Word: jesus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though it includes many word-for-word quotes and echoes from the New Testament, plus many new sayings attributed to Jesus, the Thomas Gospel is not a candidate for inclusion in the Bible. While some of the sayings may well be genuine, others are strongly influenced by Gnosticism. And Gnosticism, in its various forms (including Manichaeism) was one of the chief heresies fought by the early Christian church. Basic to all Gnostic sects was the belief that the world was evil, created by a bad god for the express purpose of imprisoning the divine spark which had somehow become vulnerable...
Part of the Gnostic's special concern seems to have been self-knowledge, an emphasis that appears at least twice in the Thomas Gospel: Jesus said: Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything . . . But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty...
What is the meaning of Jesus' well-known words about children and the King dom of Heaven? In a cryptic "saying," the Gospel of Thomas seems to suggest that it has something to do with psychological unity: Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom. They said to Him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner...
Fire upon the World. Gnosticism was strongly influenced by Oriental and Greek ideas, with their circular conception of time, as opposed to Judaism's linear time. The disciples said to Jesus: Tell us how our end will be. Jesus said: Have you then discovered the beginning so that you inquire about the end? For where the beginning is, there shall be the end. Blessed is he who shall stand at the beginning, and he shall know the end and he shall not taste death...
Christians will treasure many of these sayings for their restatements of familiar themes (It is impossible for a man to mount two horses and to stretch two bows, and it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters), as well as for their beauty and ring: Jesus said: I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I guard it until the world is afire...