I have heard that no great undertaking should begin without first asking for God’s blessing. This is doubly so here as we endeavor to discover more of our God and what requirements/responsibilities, if any, He would assign us.
The paths taken by each of us in this life are many, solitary and unique. Life is different for each man and we live it alone save the spirit of God. It can be no other way. Along a path in my walk of life I came across the Gospel of Thomas. And so my sincere prayer to God is that I can understand what he would have me know through this work.
Along this path, one of life’s many, I pause to dip my toes in the waters that flow within the Gospel of Thomas.
While understanding any work of antiquity has challenges; language, syntax, context, customs and other expected degradation introduced by the march of time, the greatest stumbling block to discovering truths are the corruptions brought about by man. Less influence by man exists within the Gospel of Thomas only because early copies of the writings were hidden away and untouched for thousands of years. Because they were out of man’s hands they were not adjusted, corrected, recompiled. Importantly no institution of man spent a thousand years corrupting the meaning of the words. I am not disparaging the men and institutions that are in the business of God, rather I am sharing with you a gem I found along one of my paths: man corrupts.
The Prologue and the ‘1st Saying’. Why have I chosen ‘1st Saying’ (within quotes) and not 1st Saying (without quotes)? Because I don’t believe the 1st Saying is the 1st Saying, it is not a saying of Christ at all. Let’s take a look at these two sentences from the Lambdin Translation of the Coptic texts:
“These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.”
and
(1) And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”
Note that the second sentence does not say that Jesus said these words, rather it states that ‘he’ said them. The way I believe that this rolled out is that Thomas had been writing things down and handed his notes to whoever was to have them transcribed. As he did so, Thomas told that person “Whoever finds…”. There is a couple of reasons that this makes more sense than holding that the entire volume of text is, with the exception of the prologue, the words of Jesus. I won’t head off on a tangent and describe all of the reason that I hold this belief, but I will invite your attention to saying 13; clearly these are not exclusively the words of Jesus. I believe the Prologue was intended by the transcriber to be conveyed as:
“These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. Thomas said that whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”
The Lambdin translation of the Gospel of Thomas is not the only version of these sayings. Others are:
Blatz
These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.
And he said: He who shall find the interpretation of these words shall not taste of death.
Layton
These are the obscure sayings that the living Jesus uttered and which Didymus Jude Thomas wrote down.
And he said, “Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death.
Doresse
Here are the secret words which Jesus the Living spoke, and which Didymus Jude Thomas wrote down.
And he said: “Whoever penetrates the meaning of these words will not taste death