Word: gospels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Evil Creator. The manuscript of this so-called Gospel attributed to "Doubting Thomas," the disciple who insisted on verifying Jesus' bodily resurrection by touching his wounds (John 20: 25-28), is dated somewhere between A.D. 350 and A.D. 425. But, say the translators, the original "goes back much earlier. We are dealing here with a translation or an adaptation in Sahidic Coptic of a work the primitive text of which must have been produced in Greek about 140 A.D., and which was based on even more ancient sources...
Though it includes many word-for-word quotes and echoes from the New Testament, plus many new sayings attributed to Jesus, the Thomas Gospel is not a candidate for inclusion in the Bible. While some of the sayings may well be genuine, others are strongly influenced by Gnosticism. And Gnosticism, in its various forms (including Manichaeism) was one of the chief heresies fought by the early Christian church. Basic to all Gnostic sects was the belief that the world was evil, created by a bad god for the express purpose of imprisoning the divine spark which had somehow become vulnerable...
...toughest Christian minds worked overtime to combat its combination of mystery, myth and spiritual snob appeal. When orthodox Christianity triumphed at last, the writings of the Gnostics were suppressed so thoroughly that most present-day knowledge of Gnosticism relies on the anti-Gnostic polemics of the fathers. The Thomas Gospel will widen knowledge-and speculation-about Gnostic doctrine...
Part of the Gnostic's special concern seems to have been self-knowledge, an emphasis that appears at least twice in the Thomas Gospel: Jesus said: Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything . . . But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty...
What is the meaning of Jesus' well-known words about children and the King dom of Heaven? In a cryptic "saying," the Gospel of Thomas seems to suggest that it has something to do with psychological unity: Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom. They said to Him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner...