Beyond Belief – The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Author: Elaine Pagels
Summary Points

The Gospel of Thomas and other texts were considered by the Church to be "heretical".  Only the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) were "orthodox". 

The early Christian movement was shaped by political concerns: many scholars are convinced that the New Testament Gospel of John (est. 1st century), emerged from an intense debate over who Jesus was — or is.  John's gospel was written in the heat of controversy, to defend certain views of Jesus and to oppose others.  What John opposed includes what the Gospel of Thomas teaches — that God' light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone.  Thomas's gospel encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as John requires, as to seek to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God.  The Gospel of John helped provide a foundation for a unified church, which Thomas, with its emphasis on each person's search for God, did not.

John’s & Thomas’s interpretations oppose each other: by claiming that Jesus alone embodies the divine light, John challenges Thomas’s claim that this light may be present in everyone.

John’s point of view prevailed and have shaped Christian thought ever since.  His view of Jesus came to dominate and even to define what we mean by Christian teaching.

How can we find that light?

Thomas’s gospel offers only cryptic clues — not answers — to those who seek the way to God.  Thomas’s “living Jesus” challenges his hearers to find the way for themselves: “Jesus said, ‘Whoever find the interpretation of these words will not taste death,’ and he warns the disciples that the search will disturb and astonish them: “Jesus said, ‘Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds.  When he finds, he will become troubled; when he  becomes troubled, he will be astonished and will rule over all things.”  Jesus encourages those who seek by telling them that they already have the internal resources they need to find what they are looking for: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'"
 
The disciples question Thomas saying, ‘Do you want us to fast? How should we pray?  Should we give alms?  What diet should we observe?

In Matthew and Luke, Jesus responds with practical, straight-forward answers.  For example, he instructs them that “when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret.”  When you fast “put oil on your head, and wash your face.”  And when you pray, pray like this: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven…’

In Thomas, Jesus gives no such instructions.  Instead, when his disciples ask him what to do—how to pray, what to eat, whether to fast or give money, he answers only with another koan: “Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate; for all things are plain in the sight of heaven.”  In other words, the capacity to discover the truth is within you.

The disciples still demand that Jesus “tell us who you are, so that we may believe in you,” he again deflects the question and directs them to see for themselves: “He said to them, ‘You read the face of the sky and the earth, but you have not recognized the one who stands before you, and you do not know how to read the present moment.’

Thomas’s Jesus offers some clues.  After dismissing those who expect the future coming of the kingdom of God, as countless Christians have always done and still do.  Thomas’s Jesus declares that
the Kingdom is inside you, and outside you.  When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will see that it is you who are the children of the living Father.  But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are.

How can we know ourselves?  According to Thomas, Jesus declares that we must find out first where we came from, and go back and take our place “in the beginning.”  Then he says something even stranger:  “Blessed is the one who came into being before he came into being.”  But how can one go back before one’s own birth—or even before human creation?  What was there before human creation—even before the creation of the universe?

According to Genesis, “in the beginning” there was, first of all, primordial light.  For Thomas this means that in creating “adam [humankind] in his image,” as Genesis 1:26 says, God created us in the image of the primordial light.  This “light Adam,” although human in form, is simultaneously, in some mysterious way, also divine.  Thus Jesus suggests here that we have spiritual resources within us precisely because we were made “in the image of God.”

Irenaeus, the Christian bishop of Lyons, warns his flock to despise “heretics” who speak like this, and who “call humankind [anthropos] the God of all things, also calling him light, and blessed and eternal.  What Irenaeus here dismisses as heretical late became a central theme of Jewish mystical tradition—that the “image of God” is hidden within each of us, secretly liking god and all humankind.

John wrote his gospel to refute what Thomas taught.  He invented a faithless and false character we call Doubting Thomas.  John probably knew that certain Jewish groups, as well as many pagans who admired Genesis 1, taught that the “image of God” was within humankind.  In any case, John decided to write his own gospel insisting that it is Jesus — and only Jesus — who embodies God’s word, and therefore speaks with divine authority. Only Jesus is from God, and he alone offers access to God.  John never tires of repeating that one must believe in Jesus, follow Jesus, obey Jesus, and confess him alone as God’s only son.  We are not his “twin”, much less his equal; we must follow him, believe in him and revere him as God in person: thus John’s Jesus declares that “you will die in your sins, unless you believe that I am he”.

Mark, Matthew and Luke mention Thomas only as one of “the twelve.”  John singles him out as “the doubter”—the one who failed to understand who Jesus is, or what he is saying, and reject the testimony of the other disciples.  On the other side, many of John’s Christian contemporaries revered Thomas as an extraordinary apostle, entrusted with Jesus’ “secret words.”  According to John, Jesus praises those “who have not seen, and yet believed” without demanding proof, and rebukes Thomas as “faithless” because he seeks to verify the truth from his own experience.

What such people seek, however, is often not a different “system of doctrines” so much as insights or intimations of the divine that validate themselves in experience—what we might call hints and glimpses offered by the luminous epinoia.  Some  engaged on such a path purse it in solitude; others also participate in various forms of worship, prayer, and action.  Engaging in such a process requires, of course, faith.  The Greek term for faith is the same one often interpreted simply as belief, since faith often includes belief, but it involves much more:  the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love. Tertullian ridiculed those who saw themselves more as seekers than as believers.  Despite his inference that those who discriminate scripture (eg, ‘I take this to mean something different; ‘I do not accept that’) are either foolish or arrogant, it is not only “heretics” who choose which elements of tradition to accept and practice and which to reject.  The sociologist Peter Berger points out that everyone who participates in such tradition today chooses among elements of tradition; for, like Judaism and other ancient traditions, Christianity has survived for thousands of years as each generation relives, reinvents, and transforms what it received.

This act of choice — which the term heresy originally meant — leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve:  How can we tell truth from lies?  What is genuine, and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil?  Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows that there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits.  Orthodoxy tends to distrust our capacity to make such discriminations and insists on making them for us.  Given the notorious human capacity for self-deception, we can, to an extent, thank the church for this.  Many of us, wishing to be spared hard work, gladly accept what tradition teaches.

But the fact that we have no simple answer does not mean that we can evade the question.  We have also seen the hazards — even terrible harm — that sometimes result from unquestioning acceptance of religious authority.  Most of us, sooner or later, fine that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists.  What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions — and the communities that sustain them — is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery.  Thus they encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to “seek and you shall find.”

  z