Gospel of Thomas

[Guest guest]

Dear List

 

Further to the message from Kathiji about Gospel of Thomas;

I investigated the site he mentioned. I also came across the following

url (within that site)..It seems to have a lot of parallels with 'Advaita'

thinking.

 

jay...

 

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/thomas.html

 

quote:-

 

One of these documents [found at Nag Hammadi] begins with the scribal note

in the margin, " The Gospel According to Thomas. " And the first sentence of

that document says, " These are the secret words which the living Jesus

taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote down. " And then they start a

total of over 110 sayings, each introduced by " Jesus said.... " Some of those

sayings have parallels in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Some of

these have not. Some of these sayings may go back to a very early period of

Christianity, some of them may have been added later. The document itself

comes from the fourth century.... As with all gospel text, with this one in

particular, we have to remember that these texts were fluid, that scribes

could add, that scribes could leave out things, that scribes could add

comments, or add an interpretation. So we cannot with certainty reconstruct

what did the Gospel of Thomas look like around the year 100 or earlier. But

it is very likely that it existed at that time, and that a good deal of the

material that's now in that manuscript was already in a Greek manuscript

that dates back to the first century. Which of course, is very exciting

because here we have a collection of sayings of Jesus, additional sayings of

Jesus, that were not known before, and the whole beginning of a new field of

studies has opened up....

 

Now what is typical about these sayings is that in each instance, these

sayings want to say that if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have

to recognize yourself. You have to know yourself, know who you are. It

begins with a saying about the Kingdom of God, " if you seek the Kingdom of

God in the sky then the birds will precede you. And if you seek it in the

sea, then the fish will precede you, but the Kingdom is in you. And if you

know yourself then you know the Kingdom of God. " (The Kingdom of the Father,

in fact, it always says in the gospel of Thomas. Normally the Kingdom of the

Father, not the Kingdom of God.) " But if you don't know yourself, you live

in poverty. " And poverty is understood as the ignorance of a life in its

physical existence. Knowledge is understood to be the knowledge of one's

divine origin, of the fact that one has come from the Kingdom. That we are

on this earth only in a sojourn....

 

What does it mean really to know oneself? To know oneself is to have insight

into one's own ultimate divine identity. You can go back to understand this

to Greek models, which certainly exist. " Know yourself " is a very old Greek

maxim... that is, you have to know that your own soul is divine, and then

you know that you are immortal, whereas the body is the mortal part of human

existence. Now this is radicalized in the Gospel of Thomas into saying that

everything that is experienced physically and through sense perception,

everything in this world that you can perceive in this way is nothing. It

is, at best, chaos and, at worst, it doesn't even exist in reality. The only

thing that really exists is your divine spirit or your divine soul, which is

identical in its quality with God himself. And Jesus is the one who teaches

that....

 

[When one truly knows oneself], one understands that one is divine, but also

one understands that one is mortal. In such a way, you recognize that this

mortality is really meaningless, as physical existence is meaningless. And

therefore, death is no longer a problem, but death is a solution, because in

death finally all this mortality will fall away, and the true self will be

liberated to an independent existence that's no longer dependent on physical

existence. And on everything that goes with physical existence, sickness and

poverty and so on. And so physical existence is often described as poverty.

But when you know yourself you are no longer in poverty.

 

 

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