Last week, we began looking at how the church came into being in the aftermath of  Jesus’s execution.  We explored how James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the initial leader of this proto-Christian movement.  Centered in Jerusalem, this school of thought focused on tailoring the life and message of Jesus to fulfill the messianic hopes of the Jews.  They created communities that focused on the Torah and keeping the many laws prescribed by Judaism.

As we continue our archaeological dig, the next earliest development hinges on an almost forgotten gospel, the Gospel of Thomas.  This is a fascinating development because it shows very clearly the power struggles among those early groups who were attempting to follow Jesus's teachings.

The only known copy of the Gospel of Thomas was found buried in the sands of the Egyptian desert in 1945.  It was found along with many other books from the early Christian era that were suppressed after the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.   Some of these books are fragmentary, while others, such as the Gospel of Thomas, appear to be complete.

Biblical scholars initially dismissed the importance of these books and simply labeled them as gnostic texts.  This put them in the category of “interesting collateral information,” but not really very important.  As later scholars examined these texts, however, they drew very different conclusions.  They began to see a plethora of viewpoints in the early Church that had been unknown until then.

What emerges from this finding is a dawning understanding of what happened to these followers of Jesus as they dispersed after his death.  Instead of a single, monolithic faith, the first 200 years after Jesus' death appear to have been a time of great spiritual exploration.  Remember, in the chaos that followed Jesus’s execution, there was no creed or statement of faith.  There was no Scripture to refer to for answers.  There was no authority to settle questions of belief.  There was no way to separate the truth about Jesus and his teachings from what was false.  The situation was chaotic.

Imagine, for a moment, what you might do if you found yourself in this situation.  It seems reasonable that you would collect the stories that you and your friends remembered about Jesus.  Then, depending on your biases, you would begin exploring what the stories meant.  In other words, you would begin to theologize and make meaning from these stories.

It’s important to note that you would not be working in isolation.  There would be other groups of Jesus followers scattered throughout the Mediterranean, and other points of view about his teachings.  As a result, it seems natural that very different theologies would arise.

Let me give you some examples.  We know that Paul thought that women should be seen but not heard in a church setting.  While he had a number of female helpers, Thecla and Phoebe come to mind, he clearly reflected the patriarchal culture of his Jewish heritage.  Other Christian writers from this era had very different ideas about the proper role of women.

In the same cache of documents as the Gospel of Thomas, we find fragments from the Gospel of Mary.  Authorship of this book is attributed to Mary Magdalene, and it clearly indicates her role as an equal to the Apostles.  In this gospel and in other texts, there is no mention of the alleged prostitution that was later associated with Mary Magdalene.  Other texts support this very different understanding of a woman’s role, and indicate a much more robust role for women than Paul was comfortable with.

Even more astonishing, we find fragments from a book titled “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.”  This text, delivered by a female in the first-person voice, is filled with passages like the following:

“I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter,” and so on.

What do you make of the book filled with these wild contradictions?  These strange paradoxes?  Among other things, we can certainly conclude that there were serious differences, and even contradictions among the different proto-Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean.  

As we will show later, the political needs of the Roman Empire led to the suppression of all these points of view, save one – that of Paul and his doctrine of sin and salvation by faith.  As I reflect on this, I am deeply saddened.  This suppression, while politically expedient at the time, deeply damaged our understanding of the person of Jesus and damaged our understanding of his teachings.

*  *  *

So let’s go back to where we began today – looking at the Gospel of Thomas.

This gospel is very different from the four canonical Gospels found in the New Testament.  It has nothing about Jesus' birth and nothing about his death and resurrection.  Instead, it comprises 114 sayings attributed to Jesus.  While versions of some of these sayings are familiar, others are strikingly different.

I’m going to assume that most of my readers are not familiar with the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas's ideas are radically different from those in the New Testament.  This does not mean they are “wrong.”  Rather, it underscores the point that there were many different interpretations of Jesus’s life and teaching, as well as serious power struggles between competing proto–Christian communities.  You might think of it as parallel to our present situation, where Orthodox, Catholic, liberal Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist theologies all compete with one another.

Here is a timeline that we can reconstruct from the available evidence.  For the first 20 years after Jesus’s execution, sayings and narratives about his life were collected, but there were no authority structures.  Between about 50-70 A.D., several groupings of Jesus’ sayings began to be compiled, one by Thomas and the other by Mark.  Between 70 and 90 A.D., the synoptic Gospels were consolidated.  From about 90-110 A.D., the Johannine understanding of Christ emerges as a cosmic and mystical interpretation of Jesus, an interpretation that was quite different from the portrait described in the synoptic Gospels.  Finally, around 110–130 A.D., a bishop–centered authority emerges, driven by Ignatius, the Bishop of Lyons, among others. 

The Gospel of Thomas stands in clear opposition to what came to be known as the institutional Church.  Rather than describing humanity as sinful and broken, as Paul did, Thomas asserts that Reality is whole and that our ignorance of what is real is the core problem.  This ignorance is overcome through insight and seeing Reality.  Christ Jesus does not stand as a mediator in this account; in fact, no mediator is necessary because Reality is available for anyone with “eyes to see.”

This version of Christianity repudiates the control structures of the emerging Christian orthodoxy.  It was implicitly anti-Imperial.  There was no glorification of Rome, no legitimization of violence, and no cosmic endorsement of Empire.

It was also explicitly against ecclesiastical authority.  It denied the notion of apostolic succession or any external authority.  It denied that belief alone could result in salvation.  Instead, the Thomasine school asserted that Truth is immediately accessible to all who are willing to open their eyes and see it.  Every follower of Jesus was invited to verify his teachings through their own experience.  

As you can see, this was a direct threat to the emerging power of the bishops.

Pauline theology is based on fear and control.  In Paul’s view, human beings are stained by the sin, ‘the badness,’ of Adam.  Their only hope is the salvation offered by Jesus’s sacrifice of his life.  This entails submitting to the authority of the Church, receiving the Church's sacraments, and, if everything works out, perhaps you will find yourself in heaven after you die.

*  *  *

The Thomasine school drew very different conclusions from these same data about the life and teaching of Jesus.  Thomas asserted that the kingdom of God is already present.  It’s not coming sometime in the future, it is not mediated by Jesus, and it is not some external event like ‘going to heaven.’  Instead, Thomas asserts that, “The Kingdom is (already) inside of you and outside of you.”  (Emphasis mine.)

In this view, the fundamental human problem is not sin, but ignorance.  Thus, the idea of salvation is significantly altered.  It is not forgiveness.  It is not the substitution of Jesus’s purity in place of our sinfulness.  Instead, it is recognition that we are already in the presence of God.  

Jesus’s life, then, is transformed by this understanding.  He is no longer the “Redeemer,” he is the Revealer.  Thus, there is no sacrificial theology and no exalted and cosmic Christ.  Instead, Jesus functions to point out the Way.  He is a provocateur, using paradox to shake up our conventional view of ourselves and the world.

The Gospel of Thomas was written for anyone who seeks.  As such, everyone has equal standing, and there is no such thing as a clerical class.  It is not an evangelical theology.  It doesn’t want growth in numbers; instead, it wants growth in depth of understanding.  This is not an intellectual understanding, but rather an experiential one – a direct perception of Reality.

Thomas states that the Divine is not to be found elsewhere.  The Divine is right here in our midst and inside each one of us.  The unity that connects us – a form of non-duality we have explored in previous newsletters – is obscured, but it is not broken.  The problem is our failure to recognize what already is.

Thus, we are not saved by the intercession of another, nor are we repaired from the outside, nor are we redeemed by substitution.  Instead, our task is to understand experientially what we already are.  In this view, Jesus does not possess divinity on his own – he is not the only son of God.  Rather, Jesus exemplifies what each of us already is, and he invites us to awaken to our own deepest inner Reality.

*  *  *

As you can see, Thomas makes the institutional church impossible.  He systematically undercuts the fear-based methods of control used in the institutional church.  He ignores the clergy and the sacraments.  He sees all people as inherently equal – an understanding that resonates in our contemporary world.

The Thomasine stream of understanding did not disappear because it lost the battle for “hearts and minds.”  The Thomasine school was suppressed because it could not be weaponized by bishops or emperors.  In my view, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the unknown Christians who refused to burn the Gospel of Thomas, but instead hid it in a clay jar and buried it outside a cemetery in the deserts of Egypt.  Their courage and devotion to the Truth have enabled us to draw back the curtains of history and peer into the actual circumstances of the early Church.

The Gospel of Thomas is not a missionary tract or a catechism for new believers.  The author of this gospel wrote for committed insiders seeking direct experiential insight.  Thomas wrote for those who were already followers of Jesus, for those already disillusioned with authority, ritual, and the notion of a delayed salvation.  He wrote for those capable of a sustained contemplative reflection, and I suspect this includes many, if not most, of my readers.

For Thomas, the focus is on the direct perception of the spiritual reality which underlies our phenomenal world.  He is interested in changing our understanding of Being – our own being and the being we attribute to God.  In his view, awakening is not the adoption of a particular set of beliefs, nor is it a moral achievement.  Instead, awakening is a structural change in how Reality is experienced.  Instead of our egocentric, Me–Me–Me, the true Christian awakens to a direct perception of the Divine.  This, in his view, is the stuff of salvation.

*  *  *

I think I will bring this to a close for now.  I am hopeful that this essay disrupts your understanding of the Church.  I do not believe the Church would exist today without the structure provided by the institution.  That said, I am deeply saddened that the understandings presented in the Gospel of Thomas have been suppressed so completely.  

While I am grateful for the institutional Church and all of its trappings, and bells and whistles, I am deeply saddened that the understandings presented in Gospel of Thomas have been suppressed so completely.  

May you find your true home in the arms of our Lord!

God bless you, now and always,

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter series helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.