There is one more theme I would like to mention which is vital to the teaching of Jesus in the Thomas Gospel, and that is the nature of Knowing. We learn that the Kingdom is accessible to us here and now through right Knowing, and we have seen that this concept is diametrically opposed to the developed Christian imperative of faith based on belief. We have seen that the concept of knowing probably traces its roots to the Gnostic tradition which was ruthlessly rejected and suppressed by the early Christian church. We have seen that this knowing is of the intuitive and experiential kind which can only be attained by learning to still and silence the mind.

Knowing is, in Thomas, the salvation – not from sin— but from spiritual poverty. Logion 3, which has already told us that ‘the Kingdom is in your centre and is about you’ goes on to say:

. .. When you Know your Selves then you will be Known, and you will be aware that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not Know yourselves then you are in poverty, and you are the poverty.

If any impression might arise that Jesus’ emphasis in Thomas on Knowing was any less demanding than the later Church’s imperatives on believing, Logion 3 therefore sets us right. The spectre of being trapped in spiritual poverty, and of ourselves constituting that poverty, is a fearsome one indeed. It is with a hint of irony perhaps that in Logion 91 Thomas reports the disciples as asking Jesus: Tell us who you are that we may believe in you – the only use of this word in the Thomas Gospel. Jesus answers: You scrutinize the face of heaven and earth, and him who is before you have not Known… .The object of Knowing is Jesus himself and through him the Father. Jesus said: Know Him who is before your face, and what is hidden shall be revealed to you: for there is nothing hidden that shall not be manifest (Logion 5 ). Our little group’s contemplation of and meditation on the picture of a very early icon of Jesus has perhaps hinted at the quality of Knowing that Jesus was demanding from his disciples in relation to himself.

On first encounter with Logion 3 — when you Know your Selves, you will be Known — we were tempted to question mentally “known by whom?” There was no obvious answer and slowly the mind steps aside in favour of an intuitive response to these words, on the lines of Meister Eckhart’s perception that ‘ the look by which I know God is the look by which God knows me’. Subject and object become merged into One.

But there is a special kind of Knowing which, even though Jesus refers to it only once in the Thomas Gospel (Logion 28), is the one that really counts – this is ‘METANOIA’ or transformation of Knowing at a level beyond the mind. It is a change of Knowing which transforms the awareness of the Knower. In Logion 2, Jesus says that when the seeker becomes a finder, he will be turned around, and when he is turned around he will marvel and he shall reign over the All. This turning around, this transformation of Knowing, thus becomes the pivotal act or experience, and it is at the very heart of the teaching according to Thomas.

There is evidence from the Christian gospels that Jesus did use this word frequently; the Thomas Gospel gives us a clue as to its proper meaning, but that proper meaning has been systematically concealed in the canonical Gospels by translating it as ‘repentance’. Repentance is of course a kind of turning round also, but of a negative kind which neatly serves the propositions of sin and salvation.

As to the roots of this Knowing and of ‘metanoia’, it will be interesting to learn what equivalents exist in the Hindu tradition, or whether we must see it as exclusively arising in the near eastern Gnostic context.

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