the gospel of Saint Thomas E-Book

anonymous

• Herausgeber: Aroha
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 250

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Gospel of Saint Thomas An ancient Gnostic text containing sayings attributed to Jesus Christ. The gospel focuses on inner knowledge and spiritual self-discovery, emphasizing that divine truth lies within each individual, challenging conventional teachings with a mystical perspective on Christ's wisdom.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Foreword by Jacob Needleman

Abbreviations

Introduction

THE TEXT OF THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

COMMENTARY

Footnotes

Bibliography

ABBREVIATIONS

I Cor, II Cor

First Corinthians, Second Corinthians

I John

First Letter of John

I Peter

First Letter of Peter

I Thess, II Thess

First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians

I Tim

First Timothy

Col

Colossians

Dan

Daniel

Deut

Deuteronomy

Eccus

Ecclesiasticus/Sirach

Eph

Ephesians

Ex

Exodus

Ezek

Ezekiel

Gal

Galatians

Gen

Genesis

Heb

Hebrews

James

Epistle of James

Jer

Jeremiah

John

The Gospel of John

Lev

Leviticus

Luke

The Gospel of Luke

Mark

The Gospel of Mark

Matt

The Gospel of Matthew

Num

Numbers

Phil

Philippians

Prov

Proverbs

Rev

Revelation

Rom

Romans

Zach

Zachariah

FOREWORD

Among all the astonishing documents accidentally—or fatefully—unearthed in 1945 near the desert village of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, the Gospel of Thomas has made the greatest impact on our understanding of Christianity. The first English rendering of this text was published in 1959 and was greeted with intense interest by scholars and theologians alike. But the impact of this document was soon felt far beyond the circles of specialists, almost as though an audible recording of the voice of Jesus had been discovered. That is to say that even across the reaches of millennial time and even through the curtain of translation from languages known to but a few, for many of us the words in this text have the power to touch an unknown part of ourselves that brings with it an undeniable recognition of truth and hope. When it was said of Jesus, by those who were at first bewildered by him, that he spoke “as one having authority,” what is surely meant is that he and his teaching authenticated itself by their power to awaken that same hidden, self-authenticating part of the human heart and mind.

Here we have the key to approaching the fundamental category that scholars and theologians have applied to this document and those like it—the technical term gnosticism. It is a word that in fact points to something of great importance to our understanding of all the spiritual traditions of the world and, as such, of great importance to our understanding of human life itself.

When scholars apply the label gnostic to the documents found at Nag Hammadi, they are generally assigning them to the current of religious doctrines and practices that flourished in the early centuries of the Christian era and were condemned as heresy in a movement spearheaded in the second century by the redoubtable bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus. The eventual result of this condemnation was the widespread suppression of these heresies and the relentless destruction of their constitutive texts. Until now, most of what was known of these teachings was based on the adversarial accounts of them provided in Irenaeus’s vastly influential work, Against the Heresies. The immense historical significance of the Nag Hammadi documents consists in the likelihood that they were buried by members of some of these communities in order to preserve them from the storm of the ecclesiastical book burning of the time. Thus, nearly two thousand years after the suppression of these so-called heresies, we now suddenly have the opportunity to look directly at aspects of their teachings instead of seeing them largely through the eyes of their enemies.

But although the texts themselves can now be directly seen for the first time in nearly two thousand years, really to see them is a task that invites us to something much more demanding and joyous than simply reading them off the pages of ancient scrolls or modern translations and interpreting them according to familiar habits of intellectual analysis.

It is not for nothing that in this document the very first words of Jesus, here called by the Aramaic name Yeshua, are these: “Whoever lives the interpretation of these words will no longer taste death.” Is this merely a figure of speech? Or do these words speak to some kind of knowledge and knowing that have an action upon the very flesh and blood of a human being, an action that is incomparably more penetrating than anything we call “knowledge” or “knowing”—including even our inspired moments of intellectual insight or passionate realization? Is there some kind of knowing that can transform our being to the point—dare we imagine—of bringing forth a life that does not die when the body dies? Such knowing as this is inseparable from the action of faith—considered not simply as a set of emotionally charged beliefs, but as a movement within the human psyche that generates a magnetic current flowing between our individual human life and the source of human life itself; and that deposits into our human life the spiritualized matter of what is called the “new Adam”; and that enables a man or woman actually to answer in an entirely new way the great cry of St. Paul: “For the good that I would, that I do not; and that which I hate, that do I,” or, in other words, to answer with the actions of love rather than with brittle promises of future virtue. Such transformational knowing actually has little or nothing to do with what we ordinarily call thought. It has to do with energy, the energy of consciousness. This energy is at the heart of what is signified by the ancient word gnosis, from which gnosticism is derived.

In applying the term gnosticism to these teachings, scholars and theologians understandably call our attention to the emphasis that most of the Nag Hammadi documents place on the role of knowledge in the religious life—in apparent contrast to the demand for faith that became the central tenet of the Church over the centuries, especially in the West. There are numerous other doctrines that are sometimes identified with gnosticism—such as its apparent metaphysical dualism and condemnation of the world. But it is the notion of gnosis as transformational knowing that is of utmost importance and that cries out for deeper inquiry in the world we now live in, a world—a civilization—which is deeply, perhaps fatally, afflicted with an ever-widening disconnect between what we know with the mind and what we know in our heart and in our instincts.

Both in our civilization and in our personal lives, the growth of knowledge far outstrips the growth of being, endlessly complicating our existence and taking away from us far more than it gives us. In relation to the advances and applications of scientific knowledge, we are like children restlessly sitting at the controls of a locomotive. Without a corresponding growth of inner, moral power, our intellectual power seems now to be carrying us toward disaster—in the form of the catastrophic destruction of the natural world, in the decay of ethical values, in the secrets of biological life falling under the sway of blind commerce or blind superstition, and above all, in the impending worldwide nuclear terror. May we not therefore say, as Plato said 2,500 years ago, that such “knowledge” as we have does not really deserve the label knowledge? Can we listen to him as he tells us that knowledge without virtue can neither bring us good nor show us truth? This is to say that such knowing as we have is not transformational; it does not elevate our level of being and it does not nourish the development of moral power.

It is only the fully developed human being, which means only the fully developed human mind in which the intuition of objective value is an essential component, that can see the world as it really is, and that, through its action upon our instincts and impulses, can lead us toward the capability to act in the service of the Good.

The present text is offered to us by Jean-Yves Leloup not so much as a commentary on these words of Jesus, but “as a meditation that arises from the tilled earth of our silence.” I take this to mean that it is through the author’s own inner opening toward the Self that his scholarly and theological skills take their ultimate direction in translating and interpreting what he rightly calls “this sublime jewel of a gospel.” In other words, there may be, and I believe there are, two kinds or levels of knowing operating in this book. On one level, the visible level of words and concepts, there are the insights and explanations that will help every serious reader think in a new way about the meaning of the teaching of Jesus, a way that does not in any way deny the greatness of Christian doctrine that has brought comfort to countless millions of men and women throughout the ages. But for Leloup, this kind of knowing about the Christian religion, precious as it is, is secondary to a deeper kind given through the grace that is the fruit of the inner work of meditation.

And what words can characterize passage to this deeper level of knowing? Leloup puts it this way: “There exists a relative consciousness formed and acquired through readings, encounters, and the thoughts of others.” And he goes on to say: “But there is also a consciousness that arises directly from knowledge of ourselves, of the ‘Living One’ within us. It is toward this consciousness, this gnosis, that Yeshua invites us in the Gospel of Thomas—not in order to become ‘good Christians,’ but to become christs—in other words, gnostics, or awakened human beings.” This deeper knowing may properly be called pure consciousness—or, perhaps more precisely, the pure energy of consciousness. It is an energy, no doubt itself existing at many levels, that can be allowed to descend into the body, heart, and mind and, through its own active force, make of us the being called anthropos, the awakened, fully human being.

This energy is not what we ordinarily call thought. But it is this energy that has the power to do what we have wrongly imagined our ordinary thought can do: It can direct all our functions, including our mental thought. This book, therefore—as is true of Jean-Yves Leloup’s presentations of the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip (which are also gnostic texts)—is in itself a step toward the work of the mind that desperately needs to be rediscovered in our era. The proper work of the mind is to function at two levels, the level of silence and the level of expression. And it is expression that is secondary—that is, truth in the form of words and formulations can come only out of silence, the state of the pure energy of consciousness anterior to its assumption of forms; words; ideas; associations; the organization of impressions, images, programs . . .

The mind alone—the mind that is not nourished by the silence of the fertile void of pure Being—as such is incapable of guiding human life. The ordinary, isolated intellect, no matter how brilliant or inspired, has not the energy to command our thoughts, words, impulses, memories and experiences in a way that conforms to truth and the Good. This, in sum, is the tragedy of our era, of our knowledge in the modern world. All that science has brought us—the phenomenal, wondrous discoveries it has brought us about life, matter and the universe—will eventually bring us nothing but destruction because we have forgotten that the mind alone cannot direct itself or the whole of ourselves. It does not have the energy for this. It is an energy that must come from another, higher level within the human psyche, a level that is experienced as silence.

Whatever we wish to call it, then—gnosticism, esotericism, mysticism, each in its authentic rather than imitative form—spiritual work has to do with energy rather than solely with what we call thought. Gnosis is a force, not just a set of ideas, symbols, or concepts. To the extent that we render our religious or moral teachings only in words, no matter how beautiful or systematic, we are bound to become the prey of academicism, dogmatism, or fanaticism. What our modern world has suffered from most of all is runaway ideology, the agitated attachment to ideas that thereby become the playthings of infrahuman energies. This is the great danger of all ideologies, whether political, religious, or academic.

“Is it possible,” Leloup asks, “to read these logia [these sayings of Yeshua] in a way that allows them to make their way into the mind and the heart of our humanity, leading us into a voyage of transformation, toward a full realization of our being?” Within this question lie both the effort and the reward, the demand and the gift, offered by this and all truly sacred writings. What would it mean to attend to our inner state of being even as we try with all our might to grasp the meaning of these sayings—alone in our room or in our exchanges with companions and colleagues or, for that matter, in our inner confrontations with all the views that we may have previously taken as the sole truth? What would it bring to us now to keep a quiet mind alongside the passionate commitment to independent thought that once brought such hope to our modern world? “It is my belief,” Leloup concludes, “that it is from this ground [of inner silence], rather than from mental agitation, that these words [of Yeshua] can bear their fruit of light.”

JACOB NEEDLEMAN,

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY,

SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY.

INTRODUCTION

THE DISCOVERY

It happened in 1945, in upper Egypt, in the area where Khenoboskion, the ancient monastic community founded by St. Pachomius, had once stood. There was nothing unusual about that particular stretch of land, near the Arab village of Nag Hammadi, and nothing unusual about the peasant digging there in search of fertilizer. It was by accident that his blade struck the treasure in the buried jar.

It was a treasure not of gold, but of words, emerging from the shroud of many centuries, written on parchment that had been slowly decaying under the sands: a gnostic library hidden in amphoras normally used to age wine. The library consisted of fifty-three parchments written in Sahidic Coptic, the last remaining language still close to the extinct ancient Egyptian pharaonic language. (The word Copt is derived from the Arabic qibt, which in turn derives from the Greek Aiguptios, Egypt.)

Among these fifty-three manuscripts, in Codex II, there is a gospel, or “good news,” attributed to Jesus’ disciple Thomas. This gospel contains no apocalyptic proclamations and no prophecies. Instead, it reveals what we have always carried within ourselves: an infinite Space, which is the same within us and without us. All that is needed is to break open the man-made jar that hides it from us.

This Gospel of Thomas contains no biography of Jesus (Yesu in Greek and Coptic, Yeshua in Aramaic), nor any account of his miracles. It is a collection of 114 sayings, called logia in Greek (singular: logion). These are said to be the naked words attributed to the Master, “the Living Jesus,” written down by Didymus Judas Thomas, the Twin. Who was the latter? Was he the “twin” (didymos in Greek, and thomas or te’oma in Aramaic) of Jesus in some sense of an alter ego or closest disciple? The sayings themselves do not elaborate on this, for they are anything but loquacious narratives. Many of them seem as terse and enigmatic as Zen koans. But if we allow them to penetrate into the ever-grinding cogs of our ordinary mental apparatus, they will sprout like living seeds and grow there—given time, they may bring the turning wheels to a full halt and a silence . . . a transformation of consciousness.

CRITICAL REACTION

This gospel has elicited a wide range of reactions from critics. For some scholars it represents one of many apocryphal writings, an item of academic interest in the study of gnostic texts. For others, it is a mere collage of the words of Jesus derived from the canonical gospels and mixed with heterodox traditions that claim to originate with Jesus. For still others, it is the closest document we have to the very source that the canonical gospels themselves drew upon, a tradition that predates them. In this view, the Gospel of Thomas is the “protogospel” that we have so long been seeking, the only one that transmits the authentic words of Jesus.

But whether we like it or not, Yeshua of Nazareth was not a writer. It is therefore impossible to speak of “the authentic words of Jesus.” Every saying of his that we possess consists of words that have been heard—words that bear the imprint of a listener whose listening may be crude or subtle. The gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Thomas, and a number of others represent at least five different ways of listening to the Word. Each also represents different ways of understanding, interpreting, and translating cultural and linguistic differences according to the quality of his own intimacy with the Master, and according to his own levels of evolution, openness, and awareness. None of these ways of listening can pretend to circumscribe the Word. Each has truth, but none contains the whole truth.

Thomas seems to have a less “Jewish” ear than does Matthew; he is less interested in stories of miracles than is Mark; and he does not share Luke’s interest in the annunciation of God’s Mercy, “even to the pagans.” What interests Thomas is the transmission of Yeshua’s teaching. Every saying received from the Master is treated as a seed, with the potential of growing a new kind of fully conscious human being. In this way, Thomas and other authors of the lineage of that “infinitely skeptical and infinitely believing” disciple see Yeshua as a gnostic, like themselves.

WAS YESHUA A GNOSTIC?

When Yeshua asks his disciples “Who am I to you?” only Thomas refuses to answer: “Master, my mouth could never utter what you are like.” It is a good answer, recalling Yeshua’s own answer of silence to Pilate’s question “What is Truth?” Perhaps we, too, would do well to keep silent, instead of answering “Jesus is this” or “Jesus is that.” This is in harmony with the practice of gnostics, who are not theologians concerned with finding names for the unnamable, but rather practitioners of “knowing silence.”

Yeshua “Is What He Is.” No one possesses a total and complete vision of Him. Yeshua only affirms, with love and power, a pure and simple “I Am.” And this affirmation awakens a mysterious echo in each of us.

But what is his teaching? It is in relation to this question that the Gospel of Thomas can be considered a “gnostic” gospel—but only if gnosis1 is understood to be nondualistic and is not confused with certain forms of dualistic or Manichean Gnosticism. Indeed, Yeshua appears in this gospel as a Being who seeks to awaken us to our own state of consciousness. This is also consonant with a passage in the Gospel of John, in which he says: “Where I am, I also wish you to be . . . the Spirit given me by my Father, I also have given to you . . . I am in you, and you are in me . . .” and so on.

Like the Eastern sages, Yeshua speaks in paradoxical aphorisms that invite us to become conscious of our uncreated origin, of our boundless freedom, even in the midst of the most severe contingencies. Thus we awaken to absolute Reality, right in the heart of the bleakest and most relative of realities.

Gnosis is a twofold lucidity regarding the human condition, at once a unitary witnessing and a dual awareness of both absurdity and grace. Relative reality shows us that we are dust and return to dust. “All that is composed, shall be decomposed,” as Yeshua says in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But there is another reality, one that shows: “We are light, and return to light.” Within us is a sun that never sets, a peace and wakefulness toward which our infinite desire yearns unceasingly. Relative reality shows us that we are either male or female; but full reality shows us that we are both.

Gnostics claim that an integration of our masculine and feminine polarities is possible, reaching toward a realized human beingness that does not love from lack, but rather from fullness. Then our love becomes not merely a thirst, but instead an overflowing fountain.

We must cross unceasingly from limited to unlimited consciousness. “Be passersby!” the Gospel of Thomas commands. There exists a relative consciousness formed and acquired through readings, encounters, and the thoughts of others. But there is also a consciousness that arises directly from knowledge of ourselves, of the “Living One” within us. It is toward this consciousness, this gnosis, that Yeshua invites us in the Gospel of Thomas, not in order to become “good Christians,” but to become christs—in other words, gnostics, or awakened human beings. Gnosis is not some state of mental expansion or ego-inflation. On the contrary, it means putting an end to the ego. It is a transparency with regard to “the One who Is” in total innocence and simplicity. This is why the qualities of the gnostic are said to be unconditioned, to resemble those of “an infant seven days old.”

Is the Yeshua of Thomas different from the Yeshua of the other gospels? Undoubtedly! But this difference resides not so much in the ultimate nature of the Christ as in the presentation of his teaching. It is a difference of hearing, rather than of words. Thus it is possible to read this gospel in a Catholic, Orthodox, or other manner, just as we read Luke, Mark, Matthew, and John in different ways. There is no need to enter into a dualistic polemic, setting the Gospel of Thomas against the canonical gospels, considering it superior to them and the only authentic gospel. To do so would, after all, be merely to give in to a reaction against the other dualistic polemic that has branded the Thomas Gospel as a fabrication of lies and heresies. (This is not unlike the former neglect of the Gospel of John, which many exegetes branded as either too Greek or too Gnostic . . . and today, there are those who say exactly the opposite.)

Might it not be that our task is to read all the gospels together, seeing them as different points of view of the Christ, different points of view that exist both within us and outside of us, in historical and meta-historical dimensions? Does not the Nag Hammadi discovery, with this sublime jewel of a gospel, reveal to us new facets of the unchanging Eternal Jewel? Is it not our task to go beyond both naive enthusiasm and doctrinaire suspicion to cultivate the ear of the golden mean and to learn to listen to the Spirit, which speaks to all human beings, beyond all Churches, religions, and elites?

THE TRANSLATION

In this translation of this gospel I have used the Coptic text as established by Yves Haas, as well as the Oxyrhynchus papyri and the Greek retroversion of Rudolf Kasser. I have also made use of the work of Professor Puech and of Professor Ménard, with whom I worked for some years at the University of Strasbourg on another great gnostic text, the Gospel of Truth. I make no claim here of presenting a “definitive” version of the Gospel of Thomas. This translation is one interpretation among a number of others, informed by my desire to be faithful to the breath, or spirit, as well as to the letters, of these words.

Pope Gregory I said that only a prophet could understand the prophets. And it is said that only a poet can understand a poet. Who, then, must we be in order to understand Yeshua?

THE COMMENTARY

Without underestimating the importance of scholarly expertise, yet determined to distance ourselves from the quarrels of scholars and esotericists, we must ask the question: Is it possible to truly read the Gospel of Thomas today? Is it possible to read it as a scripture unencumbered by the glosses of textual criticism or of subjective excess, allowing it to speak for itself and to inspire us? Is it possible to read these logia in a way that allows them to make their way into the mind and the heart of our humanity, leading us into a voyage of transformation, toward a full realization of our being?

If so, then what I propose is not so much a “commentary” on these words of Yeshua of Nazareth as it is a meditation that arises from the tilled earth of our silence. It is my belief that it is from this ground, rather than from mental agitation, that these words can bear their fruit of light.

THE TEXT OF THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

These are the words of the Secret.

They were revealed by the Living Yeshua.

Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.

1    Yeshua said:

Whoever lives the interpretation of these words

will no longer taste death.

2    Yeshua said:

Whoever searches

must continue to search

until they find.

When they find,

they will be disturbed;

and being disturbed, they will marvel

and will reign over All.

3    Yeshua said:

If those who guide you say: Look,

the Kingdom is in the sky,

then the birds are closer than you.

If they say: Look,

it is in the sea,

then the fish already know it.

The Kingdom is inside you,

and it is outside you.

When you know yourself, then you will be known,

and you will know that you are the child of the Living Father;

but if you do not know yourself,

you will live in vain

and you will be vanity.

4    Yeshua said:

An aged person will not hesitate to ask a seven-day-old infant about the Place of Life, and that person will live.

Many of the first will make themselves last, and they will become One.

5    Yeshua said:

Recognize what is in front of you,

and what is hidden from you will be revealed.

There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

6    His disciples questioned him:

“Should we fast? How should we pray? How should we give alms? What rules of diet should we follow?”

Yeshua said:

Stop lying.

Do not do that which is against your love.

You are naked before heaven.

What you hide will be revealed,

whatever is veiled will be unveiled.

7    Yeshua said:

Fortunate is the lion eaten by a human,

for lion becomes human.

Unfortunate is the human eaten by a lion,

for human becomes lion.

8    Yeshua said:

A human being is like a good fisherman

who casts his net into the sea.

When he pulls it out, he finds a multitude of little fish.

Among them there is one fine, large fish.

Without hesitation, he keeps it and throws all the small fish back into the sea.

Those who have ears, let them hear!

9    Yeshua said:

Once a sower went out

and sowed a handful of seeds.

Some fell on the road,

and were eaten by birds.

Some fell among the thorns,

which smothered their growth,

and the worms devoured them.

Some fell among the rocks,

and could not take root.

Others fell on fertile ground,

and their fruits grew up toward heaven.

They produced sixty and one hundred-twenty units per measure.

10    Yeshua said:

I have sown fire upon the world,

and now I tend it to a blaze.

11    Yeshua said:

This sky will pass away,

and the one above it will also pass away.

The dead have no life,

and the living have no death.

On days when you ate what was dead,

you made it alive.

When you are in the light, what will you do?

When you were One, you created two.

But now that you are two, what will you do?

12    The disciples said to Yeshua:

“We know that you will leave us.

Who will be great among us then?”

Yeshua told them:

When you find yourselves at that point,

go to James1 the Just:

All that concerns heaven and earth is his domain.

13    Yeshua said to his disciples:

What am I like, for you?

To what would you compare me?

Simon Peter said: “You are like a righteous angel.”

Matthew said: “You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said: “Master, my mouth could never utter what you are like.”

Yeshua told him:

I am no longer your Master, because you have drunk, and

become drunken, from the same bubbling source from which I spring.

Then he took him aside, and said three words to him . . .

When Thomas returned to his companions, they questioned him: “What did Yeshua tell you?”

Thomas answered: “If I told you even one of the things he said to me, you would pick up stones and throw them at me. And fire would come out those stones, and consume you.”

14    Yeshua said to them:

If you fast, you will be at fault.

If you pray, you will be wrong.

If you give to charity, you will corrupt your mind.

When you go into any land and walk through the countryside,

if they welcome you, eat whatever they offer you.

You can heal their sick.

It is not what goes into your mouth that defiles you,

it is what comes out of your mouth that defiles you.

15    Yeshua said:

When you see someone who was not born from a womb, then prostrate yourselves and give worship, for this is your Father.

16    Yeshua said:

People may think that I have come to bring peace to the world.

They do not know that I have come to sow division upon the earth: fire, sword, war.