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The Sign Goeth

A North Carolina-based advertising company said it’s taking down a gun shop ad that disparagingly refers to four congresswomen of color as the “4 Horsemen” and “idiots.” Anti-gun violence and civil rights activists have lambasted the ad as “dangerous” and “violent.” 

I do note that the advertising company is pulling down the sign and not the retailer.

Dangerous and violent? What a weak-kneed nation we’ve become.

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Government as God

Sorry Tomi, while the right is not God given the government does have the ‘authority’ to do whatever it wills. Our government has become so powerful that it now embargo’s the accounts and currency of innocent Americans and makes them fight, without resources, for their return.

The government believes it is God.

The country formed on the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness now deprives it’s citizens of each of these without either shame or due process.

Have we gone to far down the path of tyranny for the blood of patriots to right this ship? Probably so.

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Word Play and the 114th Saying

In the past I’ve posted several articles on the structure of certain sayings and intermingling of several seemingly independent phrases within Gospel of Thomas. Sometimes I question whether (or not) some ‘helpful’ scribe or transcriber decided to include their interpretation of a saying or to add information to help the reader to understand what Thomas had written. In other instances I wonder if the entire saying is attributed to Thomas’ writing when it was not his contribution at all.

I’m not a forensic linguist and I don’t have a friggin clue on how to decipher Coptic. The only tools I am capable of leveraging to understand the Gospel of Thomas are my faith, my intuition and my intellect (as weak as this latter attribute may be) .

So I was plodding around in Thomas’ work and read his final saying (114) and here are my thoughts.

Saying 114 in Coptic

Saying 114 in Layton’s translation reads:
(114) Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

As is my want, I thought to bring some words forward within the saying and to send other words to the background. I came up with this:

Or
Jesus said “I am going to make her a living spirit that will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Now, along with the gazillion of other things I don’t know, I don’t know if this brushes away error and deceit and correctly captures what Thomas originally intended. However, my faith, intuition, and intellect leads me to believe that this is what Jesus would have us know.

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Repetition Intended? | 48 and 106 In the Gospel Of Thomas

There is an important difference between what appears to be two closely related saying in Thomas’ Gospel. Consider sayings 48 and 106.

The relationship (or similarity) between the two raises a lot of questions: Are the repetitive portions of each saying intentional. Are the intentionally presented this way? Why is it that more is gained by considering each saying in light of the other, and (assuming that this is so) why they are separated by so many intervening sayings?

Are these breadcrumbs that lead us along a path?

The sayings (Layton from the coptic) below:

(48) Jesus said, “If two make peace with one another within a single house they will say to a mountain ‘go elsewhere’ and it will go elsewhere.”

(106) Jesus said, “when you (plur.) make the two into one you will become sons of man, and when you say, ‘O mountain, go elsewhere!’ it will go elsewhere.”