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Comment on No wonder Jesus didn't get a fair trial...

That was actually the key point in a competing early tradition against the cannonical version we all know.

It basically pushed for people to realize that the guy calling everyone brother and sister wasn’t claiming to be an only child, but that everyone was literally the child of a creator with salvation as their birthright.

The problem was this meant that prayer and fasting and most importantly - giving money to priests and the church - was pointless. You basically got salvation by default because much like in Solomon’s decision, a true parent is the one that wants its child to live and thrive even if it isn’t even known to the child, and it’s the false parent that is willing to see the child suffer and die, only caring about recognition.

Some of the lines from the text this tradition was centered around are great:

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty. […]

If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits. […]

The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, ‘When will they come and take what belongs to them?’ […]

This text and its perspectives were such a threat to both the church and the Roman empire (one of its sayings called for an end of dynastic monarchy), that after the emperor of Rome put together the canonization at the council of Nicaea in short order it ended up literally punishable by death to possess it and we only know what it says today because a single complete copy survived buried in a jar for nearly two millennia.

It may have even had Solomon’s decision in mind given that story was about the child of a prostitute and one of its sayings was:

Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.

(Note: Elsewhere this text stresses to “make the male and female into a single one,” so the ‘Father’ elsewhere may have been a side effect of Aramaic’s binary genders with no neutral ‘Parent’ to have used instead and “father and mother” here in this saying may have been intended more to emphasize the motherly qualities of a singular divine parent than to have been about two separate parents.)

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kautau@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For a bit more info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas

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- OctopusKurwa@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Some of the sayings in the gospel of Thomas are so strange.
  
  "Jesus said, “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”
  
  Lol the fuck does that mean?
  
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  - kromem@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Dude… This one is fucking wild.
    
    First off, keep in mind that the numbers are arbitrary. They were decided by early scholars who we now know spent 50 years misclassifying it as a Gnostic text.
    
    Then consider that the very next line is the only one in the entire work preceeded by a numbered saying but beginning with a conjunction.
    
    So take the two together (and let’s throw in the one after for good measure):
    
    Jesus said, “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”
    
    And he said, “The person is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!”
    
    Jesus said, “Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them). Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn’t take root in the soil and didn’t produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.”
    
    So first you have a saying about how no matter if man eats lion or the other way around man will be the inevitable result.
    
    The part about the net mirrors Habakkuk 1:14-17 with a metaphor of man like a fish, but here “the human being” is like a big fish selected from small fish.
    
    Then the next saying is about how with randomly scattered seeds it is only the seeds that survive to reproduce which multiply.
    
    The only group recorded following the Gospel of Thomas had this to say about the parable:
    
    For the ends, he says, are the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow…
    
    Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.3
    
    Elsewhere this group describes these seeds as “indivisible, like a point as if from nothing,” and “making up all things.”
    
    See, 50 years before Jesus was born the poet Lucretius writes a poem in Latin about the Epicurean philosophy, and instead of using the Greek atomos to describe indivisible parts of matter, he refers to them as ‘seeds’.
    
    For example:
    
    Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain seeds suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
    
    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura book 2
    
    In fact, Lucretius used the metaphor of “seed falling by the wayside of a path” to describe failed human reproduction. This is how it is phrased in both the version of the sower parable quoted in Pseudo-Hippolytus and in all the canonical gospels - “on the path” in Thomas may have been an attempt to correct the translation as it made it’s way into Coptic.
    
    See, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura is the only extant work from antiquity that explicitly described what is basically evolution from the idea that it is a doubled seed with one part from each parent that passed on traits to the idea there were intermediate mutants that didn’t survive because they weren’t as adaptive as others in order to survive and reproduce. We think this is only as old as Darwin, but it predated Jesus by decades.
    
    And the Epicureans were known to Judea where one of the sects (the Sadducees) had similar perspectives about no afterlife and where the Talmud has a Rabbi in the first century saying “Why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
    
    Lucretius even explicitly described man as originating from nature as well:
    
    I cannot hold The race of mortal beings was lowered on a rope of gold To the fields down from the lofty heavens, nor that mortals came From the sea, nor from the waves that smash the rocks. It’s from the same Earth that feeds them from her body now that they were born.
    
    Lucretius De Rerum Natura book 2
    
    And many of the ideas in Lucretius we see paralleled in Thomas.
    
    For example, in terms of if intelligent design was the origin or evolution, you have saying 29 where the spirit arising from flesh is the greater wonder over flesh arising from spirit.
    
    In response to Lucretius’s points about there not being an afterlife because the soul depends on bodies, you have sayings 87 and 112 bemoaning a soul which depends on a body.
    
    In response to Lucretius’s claim about the notion the cosmos was like a body that would one day die, you have saying 56 about how the cosmos is already a dead body.
    
    While outside the scope of this comment, effectively most of the Gospel of Thomas seems to be a rebuttal to Epicurean philosophy by incorporating ideas from Plato such that it claims this is a non-physical copy of an original physical universe, and because of that there actually is an afterlife as opposed to the Epicurean ideas.
    
    So back to saying 7, in combination with 8 and 9.
    
    TL;DR: These seem to be in this broader context, an embrace of Lucretius’s views of survival of the fittest in the context of humanity, as in that the human being is like the big fish from small fish, so no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion, man was was going to be the result.
    
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    OctopusKurwa@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wow I think I found Bart Ehrman’s Lemmy account lol.
    
    In seriousness though, that was a great read thank you.
    
    I wouldn’t blame the scholars who misclassified it too much. If I read it without knowing anything about it I would probably make the same mistake because secret knowledge is a big focus in it.
    
    Do you reckon Thomas’s author had access to Q ?
    
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  - jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Jesus was stoned.
    
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    OctopusKurwa@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No dude he was crucified
    
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Katrisia@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.

Huh? Is this about obligatory alms/tithes or is it about any kind of help to others, or both?

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- kromem@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s a good question. In part it’s difficult to answer because it isn’t clear which sayings or parts of which sayings in Thomas are original vs added later on. So a saying unique to it about if you have enough money to lend it at interest it would be better to give it away without expecting it back could be from a different time period from this one here.
  
  But my guess would be this is about alms/tithes and charity to the church.
  
  First, it’s paired with the obligations of fasting and prayer which has a religious context.
  
  Second, you see Paul arguing in 1 Cor 9 with the group in Corinth about his rights to make money from them, indicating they had a contrary perspective. The people in Corinth also had the view “everything is permissible for me” similar to other attitudes in Thomas and there’s actually a fair bit of overlap in the letters to Corinth beyond the scope of this comment.
  
  Finally, the notion the church could collect money appears to be one of the later edits to canon.
  
  You see in all the Synoptics Jesus tells the apostles they can’t carry a purse when spreading the word which would have prevented monetary collections. A similar saying about only accepting food and shelter is found in Thomas. But in Luke at the Last Supper Jesus explicitly reversed this, basically saying “remember when I said don’t carry a purse? Well carry one now.”
  
  Thing is, that part is absent from Marcion’s version of Luke which is probably the earliest surviving copy.
  
  So there’s a fair bit of supporting evidence that a historical Jesus didn’t look kindly on collecting money in a religious context and this was changed later on (it also makes sense the surviving version of the tradition would have been the one to change this).
  
  And given the Gospel of Thomas elsewhere has a unique saying about giving money away if you have enough to be lending it at interest, I suspect in this case about charity it’s a narrow scope specifically about the notion of obligation to give to charity for everyone including the poor as opposed to the merits of giving away money for the rich who are just going to die with a bunch leftover (the topic of saying 63 about an old man who kept saving up for the future and then just died).
  
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volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

we only know what it says today because a single complete copy survived buried in a jar for nearly two millennia.

That’s crazy.

(Also: Could you explain what your last quote means? I’m not sure how to put it in context.)

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- kromem@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So in Hebrew and Aramaic, words have only two genders: male or female. Unlike many other languages, there’s not a neutral gender.
  
  So you have ‘mother’ or ‘father’ but not ‘parent’. Or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ but not ‘child.’
  
  One of the sayings (#22) in this text has the following line:
  
  When you make the two into one, […] and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female
  
  There’s a fragmented reference to what appears to be a “true mother” in saying 101 in contrast to a human mother, and then in saying 105 quoted above it refers to knowing a father and mother, much as it regularly refers to ‘knowing’ one is the child of a “living Father” elsewhere in the work.
  
  One interpretation of the sayings about a mother and a father would be that it’s referring to two different entities. You see this crop up with later Gnostics.
  
  But in light of saying 22 and knowing about the constraints of a possible Hebrew or Aramaic origin for sayings contained here, another interpretation (and the one I’m inclined to) was that these aren’t sayings about an exclusively masculine ‘Father’ or a feminine “true mother” but are still within the context of monotheism with the perspective of a dual natured single ‘Parent’ that has characteristics of both a father and mother.
  
  This would be in keeping with the later followers of this text who saw the divine itself as broght forth by an original hermaphroditic (i.e. both male and female) primordial Adam, but here we’re veering off into the dualistic cosmology of this text and group which is much too complicated for this already lengthy comment.
  
  Hopefully this helps clarify?
  
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