Multiple Thomases and other Curiosa

I reflected yesterday on the multiple Thomases in my life, and it's really funny. I can't think of this having been as prominent before. In fact I can't remember any Thomases before the last few years, and now they seem to be everywhere. So somehow my mind is on the topic of Thomas indeed, and synchronicity is of course one way to incorporate joining into our experience. As to Gary Renard there is the notion of a parallel Thomas experience with Michael Tamura, as documented in The Return of the Revolutionaries, see www.johnadams.net and then there is also the experience of Micael Ledwith. I was present when Gary and Micael were together on a TV panel discussion in Manhattan, on Alan Steinfeld's New Realities TV. It did not particularly impress me in any specific way, but it was a curious fact nevertheless.

Besides the fact that many of these incidents of past life recall can be very fallacious, no doubt, there is no question that for some people they can be very clear and strong, as was the case with General George S. Patton, for whom they were an unquestionable fact of life, and clearly had a great deal of accuracy, and explicit relevance to his present incarnation, such as knowing how to pick his route through France with avoidance of man-made bridges, since he remembered from the Gallic wars, when he marched with Caesar, where the natural places were to ford rivers, and avoid other obstacles. Yet there remains the fact that often times the stories don't fully coincide or confirm each other or the historical record for that matter. It would seem that different people remember different aspects of the experience, and there may even be something to the multiple choice nature of our script, that different people remember different versions. None of this yields to much rational analysis, because the holographic nature of this experience is beyond easy comprehension, but it is just another aspect of our experience.

It has been clear to me for a long time that a preference or a strong interest in certain periods of time indicates a certain level of awareness of: "I was there," as GSP would often note in his books, and sometimes it was: "I know, I was there." And he was provably right on numerous occasions. I know I had that sense with Plato and the academy, and to some degree I have it with the time of Jesus, yet I have no great Aha! experiences around that, except to realize that as we become less afraid of ourselves, we can let more of these experiences in perhaps, so memories can come back. At a certain level it can be a distraction, if we let it, but it can simply be a happy experience, which can enrich our lives. The fact that multiple people are having partially overlapping memories is also easily possible once we fathom the holographic nature of the mind even a little bit. There are not discrete souls incarnating in bodies, that's just how we conceive of it as long as we identify strongly with our body, rather, the puppeteer, the mind dreams up all the characters. We are only identified with one particular role until we wake up from it.

Nonsensical Logic Isn't

The literature about the Thomas gospel, and therefore the conversations on the topic in general, seems to be full of alternative theories about Jesus and Thomas which make no sense to me at all, the most predominant one being the notion that by one definition or another the Thomas gospel would or should be considered a gnostic document, which it is not. Some helpful reflections could be found in a current book, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.

The notion of gnosticism in and of itself remains fraught with problems, because it is really a nomenclature for a wide range of religious and spiritual traditions which flourished perhaps in the second and third centuries of the Common Era, but which has roots that reach back well before Jesus. By and large gnosticism was thrown out by the nascent church as heresy, which seemed to be fulminating against the gnostics and to all they could to wipe out the teachings. And to a large degree the best knowledge we have about some of the gnostics is because the church did such a good job of fighting them, very much in line with the psychological notions of the Course that opposition makes the error real. Bisshop Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses dealt with them so effectively that in many cases his work remained the best source of information on many of the gnostic schools. Even in recent times the term has given rise to much confusion, when at one point Elaine Pagels proposed that Paul may have been a gnostic, which is preposterous, and in another case Miachael Allen Williams in his book correctly argues that the whole nomenclature should be abandoned, because it lumps too many dissimilar traditions together. In other words, the term causes more confusion than it breeds understanding. I'll say!

Pertaining to the Thomas Gospel, the first association with gnosticism was because the manuscripts we have are from the 2nd and 4th century of the Common Era, and some of the statements sound so alien to Christian writers, that they thought it must be a heretical document, and courtesy of Bishop Irenaeus, sure enough, it became a case of let's throw it on the heap of "gnosticism," just as well nobody really knows what the term means, and so it becomes an epithet, and it certainly does not mean Christian. So initially the "gnostic" epithet became the knee-jerk defense of Christianity against the authenticity of the Thomas gospel. By now the internal evidence is pretty convincing that this view was not warranted, and that instead the Thomas Gospel predated Paul and the canonical gospels. So now other arguments have to be found to get rid of its perceived authenticity since its rediscovery, and that's how the churches and writes with broadly Christian allegiance have tended to use the term in modern times.

Then there are those who seem to think broadly that since the early Christians did not like the gnostics, and the Thomas material is clearly different from the Christian tradition, therefore they should automatically assume that the Thomas gospel was gnostic, and this should now be seen as something positive. That makes no sense either. What  is true is that a few things in the Thomas gospel are evocative of some concepts we know from gnosticism, and some ideas of the early Jesus are well preserved in later gnostic tradition, such as the "Be passersby," of Logion 42, and the notion in the Valentinian school of gnosticism that Jesus was laughing under a tree, and they really crucified somebody else. Even though it borders on a possible misunderstanding, it is certainly an ineresting way of expressing the notion that Jesus was not his body (ergo that we are not our bodies), and truly puts him in the oberver's seat, as a 'passerby.' But the fact that some of his teachings which were ignored by the Christian community, flourished in certain gnostic schools, does not per se make Jesus a gnostics, just as little as he was a Christian for similar reasons: it was invented later. This is true even if some gnostic type thinking was in evidence well before Jesus's time, as in the Wisdom traditions of Judaism, etc.

So this becomes a classic case where the label really has nothing to contribute to the conversation, and in reality becomes an impediment to understanding the Thomas sayings as they should be understood, and without making Jesus into anything that he isn't. So the label - gnostic - in both cases cited above is an obfuscation, and it sullies the very freshness of the Thomas gospel, which first and foremost really remains an invitation to read and hear the sayings of Jesus just like they sounded, and it only takes a little effort to adjust in our imagination to be with him then and there. And realizing how easy that is, makes it also much easier to understand how he is with us here and now.

In the Vernacular

The hallmark of Gary Renard's books is their informal nature, and the hallmark of the Thomas gospel is also its informal nature. The only thing is that in a way, because we are 2,000 years removed from the Palestine where the historical events took place, sometimes the imagery seems a bit alien, and it frankly takes some getting used to. This is one reason why Pursah focuses in The Disappearance of the Universe on the 22 sayings which she feels are the most readily accessible for a modern Western reader. Next, by publishing the collection of 70/71 in Your Immortal Reality, we have a highly readable version of the collection, that we can pretty much read without hiccups, and if we take in its overall effect we can distill an image of Jesus in normal day to day interaction with people, using anything and everything as an example of what it is he's trying to tell them.

The longer I spend time with the Thomas material, the more Pursah's gospel of Thomas, as a "kernel" makes sense, because it allows a streamlined reading experience, it comes across as casual and informal, once you're used to it, and it certainly shakes you up, for Jesus keeps coming out with things that make you think twice, and that's exactly the purpose of course. Very much as Pursah says, this is not a complete presentation of the thought system of the Holy Spirit, but once you have your bearings about that even a little bit, it hangs together very well, and is certainly part of a consistent fabric.

In terms of being "in the vernacular," Pursah's recommendation to Gary makes sense, namely to avoid the name Jesus, because it has so many problematic connotations for so many people, so hence the "J" which Gary uses throughout his books. The idea is: My name is Yeshua, but you can call me "J." Doing so removes another barrier between us and him, and makes it easier to relate to him as he presents himself in the Course, as an older brother, who just happens to know the way home, which we have lost. Therefore it just makes sens to ask him for help, instead of trying to play Baron von Münchhausen, and try to pull ourselves out of the mud by our own hair. The following paragraph from the Course is always a good reminder, and it falls completely in line with the casual nature of the Thomas gospel, albeit that the Course's language is a bit more formal, but it does not leave a lot of wiggle room, for the Course is what the Thomas gospel isn't--a full exposition of the thought system:

Awe should be reserved for revelation, to which it is perfectly and correctly applicable. It is not appropriate for miracles because a state of awe is worshipful, implying that one of a lesser order stands before his Creator. You are a perfect creation, and should experience awe only in the Presence of the Creator of perfection. The miracle is therefore a sign of love among equals. 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-1.2.3)

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.

Thought Experiment with Thomas

While on the one hand the Thomas gospel is simply an odd collection of sayings of Jesus, and hardly a complete presentation of his teachings, it is important to realize that it is truly the most complete document we have before Jesus was posthumously remolded into a Christian by the diligent efforts of Paul, Peter and the gang. It just turns out that our whole understanding of the situation is so molded by the mythologizing of Christianity that has indoctrinated us all with its version of the facts. In Gary Renard's books his teachers, Arten & Pursah, also point out that the Thomas gospel was not a very complete document, mainly, as Pursah explains, because in her incarnation as Thomas she was ultimately decapitated, and never had the opportunity to add certain thing she might have wanted to add, leaving the book somewhat unfinished.

However because the Thomas sayings predate the canonical gospels, and most particularly Paul whose theological veneer has been applied to all of the New Testament, there is reason to try and focus on the Thomas sayings in isolation, and if you're comfortable with the selection of 70/71 sayings which Pursah presents, as I am, then I would suggest you stick to that, because this selection eliminates numerous ambiguities which otherwise spoil the soup. You have now just eliminated all of the theology of Christianity, and so as a pure thought experiment it is now worthwhile to try to understand what Jesus is saying within just the context of those 70 sayings, for in doing so, you will come as close as you could to hearing him without any addition of extraneous stuff that came later.

As a young man I thought I would get to this point by learning Aramaic, Coptic, etc., until I suddenly knew intuitively that if Jesus was indeed who I deep down knew he was, then also he could bloody well speak to me in my own language, and I should not have to learn some abstruse language to be able to understand him better. The way I look at it today, that was truly the Voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus if you will, speaking to me--it was an inspired thought. Since then--having once and for all seen the fallacy--I gave up my efforts at that kind of scholarship, although I'm still happy that I can at least read my New Testament in Greek.

What I would like to suggest here then, as an ongoing thought experiment, is to read the Thomas sayings purely in the context of that collection itself, and stopping yourself as much as possible from pulling in the later Christian theology, and try to add essentially nothing to them. Just let them speak for themselves. By the end of this exercise it will be thoroughly clear to you that Jesus was not a Christian, because very simply Christianity had not been invented yet. So he never had a chance to go to catechism class either, for those had not been invented yet either. This, in my view, is the sort of hidden invitation which the Thomas gospel extends to you, its reader. Try it, you might like it!

Thomas Logion 34

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

This quote of course is well familiar as it is quoted in Mt 15:14 and Lk 6:39 in the canonical tradition. However, the way it is construed in the canonical tradition as part of a story always creates a bias towards a certain way of reading it, which is absent in the Thomas material, where you're just looking at the stark statement. It may then be worthwhile to look at these statements within the context of the Thomas tradition itself, before they were woven into anything else. I would like to periodically consider the Thomas sayings here, not primarily as I do in the book, in the context of DU and ACIM, but first by relying primarily on the Thomas tradition proper, and more specifically Pursah's rendering of it, since I'm totally operating on the assumption that she effectively separated the chaff from the wheat.

The immediate and obvious associations are then that a blind person is someone who does not see, and who should therefore not be leading anyone else. And the obvious association with the second clause is that falling into a hole prevents you from getting where you were going. Thus the image is simply one of getting lost on our way by picking the wrong guide, in this case our blind eyes.

Within the context of the Thomas gospel itself, it is pretty evident that Jesus himself, in the way he speaks to us, at least exemplifies someone who does see. Starting in Logion 3 and in many other instances, Jesus points out things to us, his readers, his audience, which make it evident that he sees and we don't, but we could learn from him. So when we are looking to pick a guide on our journey who is not blind, definitely he should be our first pick. In Logion 3 he points out that Rather, God's Divine Rule is within you and you are everywhere. Evidently this means he is pointing out something to us that we currently do not see, and this is why we're listening to him in the first place. So in a way Logion 34 is a strong hint that we might try Jesus for our guide, because of his evident qualifications as "seeing" in this sense and not being "blind." Other similar implications can be found e.g. in Logion 5, Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. Again, this also implies that Jesus knows what is in front of his face, and nothing is hidden to him, which he can tell is not the case with us, and we need help, and so he is telling us how to go about learning to see. In the present saying Jesus is gently advocating his services as a guide, over our various ego-friends who are stumbling around in the dark like we are, and under whose guidance we would fall into a hole. In terms of the Course this means choosing the Holy Relationship over the special relationship.

And we all know which hole he is talking about, for the hole is hollow, it is the ego's world of scarcity and lack, which we keep falling into until we realize as Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford did at that historical moment which preceded the dictation of A Course In Miracles, when they wondered together that "There must be another way." Falling into a hole, in that sense is an image similar to wandering around in the desert (dry, barren), and never making it to the promised land, and it symbolizes the condition of the ego, which always again offers us to gain the world but lose our soul.

The Invasion of Holland

The funny thing is that I have a sort of a childish interest in achieving a Dutch edition of my own book, and the notion of becoming my own translator is a hoot and a half. The whole idea began to become serious a few years ago when I took over the translation of Gary Renard's 2nd book, Your Immortal Reality (YIR for friends), into Dutch in mid stream, because the translation was in trouble. The process got under way when the Dutch translators at the time asked me to translate a few pages of my material which Gary quoted in the seventh chapter of that book, and I ended up besides translating those pages, also looking at the Thomas sayings, and then ultimately beginning corrections of the first six chapters. Eventually I took over the entire translation, and the book did OK.

In the aftermath of all this I checked up on the first book, The Disappearance of the Universe, (DU for short), and found that besides some 5, 6, 7 issues on every page, about once every other page Gary literally said literally the opposite in Dutch of what he said in English, so there was no doubt in my mind that the book had to be translated all over again. It was loosely agreed with the publisher at the time that for various reasons the best time to do this would be in the run-up to the third book, which is now due out in the spring. So this week I finally delivered the new Dutch translation to the publishers, which ended about four months of concentrated effort and ridiculous schedules. Meanwhile some reviews of the 2nd book were appearing in a newsletter, and it became clear they skipped reviewing the first book because it was more or less unreadable in Dutch, but they liked the 2nd book. I had also become acutely aware that translating my own book into Dutch would be nearly pointless as long as Gary's major book was in this bad shape, to the point that he was constantly contradicting himself in Dutch, while in English the book was crystal clear and logical. This situation is now on its way to being mended so that the first book will probably appear in a new edition in the spring, followed within the month by the third book, which is due to appear in English in March, and should appear in Dutch in about April. So my fervent hope is that it will work out more or less like the Tylenol scandal, leading to a greater success, triggered by the fix-up.

In any case, the translation process was something else again, and presented a million forgiveness opportunities for Annelies Ekeler--the proofreader-- and myself. Very frequently (but of course-miracles are natural) we experienced a profound synchronicity between issues we were going through and the subject matter we were working on. We had an absolute ball with it in the end, and I would not want to have missed the experience but the misunderstandings were frequently hilarious, including one morning when we started again to work on the translation via Skype, beginning with some private conversation, and then without transition I had proposed the first sentence that said something about the previous visits of Arten and Pursah, Gary's ascended master-visitors. For me this was simply the most effective way to switch from our conversation into work, but Annelies did not make the transition from personal conversation to work conversation with me, and she misconscrewed it (to borrow a phrase) badly and thought I was claiming that Arten and Pursah had visited me 5 times and she was shocked that I hadn't told her about it. Funnily enough, in a way I think this is the whole point of the book, namely that really Gary shares his life with the reader in such a way that vicariously through him we get to experience a lot of things that can be very helpful to each of us. It is all about the reader identifying with Gary, and so to open himself up to a new experience, which may not have the same physical form in our own lives, but which can be very empowering and eye opening. After all, these teachings are really radical, and the tie-in between the Thomas gospel, which so much seemed to be coming out of left field when first it was looked at through Christian eyes, is now increasingly beginning to make sense, and it is really Gary's work where the foundation for this connection was laid. The way we look at the Thomas gospel will never be the same. The first ever translation of Thomas which I read was by Prof. Gilles Quispel, in the sixties. He died not too long ago, and by now I've heard rumors that a daughter of his in fact has become a student of A Course In Miracles. He reported this in his last interview on Dutch television, and that would not at all be surprising. The edition of the Thomas gospel which Pursah introduced through Your Immortal Reality truly has that quality of freshness which makes the reader feel like being spoken to directly, and that is what it's all about.