CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
In the mid-1940s the world became aware of two magnificent archeological discoveries. The first occurred in Egypt in 1945 and is known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The second, and until now the best-known, occurred in 1947 and is commonly called the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nag Hammadi documents show the diverse thinking of various Christian sects up until about 350 CE. In contrast, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide additional understanding of both the moderate and extreme Jewish religious thinking at the time of Jesus. This book is a radically different translation and explanation of one of the Nag Hammadi documents, called by many the Gospel of Thomas.
As you will discover, this book is not a Gospel like the ones written by the New Testament Evangelists. It is a manual that teaches a method of personal growth, which I call the Way of Life. Thus, the title of the book.
The Nag Hammadi Discovery
In December of 1945, in Upper Egypt near the current city of Nag Hammadi and the now vanished ancient Christian monastery of St. Pachomius, two brothers, Muhammad ‘Ali and Khalifah, set off on their camels to obtain nitrogen-rich soil that could be used as fertilizer. At a large mound called Djebel el-Tarif they began to dig. Soon Muhammad ‘Ali unearthed a large, sealed clay pot. Inside he found thirteen leather-bound books filled with crumbling yellowed parchment. Although he was unable to read the text, he knew that the books were ancient and possibly worth a lot of money when sold to antiquities dealers on the black market in Cairo. What Muhammad ‘Ali had discovered were Coptic copies of manuscripts created before 350 CE. The originals seem to have been written in Greek, the language of the New Testament.
He took the books to his house. While he was out on an errand, his mother ripped out some of the pages and began to burn the manuscripts for kindling. Fortunately, before all was destroyed, Muhammad ‘Ali hid them from her and from the authorities who might confiscate them. He placed them with different friends.
Those friends began to sell them in Cairo. Before long, the books came to the attention of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, and the books became nationalized.
While the Dead Sea Scrolls became famous rather quickly, the Nag Hammadi Library was largely unheard of by the general public until the early 1970s. One of the barriers to publication was the absence of scholars who could read and translate Coptic, the language of the documents. The second reason for hesitant publication was that early on scholars dismissed the documents as arising out of a strange Gnostic sect, which they believed had little or no bearing on the Christianity of today.
A Two-Thousand-Year-Old Secret
After Jesus died his disciples and other followers found themselves disputing about how they might continue in his spirit. They could not agree who Jesus was, what they should think, and how they should respond to people who did not embrace Jesus. In short, they did not always agree on the Way of Jesus. At the same time, Orthodox Jews began to persecute these disciples. Many of them fled the area because of this assault. Some carried Jesus’s sayings and parables to Egypt; others to the north, to what is now Syria and Turkey; others, east to India; and others around the Mediterranean to Rome and to what is now Spain, France, and England.
We might ask, “When the disciples dispersed, what collection of Jesus’s sayings and parables did they carry with them?” They did not possess the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because these works were not composed until 30 to 110 years after Jesus died. Jesus spoke volumes of wisdom. Was any of it recorded, copied, and transported with the disciples? The answer is a clear yes. Scholars have long known that the authors of the Gospels composed from previously written texts. Wouldn’t it be great if we could read these early texts?
Paul the apostle founded what later became the Church of Peter and Paul. That church later became the Roman Catholic Church, and because of numerous schisms, we now see many Christian denominations. From the very beginning, the Church of Peter and Paul began to ostracize and then persecute other Christians with different notions of truth. This was done in the name of protecting what the regarded as the “true church.” They also began the practice of destroying documents that did not support their doctrine about Jesus, God, and the nature of sin and redemption. This practice became ruthless after the Roman government endorsed the church of Peter and Paul in about 312 CE. Over the next century, with the backing of the Roman army, the Roman church tortured and killed so-called heretical Christians, destroyed their documents, and dismantled their monasteries and houses of worship. In 367 CE, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy unacceptable documents. Someone, perhaps monks at the monastery of St. Pachomius, gathered thirteen of the books Athanasius wanted to burn, removed them from the monastery library, sealed them in a heavy, six-foot jar, and intending to hide them, buried them on a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi. And so after sixteen hundred years, we now have an opportunity to study and learn from the followers of Jesus who interpreted his Way in a different manner.
Thomas
You might be asking, “Who was Thomas, and how did his name get attached to this book?” Did Jesus title the book, or did later generations name it after Thomas, the scribe named in the second poem? A man of the same name is mentioned in the other Gospels as being a close disciple of Jesus. He may also have been the group storyteller and scribe.
In Jesus’s time, few people could write. Authors composed in their minds, memorized their work, and delivered it orally. After many mental revisions, these authors then might go to a professional scribe to pay to have the work recorded on valuable parchment.
We need to understand that Jesus’s oral culture did not title works or designate authors as we do. Let us imagine that an oral work was begun by an individual named Donald, then heard by Jerry, who then revised or added to it. Then let’s say that many others did the same for fifty years before it was finalized. Who was the author? Most ancient texts have no title and no defined author. We don’t know for sure who composed Genesis or the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The scribe of this Nag Hammadi book titled it “Gospel of Thomas.” Because of that notation, people refer to it by that title.
A Book of Wisdom Poems
Since the discovery of this text, it has been translated into many languages. Until now, no one has disclosed it as an intricately organized, unified book of wisdom poems. Rather they view it as a collection of sayings.1 And no one, to my knowledge, has shown it to be a systematic manual for personal development.
This ancient text is a brilliant piece of literature, surpassing most in form and wisdom. You will discover that the author divided most of the major poems into sub-poems, more than three hundred in all. He then brilliantly arranged these nested poems into an eleven-chapter, progressively developed manual for personal growth. When I compare the wisdom in this book with respect to describing who we are and how to become a better person, I place it ahead of all other philosophers and psychologists I have studied. When I look at how the author masterfully wove the arrangement of each poem and of each chapter with the content, I am left speechless. He matches Shakespeare with his ability to describe our current condition. He exceeds the bard with his explanation of what we might become. And Shakespeare never described the process of personal development.
Upon reading this book, you will discover a tightly organized treatise on how to become wise. After you examine the evidence, you may agree with me that Jesus was the author. Thus, even though I will proceed as if he composed this book, I don’t expect anyone else to come to the same conclusion without much study.
Reasons to Conclude That Jesus Wrote This Book of Poems
A great deal of data point to Jesus as the author of this book. Some of it I will present now. The rest will be better discussed in chapter sixteen because much of the evidence is within the book itself.
The Form of Jesus’s Book
Because the majority of people in Jesus’s audience could neither read nor write, he needed to recite his core ideas over and over until people memorized them. While he was doing that, he would explain what they meant. Those in the audience who cared to remember and pass on his message to others could do so.
Therefore, we would expect that Jesus’s book would contain short statements of his wisdom, and that it would not contain his lengthy ever-evolving commentaries. That is exactly what we find in this text. His manual is made up of short, clever wisdom poems that one could easily and enjoyably memorize.
The Inclusion of Information from Later Gospels
Scholars have known for more than one hundred years that the Evangelists of the Christian Scriptures who wrote 40–110 years after Jesus died were relying to some extent on earlier gospels and collections of Jesus’s sayings for their material. In a book that might have been composed earlier than their works, we would expect it to contain the information found in those later texts.
Jesus’s work includes about 50 percent of the parables and sayings that we find in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Thus, we have good reason to suspect that his book was one of their sources of information.
Jesus’s book does not include some parables and sayings that the Evangelists attribute to Jesus. It is possible that Jesus wrote more than one book and that there are others waiting to be discovered—if they haven’t been destroyed. Or it is possible that the Evangelists composed material and then attributed it to Jesus. That practice was common and legitimate in the first century.
This manual describes the beginning and intermediate steps to becoming wise. If Jesus composed another book, it would probably be directed at those far along on the way of wisdom, and it would include some of the material that we find in other gospels.
A Lack of Biographic Information
We would expect that Jesus’s book would contain little, if any, biographic information. Jesus would want to convey wisdom, not to explain how he was born, how he grew up, and what cities he visited. His manual contains almost no facts about his history. Because Jesus would have written his book before he died, it would not include any description of his last days, his death, or his resurrection. And that is exactly what we find in this work.
The Date of Composition
There are two schools of thought about when this book was written. 2 Some recently published books 3 indicate that the sayings were published prior to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. They have determined that period by analyzing the book’s language and its content. One scholar, Elaine Pagels, in her book Beyond Belief, argues that the author of the Gospel of John was well aware of what she calls the Gospel of Thomas.
Jesus’s book contains wisdom poems arranged in the classical arch or chiastic structure. That style was used in the composition of sections of the Bible, including the Torah. By the first century CE, it had become a highly developed method for conveying oral and written information. Jesus would have mastered it and chosen it for his compositions. After the first century, it appears to have been rarely used. That fact also dates this work.
The Internal Evidence of Authorship
The first two sub-poems of this book state that Jesus spoke the words and Judas Thomas wrote them. In other words, the introduction clearly indicates that Jesus was the author and Judas was the scribe.
The work is divided into over 114 poems. Each one begins with a sentence preceding the poems stating that Jesus was the author. How unusual for that assertion to be made so many times. Clearly, Judas Thomas wanted us to know that no one but Jesus composed every single part of the book.
Further Evidence
Jesus’s book contains the most convincing evidence that he wrote it. First, the reader will need to understand the arch form of the poems. They have been so intricately organized that I argue in chapter sixteen that no one but Jesus could have done it.
Second, the author of the inflammatory messages contained in these poems would have been marginalized, persecuted, and killed as was Jesus. He threatened the religious and secular structure of society by condemning indoctrination. Unenlightened cultures depend on convincing people to think and act in official ways to maintain their notion of order, correctness and holiness. Jesus taught people how to use their own soul knowing to make decisions for themselves. He did not preach a doctrine and did not support any, no matter the source.
Third, we know of no other follower of Jesus who openly preached the radical messages found in this book and who died a violent death. If someone else had written it, he would have had the courage to preach it. Such a person would have been as notorious and vilified as Jesus was. He would also have been able to compose his own book without using Jesus’s material. And he would not have introduced each poem with a statement similar to: “These are the words of Jesus.”
Why Was This Book of Poems Hidden?
No early witnesses of Jesus’s life have mentioned that he composed a book before he died. Why? Because it would be dangerous for anyone to be caught with a copy of it. Also, Jewish followers of Jesus were probably reluctant to admit that Jesus was assaulting their treasured traditions upon which they based their identity.
In Palestine in the hundred years preceding Jesus and during his life, the people eagerly expected a Messiah to lead them out of bondage to the Romans, to restore the kingdom of Israel, and to bring back to Israel its lost tribes. During that period, many leaders rose up declaring themselves to be that Messiah. Over and over again, these false prophets led revolts against the Romans, who viciously put them down. Thousands upon thousands of Jews were killed and exiled as the Romans restored order.
As a result, the Jewish religious establishment feared for their lives and for Judaism. They did not want anyone to upset the current order which kept them in power and which ensured the continued existence of their religion and race. Thus, when word spread that Jesus was the Messiah, the religious hierarchy, fearing a loss of everything they held dear, turned him over to the Romans for crucifixion. Or so says common, current theory.
You will discover that this book contains a vastly more revolutionary message than that Jesus was the Messiah. In fact, Jesus never says that in his work. Let us suppose that historians are wrong: Jesus was not killed because he said that he was king of the Jews, nor because he worked miracles on the Sabbath, nor because he upset tables in the temple. Instead, consider that he was killed because of his radical two-part message that we find in this book: that secular and religious indoctrination destroys the human spirit and that there exists an alternative way for us to become fulfilled human beings who grow daily in the love of others and God. Secular and religious leaders who heard that message would have been threatened; and some would have even wanted him killed. At the least, they would have wanted to suppress Jesus’s book and ensure that the world did not know the real Jesus. That was what happened.
After Jesus died the Jewish authorities and the Romans continued to persecute his followers. What were the early followers to do with Jesus’s book? If they proclaimed its true message, they would be threatened and so would any followers. In order to survive, they needed to hide or destroy documents that would invite attack.
In order to preserve some of Jesus’s ideas, they kept some and hid the rest. I think they did this in two ways. First, they developed tame collections of his sayings and parables and distributed them in the years immediately after Jesus died. We know that they existed. Eventually, forty to seventy years later, those ideas became incorporated into the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are sanitized versions of Jesus’ book.
Paul took another tact. He seldom quoted Jesus at all and constructed a doctrine about Jesus that showed the Roman authorities that Jesus proclaimed a spiritual kingdom, not one that would threaten them. Paul’s ideas form the basis of most if not all versions of Christianity today. Most proclaim a supposedly “true” doctrine, which often contradicts that of others. Most declare other doctrines “false” and “sinful,” most insist that it is the “true” church, most interpret scripture to support its version of the “truth,” most in subtle and sometimes blatant ways persecute people of different faiths, and most suppress and destroy documents that do not conform to their views. All of that conflict occurs because Paul and his followers decided that Jesus was not attacking indoctrination, but was promoting it.
Probably only a few copies of Jesus’s book circulated after Jesus died. From the beginning, dogmatic Christians and Jews were on the attack. In order for Jesus’s true followers to camouflage their Way, they may have named his work the Gospel of Thomas. That would indicate that Jesus had little or nothing to do with it. Therefore, if the religious or Roman authorities caught anyone with the book, they may persecute that person as an aberrant member of Jesus’s followers, but they would be less likely to attack the entire organization.
Jesus spent most of his life creating sayings and parables. When we lift them out of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we find a prodigious amount of original wisdom. We also know from other early sources that Jesus composed much more material than these works contain. How foolish of us to think that such a great author as Jesus would go willingly to his death without wanting to pass on his insights in one or more books.
Would Jesus choose to die only hoping that people would remember his compositions exactly as he preached them? I don’t believe so. It is highly likely that he wished to have his message passed on intact, with no editing by others.
The Way of Life
We take for granted that our way of life is a good one. It does not occur to us that another diametrically opposed option exists. Jesus called our normal way of living, “death.” He also recognized that in each moment people grow either in death or life. When they grow in death, they become more lost, worried, and unable to live in the moment. For example, people often regret their past mistakes and worry about their future. Others live from distraction to distraction. In contrast, those on the Way of Life grow to live in the present in joy and love of all.
We are on the Way of Death to the degree that our minds race, our bodies need to keep busy, and our souls rely on money, relationships, faith, and hope for security. We walk the Way of Life to the degree that we experience stillness while living independent of all supports, including faith, friends, family, money, and things.
To the degree that we embrace secular and religious doctrine, we die. To the degree that we become independent of the ideas of others by discovering and utilizing our own soul knowing, we live. Jesus grew in that way and he teaches us how to do it in his book.
This Translation
I learned New Testament Greek as a Jesuit. That language evolved into Coptic. While my language training helped me, I cannot claim to be a Coptic translator. I had to rely on other translations, particularly the wonderful interlinear translation by Michael Grondin. He breaks words down into their fundamental units of meaning in a way that helped me to determine their core poetic intent. I also had the advantage over previous translators in that I could lay the text out in an arch form. The parallel structure of that arrangement revealed which of a number of meanings Jesus intended for a particular word.
When others translated this work, they transliterated the text; that is, they interpreted the text in various ways trying to capture the intended meaning. In what you are about to read, I do not do that. Jesus composed this work using an ancient arch poetic form. In order for us to experience the poetic meter and other features of the form, I had to translate the text literally. For the most part, I was able to do that.
The Coptic 350 CE text of Jesus’s book, as we now have it, does not show the poetic structure. Along the way, to save expensive parchment, someone wrote out the text one line after another and expected the audience to know how to break it into poems. We have lost the rules that people used to divide a text into a poem with stanzas with the correct words on each line. I have reconstructed those guidelines. In order not to overwhelm the casual reader with a scholarly presentation of them, I put a few after each of the first few poems. The casual reader may choose to skip them. Those more interested can study those guidelines in the context of the previous poem.
Let me provide one final comment about the translation. Jesus defines the meaning of a phrase or metaphor in context. He doesn’t, for example, say, “Death means X.” Instead, he will use the term death over and over in different contexts. He then expects us to remember each instance of his use of that term, compare them, and finally discern their meaning. This method provides vastly more intellectual and visceral information than a dictionary definition.
So that the reader knows that Jesus repeated a word or phrase, I translated it the same way throughout the book. That’s something that other translators have not done. For example, if I translated moy as “death,” I did not translate it the next time as “loss of life” or “deceased.” If I did, the reader would miss how Jesus referred him or her to a previous poem and, within it, to a context that explained the meaning of death.
Jesus’s Phenomenology
In this book Jesus describes phenomenologically, that is, from his inside-out experience, how to develop wisdom. As we grow, our inside and outside awareness changes and evolves. In other words, as we become conscious, we discern more within us, and we see other people and how the world works more clearly.
Jesus did not describe the world as most theologians, philosophers, and psychologists do, by trying to state universal truths that apply to everyone. For example, he did not state that there were three persons in God, as do Christian theologians, nor that God is one and cannot be divided, as do Islamic clergy. Rather, he describes one’s experience of God and of everything else at a low level of growth and at a high level. To do that he uses metaphors and allegories. He puts phrases and stanzas in juxtaposition to each other. He plays on words and images, and he uses other poetic techniques. His style yields great personal insights if we are willing to be patient and reflect.
I find that it takes a lot of work to grasp Jesus’s meanings. His poems forced me to think through ideas for myself. I had to compare his experience with mine, and I had to decide for myself not only what he meant, but also how I want to view others, the world, and myself. I don’t see how one can do that and speedily devour this work.
This isn’t a book one will read and shelve forever. No, it comprises a true scripture in the sense that whenever we return to it, we will encounter the poet and ourselves anew.
Numerology
Those familiar with biblical numerology will recognize that Jesus uses it throughout his book. He counts everything. The critical numbers possess meaning, which I understand as follows:
- One means “unity.”
- Two means “twin,” “double,” or “twin supports.”
- Three means “a short period of time,” “a short preparatory period,” “a short introduction,” or “a short conclusion.”
- Four means “whole.”
- Five means “strong.”
- Six means “dark” or “evil.”
- Seven means “perfect” or “complete.”
- Nine means “a long period of time,” “a long preparatory period,” “a long introduction,” or “a long conclusion.”
One will be astounded at how Jesus numerically structured his work. For example, the second chapter consists of nine main poems, and each of them includes one, three, or five sub-poems. Each poem consists of three, five, or seven stanzas. Thus the text possesses meaning, but so does the arrangement of the book’s elements.
The Organization of This Book of Poems
Jesus’s book consists of eleven chapters. I call them sections. I do that to distinguish his chapters from mine in this book. In other words, when you read the word section, know that I am referring to a chapter in Jesus’s book. When I use the word chapter, I denote a chapter in The Way of Life. This volume presents sections one and two of Jesus’s book.
We don’t know what Jesus titled his book, if he did. I am calling this book and the series to follow The Way of Life.
Jesus’s book consists of about 120 poems. Most are divided into sub-poems. For example, the first section of Jesus’s book is his introduction. It is one long poem broken into three parts, each part being a sub-poem.
To summarize, the reader will need to distinguish between chapters of this volume, sections of Jesus’s book, and between poems and their parts.
Let us now proceed to chapter two of this book. It presents section one of Jesus’s book of poems.