HERE is a Gospel sandwich. The filling is pure common sense: don’t start what you can not finish. The bread is 2 hard sayings: hate your loved ones, and quit your possessions.
Luke 14.25-27 says that we must love Jesus greater than family. That struck a chord with me, because I actually have been listening to a podcast a few cult called the Jesus Army. It is one thing to say that loyalty to family must not trump duty to God; it’s one other to treat rejecting one’s family as a test of loyalty. People could also be pressured into giving up a hobby, or a friendship, or perhaps a pet. They think that what’s being tested is their devotion to God. What is basically being tested is their devotion to the group.
This teaching of Jesus in Luke is present in two other Gospels. One is Matthew, 10.37-38 (with some variation in the small print). But the opposite text shouldn’t be Mark or John. Perhaps it appeared in Q, that hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus which Matthew and Luke used but Mark and John didn’t (Q has not survived). But it will probably be present in an apocryphal book, the Gospel of Thomas. In this context, “apocryphal” means a book written after the Bible, to not be confused with the Apocrypha in some Bibles, that are writings from the period between the Old and New Testaments.
The Gospel of Thomas claims to be “secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down”. It was discovered in 1945, written in Coptic, a lost type of Egyptian, in a manuscript from the fourth century. Fragments of an earlier Greek version also survive; the unique text could also be not much later than John.
No Bible has ever contained the Gospel of Thomas. Like the canonical Gospels, it preserves material from early times, when oral traditions about Jesus were first written down. Some scholars link the distinguished part that it gives to Thomas together with his unique depiction in John’s Gospel. Unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, it’s Gnostic in outlook: which means it treats truths about Jesus as esoteric secrets for a privileged few — cult-like, we’d say.
In a method, the Gospel of Thomas is irrelevant to Christians: the four-Gospel canon was established by 200, long before the canon of the New Testament as a complete was closed. But it’s considered one of several Gnostic writings which have left a mark on Twenty first-century Christianity through Dan Brown’s fantasy The Da Vinci Code (2003).
Twenty years ago, the web had hardly got going because the natural refuge and breeding ground of evidence-free conspiracy theories. But Brown’s book gave a glimpse right into a dystopian future that has now develop into reality: facts and corroboration being overtaken by fake news. Misinformation. Disinformation.
The Da Vinci Code was a trailblazer when it got here to mining Gnostic pseudo-Christianity for factoids rather than facts. It treated Gnostic texts as evidence of a church conspiracy to cover historical truths about Jesus. It probably undermined many individuals’s faith. My then congregation, 20 years ago, included some who were apprehensive by what they read in it, while my daughter explained to me, after an RE lesson, the “fact” that Jesus had not died, but had married Mary Magdalene.
Thank goodness we Christians have our own version of BBC Verify: the canon of scripture. It represents meticulous research intended to ensure that Christians wouldn’t be deceived by fake teaching and pseudo-Gospels. The canon is our own quality assurance, confirmed for the Church of England in Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles.
There is not any story of Jesus’s life within the Gospel of Thomas: just a group of statements, mixing fact and fantasy. The one which recalls Luke 14.26-27 stands beside a non-scriptural considered one of Gnostic origin:
Para. 55: “Jesus said: whoever doesn’t hate his father and his mother cannot develop into a disciple to Me. And whoever doesn’t hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross in My way is not going to be worthy of me.”
Para. 56: “Jesus said: whoever has come to grasp the world has found [only] a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world” (translation by Thomas O. Lambdin).
That should reassure us that, when our Christian forebears decided to set the variety of canonical Gospels at 4, they knew what they were doing.
(Readers can access Lambdin’s text on the Internet Archive, under “The Nag Hammadi library in English”, and see for themselves how the text merges authentic fragments from the canonical Gospels with Gnostic speculation and fantasy.)
