The Last Line of the Gospel of Thomas Will Make Your Jaw Drop

0:00 in justosition to other books that were floating around bearing

0:04 the names of Jesus and the apostles that just had no credibility.

0:08 What are those?

0:09 Okay, so like the the Gnostic Gospels

0:11 or things like that like the Gospel of Peter,

0:13 the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas.

0:16 I don't even know if I know about these.

0:18 Okay, so the podcast is not done.

0:20 Okay, but then then it can be done.

0:21 But what is this?

0:22 Yeah.

0:23 So there were other books at the time written by other eyewitness people.

0:26 So no.

0:28 Okay.

0:28 So you have the first century,

0:30 you have the gospels and even then

0:33 the understanding is that there's one gospel message, right?

0:36 That's the message of who Jesus is and what he came to do.

0:39 But the idea is that those gospels are according to Matthew,

0:42 Mark, Luke, and John.

0:44 One gospel but four accounts of it.

0:47 Eventually gospel literature is kind of framed

0:50 in an understanding of it looks a particular way.

0:53 But there were groups in the subsequent centuries after

0:55 Jesus's death that aimed to appropriate Jesus and the disciples.

1:00 So they wrote documents that tried to shoehorn

1:04 the credibility of adding Jesus into their philosophical systems

1:09 in order to kind of bring Jesus into the mix.

1:14 So interestingly enough,

1:15 they always almost always portray Jesus as a pagan mystic

1:19 and that's very palatable for the pagan mystical world.

1:22 And so at even face value we can go

1:25 okay is it more likely that the first century Nazarene

1:29 rabbi itinerate Jesus of Nazareth was actually a pagan mystic

1:34 that later people tried to paint as a Jew or

1:38 is it the opposite right that he's clearly you know born

1:41 in Bethlehem growing up in Nazareth wandering around Galilee that in this Jewish

1:48 saturated Hebraic world and that later people are like let's make

1:53 him into a little bit more of a like a pagan philosopher.

1:56 I think that's what's going on, right?

1:58 But you have uh documents, even early documents,

2:01 something like the Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings.

2:05 Um it's one of the more famous ones because

2:07 in 1945 it was discovered in the Nagamadi Desert,

2:10 what's known as the Nagamadi library.

2:13 Also contains other documents like uh the secret

2:15 gospel of John and the Gospel of Philip.

2:18 But the gospel of Thomas is one of the more kind of famous well-known ones.

2:22 It's not a gospel in the formal sense of like a birth,

2:25 life, death, and resurrection, but it's 114 sayings of Jesus,

2:30 but the this gnostic group,

2:33 which so the the term gnostic comes from the Greek word nosis,

2:38 which means knowledge.

2:39 And the idea is within historical biblical Christianity,

2:43 salvation is something that is done external to you

2:46 on your behalf by the finished work of Jesus.

2:49 Gnosticism comes from the east.

2:52 It makes its way into the the Roman world

2:57 and it starts to appropriate and include individuals into its system.

3:03 And so by the second century,

3:04 Jesus gets kind of by osmosis grouped into these philosophical systems.

3:10 And though there's a whole bunch of dozens of different

3:13 gnostic groups which don't even agree with one another,

3:16 the kind of central thread is that salvation is not something external to you.

3:22 It's actually innate about you because it's not just that Jesus is God,

3:26 but Michaela, you're divine.

3:28 And the way you unlock that is by secret knowledge.

3:32 So you listen to the secret knowledge once it kind of clicks

3:36 and you become enlightened then you realize I'm actually a divine being.

3:40 Oh this is whatnosticism is

3:42 sonosticism is about sonostic literature often has Jesus uh he

3:48 he's very secretive and unlike the the more public ministry

3:51 that we see in the biblical gospels Jesus is whispering

3:53 the secret knowledge into the ears of whoever is the claimed individual.

3:58 Interestingly enough,

3:59 it's never the individuals that are are the key people in the biblical gospels.

4:02 It's never uh Peter, James, and John.

4:05 It's it's always the it's always Judas or Thomas or Philip.

4:10 It's kind of the other background here, Mary Magdalene.

4:13 Um in a way that kind of is trying to ostracize

4:16 the key figures in the biblical gospels and actually say,

4:20 you know, you guys think it's Matthew and Peter and James.

4:23 It's actually it's actually Philip or Mary Magdalene.

4:27 Oh, interesting.

4:27 Um, but the Gospel of Thomas has a number of key features to it.

4:32 It's I mean, right off the bat, all of these are written when people

4:36 that are associated with their names are long dead.

4:39 So, Thomas is dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas is written,

4:43 which is a key indicator that, you know, this isn't reliable.

4:46 Um, but then it has teachings like the last line of the Gospel of Thomas

4:51 has one of the disciples saying to Jesus,

4:53 "Let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life." Okay.

4:57 So, starting off on a good note.

4:58 And then Jesus replies and says, "Don't worry

5:02 because I will make her appear male as you males."

5:07 And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is,

5:09 "Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." Wow.

5:13 They're really ahead of their time now.

5:15 I know, right?

5:16 But it's this kind of stuff.

5:17 So, so when you have these these other pieces

5:20 of literature that are are they're they're trying to kidnap,

5:23 they're trying to put words on the mouth of Jesus that Jesus never said.

5:28 And interestingly enough, early Christians are well aware of these guys

5:32 like write treaties like against heresies where

5:36 he stipulates that there is a book

5:39 called the Gospel of Thomas and it's nonsense.

5:42 It's heresy.

5:44 It's silly.

5:45 And for a long long time until 1945,

5:47 we had no like tangible artifact evidence for the Gospel of Thomas.

5:52 But when eventually that comes to light, what does it do?

5:56 It confirms that what Erenus was talking about

5:58 with the silliness of the Gospel of Thomas actually happens.

6:01 And and we have we have evidence for that also in the the Gospel of Peter.

6:05 Um the Gospel of Peter pops up also discovered in the 19th century.

6:10 And when we discover it,

6:12 we have um a particular church leader uh I believe he's in Turkey

6:17 and he's writing to there's a church in roads that writes to him and says,

6:22 "Hey, we've come across this Gospel of Peter.

6:25 We're not sure what this is." And he says, "Okay, well, you keep reading it.

6:28 I'm going to look into it." And then he finds

6:31 a copy of it and then writes immediately to them and says,

6:33 "This is heretical." Like all the way through this thing,

6:37 it doesn't represent anything that's accurate about Jesus.

6:39 stop reading it within your church community.

6:41 Now, we don't find the actual copy of the Gospel

6:44 of Peter until long long long long long long time after that.

6:47 But then once again, what does it do?

6:49 It confirms that when we discover the Gospel of Peter,

6:52 it has these kind of gnostic esoteric

6:56 denying that Jesus ever had a physical body.

6:58 And so Jesus is on the cross and he's kind of chilling.

7:01 He's floating because he's like the ancient world

7:04 had no problem with believing Jesus was God.

7:05 But believing that Jesus was a man, that's the actual hang-up.

7:09 And so, okay,

7:10 if Jesus, if Jesus denying the incarnation was a central point to a lot

7:14 of this stuff because the physical is evil and the spiritual is good.

7:18 So you wow this idea which is once again why

7:22 you read the book of Acts and you get to Acts

7:25 17 Paul is preaching on Mars Hill at the Aropagus

7:30 and it seems that his audience of like Jew of of Greek

7:34 philosophers are tracking with him until he drops the word anastasis

7:38 resurrection and then all of a sudden they're like no we're

7:41 out and it's because an idea of a bodily resurrection they're

7:46 like that's the opposite osite of what we're trying to attain.

7:49 I'm stuck in a meat prison because I'm a spirit that is

7:52 stuck in a body and I death actually releases me from this.

7:56 So this whole Jewish narrative idea of a resurrection of the dead,

8:00 I I want nothing to do with that.

8:03 And so this is a Platonic thought that is adopted by Gnosticism.

8:06 And so they have no they have no hangup with Jesus being God.

8:10 They just deny entirely that he was physical.

8:14 Wow.

8:15 Wow.

8:16 It's no wonder you've gone deep on this.

8:18 It's kind of tempting.

8:19 It's kind of tempting.

8:20 Wow, that was cool.