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.

Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark, ctd. 0

Some time ago I discussed an article of Prof. Stevan Davies here, which provided some unique insight into the editorial process which turned Jesus into a Christian. Presently, I want to discuss Stevan Davies' second article in some detail. I note that, while I tend to favor using the name Jesus at the moment, I do understand and appreciate why Gary Renard was guided by his teachers to speak of J, because so many people have problematic associations with the name Jesus, and thus might pass up the teachings of A Course in Miracles for that reason. I myself referred to what I now call "Jesus" as "God's Help" which would be the etymological meaning of his name in Hebrew. For me the most helpful operating definition of Jesus is given by Kenneth Wapnick, who is the premier teacher of A Course in Miracles: "Jesus is a what, who looks like a who, because you think you're a who," in other words, in truth we are spirit, but as long as we identify with the dreamroles of who we are, as characters in this stage play (All the world's a stage), spirit may demonstrate its presence to us in the figure which we in the West call Jesus. That definition gives very practical expression to the most abstract understanding we seem capable of and still use words--and the essence of Jesus's teaching of course is that it's all in the experience, since evidently his kingdom is of spirit (that is the "what"), and not of this world, and therefore clearly beyond words, as the words and concepts are very much of this world, or, as the Course puts it, "symbols of symbols, and therefore twice removed from reality," i.e. the word is the symbol for the concept, which itself is a symbol for the reality which it refers to. I'll quote the relevant passage here in full:

Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. What you ask for you receive. But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. It does not matter. God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality. (ACIM:M21.1)

In short, the process we witness with Jesus is that he speaks to us of a non-dualistic reality, where all is one, but because of our perception of a world in which we live, which is very much a world of duality (light/dark, black/white, war/peace, male/female, etc.), he can ONLY speak to us in parables, though we constantly persist in our bad habit of taking him literally, and thus we see from time to time in the literature how Jesus clarifies this point over and over again, as in Mark, here:

Mark 8:15-18 (New International Version)

¹⁵"Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod."
 ¹⁶They discussed this with one another and said, "It is because we have no bread."
 ¹⁷Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? ¹⁸Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember?

In short, we constantly do not get it that everything, but everything he says or does, comes to us in parables, and that he is leading us beyond our mortal intellect which continues to frame what he says in the context of our dualistic world, where we think we live, and we won't share in his (non-dualistic) experience of the Kingdom, unless we let go of our judgment, which otherwise prevents our ability to follow him, in terms of living what he demonstrates. The ego always wants to talk about what it sees and hears, which is a stalling technique. For that reason it becomes soon very clear in the context of learning A Course in Miracles, that all questions are of the ego, and in fact always express only one thing, namely the ego's secret mission to trip Jesus up, and to prove that he is wrong and we are right.
In terms of the historical Gospel tradition then, the process is that first we have a record of some of his sayings in no particular order, as in the Q and the Thomas traditions, and then we get the narrative Gospels, in which a process begins of the writers framing the stories according to their own best understanding, which may or may not have anything to do with what Jesus actually taught. Most importantly, by thirty years after his death, the figure of Paul comes on the scene who begins to reframe Jesus, and becomes really the originator of one particular tradition which just happens to become dominant, and evolve into what we today think is Christianity, which takes final form through such things as the Nicean Creed which dates to 325 CE, and the definition of the Canonical books of the New Testament by bishop Athanasius in 367CE, which was the first time they were defined in the order we now know. The tendency then which we all have with Jesus, and which is the basis of all distortions of his writing, is that we constantly try to frame his teachings in terms of this world, instead of listening to him, and let him teach us to understand it in the way he intended them. The end result is then a tradition about him, and explanation of him (theology), which end up taking the place of his very direct and simple teachings. The very same process we are watching currently unfold around A Course in Miracles which has given rise to an entire industry of would-be teachers and writers about the Course, who all too often add their own stuff to it, and distort what the Course clearly says.
The issues Prof. Stevan Davies discuss are so interesting, because they document such a process as it once took place with Jesus, and in the formative process from which Christianity resulted. Thus once again, his teachings are about healing our relationship with God and therefore with our Self, and they are geared to experience, not theology, or, as he puts it in the Course (and I'm quoting the whole paragraph, as it is relevant to this article):

The ego will demand many answers that this course does not give. It does not recognize as questions the mere form of a question to which an answer is impossible. The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask this in many forms. Yet there is no answer; only an experience. Seek only this, and do not let theology delay you. (ACIM:C-in-4)

Accordingly also, the way Jesus' teaching comes across in the Course, it comes down in the end to a willingness ("the little willingness") to let ourselves be guided by spirit instead of our ego, and thus to let "Jesus" show us the way home. That is certainly a nice thought to contemplate in this Easter time.

Back to Basics

The other day I posted about the exact issues of how to mentally disentangle the Christian construct of Jesus from the Jesus of the Thomas gospel. This theme is very much in line with my recent discussion of the materials of Stevan Davies, who is a Biblical scholar who has done an incredible job in identifying how the story changed between the Thomas gospel, which dates from the year 50CE, and the later Canonical Gospels, which are dated from ca. 65CE (Mark) onwards. The most significant difference is that in the period 60-65CE, Paul's writings appear on the scene and the influence of his thinking very much sets the tone for the whole New Testament, and so, if you were to put the NT in proper chronological order, the letters of Paul should come first, then Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and then John and Revelation.

If you reordered the books that way, you'd instantly understand why it's such a big difference that the Thomas Gospel was 15 years or so earlier than that: Paul is in between. A simple way of looking at it is that the New Testament reflects the way that Paul said we should look at Jesus. That is a very different thing than the teachings of Jesus proper. The Thomas Gospel has only statements directly attributed to Jesus, and NONE of the interpretations which Paul developed, and which became the basis of Christian theology. Another way of putting it is that Christianity--leaving aside for a moment that there are some 25,000 flavors of it--is merely one interpretation of Jesus, so perhaps more correctly we should speak of one set of interpretations, of him. One way or another Paul looms large in the inception of it, and I think the fair way of interpreting those events is to say that Jesus was a spiritual teacher, and Paul posthumously made a religion out of him. No doubt he had the best intentions, but that does not mean he said the same thing, he interpreted, explained, elaborated, and added on his own concepts.

In order to expand a bit more on some of this basic information, I'm going to do several posts here to discuss some very fundamental stuff that provides the foundation for my book, Closing the Circle--the topic of this blog.

Here is how it all fits together. As I like to point out to people by way of a joke, the first thing to know is, it's not my fault, and the second thing to know is, it's all Gary Renard's fault. So blame him. Complaints in triplicate, press hard, three copies. Without Gary, I would not be in this mess, and I would not have had to write this book. Jokes aside, this is the right sequence of events, but today I want to explain some more details of the chronology.

Whether we are Christians or not, if we grew up in the West, we grew up in a culture dominated by Christianity, and we're all more or less familiar with the chronology, although some of the fine distinctions I'm making about the first 75 years are not generally known, they reflect an insight that has been evolving particularly since the rediscovery of the now famous book collection at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, which dated back to the time (ca. 365 CE) when the young Church was just making decisions as to what books would make up the New Testament, and some monk had the foresight to bury a collection of books the Church did not like. What we found we owe to the foresight of this monk, and the Thomas gospel was probably the most important part of that find.

Now to explain my own relationship to all of this for a moment, let me say first that I was never a Christian, but for some reason I was interested in the teachings of Jesus. Thanks to a Dutch author, Johan Willem Kaiser, who among other things produced an incredibly insightful translation and commentary of the Gospel of Mark, I had an understanding early on that Jesus and Christianity were two different things, and since thankfully I learned to read Greek, I could at least study some of the original material, and filter out some of the theological coloration which has characterized later translations of the Bible, and via that route I tried to come back to an understanding of the original teaching of Jesus. For me the central issue always seemed to be that he was about spiritual experience, not about theology or morality. In short, Jesus was not a Christian.

The Thomas gospel began to appear in translation in the 1950's and slowly the biblical research came in motion which ultimately led to the almost inevitable conclusion I presented above. It predated the other gospels. Personally I saw Jesus as a spiritual teacher, not too different from Buddha, Krishna, Socrates, Lao Tsu, Sri Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti. Their focus was always on learning truth through personal spiritual experience, including the notion that the truth is within and knowable, if we just learn the mental hygiene not to confuse ourselves all the time with other values and thoughts that have nothing to do with the price of beans. For me the Thomas gospel was never an easy read, much of the research and interpretation I found cumbersome and less than helpful, so for a long time I regarded it as merely an interesting curiosity.

For me something changed when I discovered A Course in Miracles in 1991. First of all this book (usually abbreviated ACIM), which was channeled in the late 60's by a Dr. Helen Schucman, who was a Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in NY, and published in 1975, is attributed to Jesus. And the way he comes across in its pages is exactly that, as a spiritual teacher, with a focus on the experience of truth, not on theology. The book is very profound, highly integrated, and incorporates really a unique amalgam of Western and Eastern thought, including everything from Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and some of the premises of Freudian psychoanalysis not to mention some of the therapeutic orientation of Carl Rogers. That list could easily be expanded further. The bottom line is, for me it was intuitively clear that the intelligence speaking to me through the pages of ACIM was Jesus as I sensed he taught originally and for all time. The teacher of Truth. Not a teacher of Christian theology. Just Truth with a capital T. I had studied the Course for 12 years before Gary Renard appeared on the scene, but then the magic started...

In 2003, three books appeared, with the same publication date, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, and Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe. In short, indirectly the Thomas Gospel was in the air, for all three touch on it. The first two were more in the main stream, and they awakened an interest in the Thomas gospel and related materials, Gary's book however was a surprise hit in its own right. He had never been published before, and he was with a very small publisher, and yet before you knew it, he sold 100,000 copies, and the book was acquired by Hay House. It was in Gary's book that the connection was made between the original teachings of Jesus in the Thomas Gospel, and ACIM, and it was in his second book, Your Immortal Reality, (2006), that one of his teachers, Pursah presented her kernel of the Thomas Gospel of just 70 sayings of Jesus (compared to the 114 of the Nag Hammadi text), which she says really sounded like Jesus. Her selection makes a lot of sense, so for me at the moment, I'm totally focused on that collection of 70 sayings from Thomas as being the least suspect kernel of his original teachings, but they are still fragmentary. Thus the greater context for me is provided by A Course in Miracles.

In my next few posts I will talk a bit more about the characters involved, to make the foundation of my work on the Thomas Gospel even clearer.

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.

Do We Want the Problem or the Solution?

Duh, you think, of course I want the solution. Not so fast. Our ego system is a lot craftier than that, and as kids instinctively know, but frustrated parents often ignore, it pays to observe what we do do, and not obfuscate matters by paying attention to what we say we do. And what we do do is to hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone. Byron Katie is demonstrating with her work, The Work. In A Course in Miracles, it is expressed as follows:

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself. (ACIM:T-29.VII.1)

And we all think, when we first read this, that of course we'd rather be happy, and we are thus fooling ourselves, with the PR version of our own lives. As Byron Katie also asks, who would we be without our story? So the bottom line is that our ego identity is all wrapped up in the tale of woe which is our life, and we hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone, and no way do we prefer to be happy, all our protestations to the contrary. Everything we do is geared to validating our ego-identity. This is why Jesus was not understood 2,000 years ago. And the next point is to observe that it is completely natural that we would not understand him. Now if you've followed some of the examples of how the world reconstructed Jesus' identity in adapting the simple sayings of the Thomas gospel, and making something else out of them, then you begin to fathom the tremendous psychological resistance to accepting what Jesus was saying. For what our ego hears is that his "Kingdom not of this world" implies that we were wrong, and he was right. No way were we going to have that. Not then, not now. That's being honest about it.

Accordingly, my point in demonstrating this process of the reconstruction of Jesus in the transition from the sayings in Thomas (his actual teachings) to the story of the narrative gospels (somebody else's teachings about him), based on the analysis by Stevan Davies, is not to demonstrate that Mark (or anybody) got it wrong. The more important point is to see it as a mirror, and understand that we all get it wrong all the time, and the way he was misconstrued then, is an example of how we misconstrue him today. The joke in Course circles was often that we want Jesus to find us parking spaces, when we get to the workshop. In other words, we want to make the problem good and real, according to the way we have set up our lives, and then ask him to fix it. We completely ignore the fact that we created the problem in the first place and that the purpose of the problem is to keep him safely outside our doors, and our ego firmly in charge. We absolutely insist that instead of listening to him, we are in charge of defining the problem, and then telling him to fix it, as if he were a car mechanic. This is the process we are watching as it unfolds, when we follow the metamorphosis from Jesus the teacher, as he speaks to us in the Thomas gospel, to Jesus the Christian savior, as he is portrayed in the Pauline culture which became Christianity. All the narrative gospels were written after Paul started his preaching and writing, interpreting Jesus in his own way. And now we can understand why.

Much like Gary Renard, I like sometimes to try and shock people into this recognition by using as a point of departure the notion that Jesus was not a Christian. Then you can explain it historically, but few people realize the meaning of it. However when you see the examples I'm discussing here recently (and which I'll continue), then you begin to realize just how profound the change is. It is the transition from Jesus the Teacher of the way out of Hell, who asks us to take responsibility for our lives, and follow him, to Jesus-as-Santa-Claus, the savior who, through vicarious salvation makes it all-right, and meanwhile we don't have to do anything, except believe that it's so. That's the Maitreya role, and anything along those lines sees the problem and the solution to it outside of ourselves, so we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Logion 13 and Mark 8:27-33

The following is again based on Stevan Davies' discussion of Mark's use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I, and part of my ongoing exploration on how the nature of Jesus's teachings was altered in the transition from the simple sayings of Thomas to the narrative gospels which began to appear on the scene 10, 15 and 20 years later.

Logion 13 is fascinating, even without the additions Pursah offers to it in The Disappearance of the Universe, in which she proposes what the three things were - which of course the whole world has been guessing at ever since the text was discovered. Here is the text in the Pursah rendering from Your Immortal Reality:

J said to the disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I'm like."
Simon Peter said to him, "You are just like an angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wisdom teacher."
Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him. When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, "What did J say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one fo the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you."

Mark, 8:27-33 (NIV):

Peter's Confession of Christ
27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, "Who do people say I am?"
28 They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."
29 "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ.^[a]"
30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

Jesus Predicts His Death
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Again, we can only be amazed at the difference, as Jesus becomes domesticated through the subsequent editing of the tradition about him (instead of: of him). For one thing, of course in the context of the emerging orthodoxy, it is Peter who gives the winning answer, though up to that point the gist of the story might be somewhat comparable with the Thomas version, namely that the world is not ready (by definition) to hear Jesus's teachings of a Kingdom not of this world. However the further framing of the story in the Markan context again hijacks the pure teaching, and frames it now in the Christian mold where the upcoming death of Jesus is of the essence, and his presumed suffering beginning to be construed as an important sacrifice ordained by God, which is very, very different from the simple image which is evoked by the notion of simply saying that the world is not ready to hear this message. Peter's recognition of Jesus as "the Christ," likewise serves the Christian purpose of validating Jesus as special, and a "savior," when the point of his teaching was exactly the other way around. The section headings of the NIV reinforce this Christian theological slant even more.
With the availability of the Course and the deeper psychological understanding which it fosters, we can now also increasingly understand why it is that we do resist the message so much, namely because our ego has us convinced that accepting the atonement will be the end of us, when the truth is that it would be the end of the ego, not of us as who we are in truth -- namely spirit. In other words the risk is that we would be happy, instead of miserably hanging on to the ego.
The original teaching of Logion 13 makes that simple point, which in the story Thomas is apparently beginning to appreciate, namely that the world really is not ready to hear Jesus's message, nor will it ever be, by definition, based on the understanding that the world was made as an attack on God, being the embodiment of the ego-thought of separation from God. Jesus's message, or the atonement, after all is the message that the separation did not happen, so neither the ego, nor the world it projects are real. The only thing that is real and eternal is the love of God, and what keeps it out of awareness is our identification with the ego-self, the false self, the persona, and that is how our ego keeps us wrapped around the axle, fearing we will perish when we accept the atonement for ourselves, when instead it is the ego which will perish, and which we are NOT, in spite of its best efforts to convince us otherwise.
Thus the real issue is not that the scribes and Pharizees, or whoever, out in the world, is not accepting "Jesus," but rather the other way around, that we don't take responsibility for the fact that we don't accept him, while the Course is really showing us the mechanisms why we don't and helps us to remove the cloaking of the ego, and learn to look at its seething snake pit of hatred with the love of Jesus beside us, so that ultimately we should be able to forgive ourselves for what the Course calls the "tiny, mad, idea" of the separation, and laugh it all away with Jesus, as he also suggests in the Course. The critical passage is:

Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6)

Making a Christian out of Jesus: Stevan Davies

I would like to weave together some thoughts on the process that turned Jesus into a Christian, posthumously. I think it is always a good, refreshing conversation starter to make it clear that Jesus was not a Christian, as is now increasingly evident from what we are starting to understand of the Thomas gospel and its historical relationship to the other Gospels, as in, the fact that it was earlier, and that it lacks the explicit theological ideas,which defined Christianity. Ergo, those were added later, and were never part of Jesus' teachings. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that, and if Christianity is working for you, that's fine--if it ain't broke don't fix it. But if you're at all like me and have an experience of cognitive dissonance with Christianity, understanding what Jesus said originally may be of some interest. I myself always was tuned in to wanting to understand the historical context, and hearing the teachings of Jesus without anyone else mixing in anything. Later I began increasingly to understand that the most critical thing is of Course my own inner understanding of him, and alongside that, my discernment of the historical picture deepened as well of course.

For me the whole thing started at a very young age, in a manner that I imagine was not dissimilar to the process that led Thomas Jefferson to his Jefferson Bible: just plain being bothered by the sense that there was too much redacting of the sayings of Jesus and too much editiorializing going on, and I always wanted to hear him without the clutter. What was the unadulterated voice like? I was made aware very early that particularly since the time of the enlightenment many serious theologians had begun asking such such questions (o.a. Radikalkritik). So many years later it became clear to me that the Thomas Gospel was the single clearest means history has now given us for cleaning up these misunderstandings. In the process of writing my book I became aware of lots of materials that is available today, some of which might have pulled the book into another direction entirely, and lose focus. So there are always things you can't cover. The purpose of this site however is definitely (among other things), to provide a home for some explorations which might have been too detailed for the book.

One fascinating piece of research in this category was by Prof. Stevan Davies, and his main site on the Thomas gospel is available through the link of his name here, and the piece that caught my attention was an extensive analysis of his of how, in the transition from Thomas to Mark, the sayings were combined, and given a context, which set up the whole process of viewing Jesus a certain very specific way, namely the Christian way, as it was then beginning to emerge. The greatest influence in which was the theological influence of Paul. I want to discuss some of his findings here, not from a formal scholarly standpoint, for that I'll refer you to his original article, but from the point of view of the content, as we might understand it today based on A Course in Miracles. I will provide the links to the material, will avoid the detailed discussion, which invariably will boil down to the difference between choosing the ego or the Holy Spirit, since that is the only meaningful choice ever. I will simply expand on his comments with an eye to how you might look at the material from a Course standpoint.

In general terms then, it may pay to recap here something about the issue of level confusion as the Course sees it, which is really the psychological mechanism which the mind uses to defend against the teachings of Jesus, while conversesly the miracle is Jesus's way to undo the level confusion. And, as the Course makes abudantly clear, coming and going we have the need to defend ourselves againt his teachings of a Kingdom not of this world, since we prefer our own little kingdom which is very much of this world, for the very good reason that here we get to be the boss. So level confusion is in effect the ego's way of reinterpreting Jesus's sayings on the level where it operates, the body and the world, and as a result it now gets to tell Jesus what it is he means, rather than the other way around. It's a simple case of the ego telling him to play by its rules, or not at all, for the simple reason that it's the ego's ball.

After we kill him, we feel guilty, but then we turn around and we then sugar coat it by making an idol out of him, and creating a religion in his name, which acts essentially as a justification of the ego. The way the truth is preserved in spite of all the world's violence directed at him is exactly because he does not defend himself, since he knows that he is not his body. Here is one of the key passages from the Course:

    Since you cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the truth that will set you free, and will keep you free as others learn it of you. The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge that you threw away. An idea that you share you must have. It awakens in your mind through the conviction of teaching it. Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love. (ACIM:T-6.III.4)

Since our behavior reflects what we believe, we are always "teaching," i.e. expressing a belief system. Any one with parenting experience gets to find out how children respond to what you do, not to what you say they should do, although they can get pretty confused in the process, if as parents we are of a split mind, and take our confusion out on the kids. And it's not only the kids who get confused, we're confusing ourselves as well, and often times don't realize that the kids merely reflect our own confusion back to us. He is even more pointed in an earlier paragraph, dealing specifically with the crucifixion, in effect correcting our level confusion:

    That is why you must teach only one lesson. If you are to be conflict-free yourself, you must learn only from the Holy Spirit and teach only by Him. You are only love, but when you deny this, you make what you are something you must learn to remember. I said before that the message of the crucifixion was, "Teach only love, for that is what you are." This is the one lesson that is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson that is one. Only by teaching it can you learn it. "As you teach so will you learn." If that is true, and it is true indeed, do not forget that what you teach is teaching you. And what you project or extend you believe. (ACIM:T-6.III.2)

In other words the only way to be consistent is to choose for oneness, is to choose for Love, since if there's oneness, there cannot be conflict, so teaching anything else creates conflict. The simple fact that remains is that truth is true, and everything else is a lie. Thus the way Jesus teaches--he did then, and he does now--is that it's all on the mind level, he asks us to follow him to his Kingdom which is not of this earth. Or to paraphrase that, here in this world, everything is dualistic, and therefore conflict ridden, for the world arises from a thought of conflict, which is the thought that I could be separate from God. So as long as we take the world and the body as our point of departure in our life, and our thinking, we have conflict built in, and the consequence are in accord with that. If we follow Jesus, we take spirit as our point of departure, on which level their cannot be conflict, since everything is one. This is why the Course constantly urges us that the answer is not in dragging Jesus into our messes, and making them good and real, but rather that we should take the illusion to the truth, and turn to Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help, which entails returning to the mind, and joining the solution instead of making the problem real and thus preventing the solution.

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness; or what you made to what you are. Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourself. The knowledge is safe, but where is your safety apart from it? The making of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you are. Thus truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The past that you remember never was, and represents only the denial of what always was. (ACIM:T-14.IX.1)

So, as with Jesus before Pontius Pilate, to the world it's the other way around, as is explained here:

Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its life, for its existence depends on keeping this secret. So it is this secret that we must look upon, for the ego cannot protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is dispelled. (ACIM:T-13.II.4)

So this is the point also why Jesus's message is never lost, never mind how badly we mangle it. It also explains why across the ages people have found their way to him at all times, in spite of religious beliefs that sometimes seem to make hit harder, for his message never dies. That is its exact point, that is the resurrection. He taught to the seeming end that he was in the world but not of it, that he was spirit, not his body, and the final expression of that was to experience the crucifixion of his body, knowing full well that he was not his body. Thus the inner peace he demonstrated is the appeal to the heart, to value only truth, and no words, no theology can undo that message, since it is beyond words. It is the living reminder that his reality of Love (the Kingdom), is ultimately preferable to the substitute reality of the ego, in which we stubbornly believe we are the role we play, even after the play is over. The choice in the end is simply between disssociating the role, and remembering who we are in truth, as spirit, or justifying the role as our only reality and thus continuing the murder of Christ, or the crucifixion, as the Course usually refers to it.

What Christianity did with the teachings was to pull them down into this world, even while Jesus as appealing to our better knowledge, such as in Matthew, when he is quoted as saying: "How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread?" In short he is teaching in parables on what is going on in the mind, and so leading us back to the abstract reality of spirit, while we insist on dragging him down to our problems in the world, be they about bread, or finding a parkin spot.

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).

Stevan Davies Translates the Thomas Gospel

The Shambala Library edition of Stevan Davies' translation is absolutely beautiful in form and in content. It is somewhat unfortunate that the very passionate foreword by Andrew Harvey does not integrate well with the book. First of all we are not even introduced to Mr. Harvey, nor is there any clarification of his relationship to the translator, publisher or the Thomas material in general, other than that he apparently feels inspired by it and has an opinion. We find out mr about Mr. Harvey on-line, here: http://www.andrewharvey.net/biography.html In terms of content this foreword in my view strikes a bit of a discordant note with the rest of the book. While clearly Mr. Harvey feels very inspired by Thomas, and presents a few interesting observation, his overall point of view is highly personal, and if not seemingly at odds with Stevan Davies' views, at least not well integrated with them, nor is it clear in what tradition it stands besides Mr. Harvey's own idiosyncratic reading, based on Sri Aurobindo's work, the rationale of which is less than totally clear from this piece. In a more general sense these comments reinforce for me the feeling that the study of Thomas is pretty much lost at sea if the point of departure is found only in the fact that Jesus somehow teaches something different from Christianity, without any clarity about what the difference is all about, for the Thomas Gospel is not sufficiently comprehensive to support a complete picture. Needless to say I feel that without the vantage point that Pursah provides through the work of Gary Renard, this is pretty much a lost cause.

The part of the foreword by Prof. Davies however is eminently worthwhile and a very good synopsis about the position of the Thomas tradition, and serves to make a few very important points which are not always brought out by even the best texts on Thomas. First, Prof. Davies broadly embraces the timing as represented in the first post on this blog, which provides a foundation for a roughly similar look at the material. However, he makes a number of very insightful comments, which to me were worth the price of admission. These include a very well reasoned view of why and how the emerging main stream orthodoxy starting from Paul and Mark represents a radically different view from the Thomas tradition by placing Salvation in the future. And based on these observations he proceeds to hint strongly that what we know as Christianity may not at all represent Jesus' teachings.

Further, he does take up the issue of the Thomas timeline, and in fact pretty much disembowels the church-favored notion that Thomas must be late and Gnostic, as merely a convenient way to get rid of him. He provides crystal clear logic why Thomas is not automatically a "gnostic" book, because it was found (at Nag Hammadi) with other Gnostic books, as it evidently lacks the cosmogenetic speculations that make the gnostic tradition in the narrow sense so recognizable. Meanwhile of course in the wider sense Thomas does have a focus on the direct knowledge of God, which on the most abstract level is the heart of the Gnostic tradition. In this spirit Davies closes the foreword by referring us to the obvious purpose of the Thomas gospel per se, which is to have our own relationship with the material (and with Jesus no doubt, though Davies does not express that clearly), and explore the meaning of it as a point of departure for our own spiritual growth, making the point that the very idea of learning the "meaning" of this gospel from someone else would defeat that very purpose.

Davies then proceeds with an introduction, which is very helpful, and continues to make very salient observations. He lays out carefully why Thomas appears more "original" than the synoptics, thus reinforcing the very common-sensical view that it must have been older and a source for that tradition, as well as leading an independent life of its own with a tradition that developed in Syria and India. He makes the very astute observation that since it incorporates in saying 12 a recommendation to let James lead the community after Jesus' death, that the book therefore logically should predate the death of James in 62 AD, which seems highly likely also from the point of view of the absence of any Pauline influences in Thomas. His repeated emphasis on the statements that the Kingdom is already here, and "seek and ye shall find," are grist for the mill of Course students, since the Course teaches that "the world was over long ago," and that the  "tiny mad idea" never happened in reality, and that the only thing needed is that the student should "accept the Atonement for himself," referring to the experiential realization that the tiny mad idea indeed did not happen, and had no effect except illusory ones.

Finally, in a little section called "Cast of Characters" he makes the very important observation that the Apostles in Thomas appear as examples of people who misunderstand Jesus' teachings. He does not elaborate on this further, but I would like to add that this is a crucial point. If one has this vantage point, the entire reading of the canonical Gospels changes, for one then abandons the assumed homogeneity of the "Christian" tradition, and reads the books as the attempts of people struggling to understand this teacher Jesus to whom they felt attracted, but who they did NOT understand. We literally don't understand where Jesus is coming from because he is present to us from outside of the time/space framework, and beckons us to come and follow him there, out of the "cave" in which we are chained to the time/space framework - almost literally, the dimensions of time/space are the "walls" of that symbolic cave.
At the moment we shift to that position of uncertainty about our understanding of him, we are back to seeing the whole tradition, canonical and apocryphal alike, as potentially at least equally relevant and as an invitation to come to our own conclusions, and seek our own relationship with the teaching. From that vantage point we have by implication abandoned the arrogance of the orthodox tradition which already knows what Jesus teaches, to one of seeking, in which there is room for Jesus to teach us what it is he has to say. And Jesus explicitly guarantees: "Seek and ye shall find," as Davies frequently reminds us.

The translation itself is unproblematic and clean, and it might be one of my favorite translations. The commentaries are definitely inspired and inspiring, with the proviso of course that there are inner contradictions in the material which only Pursah's Kernel resolves, resulting in a much cleaner reading. In all this is a lovely book, a beautiful edition and certainly a worthwhile introduction to the Gospel of Thomas materials.

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.