On Giving Birth

What danger can assail the wholly innocent? What can attack the guiltless? What fear can enter and disturb the peace of sinlessness? What has been given you, even in its infancy, is in full communication with God and you. In its tiny hands it holds, in perfect safety, every miracle you will perform, held out to you. The miracle of life is ageless, born in time but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant, to whom you gave a resting place by your forgiveness of your brother, and see in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, not to the cross, but to the resurrection and the life. (ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10)

Observant people have often realized that dying is a continual process, that is entirely part of this life. Just look back, how many phases of your life have completely died off, and it feels now as if you were a different person then, and yet, when you lost that job, that relationship, or some other situation, it seemed like death, like a huge loss, like a sacrifice, but the facts prove that it was not, if you learn to forgive and let go. Or, if you want to give in to our sado/masochist tendencies, you can spend the rest of your life beating yourself up about the past and making yourself miserable. We certainly have that option, but it's a choice. Plato discusses the fear of death beautifully in pointing out that we're merely on this side of a door, and cannot see the other side until we pass through, but it's not the end, and he also clearly understand that throughout our lives we pass through such doors of transition in the psychological sense, the death of the body is merely another one of those. Reflecting on this more deeply, we might begin to understand why dying is a psychological process. By the same logic giving birth is a psychological process. It all boils down to the choice between the ego or the Holy Spirit as our teachers, and the choice happens continuously in every moment, except we're not usually aware of it. The essence of the choice is between form and content, between the body or spirit, between manifest and latent, between duality and oneness, murder or love, death or life etc. The point being that forms (Saturn) are constructs of time and space, which only exist temporarily, and sooner or later all waste away, and if we dedicate our lives to preserving form we commit ourselves to dying with them, while the choice for life is the choice for spirit, in which we realize that form does not matter and the Holy Spirit will give us whatever forms to work with that are most useful at the time, until they go and we move on.

In mythology the image of "son" is often used to symbolize the effect of our choices, just like in real life (as any good family therapist will tell you) the children mirror their own choices back to the parents, and this is why children can be so maddening if the parents live in denial in any way shape or form. At some point most parents become aware that children have the annoying habit of learning what you do, not what you say, and to that extent clearly the children are helping the parents grow up, more so than the other way around. The Dutch spiritual teacher J. W. Kaiser (JWK) calls children in this sense our "self of tomorrow," quite in the spirit of "by their fruits shall ye know them." In short, what we experience reflects our choices at this level, and our experience in life in that sense is our son, who reflects back to us what we choose to be. Kaiser's brilliant translation, commentary, and explanation of the Gospel according to Mark, (Beleving van het Evangelie, not available in English). Kaiser understood that what mattered about the story is hardly the manifest content, as Paul and eventually Christianity would have it, but the latent, or inner meaning of the story, which of course merely reflects what is going on in the mind, and which can become clear to us through experience if we ourselves make the inner choice to follow Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, as no doubt he did in order to be able to read the book in the way he did.

The rest is very simple in every situation we have a choice of teacher (in the terminlogy of A Course in Miracles), or "father" in terms of the Biblical myths. Our soul (Mary/Miriam - etymologically meaning "in revolt, in uprising" as per JWK) when it rises up to the dictates of time, and begins looking for "another way" (as did Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford in the developments that led to ACIM- See Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity), and in this condition we will realize that we may be "betrothed" to a figure in time (Joseph, again as per JWK), but we are not fulfilled by what the Course calls special relationships, our deepest longing and our life's purpose can only be fulfilled by choosing the Holy Spirit, who thus becomes the Father, of what we ourselves are then becoming, as reflected in the quotation from ACIM above. Forgiveness is the process where this birth takes place, again and again and again, when we choose against the ego past as the father of our life of tomorrow (symbolized by Joseph in the story), and for the Holy Spirit as the father of our "child." And so the way of the spirit is a matter of active choice, choice for content over form, in full awareness that forms come and go, and in letting go of our attachment to them, what is eternal in us will be reborn to us - the theme of Gary Renard's book Your Immortal Reality.

In terms of the Thomas Gospel, there are many sayings which reflect this choice possibility, such as Logion 13, and Logion 42, "Be passersby," which puts us in the position of observer of "our life" so that we can start seeing it, rather than being it, and thereby put ourselves in a position to make another choice through forgiveness, and so letting the Holy Spirit run our life, instead of the ego, which merely wants us to play the hero of the story, and to act on the manifest content, and continue to keep us mindlessly and permanently embroiled in the world. So living in the now in this sense means not responding to situations from the past, but truly approaching every day, and every moment like it is the beginning of the rest of your life, and deciding if you want to continue in ego-hell, which is form first, never mind the content (murder), or choose the Holy Spirit instead, which means content (spirit) first, and leaving the form to Him, and assume the way back to Heaven, where all nice childern (all of us, whenever we're ready) go.

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)

Your Immortal Reality

The full title of the book is: Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death, and for reference purposes on the Yahoo! group on Gary's work, it was promptly abbreviated to YIR. Within the work of Gary Renard, this book is the most important one with respect to the Thomas Gospel specifically, for it is here that Pursah gives us her version of the text, which comes in Chapter 7.  Her presentation lines up well with history. While the Nag Hammadi library was clearly buried around the time that Bischop Athanasius was propounding the Canon of the New Testament, and would-be Christians were turning violent against any books that disagreed with the accepted positions, and therefore around 375 CE. We know from the correspondence with the fragments of Greek Text which we have from a find dating back to the end of the 19th century that the text of the Thomas Gospel existed in similar form in Greek, which would have been the original language, in ca. 140 CE. And circumstantially it is now clear that the Thomas Gospel must have existed as an identifiable collection ca. 50 CE, or within the first 20 years after Jesus's death.

Pursah's proposition is that she is reducing the collection of 114 sayings to a presumed kernel of 70 sayings, corresponding to 71 in the Nag Hammadi collection because of the contraction of Logia 6 &14. Her edits are mostly fairly cosmetic, but for a few cases. In all cases her edits produce a crisper statement, without any compromise, usually leaving off stuff that feels like it could very reasonably be suspect. Her proposed contraction, discussed on page 161 of the book, of 6 & 14 into one statement makes so much sense, that one wonders why we did not think of it ourselves. In short her edited version is very convincing, and leaves off about 1/3 of the collection, of which Pursah says they were generally added later and subject to some amount of correction, and in the process some inner contradictions are removed. In short she proposes, based on her recollection, that these 70 sayings she selects are the ones she can vouch for were very close to the original, going sofar as to say that if you rendered these in Aramaic, you would have just about the words Jesus spoke back then. As I've argued in my book, Closing the Circle, the rest is a personal decision, quite along the lines of the distinction William James made between formal and personal religion: we have only our own inner compass to go by if we want to rely on Pursah's version. I did, and I even wrote a book about it. So for me it's a done deal. One important comment Pursah makes, which should be obvious, but merits mention here, is that quite evidently the Thomas Gospel is not a complete presentation of Jesus's thought system. The quotes are a bunch of pearls on a string, however in the treatment in both DU and YIR, it becomes evident that the string is the thought system of the Holy Spirit of which we do have a very profound and complete presentation in the form of A Course In Miracles.

The book as a whole is a continuation of Gary's deeply inspiring personal learning experience of the Course, as guided by Arten and Pursah. And in spite of all the clowning around he does, giving us so many ways to recognize ourselves in his exploits, he remains thoroughly humble in his overall presentation, presenting himself as just another Course student, but sharing with us just exactly how much it is all in the application, not in the theory. If Gary could learn it, we could too. We may not have the experiences he has, but we can still learn from his experiences, and the implicit promise is that to us all experience will come along the way in forms that we can understand. So it is never about imitating the form, as was the old Christian misunderstandig about the Imitatio Christi, which was the early Christian belief that if we only let ourselves be crucified for our tenaciously held beliefs we would go to heaven. Of course that was never what Jesus meant to teach, and he firmly disabuses us of that notion in the Course. It is always about learning to walk the talk, and Gary's sharing his own struggles with us via these books remains a powerful encouragement that we can do the Course, for we all can identify with him, since we've all done what he's done, and sometimes worse, or at least different variations. But in the process he really works through all the issues we all have with learning the Course.

The Thomas Logia sound like Zen Koans sometimes

That sort of a comment has been quite common in the discussions around the Thomas gospel. By now we know enough to understand what happened to the Jesus tradition after his death: substantial embellishment. So no wonder that these early materials should have a different character.

Jesus may or may not have been to India in those first 33 years about which we know so little. We may not be able to know this for sure. However philosophically, since truth is one, and oneness is a non-dualistic concept, therefore it should not surprise if Jesus sounded like Buddha or like Advaita Vedanta at times. The explanation is not necessarily that he was exposed to those sources, although he may have been. People did travel. The summary of these different forms of belief system, from dualism to pure non-dualism is very well explained in Gary's 2nd book, Your Immortal Reality.

The philosophical point is perhaps more compelling. If truth is true, and all else is a lie, well, there are only so many ways you could express truth in words, particularly since words are by nature dualistic, and so you can only approach it, never state it explicitly. So at some level the most abstract expressions of wisdom teaching would have to sound recognizably similar. So to be "like the Buddha," Jesus does not have to be a Buddhist, or even have known about the Buddha. From that standpoint I am totally at ease around Gary Renard's frequent observation that A Course in Miracles is sometimes closer to Buddhism than to Christianity, although of course there are very dualistic traditions in Buddhism, but it does seem that in Buddhism more of the original non-dualistic teachings survived and even thrived at times.

The Gospels Revisited - The Jesus Seminar

I meet Course students who don't have the familiarity with the Christian tradition to appreciate some of the comments in A Course In Miracles, and the evident allusions to New Testament stories, and some of them would like to find a decent source. At the present time this edition, The Complete Gospels,  is arguably the finest resource one could consult, in particular also because it simply presents all the different gospel traditions side by side, without overly emphasizing those that Christianity declared to be the canon of the NT. It is the most neutral and unbiased way to be introduced to this important cultural good. For people who have been exposed to a lot of this material in their upbringing, but who want to take a new look at it, this edition naturally is the best source.

The Jesus Seminar is doing an incredible job in making many materials accessible. For my upcoming book Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles, I have extensively consulted The Five Gospels, and I'm discussing that book's conclusions about the authenticity of Thomas sayings in an appendix to the book. While I'm not really using this edition for my book and this blog is really focused on materials for the book, I still want to post this note here, if nothing else because I mentioned in my discussion of The Five Gospels that there is a need for this kind of an edition. I may also remind the reader that Gary Renard has shared with us that Pursah favors The Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Phillip.

This book is brilliant, and very helpful. It provides modern, clean very non-denominational translations of the Gospel materials, and the only deference it shows to the canonical gospels of Christianity is by putting the synoptics first, though in chronological order (Mark first), not in orthodox theological order (Matthew first), and prefacing John with the putative "Signs" gospel that may have preceded it.  Then follow the sayings gospels, specifically the reconstruction of Q as well as Thomas. Chronologically these actually are deemed to precede Mark at least as a general literary form, so this is the one compromise to the Christian orthodoxy that this book makes. The time line which the JS believes in is in sync with Pursah's position in Your Immortal Reality, to wit, the kernel of Thomas may have been together by ca. 50 CE. (When we're in the presence of the Jesus Seminar it is politically correct to use 'CE' in lieu of 'AD.') The bulk of it would seem to have congealed ca 70-100 CE, but the JS pointedly observe that Thomas must have been 'together' before the synoptic Gospels, based on the internal evidence of the sequence of ideas as much as literary form between the sayings traditions and the synoptics. Helpfully the book also presents the Greek Thomas fragments from Papyrus Oxyrrhynchus, which are of some interest because of the variations they show.

Reading between the lines, I suspect that one of the reasons they feel Thomas congealed as a document only at the same time as the narrative gospels would be because they feel they have to account for the gnostic influences, and gnosticism doesn't take off till later. We may look at that question differently with Pursah and the Course, and understand that some of what Jesus taught originally definitely was grist for the mill of gnosticism, and Jesus did not start out as an orthodox Christian but some of his words sounded 'gnostic' and so the material became tainted with gnosticism later. On the contrary Jesus' original teaching contained some elements, including that of an inner knowing, or 'gnosis' of truth, which naturally lent themselves to be expanded upon by later gnosticism (and often distorted in the process), while the emergent orthodoxy edited that tendency out of his teachings with Paul leading the charge.

Next follow the Infancy Gospels which are rather late myths, then Fragmentary Gospels, some of which are still highly interesting,  followed by the Jewish-Christian Gospels and then Orphan Sayings and  Stories. The whole makes for a very complete and balanced edition, and very worth perusing. It should also be remembered that many Jesus stories apocryphal and otherwise were not gone when the church forbade them or destroyed the manuscripts. One example is the beautiful legend of St. Christopher. Never mind the church abolished him from the register of saints, for being fictional, the influence his story has had on the western mind can hardly be underestimated, witness the many images of St. Christopher in medieval art. The same applies for much of the apocryphal material - the church may have successfully destroyed the books, but the traditions frequently lived on.


If there are shortcomings they are easily offset by the many merits of this publication. I note in the introduction that the emphasis still is on wanting to understand the history of Christianity, which is not interesting to me. What interests me is the tradition of the teachings of Jesus, and this collection can shed light on that. Some word choices in the translation are a definite improvement such as "change of heart" for the Greek "metanoia," which is much better than the God-awful "repentance" of traditional Christian (read Pauline) translations, and a beautiful parallel to the Course's "change of mind," which would arguably be more accurate since Greek "noia" comes from "nous," which definitely does mean mind, but "change of heart" certainly conveys that meaning if in a less technical and more poetic sense.

Sometimes the preference for a what is supposedly contemporary language pours too much water in the wine of good translation and compromises the meaning. An example is a key phrase in Mk 4:34, which I'm quoting here in both the SV and KJV versions:
Yet he would not say anything except by way of parable, but would spell everything out to his own disciples. (Mk. 4:34 SV)
But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk. 4:34 KJV)
The original Greek, however "kat idian" connotes "privately," or "individually" and clearly that is the whole point of the statement, which is irretrievably lost in the smooth language of the SV. This is where it is clear that linguistics is not the only qualification to translating, understanding the subject matter is equally relevant, and that comes only through the experience of actually practicing what Jesus teaches.

There are other places where the effort to bring a fresh and modern translation occasionally goes overboard in my view. Greek 'basileia' does mean kingdom, and the choice to use instead 'God's Imperial Rule' is at least equally debatable, and I find that Pursah's choice of  'God's Divine Rule' would be far preferable and less ambiguous as a translation, particularly in view of how Jesus speaks of giving to the Emperor what is the Emperor's - clearly ' Imperial'  would be primarily associated with the empires of the world. But again those are minor points in the overall scheme of things - readability and relative freedom of the homogenizing influence of Christian theology on most translations are important steps in the right direction.

Marvin Meyer's Gospel of Thomas

Marvin Meyer's translation is without any doubt the leading translation of the Thomas Gospel and is available in numerous editions, both by itself and as part of larger collections. Before there was Pursah's kernel of the Thomas Gospel, as published in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality, Pursah at one point recommended  the Marvin Meyer edition to Gary as the best translation at that time. At the time Gary shared this information on the Yahoo-list for Disappearance of the Universe. I favor the separate edition, which has the Coptic text, Marvin Meyer's introduction and notes.

Meyer's introduction is succinct and to the point, and wonderfully insightful. I may not always agree with it in detail, but it is helpful, and his point of view is reasonable. He comes to the conclusion that evidently pieces of the Thomas Gospel go back to the early times, and that as a literary form the sayings gospels predate the narrative gospels. He feels however that the book as a whole probably congealed closer to the date of the Oxyrrhynchus Papyri, which he puts at 200 AD, but that is a detail since he clearly allows for an early origin, which is critical as I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog.

He cites some specific examples that make it insightful to the reader why, besides the general form of the sayings gospel being part of the early tradition along with Q, certain specific logia very evidently present an early form which was later embellished in the narrative gospels, thereby giving us strong clues about the historical relationship between the two. The example he gives is the parable of the sower in saying 9, which reappears in the synoptic gospels in an embellished form, making it seem very logical that Thomas has the "original" form. On the whole however he does allow for some disagreement among scholars, in terms of the relationship, which evidently do exist, and by the way are easier to accommodate with Meyer's position that some sayings are from the early days but the book as a whole from the second century. This particular aspect of his position might actually harmonize well with what Pursah does say in Your Immortal Reality, namely that the kernel of seventy sayings which she gives was together early on, and that the rest were embellishments which simply accrued over time, which would explain why by the date of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri, we might have an expanded Gospel of Thomas, of now 114 sayings, and a lot of internal contradiction.

Next he explores the position of the Jesus seminar which also is that the Thomas sayings have a high likelihood of going back to the original Jesus of history, noting along the way that this means the recently fashionable view of the apocalyptic figure of Jesus as portrayed by Albert Schweitzer, can no longer be supported based on the Thomas information. Jesus now appears more as a wisdom teacher, as a spiritual guide. One of the points of contrast with the traditional Christian view he cites is the obvious emphasis at the outset that by finding the meaning of these sayings we will be enlightened, and that is evidently a totally different Jesus speaking than anything Christianity has shown us. Another is in saying 113, the notion that the Kingdom is here now, except we don't see it. This comes close to the position of the Course, and the notion of our responsibility for sight, by choosing between ego and Holy Spirit. His notion of seeing Jesus more as a cynic philosopher, who is looking to awaken us from our mental rut is a very reasonable assessment of the new notion of Jesus. In all this introduction of 15 pages covers more worthwhile material than some entire books.

The text and translation are wonderful, meticulous, but nowhere forced. He chooses not to try and capitalize terms like Kingdom and Heaven, which is reasonable, though it would not be my preference. The argument for it is to remove it from Christian stereotypes. For readers who come at this material from a Course perspective, that risk seems less likely, and we might like to see the familiar capitalization. Printing the translation on facing pages next to the Coptic text is a pleasant arrangement, and simply beautiful, even if you can't read Coptic. The notes at the end are wonderful, and like the style of the introduction, succinct and to the point, which does not mean I always agree. In the notes to the prologue, Meyer argues that the "Living Jesus" probably does not refer to the resurrected Jesus, when I feel that this definitely is exactly what it would mean, i.e. that the resurrection which is an experience of the mind, predated the crucifixion and that for the time of his ministry on earth Jesus was an Awake from the dream, which is why he could teach the way he did. This is one of the arguments which raged in the early centuries between the "heretics" (gnostics and other dubious folk), and the emerging orthodoxy, which finally settled on the resurrection of the body, which takes place only after the crucifixion. With the Course we might look at that differently, simply realizing that advanced teachers could appear at will, and that the Christian focus on the body misses the point.

The book concludes with an essay from Harold Bloom, who has a particularly gnostic take on the Thomas Gospel. He certainly hits many interesting points, though for my money of course the Course perspective as given by Pursah carries the day, and we would hardly see Jesus as a Gnostic teacher, though we might notice with interest that many core notions of his teachings were developed in interesting ways by later Gnostics, such as Valentinus. Meyer on his end definitely tempers the currently fashionable trend of declaring the Thomas Gospel a gnostic book, and he alludes to all the uncertainties and confusion attached to the term. In all this book is, next to the edition of The Five Gospels by the Jesus Seminar, undoubtedly my favorite Thomas edition, though there are many other worthwhile editions around.

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.

Closing the Circle & The GoTh Timeline

Closing the Circle is (going to be) a book about the continuity of the teachings of Jesus, which in turn belies the discontinuity of our world of time and space, which is obfuscated by our seeming experiences of the 'passing of time,' not to mention the illusion of 'development.' The illusory nature of such concepts of reality is exposed head on in the teachings of J, by affirming in so many ways that truth merely is, and does not have to become, and both the Gospel of Thomas (GoTh) and A Course in Miracles(ACIM) are expressions of that truth, which are quite consistent with one another, as is highligted in particular by Pursah's kernel of the Thomas Gospel, as published in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality. One of such dubious developments was the repression of the teachings of Jesus, and the blatant replacement of them in the world by Paul's teachings about Jesus, which in order to obliterate all traces of the crime were for good measure named "Christianity," and which in effect were nothing more than the ego's coopting Jesus by producing a g-rated version of him in all respects, and thus to firmly pull him into the world and assign him a role which suited us, and which accordingly could become "popular" as in "popular religion," and "popular culture." One of the items I'd like to consider at the outset is the most probable timeline of GoTh as I see it, and discuss some of its implications. 1) J (30-33 AD) 2) => Q & GoTh (50-60 AD) 3) => Mk (55-65 AD) 4) => Lk & Mt (75 AD) 5) => Jn (90-120 AD) 6) Traditional "Christianity," as formed by the Council of Nicea in 321 AD. The above is a step-wise representation of the funnel of information that led to the formation of the classic notion of a monolithic Christianity, an illusion which even in the official version did not last much longer than to the time of the first split, between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic church, about 300 years later. What we now understand is that the funnel overflowed a few times, and spilled material which did not fit the mold of what Christianity was becoming. Meanwhile the other traditions lived on without the dubious "benefit" of being the Roman state religion which was arrogantly named after Jesus (Christ), and which made Christ special rather than understanding that we are him, and he is who we truly are. The Thomas tradition lived on in India, and in the West it literally went underground for 1600 at Nag Hammadi, but ultimately was rediscovered there in 1945, and from the 50's till now has led to a gradual re-framing of our understanding of those early years of Christian history, and for many of us to a more intimate understanding of Jesus as he speaks to us directly, without many of the later distortions. At the modern end we thus have the rediscovery of the text in 1945, and the gradual emergence of translations, commentary and interpretations into the public awareness in the 60 years since then. In a way this went amazingly slowly, if one realizes that at least in the Anglo-Saxon world it was not until the simultaneous publication in 2003 of Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, that active interest in the Thomas Gospel began to dawn on the awareness of main stream audiences. Considering the growing bookshelves of Thomas related literature, it is proving to be fertile territory indeed. I will humbly add my contributions, and through this blog I will discuss some detailed material more in depth which is part of the research for my book. Needless to say, from my perspective Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe and its follow-on book Your Immortal Reality are by far the most interesting of the lot, culminating in Pursah's offering of a kernel of the Thomas Gospel which she represents to be authentic, thus bypassing some of the inevitable historical distortions which are undoubtedly present in the text we found at Nag Hammadi. Moreover the consolidation of Thomas interpretations around A Course In Miracles which Pursah's version implicitly solidifies, provides a clear anchor for the discussion of Thomas which has not existed heretofore and which accounts for the sometimes wildly speculative literature around Thomas. In short, I would argue that the appearance of the Pursah kernel in 2006 consolidates the content of Jesus' teachings in the Thomas tradition in a way which eliminates a lot of corruption of the tradition and gets us back to a coherent whole. If one is stuck however in a Newtonian concept of the world, it would not be possible to give Pursah's version this kind of authentic authority. To many students of the Course however this viewpoint may naturally feel comfortable and "right." I would conclude this introductory comment with the observation that, since Gary quoted my "recap" of revisionist early Christian history in his book, I clearly agree with everything Pursah represents about the history of Thomas' tradition in the overall context, and I gladly accept her endorsement of a position which common sense had already led me to believe was substantially the most reasonable view of the matter. We will come to consider the major different interpretations and dating of Thomas in future postings to this blog.