Loading...What is the Gospel of Thomas trying to teach? In my previous post I gave a basic overview of the book; here I go into some more depth (not a huge amount) about what it’s all about, what it’s trying to teach, and whether it depended on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for its sayings.
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Has anyone developed an “interpretation” of Atonement along these lines?
God suffers when we sin.
God loves us even when we sin.
If God didn’t love us, he wouldn’t suffer
(nearly as much) when we sin
God forgives our sins because he loves us
which causes him to suffer
Jesus did not actually have to suffer and die in
order for God to forgive our sins.
But, as described above, some kind of divine
suffering was necessary in order for our
sins to be forgiven.
The crucifixion is a “myth” that expresses the
idea that God, as Jesus, must suffer in
order for God, as the Father, to forgive our
sins
This keeps God from being a monster but preserves how deeply moving it is to think that the Son of God suffered and died so our sins could be forgiven and we could saved.
I’ve never heard that line of reasoning before, but I can’t say no one has had it. There are plenty of people who have thought of the atonement as a kind of myth, though; I’m not sure how they reason backwards from that, though, to the explanation of it (as you do).
suffering is a human concept.
God is divine, Holy Spirit is divine, Jesus Christ is divine/man & divine > human.
St Paul is human, Apostles/disciples are human [Judas Iscariot?]
If Jesus died, the universe would cease! rather than a darkening & a rip of the curtain in the temple. If God truly repented or relented Gen 6:6, there would be no Genesis 8:14
and why are folks so dismissive of https://biblehub.com/john/20-22.htm Berean Standard Bible
When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
Beside the Platonic/neo platonic similarities, I find myself unable to reject what I find as conceptually thematic parallels between Vedic philosophy (such as Advaita Vedanta) and the Gospel of Thomas, particularly in terms of their non-dualistic inclinations and focus on inner spiritual realization/awareness/”gnosis”, and their emphasis on the inner spiritual journey. For me, I also find it apparent in other scriptures, such as the structure of the Apocryphon of John, which I think echoes the understanding concepts like Brahman and Atman in Vedic thought and partly its descending process. Similarly, I also think there might ge some figurative parallels between the Hindu Mandala and the symbols found in The First Book of IEOU (chapter 7).
Anyway, these perceptions, (correct or not) give me some tools and a “lens” to better comprehend some of the concepts described in the Gospel of Thomas and Gnosticism, or at least aspects of them.
Another (possibly?) observation is that some symbols found also seems to be resemblent with symbols found in diverse and also very distant cultures. Various practitioners and psychological scholars, including Carl Jung, have interpreted these as manifestations of universal,mystical experiences and/or archetypical symbols which could spring out of meditation, dreams and other “spiritual journeys”/experiences and not necessarily being products of direct cultural or philosophical exchange.
Thank you for sharing your scholarship. Much appreciated!
Bart,
Thank you for this enlightening and highly satisfying exposition on the Gospel of Thomas. For me, it is superior to what I read in the Bible. For it its worth, I am among the few who believe that it is likely that Jesus ran away from home at a young age, joined a caravan as a camel tender, went to India, and joined a Jewish settlement. Being far from Roman oppression and in a land where “life was good,” he had an opportunity to learn about other religions, especially the teachings of Buddha, some of which are echoed in the teachings of Jesus, although he clung to his Hebrew roots. He developed the belief that he was selected by God to return to Galilee and preach to the Jewish inhabitants. For me, this scenario is the most plausible explanation of how Jesus was able to preach as he did, and hold his own in discussions with the Pharisees.
Bill Steigelmann
Yup, not too many others with you on that ship!
Jesus’s moral/ethical teachings are very similar to those of the Buddha! But I don’t think that Jesus visited India.
This resonates with me. How does one follow up; how does one learn more?
You might read up on the Gospel of Thomas and GNosticism, maybe starting with Nicola Denzey Lewis’s book “Introductoin to Gnosticism” (she has an entire chapter on the writings connected with Thomas).
Yes, it’s true that “the surest indicators of reliance upon a source are detailed and extensive verbal parallels,” but that’s certainly not the only way to find dependence. Gathercole and Goodacre both argue for the dependence of Thomas on the Synoptics using different methods to make the same point, independently. Gathercole finds Thomas showing evidence of Matthean and Lukan redaction of Mark. Goodacre shows Thomas’ tendency to have clumsy editing by leaving out the middle of quotes from the Synoptics. These are more than mere coincidences. It’s seems to be causation, not mere correlation.
I wonder if we sometimes rely too much on verbal similarities to be the main indicator of dependence on sources. I once had a student copy another student’s paper replacing all the nouns and verbs with synonyms. That masked verbatim dependence, but the patterns of similarity were far more than coincidence. And it was conclusive of dependence.
I wonder if some are hesitant to consider Luke dependent on Matthew, or John dependent on the Synoptics, because the narratives tend to have far less verbal similarity like we find in Matthew’s use of Mark. But so many other similarities seem to be far more than coincidence.
Thoughts?
Yes they do. They have a lower threshold of proof than I do. The instance you cite of student papers is a good one: you had clear evidence in the grammatical structures and the consistent (and rather simple) technique of simply using synonyms. Unfortunately we have nothihg that simply with Thomas and the Synoptics or the Synoptics and John. Moreoever, your student had a reason to hide what s/he was doing. The instances of borrowing from earlier Gospels that we have show no such concerns, and had no need to have such concerns: it wasn’t cheating and there weren’t copyright laws. The very big problem that GAtherpole and Goodacre have, in my opinion, is that they are so textually/literarily based thenmselves they can’t get away from thinking that similarities are always *textual* and they seem to think that we always can find the “smoking gun” for dependence. When these author were writing there were scads of similar oral traditions floating around an lots of texts (see Luke 1:1-4). Givne that, what are the CHANCES that we have all the texts they used. Just by happenstance we have their precise sources? Really? I doubt it, and the arguments end up seeming farfetched to me.
About 20 years ago, someone who knew I was a Christian handed me Dr. Pagels’ book, the Gnostic Gospels. Reading it, I thought, “Yeah, yeah.” First trained in Lutheran schools, I had made my way through Methodism and the United Church of Christ, always claiming my right to see as the Spirit gives me to see. Eventually, I ended up at Unity, a new thought “church” which nonetheless follows Jesus. Reading the Thomas quote in your Nov. 10 blog: Jesus answers: “It will not come by expectation. They will not say, ‘Look here,’ or, ‘Look there,’ but the Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth and people do not see it” (Gosp. Thom. 113), I thought, “Yes, that’s Unity.” Some of my prior reading on the Unity tradition connects Unity’s theology to the Gnostics. Does this make sense?
Yup! A lot of more spiritual less dogmatic/doctrinal forms of Xty resonate more with texts like the Gospel of Thomas.