The true message of salvation!

To get a better handle on exactly what Jesus meant in the sermons to his followers we can look back to the Gospel of Thomas.

Thomas represents a Jewish "Wisdom" philosophy that was embraced by Jesus and the Gnostics. - “That the kingdom of God is not something we must await for - but is in fact already here, if only we can become spiritual enough to see it”.

One of the documents found at Nag Hammadi begins with a note in the margin, "The Gospel According to Thomas." The first sentence of that document says, "These are the secret words which the living Jesus taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote down." Then they start over 110 sayings, each introduced with "and Jesus said."

Now this is very reveling since some of those sayings have parallels in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, and some not. However, we can state that sayings or parables that are repeated two or more times in any of the early Gospels have a much higher chance of being an actual utterance by the historical Jesus.

These sayings may go back to a very early period of Christianity; some of them may have been added later. The document itself comes from the fourth century and as with all gospel text, we have to remember that these texts were fluid.

Remember, scribes could add, could leave things out, or could add comments and even their own interpretations.

They not only could, but also did!

Now what is typical about these sayings is that in each instance, they tell us that if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have to first recognize yourself. You have to know yourself, know who you are.

It begins with a saying about the Kingdom of God, which is probably one of the most important, and reveling proclamations.

"If you seek the Kingdom of God in the sky then the birds will precede you, ad if you seek it in the sea, then the fish will precede you, but the Kingdom is in you, and if you know yourself, then you know the Kingdom of the Father.”

However, if you do not know yourself, you live in poverty, not knowledge! That which is understood to be the knowledge of one's divine origin. “The fact that one has come from the Kingdom of the Father”.

What does it mean really to know oneself? To know one is to have insight into one's own ultimate divine identity.

"Know yourself" is a very old Greek maxim... That is, you have to know that your own soul is divine, and then you know that you are immortal. Whereas, the body is the mortal part of human existence.

Now this is radicalized in the Gospel of Thomas into saying that everything that is experienced physically and through sense perception, everything in the world that you can perceive in this way is nothing. It is, at best, chaos and, at worst, it does not even exist in reality. The only thing that really exists is your divine spirit or your divine soul, which is identical in its quality with God himself.

This, in many ways, exactly reflects the philosophy of the Eastern Religions. (There is even a lot of conjecture about the lost years of Jesus, between the time when he was in his late teens until he began his ministry at about the age of thirty. There are unsubstantiated reports of his having visited a monastery in India and studied Eastern Philosophy!)

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book "The Plain Truth About god-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!)