I woke up this morning with one of those ear-bugs that just won’t go away. Not a song or lyric this time but rather the first true saying in the Gospel of Thomas (I choose to count saying 1 as a portion of the prologue). Here is the Blatz translation:
“He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.”
If you were to go here, you’d find four other interpretations from the 4 source documents found in two different locations and in two different languages. Some of the interpretations demonstrate interesting alternative readings of certain portions of the short saying, for instance the last few words of each translation from the Coptic are:
reign over the all
reign over the entirety
reign over the universe
What I find so interesting about the saying is both what I think it means and, given what it means, that it would be the first saying. What do I think it means? I don’t think that in this instance the saying is talking to the seeking of the kingdom of God, rather that we discover and wonder at the world that God created. It is an explicit call for scientific discovery.
This text with it’s 114 sayings was lost for a couple of thousand years. The first saying urging man to discover this world. Meanwhile, for many of those two thousand years the leaders of the christian movement did what they could to diminish the importance of understanding our world.
This saying perfectly tee’s up the saying that immediately follows it.