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HIDING
AND DISCOVERIES
But there is another and equally important way in which these sayings are, or have been, ‘hidden’. I would encourage you, when you have a few minutes, to visit a website called www.gospelofthomas.info created by Hugh McGregor Ross, author of ‘Jesus Untouched by the Church’ * and other publications on the Thomas Gospel. Here you can read the story of how the text of the Gospel and several other writings about Thomas and related matters lay buried in sand near the town of Nag Hammadi on the Nile — in a manner very similar to the so-called ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ of which everyone has heard – for about 1600 years after they had been formally banned as heresy by the early Christian church in the 4th century A.D. I will not take time to go into the fascinating background to these events or the miraculous survival intact of these books, after they were first discovered by local farmers in 1945, and until they were photographed for scholars in 1956 and eventually published in facsimile in 1978. The actual text of the Thomas Gospel found at Nag Hammadi is the only complete text available today: it appears to have been translated from Greek into Coptic — retaining many Greek words and being written almost entirely in Greek characters, — and formed part of a collection of books on papyrus which were in the library of the little monastery of Chenoboskia until they became ‘too hot to handle’ during the persecutions of the 4th century AD, and were buried for posterity in a single clay jar under nearby hills. Both the events surrounding Thomas’ life in the 1st century AD, and those which formed the backdrop to the banning and the burying of the Thomas Gospel in the 4th century AD, are of course the subject of extensive literature – to which the brief summaries above do not attempt to do justice. Of particular value in respect of the former is H.C.Merillat’s account entitled The Gnostic Apostle Thomas: “Twin” of Jesus? available at http://members.aol.com/_ht_didymus. The key fact is that many of the powerful concepts underlying the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas were considered unacceptable to a Church engaged in consolidating its doctrines and liturgy, and building a centralised catholic religion with the vision, power and authority to last for two millennia and more. Before he died in A.D. 236 Bishop Hippolytus of Rome had declared the Thomas Gospel to be heretical; it was formally banned, and finally excluded from the canon of the New Testament established by edict of Bishop Athanasisus of Alexandria in AD 367. I therefore want to emphasise today that we are looking at a collection of recorded sayings which survive untouched from a time two or three centuries before the Christian Church as we know it really took shape. Jesus’ authentic teaching, as recorded by Thomas, has powerful affinities with the advaita tradition of the Vedanta; it also has strong ties to the Gnostic tradition which came to be seen—to quote from a modern Catholic account of Gnosticism — as a ‘fungus at the roots’ of the new Church, and which the Catholic Church has done everything in its power to suppress and discredit. Entirely absent from the Thomas Gospel is the whole doctrine of sin, suffering, repentance and salvation, of orthodox dogma and the mediation of the Church, of belief and faith as the path to salvation, and of the terrors of death, judgment and damnation, which have formed the backbone of the Christian Church’s psychological authority up till the late 20th century. Jesus appears through the record of Thomas, perhaps more even than through the New Testament, as a great soul and unsurpassed spiritual teacher. At the heart of Jesus’ teaching as recorded by Thomas lie themes of Oneness, the return to innocence, the Kingdom within, inner Knowing as the salvation for spiritual poverty, resisting the domination of the ego, the Light at the centre and happiness as man’s true nature. It is easy to see how these ideas were regarded as obstacles to the strategies of the early Catholic Church in its formative stage. Even more important, there is no claim or hint in the Thomas Gospel of exclusivity or superiority as against other traditions or beliefs. The conviction of orthodoxy to the exclusion of all other paths, proclaimed up to the present day, took root in the early Christian Church as part of its strategy for growth. This, combined with the energy and determination with which the mainstream Christian Church has persecuted heresies – especially those associated with Gnostic, Manichean and related traditions – have aroused suspicion and sometimes hostility in countries, not least India, historically accustomed to tolerance and freedom of worship. * Hugh McGregor Ross Jesus Untouched by the Church – His Teachings in the Gospel of Thomas (William Sessions Ltd 1998)
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