare a closely related concept in A Course In Miracles:

Equals should not be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality. It is therefore an inappropriate reaction to me. An elder brother is entitled to respect for his greater experience, and obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love because he is a brother, and to devotion if he is devoted. It is only my devotion that entitles me to yours. There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you.

ACIM: T-1.3:5-13

So there we have a Jesus who simply says that we can learn from him because he's ahead of us, but there's nothing we cannot learn, as we have the full potential of realizing what he has realized already. This thought seems remarkably consistent with both the Q and Thomas quotes above, and the later Christian theology which puts Jesus more and more on a pedestal, and makes him as a person into God's only begotten son, and thus separate from us, who remain as adoptive children (according to Paul), reflects a different and later theological view, which developed among Peter, Paul, c.s., and was clearly not an original teaching of Jesus.

It remains a curious fact that Thomas Jefferson composed his "Bible," The Life and Morals of Jezus of Nazareth, in ca. 1819-1820, in other words, just before the Q hypothesis was firmly developed. Some have observed that there is a strong correspondence with the Thomas material, but we might note here that Jefferson's method was comparable to how scholars have arrived at Q, namely simply comparing texts side by side. Jefferson's efforts don't quite have the same scholarly character as the modern research into Q, but overall the broad direction of his inquiry, and his conclusions are the same, namely the original Jesus taught something very different from the Christian version of him, and it is worth returning to. Because of Jefferson's own bias, as a self-styled "materialist," he may at times have left out too much, but nevertheless, his effort is testimony to what was in the air, and now it has been validated at least in outline by modern scholarship. So, if nothing else, Jefferson was remarkably perceptive. And like Jesus, he was not a Christian.

The Critical Edition of Q,  which I'm dabbling in from time to time, is really a modern, scholarly version of a process for which Jefferson laid out the model. This edition is overkill for most students, because it gives the parallel passages in Greek, with English, French, and German translations, but if you care to follow how the scholars arrived at Q precisely, this is your book. And in-line with the work of Stevan Davies, it allows us to see many times how a lot of material about Jesus only becomes Christian because of the context in which we first learned of it, namely the narrative gospels of the New Testament, which uniformly have some amount of editorial influence from the emerging belief system of primitive Christianity interwoven in the narrative. In many cases reading the statements without the surrounding editorials, can be quite startling at first, when we come from a Christian culture, and we can only marvel again that Thomas Jefferson sat there in his office culling his book together with scissors and glue, with little else to guide him but his own intuition. In short, what Jefferson felt in his stocking feet, is now pretty much established by historical scholarship, and serendipetously reconfirmed in the work of Gary Renard, through the comments of Arten and Pursah, in their recollections of their prior incarnations as Thaddeus and Thomas respectively.

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.

Thomas one of Five? Ask the Jesus Seminar.

 This has to be one of my favorite editions of the Gospels currently on the market in English. This book is thorough and complete, and it really empowers you to study, ask your own questions, and it is not beholden to church positions which force other authors to assume later dating of Thomas, ultimately so as not to upset the applecart of Christian orthodoxy.

The book starts with a thorough exposé on the historical position of the Thomas Gospel as a precursor to the narrative gospels (synoptics), relying on the common sense insight that the sayings gospels were a type that preceded the more elaborate and interpretative narratives of later authors, all of which seem to date two or more generations after Jesus. The Q and Thomas traditions which just collected sayings seem to go back to the first generation, immediately following Jesus' death, roughly the years 35-55 AD. They lay out the time line very carefully, showing both Q and Thomas as originally oral traditions that flowed gradually into the written traditions and provided raw material for the later writers.

The translation is fresh and new and thought-provoking. They provide a reasoned accounting for their assessment of the authenticity of the Thomas sayings, which makes a fascinating read if you're in to that. By providing thorough cross-referencing they offer plenty of food for thought and opportunity to make your own assessments of the likely flow of ideas. One inspiring notion is their translation of 'Kingdom' as 'Heaven's Imperial Rule.' To my personal taste that seems a case of 'close but no cigar' because of the awkwardness of the 'imperial' moniker, given how Jesus uses Caesar as a symbol of the ego, and the ruler of the world. However in Pursah's version she chooses in some places the expression 'God's Heavenly Rule,' and that seems to be a next step along the same line of thinking, which does make sense, and so clearly Pursah is concerned to convey a more practical sense of the meaning of the somewhat forbidding term 'Kingdom,' though she uses it as well, as does the Course.

Besides the Marvin Meyer translation, this is probably the Thomas version I use the most. It is remarkably free of prejudice overall, because it does recognize that Thomas is from an early date. The one thing we might ask is, why do they make the editorial choice of putting the synoptics in chronological order (Mark first), rather than in the accepted (orthodox) theological order (Matthew first), but yet they still put Thomas last? Purely chronologically Thomas should come first. However this raises the next question, and that is why indeed stop at five? Just because Thomas is the most complete? This is still an indication that the book belongs to a Christian world view. I believe the independent world view at the present state of our knowledge would simply recognize that the canonical tradition has nothing to recommend it, other than that they won out, with a little help from their friend, the Emperor Constantine, solidifying the intellectual supremacy of a Christian orthodoxy which relied on Paul, Peter, bishops Irenaeus, and Athanasius, congealing first in the Nicene Creed at 325, and later Athanasius' list of the NT Canon in 367. So, in putting Thomas last, this edition still is deferential to the canon. I would argue so are some of its conclusions about the authenticity of Jesus' statements, except that by providing the full accounting they do, the reader can really draw his own conclusions.

In short, if we let go more and more of the limiting framework of later orthodoxy (post Nicea), we would simply read the literature from those years in a spirit that evidently nobody completely understood Jesus, some succeeded in making a world religion out of him, arriving at the opposite relationship to the Roman Empire of what Jesus had foreseen ('Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's.'). Others followed quite their own path in a variety of contemplative paths, gnostic philosophies and religions, mystery religions, faiths and practices, all of which highlight very different aspects of his teaching, and the sheer variety of which practically defies the imagination. Ever more we would find ourselves in a fix, having to decide that we are really on our own, and need to follow our intuition as to what Jesus really said. For me, the only real answer in the end comes not from the rubble of history, no matter how brilliant the treatment, but from the statement at in the preface of A Course in Miracles, saying that "Its only purpose is o provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher," or in fact in the oft repeated injunctions from Jesus in the old literature: "Seek and ye shall find," as well as "Follow me, and I'll make you fishers of men." Without our own relationship with him, which is questioning and based on the acceptance that we have not understood, but we're willing to learn, so that we now come to him as a student, as a disciple, and no longer as a theologian who already knows, and really ends up telling Jesus what he means to say, which is what Christianity has mostly done.

Besides a general collection of the Nag Hammadi writings, this book is probably the single most helpful source for someone raised to some degree in  a supposedly Christian world, to begin to develop a broader view of what the historical impact of Jesus might have been, what his authentic meaning might have been, before he was bombarded into being a proto-Christian after the fact by the 'winning' clan of Bishops gathered at Nicea.

Historical Opinions as a Key to Thomas Translations

Below I would point out some of the key historical positions, and what they imply as to the views on Thomas of various commentators.

1) The position we embrace here, that Thomas came first, is of roughly the same age as Q, the tradition which Gary Renard refers to as The Words of the Master, and therefore it was a source for the other writers. John does not quote him directly, although he seems to go to some lenghts to discredit and refute him, which would likewise argue for pre-existence. This position is in my view the most common-sense view to take today, and it was mine already for some time, long before Pursah explained the story to Gary in Your Immortal Reality. I have covered this position in the first post on this blog, so I merely mention it here for the sake of completeness. The main points for this position are that the Thomas Gospel as a form predates the narrative gospels, the internal evidence that shows an absence of all the theological notions of later Christianity, eucharist, crucifixion, etc., and the likelihood that many Thomas sayings are quoted by later evangelists, as they do appear to represent early forms of many sayings. This position simply leaves it open that Gnostic sects could later have adopted Thomas, explaining the find at Nag Hammadi, without necessarily making Thomas a Gnostic document per se. Stevan Davies and the Jesus Seminar are mostly in this camp. There is a budding awareness in this group that Thomas shows us a very different Jesus from the notions which crystallize as "Chrstianity" later on, and very likely a more original one. This logic leads to a separation between the teachings of Jesus and Christianity, as being perhaps mostly unrelated, by dint of the fact that Paul and Peter c.s. in effect put their interpretations in Jesus' mouth.

2a) The good, or benign, or perhaps merely interesting Gnostic position. Here the Gnostic associations in Thomas are reinforced but seen as a positive. Deriving among other things from the fact that the Nag Hammadi library has a gnostic character, but also from the fact that self-knowledge and introspection are  inherent to the Thomas material, and thus of a gnostic character in the wider sense. This position tends to keep open a later dating of the book since the Gnostic development within Christianity does not happen in full force until the 2nd century AD. Jean-Yves Leloup is in this camp, so was Gilles Quispel, and Elaine Pagels is as well. There is an overall tendency among this group to pull Thomas into the history of Christianity. One can not very well argue that the Thomas Gospel was not together by 140 AD (the oldest Greek fragments), but anything more recent than c.a. 60 is safe, for it preserves a picture of the Jesus of Thomas in a sort of proto-Christian landscape, because with any timing later than 60 AD, the break represented by Paul is obfuscated. Some of these authors get fascinated by Thomas and other books of Nag Hammadi, and there is a certain polite curiosity about other modes of experiencing Jesus, but the tendency remains for the Christian mold not to be seriously questioned.

2b) The Bad Gnostic position. This position is argued mainly by writers who are beholden to the Christian tradition and the churches, and in order to save its relevance, they dismiss Thomas as a later book, of the late 1st or even the 2nd century, which was the date of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri (ca. 140 AD), and by taking this position Paul's position as the de facto founder of Christianity is protected because the issue of his evident corruption of Jesus' teachings never arises. This is the position of e.g. Bart D. Ehrman, and to such writers Thomas is at best an interesting curiosity, at worst a blasphemy or a fraud, really not unlike the line of bishop Irenaeus' writings against the heretics, though often with a more sophisticated and seemingly objective modern historical appearance.

There may be some further sub-categorizations here, but the above should be helpful in determining the slant of a translation. Other issues which unfortunately taint translations are attempts to make the book sound more "modern," and God-forbid, but yes, even a tendency political correctness exerts a corrupting influence on the faithfulness of some translations.