The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus | Marvin Meyer

The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus | Marvin Meyer | Buy it......Must Read........

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The Gospel of Thom...

	The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus Marvin Meyer HarperOne, 1992 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A fresh, authoritative English translation, with an informative introduction, fascinating explanatory notes, and the Coptic text, with interpretation by Harold Bloom, our pre?eminent literary critic.

Meyer's Translation of Jesus is Superb! It's just what we feel Jesus would be!

I have many years felt that Jesus is the true Mccoy in the "Gospel of Thomas! Religion offers a lot of hope! However I feel the greatest hope in the world is to offer the Truth! This comes to us in "The Gospel of Thomas" and in this wonderful translation of Holy Scripture! Sharing the Word, of Jesus! The Gospel of Thomas Association
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Abilene, Texas 79608

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Buy it......Must Read........

This book explains what Jesus was saying, even though he spoke in riddles. I understood the riddles. There's no hoopla, no chaos, no drama in this book. It's to the point. This book confirms what I believed all along, there was no crucifixion, no dying and coming back to life. It was all a farce to hype up the image of Jesus by those who were tired of being ignored by the people who werent interested in what Jesus had to say. This book is a guide as to how to live. A must read book..buy it.

For a nonexpert, a thought-provoking volume

This is a Gospel allegedly authored by Judas Thomas the Twin. This Gospel does not provide a narrative analysis as the four Gospels of the New Testament do. The focus is the (page 5) "sayings of Jesus." As such, this work is closer to what is called a (page 7) "a collection of sayings." The introductory essay (an introduction and a rather difficult concluding essay by Harold Bloom sandwich the slim volume of sayings) notes that there are three explanations for the "Gospel of Thomas," one of which is that it is (page 13) "independent of the New Testament synoptic gospels, but it is related to oral or written traditions similar to those behind the synoptic gospels." Marvin Mayer, the book's editor, suggests that the Gospel of Thomas (page 13) "preserves sayings that at times appear to be more original than the New Testament parallels."

Bloom's concluding essay uses this Gospel to raise interesting questions about Biblical understanding. Not being an expert, I say nothing more. Individual readers will need to examine his work for themselves and come to their own judgments.

The Gospel itself is interesting, given that quite a few of the "sayings" are very close to what is in the traditional four Gospels. One example:

55 Jesus said, "Fortunate are the poor, for yours is heaven's kingdom."

110 Jesus said, "Let someone who has found the world and has become wealthy renounce the world."

Other apothegms:

1 And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."

95 Jesus said, "If you have money, do not lend it at interest. Rather give [it] to someone from whom you will not get it back."

And one final saying (discussed at length in the introduction and in Lane's work on the Bible):

114 Simon Peter said to them, "Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life."

Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom."

What to make of the Gospel of Thomas? I'm not an expert, but I do find this interesting reading. What it portends for an understanding of Scripture I must leave to others. But the questions that come to mind as one reads the essays and, even more, the text itself, makes this an interesting expenditure of mental energy.

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Ham on Wonder Bread.

Meyers sandwiches the 114 sayings of Thomas (in English and Coptic), and his commentary on that text, between two essays: his introduction, and a dozen or so pages from the famous humanist, Harold Bloom.

The middle sections may or may not be worth the price of the book. (I haven't looked over the notes yet.) I find Thomas a bit "hammy," both in the sense that (having read a few Taoist and Buddhist works) Gnostic metaphysics strike me as pretentious, and in the sense that in their lack of historical or moral interest, they are "un-kosher," don't sound like a Jewish prophet. This doesn't sound like Jesus to me; it sounds like an Alexandrian philosopher. But it's worth reading Thomas for his importance in modern Jesus debates.

Surrounding the text one finds two slices of "wonder bread" of doubtful nutritional value.

Meyer properly attempts to put Thomas in context, but offers some dubious arguments in the process. He repeats the standard Jesus Seminar line that Q is very like Thomas. The view that Thomas is an early text is often based on the assumption that both are "sayings Gospels." (A rather oxymoronic concept.) More importantly, as I show in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could, Q is radically different from Thomas. First, even the Jesus Seminar version of Q contains some stories and miracles, which Thomas does not. More fundamentally, while Q contains some of the most profound moral teaching in all literature, Thomas edits almost all of it out. Q is 37-50% moral teaching; Thomas is about 2%, and even that can be pretty anemic. ("Don't lie, and don't do the things you hate.") Odd that a "sayings Gospel" would edit out the Sermon on the Mount! Even odder that Meyer does not notice! Nor do other Jesus Seminar scholars, Elaine Pagels, or Harold Bloom.

In fact, in my analysis of Thomas and the Gospels, I found that Thomas was less like the canonical Gospels than any other ancient writing I surveyed. The convention of calling it a "Gospel" at all is, in my opinion, highly dubious.

Meyer claims that the "absence of allegorical interpretations" in Thomas' version of the parable of the sower "helps confirm that such elements were added later," and therefore Thomas contains material that predates the Gospels. But scholars like Sanders and Jenkins have rebutted this argument. John Meier, N. T. Wright, and Richard Hays also give reason to believe Thomas depends on the canonical Gospels. Meyer is honest enough to admit that some scholars take this view. The problem is (I argue) "early Thomas" scholars get the worst of the debate. In fact, often they simply ignore opposing arguments. (Pagels admitted to me she had not read Meier or Wright's views on Thomas.)

While a good writer, Harold Bloom is in even further over his head. He uncritically accepts the view that Thomas offers an "earlier Jesus." Both Meyer and Bloom repeatedly cite Burton Mack, whose gifts, in my opinion, are more those of a myth-maker than a historian. Bloom also glibly repeats Meyer's error about Thomas being similiar to "Q."

Bloom expresses amazement that the Gospels contain only a few Aramaic sayings of Jesus: "If you believed in the divinity of Jesus, would you not wish to have preserved the actual Aramaic sentences he uttered?" The answer is, first of all, Jesus may have spoken mostly in Greek. But also, Bloom seems to have a less sophisticated and more magical notion of language than the early Christians. In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is the "Logos," the translation into humanity of the nature of God. By speaking in different languages in Acts, the Holy Spirit in effect blessed all languages, and the act of translation.

Bloom asks, "Is it not an extraordinary scandal that all the crucial texts of Christianity are so suprisingly belated?" He should know better. The earliest extant Buddhist text is from 600 years after the Buddha. The earliest account of the resurrection, by contrast, was written a mere 20 years after the fact, and the first extant text is a mere 90-100 years later. Nor is 40 years (to Mark) so long; I could transcribe 1st hand accounts of the bombing of Nagasaki (where I once lived) tomorrow, from eyewitnesses, 61 years after the fact.

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3 Stars and a half...

I didn't bother reading the introduction and commentary, I went straight for the juice and read the ghospel. As a deist I didn't find it so much different from other ghospels, a bit shorter maybe, but about the same. Maybe less jolly and honky dory, a bit more down with life, good and evil are the same and all that. A bit closer to some eastern phylosophy sort of meaning, but still the same, jesus is the choosen one, he shows the way, but then will leave and leave us to dwell with the BS.
As footnote, did you know that "ghospel" is a wrong word? The original ghospels were written by greeks and they titled them "Evangels", which means "good news". Speaking of greek, I liked a lot the facing text in greek and coptic. I do suggest this edition of the book to curious ones, at the end of it all is a quick read.

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