THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO APOSTLE THOMAS

Now that we have reached the Universal plane, the pinnacle or topmost area of the Mayan Calendar, the heavens, We the People have to, according to Monoimus, a Gnostic teacher, to learn to “Abandon the search for God and the creation outside yourself, by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who make everything his own and say, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn to see the sources of your sorrow, joy, love, hate… If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find God in yourself.’


And at this most critical time of our Human Evolution you and I would, whether we like it or not, encounter these sources of our sorrow, joy, love, hate right in our midst. For example, there’s so much misunderstanding generated by so much concern for finding what’s wrong (called accountability ) with the previous administration in government, feeling so righteous about ourselves as an investigating dark force, dark, because we in power have lost our own direction in the Fog that has befallen Syria. Syria is symbolic of any country in the world today where its people are in uprising and protesters are being killed by a government that is confused and severely chaotic and bizarre in its lack of discernment about the question of the duality between good and evil.


Recently, Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in the Gospel in the Gospel of Thomas although compiled circa 140, may include some traditions older than the gospels of the New Testament, ‘as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find inside a jar in an ancient cave by archeologists, tell the origins of the human race in terms very different from the usual readings of Genesis: The Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent!


Here the serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of the knowledge while “the Lord threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge (gnosis), and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it.’ Another text, mysteriously entitled the ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind,’ offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the barren one.
And many are her sons…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible…
I am the utterance of my name.

Please read and reread the above lines and find out who it is among our feminine leaders in these islands of 7,107, past and present, embody some of the above traits… not necessarily all of them which collectively represent the many diverse women of the world and in particular, our own women here and working abroad. Focus is on the one whose ‘silence is incomprehensible’ while she’s the object of ‘being honored and simultaneously scorned.’ You can easily guess who, as she is a former president of this republic, currently held in hospital arrest, charged with various plunder cases whose evidence may yet to be seen to stand in court. These different texts range in a significant diversity, then, according to my source: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, who got her doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she chaired the department of religion, now the Harrington Spear Professor of Religion at Princeton University, participating with other scholars in editing several of the texts from Nag Hammadi.


Why were these texts (ranging from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origins of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice) buried – and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents and their burial on the cliffs at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians in the middle of the second century as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. This sounds familiar as we experience a similar effect of a press or media that is evidently controlled by the current dispensation. Here, I am just reporting briefly what the scholars of the ancient texts found at the cliff at Nag Hammadi have assessed.

Elaine Pagels asks: Does not such teaching – the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord but as spiritual guide – sound more Eastern than Western? For example: the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source: Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. Because you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out … He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.’ Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the ‘living Buddha’ appropriately would say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced Gnosticism?


The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had. He points out that ‘Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christian (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the Gospel of Thomas and used such writings in South India). Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when Gnosticism flourished (A.D. 80- 200); for generations, Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note too, says Pagels, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek-speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225), knows of the Indian Brahmins – and includes their tradition as part of the heresy:

There is … among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food… They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, not like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.


Since parallel traditions may emerge in different cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both places independently, our scholars aver. What we call Eastern and Western religions, and tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated 2,000 years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning: Pagels and company look forward to the work of scholars who can study these traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be traced to Indian sources.

We find these problems familiar in our own experience. The term ‘Christianity,’ especially since the Reformation movement in England, has covered an astonishing range of groups. Those claiming to represent ‘true Christianity’ in the 21st century can range from a Catholic cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, in the Philippines, or the member of a village church on the coast of Greece. Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox in Russia agree that such diversity is a recent – and deplorable – development. According to Christian legend, the early church was different. Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simple, purer form of Christian faith.


In the apostles’ time, all members of the Christian community shared their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and worshipped together; all revered the authority of the apostles. It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.