I’ve read several books by Elaine Pagels, but listening in to her lectures on The Gospel of Thomas
is something else again. It’s one thing to sit down with a text, quite another to listen in to a gifted teacher who appears - by the miracle of technology - in your own home while you sit back in an armchair with a coffee.Particularly interesting is the interplay Pagels identifies between the Gospels of Thomas and John, which she suggests both address similar questions but with very different answers.
2 comments:
When Pagels dug into closer readings of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and compared it with the New Testament Gospel of John, she came to a startling conclusion. “I was frankly shocked when it occurred to me that perhaps the Gospel of John was written in response to the kind of teaching you have in Thomas,” she says. “It was a completely new perception, and I was stunned.”
John fervently opposed what the Gospel of Thomas teaches: that all humanity has direct access to God because, according to the Book of Genesis, everyone is created “in the image and likeness of God.” In John’s Gospel, by contrast, the only way to know the divine being is through Jesus, who, he asserts, is God in human form. What’s more, while the authors of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke allude to Thomas as simply one of “the 12” disciples, John presents the image of a “doubting Thomas.”
Why? To undermine the credibility of the Gnostic gospel? Those are the kinds of questions Pagels poses to students in a seminar she teaches about the first four centuries titled "The Christian Revolution". A radical viewpoint underlies her comments.
DTS
Gavin,
I do not know exactly how Pagels reconciles The Gospel of Thomas together with John in her latest audio book (as I have not heard it). Perhaps you could shed some more light on the "interplay" she projects between Thomas and John. I suppose it falls along these lines:
According to Pagels, John is the only evangelist who actually states that Jesus is God incarnated. But not only Pagels says so. In one of his commentaries on John, Origen – a church father, (c.240) - writes that while the other gospels describe Jesus as human, “none of them clearly spoke of his divinity, as John does.” One may object that the other three, synoptic (“seeing together”) gospels call Jesus “son of God”, and this is virtually the same thing. But such titles (son of God, messiah) in Jesus’ time designated human, not divine roles. When translated into English fifteen centuries later, these were capitalized – a linguistic convention that does not occur in the original Greek. When all four gospels, together with Paul’s letters, were united in the New Testament (c. 160 to 360) most Christians had come to read all four through John’s lens, that Jesus is “Lord and God”.
Pagels feels that if the Gospel of Thomas were included in the New Testament instead of that of John, or even if it were included along with John, the development of Christianity would have been quite different. Whereas Mark, Matthew and Luke identify Jesus as God’s human agent, John and Thomas characterize him as God’s own light in human form. Both claim to reveal, at least to a certain extent, Jesus’ “secret teachings”, and assume that their readers are already familiar with the synoptic gospels.
Despite their similarities, John and Thomas point the secret teachings in sharply different directions. John claims that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus, while Thomas says that the divine light embodied in Jesus is already shared by humanity since we are all made “in the image of God”. Thomas thus expresses what would become a central theme of Jewish, and later Christian, mysticism a thousand years later: that the “image of God” is hidden within everyone, and it is a question of recognizing this and finding it through one’s own efforts.
The synoptic gospels claim that Jesus’ teaching predicted the coming of the kingdom of God some time in the future, an interpretation still adhered to by many Christians. However, both John and Thomas say something different, the latter very specifically: Jesus said, If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky’, then the birds of the sky will get there before you….If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get there before you. And: His disciples said to him, ‘When will the resurrection of the dead come, and when will the new world come?’ He said to them, ‘What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.’
Though the Gospel of Luke includes an alternative version of the same idea (“…the kingdom of God is within you”), Luke later retreats from this position and concludes with the apocalyptic warning that the Son of Man is not a divine presence in us all but a terrifying judge.
A century ago Leo Tolstoy, in his monumental The Kingdom of God is Within you, urged Christians to give up coercion and violence in order to realize God’s kingdom here and now. Thomas Merton, the twentieth century writer and Trappist monk, agreed with Tolstoy but interpreted his kingdom mystically rather then practically. Christians are confronted today with the Catholic church’s insistence that humanity is sinful, base and unworthy by nature and that salvation from the pangs of hell is only possible through faith in Jesus and, by obvious extension, his church, and his representative on earth, the pope.
DTS
Post a Comment