JR16: Riddles in the Gospel of Thomas
A: This morning I was looking through my somewhat dusty copy of The Gospel of Thomas*. In the notes by translator Stevan Davies, I found this statement about the 113 original sayings: “The correct interpretation of the sayings is not the final goal but the means to the goal, the discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. Thomas’s Gospel is an exercise book, a list of riddles for decoding. The secret lies not in the final answers but in the effort to find the answers (page 2).” How would you respond to that?
“Jesus said: The Kingdom of the Father is like a merchant with goods to sell who found a pearl. The merchant was thoughtful. He sold the merchandise and bought himself the pearl [Gospel of Thomas 76A].” Jesus’ sayings about pearls are difficult for us to understand today because pearls are fairly common and inexpensive. In Jesus’ time, however, pearls were exceedingly rare and couldn’t be faked or counterfeited by clever human beings. Finding a pearl in the Mediterranean was no easy task, either, as most shells brought up through the risky diving process contained no pearls at all. So to randomly find a miraculous pearl was a sign of God’s blessing and truth, a far more valuable gift than the usual man-made goods. From a theological perspective, the merchant decides to set aside his “earthly treasures” and buy into God’s economy, where the benefits are sure and lasting and unrivalled in their beauty. It’s also important to note the merchant makes his choice voluntarily. No one forces him into it. (Shown here is a 17th century pomander made of gold, enamel, and pearls. It’s on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.)
A: Yes. I know what you mean. People seem to want to read the Kingdom of Heaven sayings in a traditional eschatological way. They want the Kingdom to be about a future time, a future place. They want the Kingdom to be the special heaven that’s close to God, the place where God’s specially chosen people will end up on Judgment Day.
J: An idea that’s very old, in fact. And not restricted to orthodox Christianity, either. The Essenes of my day believed deeply in both eschatology and apocalyptic visions of the future End of Days.
A: How widespread were those Essene ideas?
J: The people I was teaching seemed to know a lot about the Essene prophecies for the coming End Times. Of course, that’s not surprising, since John the Baptist was part of our teaching circle.
A: You say that John the Baptist wrote down the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Yet biblical scholars have remarked on the fact that there’s no congruence between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. The sayings found in Thomas appear frequently in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. But not in John. If John wrote down the sayings collected in the Gospel of Thomas, why don’t any of those sayings appear in his later writings?
J: As I mentioned a few days ago, John and I had a complicated relationship spread over several years. When I first sought out John, I was the student and he was the teacher.
A: Even though he was only 18 at the time?
J: Lifespans were much shorter then for most people. It wasn’t unusual for young adults to take on great responsibilities. If they waited too long to get on with life, they might be dead. So yes — there were teachers who were quite young. What mattered in John’s case was his education, his mastery of the material. It was clear he was highly trained in Jewish religious texts. Who was going to argue with a guy who had memorized big scrolls like Isaiah and could recite them verse by verse?
A: How old were you when you first met John?
J: I was older. About twenty-three, twenty-four. By that time I’d been married, divorced, had lost my daughter to illness, and had spent about a year at a Hellenistic “medical school.” I was so old in heart and spirit that I felt about 50. I was also half bald by then. Probably from all the family stress I was under.
A: I can see how it would have been appealing to sit under a tree and talk about God with other like-minded people.
J: Yes. I was an emotional wreck. And, like so many other people whose lives have been torn apart by tragedy, I needed answers. That’s why, when I heard about John’s amazing new teachings, I sought him out.
A: What was your initial impression of him?
J: He had this serene, otherworldly quality about him, as if he was above all the turmoil and tragedy of the world around him. When you asked him a question about current life, current realities, he always answered with a religious verse. He was so confident that all the answers could be found in the holy texts.
A: What did he look like?
J: He was a big man. Very tall, very robust in stature. I’d use the word “hearty.” Hearty as in big, friendly, strong, salt of the earth. Not polished. Not sophisticated. Homespun and down to earth. I thought he was wonderfully natural in comparison to the elegant Hellenistic Jews I’d grown up with.
A: Again, I can see the appeal.
J: His voice was a rich baritone. He’d been trained in the arts of speaking and rhetoric, that was for sure. He understood cadence, rhyme, repetition — all the tricks of persuasive speech. He was always throwing in bits and pieces of wisdom — small, apt phrases and wisdom sayings. It made him sound very wise. Until I started to notice he had no original thoughts of his own. He could recite ancient wisdom sayings, but he couldn’t process new ideas, new insights. That was part of the mental illness that was slowly simmering on the back burner of his mind.
A: He kept saying the same things over and over.
J: Yes. Also, he couldn’t seem to learn from his own mistakes. Or from the mistakes of others. That was his narcissism. His narcissism got in the way of his ability to admit he’d made mistakes.
A: Eventually you overtook him in the role of teacher in your group. Is that right?
J: The group started to fracture. He had his own loyal followers, who insisted he was still the leader, the long-prophesied Jewish Messiah. Some of the group began to listen to some of the new things I was saying about God. I was actually saying something new about God. John was not. People split down the lines of “belief in tradition” versus “belief in change.” Those who believed in change payed less and less attention to John. He hated that.
A: Describe his reaction to your teachings and in particular to your healing ministry.
J: When I first started doing some teaching, John didn’t mind. He believed at first that I was mimicking his own wisdom, that I was “copying” him. I was tentative at first. I stuck to fairly traditional teaching methods, such as short wisdom sayings. I created some new sayings — nothing too radical at first — and John liked these. He wrote them down when they appealed to him.
A: Did he claim these sayings as his own?
J: He was having trouble separating his own thoughts and feelings from other people’s thoughts and feelings. There was a blurring of boundaries. When he heard me speaking these things, he believed I was somehow transmitting his own thoughts. Broadcasting them. This is a typical symptom of schizophrenia, although these days people with delusions more often believe the TV or radio or Internet are broadcasting their thoughts.
A: So he identified with those sayings?
J: Yes. If you pay careful attention to the tone of the Thomasine sayings, you’ll see that he picked all the sayings that are vague and somewhat cliched.
A: Like traditional wisdom sayings that were widespread in the Ancient Near East.
J: Yes. He picked the short, pithy phrases that resonated with his early training, his early education. Phrases that sound wonderful at first, but say nothing specific. No names, no dates, no places. Lots of metaphors. More poetry than anything. Feelings without facts. Sort of . . . dissociated. Otherworldly. Detached. Serene. But not very helpful when you have difficult questions you want answers for.
A: There’s a marked lack of context in the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas. They could have been written almost anywhere by anyone. There’s a quality of “timelessness” to the book. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean the tone is kind of spacey, kind of “out of it.” Not fully engaged with reality or with life.
J: That’s how John came across. It was a sign of his major mental illness, and shouldn’t be mistaken by others as wisdom. No one who’s suffering from schizophrenia should be placed on a religious pedestal and labelled “wise.” People suffering from schizophrenia need firm, compassionate care, not reinforcement of their delusions.
A: Mental illness was not understood 2,000 years ago.
J: Well, as with all things, that depended on the person. Not all people then believed that psychotic behaviour was a sign of demon possession, just as not all people believed that physical infirmities were a sign of divine judgment from God. Cultural ideas about mental illness usually dictate how a mentally ill person is treated by the majority. But there’s always a minority who understand mental illness to be just that — an illness. You can’t blame everything on cultural ideas. Just because the majority of people in my culture believed in demon possession was no excuse for them to go with the “status quo” on these illnesses. There was plenty of solid science, solid scientific research at the time. In fact, there was more interest in solid scientific research then than there would be in Europe for many years. So I have no sympathy for the attempts made by Christian theologians to excuse the cruel treatment of the mentally ill that appears in the Bible. It wasn’t acceptable then, and it isn’t acceptable now. The author of Mark tries to make that point very clear.
A: You know what’s weird? I remember that when I first looked at the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas — some years before I set out on my path of becoming a mystic — I felt very stupid because I couldn’t make hide nor hair of the wisdom that seemed to be hidden in the sayings. They felt like riddles I couldn’t solve. Just as Stevan Davies says in his notes.
J: And now?
A: Now most of the sayings make perfect sense to me — but only because I fully understand the religious and social and medical context in which they were spoken. You know, there’s actually some pretty good stuff in there if you know what to look for.
J: Thank you.
A: Hey. No worries. You can spend the next umpteen years fleshing out those sayings and explaining in more detail what you meant way-back-when.
J: I look forward to it.
* Stevan Davies, Translator. The Gospel of Thomas. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.
