Jesus' Twin E-Book

James Heisig

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 290

Beschreibung

In Jesus' Twin, a scholar shares his personal reflections into the Gospel of Thomas offering a learned, accessible introduction as well as inspiring insights into these ancient texts that have long stirred curiosity and inquiry. James Heisig, who has read and studied the texts throughout his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of religions, shows that the reasons for excluding the Gospel of Thomas from the Christian tradition are largely meaningless for us today. After more than half a century of concerted dialogue with other traditions, we are in a better position to recognize that not every alter Jesus is a Jesus alias. At the same time, attention to the spiritual demands being made on Christianity by our present age helps draw us more deeply into the text itself and control the tendency to immunize ourselves against its discomforts, whether through the distractions of scholarly disputation or the preoccupation with preserving orthodoxy.

Leseprobe

Jesus’

Twin

A Dialogue WITHTHE Gospel of Thomas

JAMES W. HEISIG

A Crossroad BookThe Crossroad Publishing Companywww.crossroadpublishing.com

Original title: El gemelo de Jesús: Un alumbramiento al budismo

The Crossroad Publishing Company

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© 2015 by James W. Heisig

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ISBN: 9780824520311

EISBN: 9780824520724

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Book design by: James W. Heisig

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Printed in the United States of America 2015

CONTENTS

Preface

PROFANUM

Studying the text

FANUM

Dialoguing with the text

SAECULUM

Placing the text

Bibliography

Text of the Gospel of Thomas

Preface

THE FIRST TIME I came upon the Gospel of Thomas, over twenty years ago in the course of preparing a graduate seminar on hermetic writings, I knew at once I was in the presence of something extraordinary. I collected what material I could on the text in order to familiarize myself with the current state of scholarship, and then set out to read it, line by line, with my students. Perhaps because of the year we had given to studying reading Manichean, Mandaean, Valentinian texts, perhaps because many of them had been raised in Buddhist families, perhaps even because of their native Japanese religious sensitivities—for whatever reason, they felt a spontaneous sympathy for this collection of “secret sayings” of Jesus.

A year later I had the occasion to read the text with a group of persons from the general public, only one of whom was Christian. Once again, their enthusiasm for the text surprised me. What we found together in the text made me question the dominant view of scholars that Thomas stood on the gnostic foundations of a dualism between good and evil, a rejection of the body as inherently corrupting, and a commitment to establishing a community of elite enlightened ones. The little that existed in Japanese on the subject followed this same line of thought. Unhappy with what I had read, I set to writing a lengthy essay trying to show that not only did Thomas not share in this gnostic worldview, it actually advanced a restoration of the senses as an integral part of self-understanding.

Ten years passed before I took up the Gospel again with a new group of students. In the course of our discussions it became clear that there was much more to the text than I had earlier thought. Unhappy with what I had written, I set out to collect a more extensive library of materials and to catch up with scholarly advances in the field. As enlightening as all this was, I found myself once more unhappy with what I was reading and therefore I decided to write an extensive commentary of my own. The results are the little book you now have in your hands.

I am convinced, as these pages will show, that the reasons for excluding the Gospel of Thomas from the Christian tradition are largely meaningless for us today. After more than half a century of concerted dialogue with other traditions, we are in a better position to recognize that not every alter Jesus is a Jesus alius. At the same time, attention to the spiritual demands being made on Christianity by our present age helps draw us more deeply into the text itself and control the tendency to immunize ourselves against its discomforts, whether through the distractions of scholarly disputation or the preoccupation with preserving orthodoxy.

I am grateful to Dean Victor Martínez and Professor Gabriel Suárez for arranging an invitation to conduct an open seminar in the theological faculty of the Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, during which I used the text as the background to a comparison between Christian mystical thought and Buddhist ideas of the awakened self. These lectures formed the basis of the original book El gemelo de Jesús (Barcelona: Herder Editorial, 2006), of which this is the English translation with only minor changes.

My special thanks go to Gustavo Castaño for inviting me to live in his house, where I found the perfect blend of solitude and companionship to complete this book; and to the staff of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture for their comments and suggestions.

Nagoya, Japan

1 October 2006

Profanum

Studying the text

AS CHILDREN of our times, we need to take care not to rush into the sacred precincts, the fanum, of the text of the Gospel of Thomas without first taking into consideration its place in the outer precincts of current scholarship, the profanum of the text. Without it, we risk the sacrilege of reading too much into it and taking too little out of it—in other words, of reducing it to a fashion event that glitters in the imagination for a moment only to be replaced by something more novel. The sheer volume of historical research compiled on the text over the past forty-five years and the fervor of academic debate that has surrounded it resist easy summary. Nearly everything that follows needs some qualification, even as the views I have chosen to ignore in most cases merit the courtesy of more detailed argument than I shall supply. My aim is simpler: to frame the range of questions that occupy scholars concerning the history and composition of the text, and in this way to clarify the standpoint from which I will attempt to read it. Only when that reading has been completed will we be in a position to ask the question that these preliminary remarks are bound to provoke again and again, namely, where to place the Gospel of Thomas in the Christian tradition and in the wider religious inheritance of humanity.

A VOICE FROM OUTSIDE THE TRADITION

The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is unlike any other in Christian scriptures or theology. Initial speculations after the rediscovery and publication of the text in 1959 confirmed the criticisms that had circulated already from the third century, identifying him as little more than a mouthpiece for gnostic Christianity. As further study began to question the gnostic character of the Gospel, voices on the fringe of the scholarly activity stepped up to suggest the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas was more like a Hindu or Buddhist sage, a Sufi master, or even a Cabbalist.1 The dust his figure has kicked up in the Christian world has yet to settle,2 but one thing is already clear: there is no easy way to graft it on to any of the variety of images of Jesus that have dominated Christian tradition down the centuries.

The blend of mythic and historical details about the life and death of Jesus recorded in the Apostolic Creed of the second century3—and all traces of the metaphysical language added to the Nicene Creed in the fourth century—are missing from the Gospel of Thomas, as is any reference to his baptism, temptation, and healings found in the four canonical gospels. There are no evil spirits menacing humanity and no demons to be cast out; there is not so much as a heaven and a hell. In fact, Jesus is not even a teacher of supernatural verities in the sense that the four gospels present him.4 His is more the voice of an oracle than that of a preacher of selfless love and care for the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the outcast. His sayings offer no divine truths, make no prophecies, construct no philosophical arguments, and solicit no disciples. He is not presented as a redeemer or justifier of sinful humanity. No mention is made of his death, let alone of a resurrection or ascension. There is no hint of an impending apocalypse or of a return to judge the world in the final days. In effect, the historical person of Jesus is all but transparent to the reader of the text, as if to allow the words, the words of the “living Jesus,” to resound with greater clarity.

The image of the human condition we meet in the Gospel of Thomas is also a radical departure from the scriptural and theological tradition as Christians have known it. If the language of redemption is absent, it is because human beings are not seen as born into a state of sinful disobedience which only an otherworldly divinity can rectify, but as suffering from a darkened awareness, a fundamental failure of insight into what it is that lies asleep in the recesses of their own nature.5 There is no personal relationship of the individual with God, and indeed the idea of a transcendent creator who rules a world beyond where the rewards of heaven or the punishments of hell await us is altogether foreign to the spirit of the text.

All of this would appear to nail shut the case for rejection of the text as non-Christian. But when one begins to look at what the text actually says and to reconstruct the history of its composition, the grounds for dismissing it are less sure.

The first thing one notices skimming through Thomas is that it is strangely familiar. In fact, all but 20 of its 114 sayings include sentences and phrases that have parallels in the canonically accepted New Testament.6 True, the sayings seem to be collected haphazardly with no obvious story line, but this raises the question of whether we might not have in Thomas a more faithful record of things said than we find in the canonical gospels where Jesus’ teachings are rearranged into deliberately constructed “histories.” Matters are not quite so simple, but at least the question leads us in the right direction by suggesting that Thomas is not a mere anthology of sayings drawn from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but represents a distinct tradition all its own. Although still resisted by some New Testament exegetes, this idea has in fact come to be widely accepted today among historians of early Christianity.7

The Gospel of Thomas is not the only record of sayings about Jesus surmised to have been in circulation in the generations following his death. Luke himself cites one such saying that was not included in his gospel.8 The most important of these collections has been referred to simply as Q (for the German Quelle or “source”). Its existence as a background source for the canonical gospels is generally accepted among scholars of the New Testament, even though no actual text or even reference to it has ever been discovered. And this is only one of the numerous such anthologies of sayings attributed to Jesus that the historical records of the day seem to have taken for common knowledge.

The practice of using and recording disconnected “sayings” was hardly unique to the early Christian community. It is common throughout the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman world and can be traced back as far as the second and third millennia bce in the ancient “Wisdom literature” of Egypt and the Middle East. Some of the wisdom is self-evident, some of it a challenge to what is taken for self-evident, but all of it is accessible as reflection on ordinary experience. We see examples of the genre in the biblical books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach. Moreover, at the time and place that Jesus preached, the sayings of the Cynics or “dog philosophers”—the nickname given to the followers of Diogenes of Sinopes (c. 400–325 bce) whose “useful maxims” or chreiai were used to shake people out of their conventional ideas and to offer an alternative way of thinking—were circulating widely.9

The Gospel of Thomas is much closer in genre to collections of such sayings than it is to the narrative form the New Testament gospels adopted to locate the words of Jesus. By the end of the first century the utility of these collections for established communities of Christians began to diminish, even as the biographical gospels continued to grow in importance. By the middle of the second century Wisdom literature itself had become something of an “anachronism.”10 And so it was that the tradition of collecting sayings came to be associated primarily with itinerant preachers and with groups of Christians who recast them in the form of dialogues between Jesus and his disciples that favored an emerging trend of Christian thought that we have come to know under the generic name of “gnosticism.”11 Leaving aside for the moment just where Thomas fits into this picture, it is enough to note that the blend of aphorisms, proverbs, parables, and cryptic sayings found in its dialogues is nowhere interrupted by interpretative glosses or allegorical readings of the sort we find in the canonical gospels. The words are simply left to speak for themselves, as if they had come directly from the mouth of Jesus.

THE MANUSCRIPTS

As is the case with other collections of sayings current before and after the composition of the canonical gospels, in all likelihood many of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas were transmitted orally before they came to be transcribed.12 Once in written form they continued to be passed around from hand to hand and to undergo adjustments according to the needs of those who used them and the peculiarities of the languages into which they were translated. Moreover, since these adjustments were going on at the same time as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were taking shape, it is hard to imagine that these compositions had no effect at all on Thomas—or that Thomas had no effect on them. Aside from the ever-present possibility of simple scribal error, we have also to take into account the fact that “copying” and “translating” meant something quite different in an age where oral tradition was alive and well from one where it had died the death of distrust and succumbed to the regency of the written word. For one thing, a text used for itinerant preaching, as Thomas was during the time it was taking shape, would naturally be rearranged or reworded to create word-associations and keywords that would facilitate memorization.13 For another, even with a text before them, scribes would not slavishly reproduce or translate each word or phrase. They had their own memories, their own familiarity with other texts, and some sense of what the intended audience expected of them. Today, even with the full kit of scholarly apparatus at one’s disposal, separating a simple slip of the pen from a deliberate redaction is no easy matter, and it gets all the more difficult the further a text has traveled across time and space. Nothing the early Christians wrote about Jesus is exempt from this process. (For example, by the year 300 there may have been as many as five distinct versions of the Gospel of Mark being passed around in Christian communities.) Little wonder that historians shudder at attempts to elevate particular texts or parts of texts above the conditions of their birth.

In the case of the Gospel of Thomas the only extensive records of the process are a fragmentary set of papyri written in Greek and a complete text of the Gospel written in Coptic, each with its own story to tell.

The Greek manuscript is the older of the two, dating from around the end of the second century, but the text itself is considerably older, at least as old as the synoptic gospels. There is nothing particularly difficult about concluding that an earlier version existed, since the gospel is mentioned by name in written records predating the fragments that remain with us today. When it comes to deciding just when to date it, however, there is considerable divergence among those familiar with the literary styles and languages of the century that followed the death of Jesus. The general consensus is that one or the other Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas was known to the authors of the canonical gospels, and that its sayings “derive from a stage of the developing sayings tradition that is more original than Q.”14 In this sense they bring us back to the earliest stages of memories about what Jesus actually said. Not that the sayings recorded were intended as an objective reproduction of Jesus’ sayings, only that their selection was made at a time less removed from the historical Jesus then the canonical gospels. More precision than that, at least for now, is conjecture.15

Without discounting the possibility of an earlier Greek version compiled in Jerusalem by communities associated with the apostle James (known as the brother of Jesus and hence of Thomas also),16 scholarly opinion is converging on the view that the most likely place for the composition of the Greek text that we now have was in the western Syrian city of Antioch, which Paul had used as a base for his journeys.17 The Hellenic influence was strong there, making Greek translations both possible and necessary for revering the memory of Jesus. The Christian presence in Antioch predates Paul’s arrival—in fact, it is thought to be the first place that communities referred to themselves as “Christians”—and this was to prove a source of conflict on questions of doctrine and practice. It was there that the Gospel of Matthew, to which the Gospel of Thomas has more parallels than to any of the other gospels, was composed.

When we consider the basic structural divergence of the two texts, and the radically distinct images of Jesus that result, we are obliged yet again to recognize that there was no such thing as Christianity but rather a plurality of Christianities separated by differences every bit as marked as their similarities. Given the varieties of language, intellectual environment, religious history, liturgical form, community organization, leadership, and theological orientation in which the sayings of Jesus were mirrored like so many colored stones tumbling around in a kaleidoscope, it is not surprising that there was so little uniformity. As obvious as this fact now looks to historians of Christianity, equally obvious is the way in which this plurality would come to be overshadowed by the uniformity imposed by a later age.18

All of this bears on the Gospel of Thomas. The written materials available today point us back to other texts and oral traditions where we simply cannot go. The fact that fragments of the Greek copy were in hand fifty years before they were identified as belonging to the Gospel of Thomas is some indication of just how “lost” this gospel was. In 1897 and 1903 a rubbish heap in an archaeological excavation on the site of an ancient library at Oxyrhynchus (about 160 kilometers southwest of Cairo, near a branch of the Nile at present-day Bahnasa, Egypt) turned up three papyri with sayings of Jesus that did not belong to any of the known gospels. Although the fragments were published soon after their discovery and critical reconstruction of the lacunae in them was attempted, there was no agreement on what fuller text they belonged to since they did not bear a title.19 The transcription was dated around the year 200. The assumption at the time was that this was not the first time that Syrian and Egyptian scribes had copied— and altered—the text, but it was not until the discovery of the later Coptic translation that the hypothesis of an original Greek composition in circulation already around the latter part of the first century, prior to the authorship of the canonical gospels, could be substantiated. The Coptic translation, which has twenty sayings overlapping with the Oxyrhynchus text,20 not only allowed that text to be clearly identified, but it also provided a touchstone for quotations and allusions to the Gospel of Thomas scattered throughout the writings of early historians and church fathers, which in turn provided evidence of other variants of the text since lost.

In late 1945, not far from the city of Nag Hammadi on a cliff overlooking the Nile in upper Egypt, a group of peasants happened across a sealed jar that contained the thirteen papyrus codices that have come to be known as the Nag Hammadi library.21 The manuscripts were all written in Coptic, a late Egyptian language with a written form based on the Greek alphabet and used primarily as a means to translate texts from Greek into intelligible Egyptian.22 Among them was a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Preserving texts in this way was a common practice up and down the Nile, but evidence suggests that this jar was deliberately hidden.

The origins of this Coptic translation of the Gospel of Thomas, whose codex is dated around 340, or a full century and a half later than the Oxyrhynchus papyri, are unknown. What is known is that although the entire Nag Hammadi collection represents translations of Greek texts spanning a period of some five hundred years, the translations into Coptic (actually two Coptic dialects) were produced in a wide area of Egypt over the course of a century and more. The extant manuscripts show the work of numerous hands.

The circumstances of the transcription of the Gospel and the reason for hiding it, together with other materials, are a matter of some speculation. The proximity of Nag Hammadi to Chenoboskion, the native village of Pachomius, founder of the first Christian monastery in the year 320, led to wildly different theories, from the presence of a secret sect within the monastery to the deliberate compilation of the texts as a way to become familiar with and defeat heresies. More studied scholarship suggests that both of these extremes are wrong. The care with which the copies were made suggests a reverence for the content inconsistent with the idea that they were treated as simple heresy.23 At the same time, the monastic community appears to have been far more tolerant of the religious diversity than the rigid orthodox thinkers of the age and less hasty at drawing a line in the sand between true and false doctrine.24 Indeed the monks seem to have been interested in currents of religious thought which both long antedated the rise of gnosticism and whose echoes can also be found in others of the Nag Hammadi texts.

This brings us to the thorniest of questions surrounding the work: the Thomas Christians and their ties to gnostic thought.

THOMAS CHRISTIANS ANDTHE GNOSTIC CONNECTION

Aside from the general currency that the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas might have enjoyed among the early Christian communities, it has been natural to suppose that, like each of the synoptic gospels, the text would have been particularly important in defining the identity of Christians who honored the memory of the apostle Thomas in a special way, such as the Christian community in Eastern Syria did.25 It was in this region that he was given the distinctive name of Judas Thomas, occasionally with the addition of Didymus, the Greek translation of the Aramaic nickname of “Thomas” (meaning “the twin”). The suggestion has been made, moreover, that the text was read and interpreted in a liturgical setting.26 In recent years, however, a carefully argued case has been made that the “Thomas Christians” were not organized in established communities but were a widely dispersed group of radical itinerants, men and women,27 with little or no structure. These wanderers would visit established Christian communities to preach their message of uncompromising homelessness and in turn would receive support from them in the form of temporary lodgings, food, and clothing. The idea is supported not only by the data that has been gathered on an early “Jesus movement” as it spread from Palestine eastwards but also by internal evidence in the text of the Gospel of Thomas itself.28

As the settled Christian communities grew more confident and came to rely more and more on the canonical gospels, the conflict with the radical element intensified, leading to the isolation of Thomas Christianity and eventually its demise. The Gospel of Thomas is the best proof we have of the existence of such a movement. Of itself, of course, this does not refute the possibility that established communities used the text in other ways. It seem unreasonable to suppose that they would accept the Gospel preached by the itinerants who happened into their midst and then set the text aside until the next visit. It is no less unlikely that the itinerants themselves used it only to preach to others, without employing it ritually among themselves or as a tool of instruction for new members. In any case, the message of Thomas is wider and deeper than the lifestyle of such a movement.29

We cannot fail to mention that the term “Thomas Christians” itself is more commonly associated with another tradition that has little or nothing to do with the Gospel of Thomas, namely, the belief that Thomas preached the Christian gospel in India. Allusions scattered among early church historians to the mission of Thomas identify him alternatively as the apostle to the Kingdom of the Parthians (present-day Iran) and to India. To this day Thomas is venerated in India at the founder of Christianity there. The legend that has Jesus himself spending time in India prior to his rather late public life in Palestine and while still a member of the Essene community around the Dead Sea has been around from at least the sixth century. He is said to have traveled to India at the age of thirteen, where he lived among the Buddhists for six years. Another variant has him escaping crucifixion alive and heading east, where he met Paul, who had been dispatched to bring him back for a second crucifixion. After being nursed back to health, Jesus continued on to India, where Thomas had gone on ahead, there to spend the rest of his days until passing away in Kasmir.30 Although the special relationship of the “Thomas Christians” with the Buddhists of south India is well known, and at least some of the literature surrounding the legend is reputable, the kernel of truth to the stories of Thomas and Jesus in India—if indeed there is one—has eluded demonstration.31

The cache of manuscripts among which the Gospel of Thomas was found provide a rich mine of information about the mysterious movement known as “gnosticism” that the early church fathers had worked so hard to expunge from Christian identity. Much of the history of gnosticism has had to be rewritten since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, and indeed it is still being written. For those who viewed “gnostic” tendencies as inimical to the faith, the term was synonymous with simple heresy. Not a few scholars of the Nag Hammadi library who came to feel a certain sympathy to gnostic ideas have nevertheless accepted their heterodoxy as a matter of course.32 Not only has this been unfair to the aims of the texts, it overlooks the role that this tradition played in syncretizing Christianity into a doctrinal tradition, even if the latter would eventually exclude the former from the confines of orthodoxy.

The fact is, much first-century religious thought was gnostic, and the appearance of Jesus no doubt had an influence on it and it did not simply repudiate it. It was only in later generations that the whole of gnosticism was rendered suspect by a number of church fathers who “systematized opponents and forced them to define themselves vis-à-vis the tradition of the theologians’ choice.”33 Not that there were not elements in gnosticism that could not be perceived as working against what Jesus had taught, but the Christians were not the only ones wary of certain aspects of gnosticism. The Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, for example and for quite other motives, was also critical of its excesses. Given the plurality of forms of gnosticism and a malleability that at least during its formative years it shared with early Christian thought,34 the jostle with gnostic thought is very different from the wholesale condemnation of later-day theology.

It is therefore altogether mistaken to dismiss the gnostic tendencies of the sayings of Thomas as a later accretion to an originally “pure” gospel.35 Rather, they represent a more primitive stratum of the way the sayings of Jesus were remembered and transmitted than the synoptic gospels—or even Q36—which introduced apocalyptic language in order to rein in those tendencies. Not only is there no clear-cut line between early Christianity and the birth of gnosticism, but, as the text will demonstrate again and again, Thomas itself represents a radical departure from the direction in which gnostic thought was headed.37

In very rough profile, gnostic ideas tended to cluster about one or the other, or both, of two central ideas: that all of creation is flawed from the start, and that there is something uncreated in the human spirit that connects us to a pristine reality prior to the world as we know it. Creation is often, though not always, viewed as the work of an errant demiurge masquerading as the transcendent God. This idea of a rebellious emanation from the true God spawned an elaborate cosmology of layers of “heavens,” more or less structured according to the Middle Eastern astrology of the day. At times gnostic thought fed resentment against the idea of the Jews as a “chosen race” by identifying the culprit responsible for the created world as the Yahweh of the Old Testament. More commonly it stopped at a simple repudiation of the body and its functions as an obstacle to recognition of the truth about ourselves and our world. So overpowering was the dominion of the flesh that one could rise above it only through repeated incarnations.38 Knowledge of the truth (gnosis) was thought to liberate the “unborn” light imprisoned in the darkness of matter but accessible in the inner recesses of our humanity, which is often, but again not always, viewed as an eternal, androgynous Adam.

The development of this cosmic dualism of good and evil, of spirit against flesh,39 is absent in the Gospel of Thomas, where evil is seen as a function of ignorance rather than of some rebellion that occurred in the heavenly court, resulting in the creation of the world and the need for a redeemer to be sent to restore it.40 In that sense, if Thomas can be called “gnostic,” it is only in a drastically demythified form.41 Nevertheless, it would come to be saddled with the entire trappings of gnostic systems altogether alien to its intentions. Irenaeus, writing around 180, does not mention the Gospel of Thomas by name, but it is not impossible he intended to include it in a general condemnation issued against “secret writings” about Jesus. He had little patience for collections of sayings that menaced the canon of four gospels he was interested in promoting. He writes of their compilers:

They read from unwritten sayings and, as the saying goes, undertake to weave ropes from sand; they transfer materials and reshape them and, by making one thing out of another, they lead many astray by the evilly devised fantasy of their compilations of the Lord’s words.42

The earliest clear reference to the Gospel of Thomas appears around 230 in a text of Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome, who cites a passage from the Gospel whose wording is similar to that used by a gnostic sect known as the Naassenes.43 Like his contemporary Origen, who condemned the text by name as apocryphal, Hippolytus rejected all but the four gospels we now recognize as canonical. By the early fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea explicitly condemned the text, claiming heretics had wrongly attributed it to the apostle Thomas. Soon thereafter Cyril of Jerusalem claimed that it had been written by wicked followers of Manicheanism, one of the two principal forms of full-blown gnosticism stemming from the early third century.44 This string of condemnations of the Gospel of Thomas, inspired in large part by the attempt to organize the Christian community and to eliminate sectarian movements viewed as disruptive of the harmony of the whole, culminated in 367 with the Easter letter of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, demanding that the monks in Egypt who had carefully preserved the secret texts in their libraries commit everything not certified as canonical to flames. In all likelihood it was these monks, perhaps from the monastery of Pachomius, that gathered a cache of these books and hid them in a six-foot jar in the cliffs flanking the Nile where they would remain hidden for nearly sixteen centuries.

If the gnostic tinge in Thomas (and probably in Q as well) was all but entirely erased from the synoptic gospels in favor of a messianic theology focused on death and resurrection and better suited to the establishment of a unique Christian identity, the depiction of Peter and Matthew in Thomas as having failed to understand the words of the living Jesus probably indicates a complementary disregard for the ideological viewpoints they represent as well as for the institutional stability of the church. The author of the Gospel of John takes a more direct approach in its rejection of the Gospel of Thomas.45 In organizing his account around the passion narrative, he rejects the attempts of Mark—and of the variations of Matthew and Luke—to portray Jesus as establishing a community with authoritative leadership.46 John’s Jesus addresses himself to everyone, in language that is alternately clear and enigmatic. In this latter respect, he is of one mind with Thomas. But there the similarity stops. The apostle Thomas (who may or may not have been the brother or even twin brother of Jesus47), and by obvious association anyone who subscribed to the sayings collected in the Gospel that bore his name, is depicted as a “doubter” who refused to believe what had to be seen (Jn 20:29).48 The description is not inaccurate. For Thomas belief is not a substitute for wishing to see what cannot be seen but a consequence of seeing as much as we can of what there is to see.

The more serious problem John has with Thomas is a theological one.49 In a sense it has to do with a different way of appropriating gnostic ideas into Christian thought, which opened the Gospel of John and those who accepted it to the same charges of blasphemy that it had leveled against Thomas