God, Is That The Word

Joe Croker sends me this song about Thomas, and I'm reproducing the text here, as well as his Biblical references.


God, Is That The Word?
By Joe Croker

Peaches and plums -- ripe them up distant sun, burning empty eye
Old men saw God inside, but even you will die -- even you will die
Burst and turn to stone: white dwarf or black little hole
Peaches and plums -- get sweet then they come undone

Look up in the sky -- Orion burns, galactic eye … galaxy so wide
White silk spread in the black of night, it’s

God, is that the word?  Is that the word?  God, is that the word?

Sometimes late at night in the warm pool of my little mind
The softest colors glow -- somehow everything I know
I’m just a little boy -- so at home, so unmoored -- it’s

God, yeah that's the word.  That's the word?  God that's the word.

Thomas wanted the bloody cloths, the fingers in the wounds
The Lord appears, no one swoons … deceptively mundane
Sort of like most everything, but he’s

God, is that the word?  That's the word --  that's the word. 
God, is that the word?
Or is that absurd?

Tackle, trim, bridle, bit: the long-haired mare, girl riding it
On into the barn … undress upon the straw
You’re so pure, you got it all, it’s

God …

•

John 20:24-29
John 20:24    But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

John 20:25    The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

John 20:26   And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

John 20:27   Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

John 20:28   And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

John 20:29   Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

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Some notes to the above.

No doubt Thomas was "on" to the fact that Jesus was inside, not out, that the Kingdom was inside, not outside, etc., based on the material in the Thomas Gospel, and the song reflects that. The quotes from the Gospel of John show the caricature of Thomas, in the Gospel stories, and it is dubious if that was about the real Thomas or just made up for effect. 

The Thomas character in the Johannine tradition is "the doubting Thomas," who represents all of us in a way, portraying the sign of Virgo, and insisting in typical ego manner that form comes before content, or that unless I see the physical proof, I won't believe anything, which turns things on their head. The cause is in the mind, and physical reality is but a reflection of that, and not the other way around, as the Virgo characteristic wants to believe. Since we weren't there, we won't know, but it might be that the "historical" Thomas was in fact this doubter at times and a real Virgo, however, if so, he certainly did learn the message of Jesus later in life to be able to compose the Thomas Gospel as we know it. In that case maybe he once was the doubting Thomas, who later outgrew his doubts. The beatification "pure of heart" who shall "see" God is of course the outcome of those who overcome exactly these doubts, and then, in accepting the atonement for ourselves, which is the completion of the forgiveness process, we would come to "see," i.e. experience God. (notes on the astrological nature of the Thomas character based on J.W. Kaiser, Beleving van het Evangelie, Uitg. Synthese, (p. 216-217). The word the Course tends to use for this "seeing" is vision, which again has nothing to do with the physical eyes, but everything with the question of with whom we are doing the seeing. With the ego we will always see the world of separation, with the Holy Spirit we will "see" the universe of Love.

Russian Dolls

The fun of russian dolls seems to be endlessly fascinating, and one way of looking at it is perhaps, that none of them are actually "it." They all point to each other, and the multiple reciprocal references are the explanation of the whole concept more than anyone doll is the explanation of the concept.

I'm working on that kind of an experience in real life, with my weekly workshops at the Theosophical Society in Manhattan, details here: Course in the City, since, starting March 4th, we made a start studying Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, which is a format we've tried once, with a chapter out of Gary's second book, and it certainly produced an interesting dynamic. So this time we decided to go thorough all of his work in this kind of a fashion. So this is a chance for the members of the group to experience what it might feel like to be an ascended master... or, at the very least to think about it, and to get in touch with our own feelings about this whole story, much more so than if you're just reading it, and it's Gary's story. When you play it out it becomes your story.

At the same time, taking on these roles allows us to be at different times and places, and identify more with the notion that we may in fact have some deeply hidden awareness or experience of being at different places in different times. So the whole thing becomes a discovery voyage about how the mind works, and the results are quite interesting. It is a seemingly innocuous, but very profound way to question a lot about our self concept.

One of the things which presents itself, is perhaps the faintest discovery of our own feelings about where we were at the time of Jesus. People often have quite significant experiences around that issue, when their own relationship with Jesus in the present is being cleaned up, as might happen when they study ACIM.

Here is one clear example of how things come full circle, and therefore it underscores the reasons why the title of my book is Closing the Circle.

As Stevan Davies shows in his article Mark's Use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I here is another case of total transformation. He takes as the main sources for the idea Logia 13 and 108, and then shows how the idea is developed into something altogether different, and unsurprisingly most definitely Christian, in the treatment in Mark.

Imitatio Christi is one of those theological concepts, which besides the later book by Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, gained some de facto early recognition in the development of Christianity, particularly in the early ages when it became fashionable to pursue martyrdom, as if that were the meaning of following Jesus, to die on the cross, or something closely similar, and to die for one's beliefs, as if Jesus was a mere religious fanatic. These concepts are always popular for it is the core of the ego's belief system.

The psychologically very profound presentation of A Course in Miracles really clarifies, how and why the Christian theological framework is really an embodiment of the ego's thoughtsystem, and diametrically opposite to what Jesus taught originally. Fundamentally this boils down to the idea that the ego-identity thinks it is really something, when Jesus in the Course dismisses it as a "tiny, mad, idea" (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6:2), in other words the ego IS the thought of separation, the thought that says it would be possible for part of God to exist separately and independently of him, and the manifestation of that thought is our body identity in the world. We thus think in our infinite stupidity, that what the Course calls "accepting the atonement," i.e. realizing inside that the separation is not only impossible, but never really happened, is absolutely a dangerous and deadly thought, which must be prevented at all cost. The atonement in the ego's eyes means that we must give up our ego's kingdom, which we call our "life" to accept his Kingdom, not of this (i.e. the ego's) world, and since our ego's would rather be right than happy (c.f. ACIM:T-29.VII.1:9). The ego portrays this as if we are giving up something for nothing, whereas Jesus is firmly of the opinion that we are giving up nothing (our illusory separate existence, which is making us miserable) for everything (his Kingdom, Heaven, Love, Happiness, returning Home, etc.). Thus it is indeed an ego thing to invest Jesus with suffering, as if that were the essence of his ministry, and then make it seem that the essence of our following him is to suffer like him. Well with that kind of advertising, few people would want to. So getting yourself crucified became briefly popular in early Christianity, but unsurprisingly the majority of people thought it was not such a hot idea. So this part of the story ends up with Jesus and a few saints getting themselves crucified, and the rest of the world placing their hope in this vicarious salvation.

What Jesus teaches and taught instead is that we simply need to realize that the ego idea simply is a joke, and not at all a reality, but an illusion we've bought into, and which resulted in the terrible nightmare which we call our life, but which is not our ultimate reality. His program of forgiveness shows us the way out of the insanity, and back towards Heaven. And that program begins with taking a step back from identifying with our bodily identity first, and learning again that what we really are is spirit.

Therefore the first step is actually in Logion 42, which Pursah calls her favorite: "Be passersby." It is an admonition to not identify with our role(s) in the world, not take them seriously, but to step back from that identification, and become more contemplative. It is in effect the first step of his forgiveness process. Another aspect of it is indeed contained in Logion 13, in the realization and understanding that the world is not ready to hear what Jesus teaches, and the question is not if the world will hear, but rather if we will hear, because then we won't need the world anymore. Finally Logion 108 is indeed a beautiful description of  the meaning of following Jesus:

J said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed that person." (PGoth, Logion 108)

The same thing is implied in the forgiveness process of the Course, and the idea that we should need to forgive Jesus, because as long as we think he is different from us, we have not forgiven ourselves either, but if we finally do accept the atonement for ourselves, and thus know we are forgiven, we will also be coming from the exact same point of reference as he does, and therefore be exactly like him in fully knowing that our reality is spirit and not the body. And that is also the logic behind the Course's explanation of the crucifixion, as being simply a demonstration of the truth that since we are not our body, even the total destruction of that body makes no difference to what we are:

The crucifixion is nothing more than an extreme example. Its value, like the value of any teaching device, lies solely in the kind of learning it facilitates. It can be, and has been, misunderstood. This is only because the fearful are apt to perceive fearfully. I have already told you that you can always call on me to share my decision, and thus make it stronger. I have also told you that the crucifixion was the last useless journey the Sonship need take, and that it represents release from fear to anyone who understands it. While I emphasized only the resurrection before, the purpose of the crucifixion and how it actually led to the resurrection was not clarified then. Nevertheless, it has a definite contribution to make to your own life, and if you will consider it without fear, it will help you understand your own role as a teacher.
    You have probably reacted for years as if you were being crucified. This is a marked tendency of the separated, who always refuse to consider what they have done to themselves. Projection means anger, anger fosters assault, and assault promotes fear. The real meaning of the crucifixion lies in the apparent intensity of the assault of some of the Sons of God upon another. This, of course, is impossible, and must be fully understood as impossible. Otherwise, I cannot serve as a model for learning.
(ACIM:T-6.I.2,3)

So, clearly, here Jesus tells us that it is not necessary to follow him in form, and get ourselves crucified, but only to learn from his extreme example, that indeed even that would make no difference to what we are. His point is here that if we fully know that spirit is the essence of what we are, we will also fully know that we are totally invulnerable forever. Our only problem arises from identifying with the perishable, our bodies, which then puts us in a fearful position, for everything in the world is a potential threat to that body. Here is finally the point Jesus makes in the Course, about our need to forgive him, i.e. to accept the atonement for ourselves, and thus finally accept that we are the same has he is, not to mention once again that this is framed within our relationships in the world, which are thus transformed into the Holy Relationship:

    I have great need for lilies, for the Son of God has not forgiven me. And can I offer him forgiveness when he offers thorns to me? For he who offers thorns to anyone is against me still, and who is whole without him? Be you his friend for me, that I may be forgiven and you may look upon the Son of God as whole. But look you first upon the altar in your chosen home, and see what you have laid upon it to offer me. If it be thorns whose points gleam sharply in a blood-red light, the body is your chosen home and it is separation that you offer me. And yet the thorns are gone. Look you still closer at them now, and you will see your altar is no longer what it was. (ACIM:T-20.II.4)

And so again we come full circle with the Thomas Gospel. In ACIM Jesus corrects the numerous ways his message was distorted, in the Thomas Gospel we find his teaching before all the distortions began, and Pursah's version even eliminates from the Thomas Gospel some distortions which have seemingly crept into the tradition.

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.

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.

Navigating by Past Life Recall

As I have argued in the prior post, "reincarnation" may be a useful way of looking at certain aspects of our experience, even if in the abstract it may not be any more "true" than the more common Western linear view of time, which really implies Newtonian physics, and is long since obsolete for that reason alone. The notion of the holographic universe is certainly not easy to grasp. Meanwhile however, the kneejerk rejection of past life recall and reincarnation that is so common in certain quarters is also obviously meaningless. I've gotten some of that in commentaries to prior posts about Pursah's Gospel of Thomas, because it is based on her memory of her lifetime as Thomas.

To take an extreme example, General George S. Patton chose his strategy in France, guided rather strongly by past life recall of a lifetime in which he was a Roman soldier and marched with Caesar, and his intuition was to avoid all man made bridges which were built after that time, guessing correctly that the Germans would or at least were likely to, destroy them. So he planned his route based on the natural terrain, and where it would be easy to cross rivers and other obstacles. In his case, his past life recall was so vivid that in his own words, he could still smell the piss and sweat of the Roman soldiers he had been with in that terrain, and frequently he could recall features of the terrain. He experienced the same with the battle field of Gettysburg in the US, and many other historical battlefields. Nobody doubts his success. For anybody interested the full details I recommend Carlo d'Este's biography. I have also previously blogged about Patton elsewhere, particularly on his experience on the battlefield of St. Mihiel in World War I.

In short, as Shakespeare reminded us, there is more in this world than is dreamt of in our philosophy, and we are well advised to keep an open mind, and be duly sceptical about the would be obviousness of what our senses would seem to tell us. It is with this in mind that in my book I have addressed the provenance of Pursah's Gospel of Thomas as a putative kernel of the Thomas Gospel, which she feels is authentic based on her recall, but aside from that I have also validated het selection based purely on my own common sense. The combined result is what gave me the confidence to go forward. Here really lies the essence of the difference--quite in the spirit of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience-- beween formal religion and personal religion, or today we would probably simply say between religion and spirituality. Learning to have a healthy relationship with that inner guide, which we all do have, but which we have buried under rationalizations, is definitely part of waking up to who we truly are. It can also become a distraction, if we become too enamored of it, and give it more importance than it really has. The fact remains however that we all have this ability, and can generally learn to live with more ease as we learn to trust it more. This is quite independent of whatever conscious awareness we may or may not have regarding past life memories or déja vu.

Gnosticism for the Rest of Us

It seems to be unavoidable. After writing that gnosticism was such a difficult category that it is almost pointless, and that both the detractors and the fans of the Thomas gospel have applied this label to it at times, which only obfuscates things and never helps, nevertheless I received consumer complaints asking: but what IS gnosticism? I resisted. I explained, the point of the post was that it's a useless category. To no avail. So hereby I will try my hand at providing a somewhat useful operating definition of gnosticism.

For one thing, in order to be fair, if you follow e.g. Bart Ehrman in his book Lost Chrsitianities, you would understand that in the years immediately post Jesus, and before Christianity began to congeal in the 4th century (Nicea, the canon, etc), during which time Christians began to aggressively wipe out everyone who disagreed with them and their literatures, there may have been as many as 25,000 varieties of "Christian" belief. The appearance of unity that was created by Nicea, was really only an appearance, not a fact. The same illusion of one Christian religion then was powerfully reinforced when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, although it would not take too long before things started to fall apart again into the Roman and the Greek orthodox portion. And the rest we know. It is still a mess today.

One of the main lines of argument from the early centuries concerned the notions of can we know God directly, and the Greek word for "knowledge" is gnosis. This sort of knowledge is talked about in some text as clearly an inner knowing, not a discrete knowledge of facts. Generally the sects who employ this type of a concept were collectively described of gnostics. You could broadly call them: those who believe direct knowledge of God is possible. The other group, which became Christianity, and for which Paul was the main cheerleader, believed we were miserable sinners, or as he calls it adopted children, with Jesus being made into God's son exclusively, and very different from us, as a magical saviour who saves us vicariously, i.e. he stands in for us: he dies, we get saved. Since in the thinking of this group he does die, and we must wait till he comes back to save us, we now need something to tide us over, and handle our communications with God. This is the logic that leads to the idea of the Pope as God's representative on earth, he is the Vicar of Christ, until the latter comes back, and of course they secretly hope he never does, for then they're out of a job. More generally of course the priesthood is then the intermediary between God and us, and we don't get to have his phone number.

This is the basic distinction: gnostic say you can reach God directly, and Christians say you can't, you're a miserable sinner, etc. etcs. The more the Christians won, the more they put down the gnostics as heretics, and since they burned just about all of the gnostic literature, for a long time we knew very little about them, except for the famous bishop Irenaeus of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century, who described all the outrageous gnostic beliefs in his book Adversus Haereses. So in a lot of ways, Irenaeus became for a long time the pre-eminent source on gnosticism, since he described the teachings of many gnostic teachers in detail. So he did more to preserve it by trying to be so thorough and efficient in wiping them out. By now of course many documents have been found again.

Gnosticism has too many varieties to be useful as a category, for even the very word gnosis itself gets different interpretations in different sects, and this is the reason why the usefulness of the category is dubious. For one thing for some gnostics the term gnosis begins to mean some discrete secret knowledge which has to be passed down, very much in the sense of the kabbalistic tradition. This latter usage is a special meaning, and not the original meaning of the term as Yeshua tends to use it. To the early Christians the name "gnostic," certainly post Irenaeus, became an epithet. The Thomas gospel was found with a collection of clearly gnostic documents, and lo and behold there are a few sayings in the Thomas collection where Yeshua uses the word "know" in a way that is reminiscent of some gnostic usage. Therefore this now results in the term gnostic being applied to the Thomas sayings both by fans and by detractors, and I'm arguing for simplicity. My view is just listen to the sayings as they sound. Believe you me, Yeshua stood out from the crowd, and he was speaking in very direct straightforward language. Therefore to think that we are explaining his teachings by framing them in the concepts of some second stringers, does it a disservice. By applying the label, you rob the sayings of their direct impact.

In conclusion then, I come back to my original argument, the Thomas sayings are direct, and straightforward. We need to read them as if Jesus is speaking to us directly. Just imagine yourself hanging out with him in Palestine 2000 years ago. You're in the crowd, and you've written down these things you hear him say, and you come home, and you go Wow! I gotta think about that... but you go back for more and after a while you have this little notebook of sayings. That little notebook is the Thomas gospel. Trust me, we were there, you and me both.

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.

Category Busting

The experience of this book launch is teaching me some interesting lessons, and we're only just getting started. One of the biggest challenges involves the labeling of the book, which impacts on where it gets seen, reviewed, filed in bookstores, displayed, etc. Some thoughts.

• It's a Course/ACIM book, maybe, but it's really a Gospel of Thomas book, with introductions that provide the connections to the Course, the Christian tradition, and Gary Renard's work, so as soon as you limit it to the Course, it's stuck in a rut already. I now am starting to see readers who had NO previous background in either the Course or the Thomas Gospel.
• It's a Jesus book, undoubtedly, but the term is apt to be misunderstood, for reasons that should be obvious. They are the same reasons why Pursah in Gary Renard's books uses the term "J" instead of Jesus, namely avoiding the religious stereotypes associated with him, both positive and negative, so he can be appreciated in a new light.
  
• It's a religious book. Of course not, it has nothing to do with religion as the world commonly understands that term, as little as Jesus did. He was only framed for founding a religion by Paul and others who came after him, he had no such interest or intention.
• It's a truth book. Perhaps, but that's not a category anybody knows what to do with never mind how you slice it.
• It's a spiritual book. Well, that's a possibility. Spiritual, not religious as the fashionable phrase goes nowadays. Fine. The way I tend to explain the term is that spiritual for me connotes something that is about my relationship to the Divine, and not about anybody else's rules or concepts, let alonge anything moral or behavioral.
• It is a book that invites a new way of looking at Jesus, resting on the twin traditions of the Thomas Gospel and A Course In Miracles. It has a great picture of Jesus on the cover, which by the way is called "Teach Only Love," and was painted by Sam Augustin -- Personally I like this the best. For the picture, which has a total absence of Christian paraphernalia, and represents Jesus only as a presence of love and light, seems to be inviting people in regardless of any familiarity with either Thomas, or ACIM, or anything else along those lines. It seems to make the book jump in people's arms. Although undoubtedly some are also put off by it, if they have issues with Jesus. Tough luck on them.
• It's a book on non-dualism. A bit of a stretch really, for that is not the topic in any overt way, except that the teachings of the Course, and ultimately of Jesus, clearly are completely non-dualistic.
• It's a contemplative book. For sure. I think that is the whole purpose of the Thomas Gospel, to enter a dialog with Jesus and the thought system he represents, and to invite the reader in to contemplate these ideas for themselves, not to mention to turn around and apply them in their lives.