Guest guest Posted January 20, 2009 Report Share Posted January 20, 2009 Dear All, We concluded 'Gospels In Conflict: John and Thomas' with the following words: (p.73) " But the discovery of Thomas's gospel shows us that other early Christians held quite different understandings of " the gospel. " For what John rejects as religiously inadequate--the conviction that the divine dwells as " light " within all beings--is much like the hidden " good news " that Thomas's gospel proclaims. [152] Many Christians today who read the Gospel of Thomas assume at first that it is simply wrong, and deservedly called heretical. Yet what Christians have disparagingly called gnostic and heretical sometimes turn out to be forms of Christian teaching that are merely unfamiliar to us--unfamiliar precisely because of the active and successful opposition of Christians such as John. How, then, did John prevail? To answer this question, let us look at the challenges that confronted the first generations of his readers. " Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas), Chapter 2, p. 73. Note: [152] C.H. Dodd, in his commentary on the Johannine gospel, notes that this is what separates John's message from " gnostics " ; for Dodd, this secures John's place as an authentically Christian teacher, see 'Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel', 97-114, 250-285. Here now is Part 1 of 'God's Word or Human Words'. Enjoy, violet God's Word or Human Words - Part 1 (p.74) About a year after I had written 'The Gnostic Gospels', I was sitting at tea one brilliant October afternoon at the Zen Center in San Francisco, a guest of the Roshi, along with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. The Roshi, an American whose name is Richard Baker, told us how he, as a young man, had gone from Boston to Kyoto, where he entered a Buddhist monastery and became a disciple of the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. " But " --he laughed-- " had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't have had to become a Buddhist! " Brother David, who that morning had offered to the Zen students a succinct and incisive exposition of the Apostles' Creed, shook his head. Thomas and some other unorthodox gospels, he acknowledged, may be Christian mystical writings, but, he insisted, they are essentially no different from what the church offers: " There's nothing in those texts that you can't find in the writings of the great mystics of the church, like Saint Teresa, or Saint John of the Cross. " (p.75) I said that I did not agree. In the first place, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross--to say nothing of Jacob Boehme, the German mystic of the seventeenth century, and others like him, who were condemned and excommunicated as heretics--were intensely aware that whatever " revelations " they confided to their monastic superiors would have to conform--or seem to conform--to orthodox teaching. Christian mystics, like their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, have always been careful not to identify themselves with God. But the Gospel of Thomas teaches that recognizing one's affinity with God is the key to the kingdom of God. The remarkable modern scholar Theodor Gaster, the thirteenth son of the chief rabbi of London, observed that Jewish mystics are careful to speak of 'relationship' with God but not of 'identification': " The Jewish mystic can say, with Martin Buber, 'I 'and' Thou,' but can never say 'I 'am' Thou,' which is permissible in Hindu religious teaching, for example, as in the phrase, 'tat thvam asi' [literally, " Thou art 'that' " ]. " [1] Orthodox Jews and Christians, of course, have never wholly denied affinity between God and ourselves. But their leaders have tended to discourage or, at least, to circumscribe the process through which people may seek God on their own. This may be why some people raised as Christians and Jews today are looking elsewhere to supplement what they have not found in Western tradition. Even Father Thomas Keating, the former abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, who has been a Cistercian monk for over fifty years, has sought through dialogue with the Buddhist and other wisdom traditions, as well as contemporary science, to deepen the ancient practice he calls Centering Prayer. (p.76) Fr. Keating finds that certain elements of Buddhist meditative practice complement Christian tradition by offering other experiential ways to discover divine truth. Thomas Merton, the famous monk who wrote the best-seller of the 1940s 'The Seven Storey Mountain', a Trappist like Keating, had similarly investigated Buddhist tradition. Thus even some devoted Christians have found that the impulse to seek God overflows the banks of a single tradition. Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas), Chapter 3, p. 75-76 Elaine Pagels Vintage Books, New York, U.S.A ISBN: 0-375-70316-0 Notes: For the technical discussion of the research summarized in this chapter, see Elaine Pagels, " Irenaeus, the 'Canon of Truth' and the Gospel of John: 'Making a Difference' Through Hermeneutics and Ritual, " 'Vigiliae Christianae' 56.4 (2002), 339-371. [1] Theodor Gaster's comment occurred in a conversation; Buber's phrase serves as the title of his book 'I and Thou' (translated by W. Kaufmann from 'Ich und du' and published in New York, 1970). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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