It is simply impossible without writing a book – which of course Hugh Ross and others have done — to convey to you any impression of the breadth and depth of the teaching in Thomas’ account of Jesus’ own words. Yet without attempting some feel for the texture and character of these sayings I would be leaving you with a mere historical outline. Permit me therefore to pick a handful of major themes, and let us see where I can get to in the short time remaining.

Logion # 17. I will give you what no eye has seen, and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched, and what has not arisen in the heart of man.

The Thomas Gospel offers something genuinely new in two ways. First, it shows that Jesus was presenting his teachings as something without antecedents; he did not follow the path of the later redactors of the Gospels of the New Testament by trying to root his teaching into the Old Testament in order to demonstrate its place in a progressive unfolding of history. And secondly the actual substance of what he taught was revolutionary: not only does he say so in this Logion 17, but we can observe for ourselves that the blend of ideas seems to have had multiple sources ranging far beyond the Old Testament to Gnostic, Hindu and perhaps other traditions. In this sense it may be called ‘syncretic’ but nonetheless highly coherent and unique in its totality.

Logion 3 .... But the Kingdom is in your centre and is about you

The Kingdom, or Kingdom of heaven, or Kingdom of the Father are all expressions which speak to the Jewish audience of Jesus’ day – an audience of tribes with petty Kings, to whom being in a kingdom often implied security, tranquillity, justice and perhaps prosperity. Hence the image or metaphor when applied to an inner state of being, as opposed to a place, would have been understood as a state of secure knowledge achieved, a radiant stillness, perhaps even a glimpse of Ultimate Reality. Hence also the phrase ‘The Kingdom of the Father is like…’, used in several of Jesus’ parables, does not describe a place, or even describe that condition of being. More valuably it introduces a series of pointers on how to attain that condition – especially through conquering the dominance of our ego, our ahankara, through emptying our selves to receive the Light. We shall see this illustrated in a minute..

We can start to arrive at an understanding of this only by rejecting the traditional Christian image of the Kingdom of God as a region somehow ‘up there’ to which, after death and if saved through repentance and faith, we may aspire. What unfolds is a slow understanding that ‘the Kingdom’, as Jesus uses the term, is a metaphor for an inner state to be achieved in the here and now, quite independent of bodily death, and such that finding the soul and realising our being in this world may come to remove the fear of bodily death.

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