Gospel of Thomas

I picked up an old copy of Harper’s Magazine from Book Sale in Ali Mall because of the front cover and main article: Jesus Without the Miracles. The article by a lapsed Baptist and son of a minister, Erik Reese, discusses the parallelisms between Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the so-called Gospel of Thomas.

This revolutionary President of the US, Thomas Jefferson had at one time excised and redacted the Bible to suit his own tastes, cutting out the most important events, namely the virgin birth, the miracles and finally the resurrection. This president firmly believed that the authentic teachings of Christ were hi-jacked by orthodox Christianity, and that by stripping out the canonical gospels’ claim that Jesus was the divine Son of God (and the subsequent miracles that followed were simply invented to prove it), Jefferson thought what remained show the true value of Jesus’ teachings: as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals ever offered to man”.

Of course, this raises a lot of eyebrows. This cut-and-paste episode is highly lamentable and questionable. If he believed the miracles and other important events were invented, what is stopping him from believing the rest of the Scripture were just a figment of some writer’s imagination as well?

The life of Jesus was certainly not important to him which he believed were fantastic, unbelievable stories spun by the Gospel authors (he conveniently forgot that Matthew, Luke, Mark and John were Christ’s apostles). For Jefferson only the teachings mattered. In fact, he reduced the New Testament to a 17th century version of the Chicken Soup for the Soul or any of Deepak Chopra’s self-actualization books.

He railed against the obvious consequence of putting too much stress on the miracles as narrated in Matthew or Luke: people are more concerned with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus. Jefferson is ostensibly driving a wedge between two non-issues. Why should the two points be mutually exclusive? Isn’t it that believers practice the teachings of Jesus because of the promise of eternal salvation?

Sin, sacrifice and salvation—the main pillars of Christian belief—became abstract concepts. For Jefferson, his version of the Bible only serves as a morality guidebook, nothing more. The other events were simply too strange to make sense. It is easy to see that had he lived during Ireneus time he would have been branded as a heretic!

The so-called Gospel of Thomas unearthed in Egypt sometime in 1945 mirrors the points raised in the Jefferson version of the Bible—no miracles, no divinity claims, only the teachings remains—coincidentally attributed to the same name, Thomas which in Aramaic means “twin”.

This gospel however, has never been established to have been written about the same time as the four canonical gospels, but clearly existed in the 3rd century because Hippolytus denounced such a text in his Refutation of All Heresies. This one, much like the other Gnostic texts like the Judas Gospel ran afoul of the early Church bishops, especially Ireneus, bishop of Lyon.

The teachings in Thomas (not established whether this Thomas is the doubting apostle narrated in John) clearly negate the canonical four in that the Jesus portrayed here is no Saviour, not a Messiah sent to save mankind. In fact the Jesus depicted here preaches a different kind of salvation: “You can save yourself”, he seems to be saying. There was absolutely no need for him to offer himself as sacrifice to save humanity.

It is so radical it has Jesus ridiculing divine intervention and the promise of heavenly compensation for worldly injustice. Which is a complete disagreement with John’s Jesus who forgives sin and promises eternal life.

And so it is easy to believe why Ireneus and the other early Christian Fathers denounced this “heretical” texts. Jesus not a Saviour? Blasphemous!

Again the question most enthusiastic “biblical” scholars of Gnostic gospels and other ancient texts ignore: What authority does Ireneus have in determining which among the various “Gospels” competing for attention during the “formative” years of Christianity should form the canon of Christian belief?

The well-hyped Gospel of Judas feature on National Geographic failed to shed light on this important issue. It simply hypothesized that Ireneus felt compelled to compile and choose those that would make sense of the sacrifice and persecution the early Christians suffered under the Romans. It was a lamentable oversimplification. That feature conveniently ignored the important fact that Ireneus was a disciple of John the Apostle. And as such, he was among the best to confirm and authenticate which among the competing accounts circulating then held true to the teachings of Jesus.

If the Thomas Gospel was only written in the 3rd century, then much like the Judas Gospel, it’s just an imagined account of the events that happened by those who might have their own agenda to pursue and were really not there to witness it, unlike the four canonical gospel authors.

If, as Elaine Pagel argues in her book Beyond Belief, the account really belongs to the same doubting Thomas, then we now have a case of Thomas refuting Mark, Luke, Matthew and John, a discord within the apostleship.

But we have to remember that neither the authorship of the Thomas gospel has been established nor has the time of writing. So that in essence, it remains a curious footnote. Very much like the Judas gospel, the Thomas gospel is yet unable to shake the status quo or the foundations of orthodox Christianity as we know it today.