The Chuch of Allan - The Plain Truth About God

A serialization of the book, The Plain Truth About God.

Chapter 10. - Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up!

The early Christian gospels are not historical biographies of Christ and do not really give us insight into the personal life of Jesus.

These gospels proclaim a message about Jesus and express a significance that the early Christians found in Jesus.

They are written in a way that appeals to historical truth, but they are not history in any actual sense.

The gospels expressed what people experienced about Jesus in the context of the first century Near East.

This experience was taken as a “revelation” of the Divine, and they tell us what the early Christians actually believed about Jesus!

Until the recent deciphering of the Gospel of Thomas and the discovery of the “Q” sayings, this knowledge of Christ was the only bases we had to explore the historical Jesus.

As a result, it was very difficult to differentiate between the actual words of Jesus and the words his followers (Christians) attribute to him.

It must be noted that “Q” (German for Quelle, or source) has only recently been deciphered from the first three gospels by comparing them side by side.

In this comparison, there were many divergent views and stories, but scholars also found a commonality within them that made no mention of the miracles of Christ.

Rather they pointed to the striped down sayings and parables that were probably the “authentic words of Jesus.”

Since the first gospel Mark, was not written until thirty-five or forty years or so after the death of Jesus, (Well over a generation later!) we have to remember that early Christian preachers told stories about Jesus in order to convey the significance they saw in him.

In explaining his parables and stories, it was necessary to paraphrase them and even add to them by way of clarification.

The early Christians did not distinguish between the actual Jesus and the Christ of their religion. They also did not distinguish between the sayings of the earthly Jesus and the explanations and interpretations of Christ’s sayings given by their leaders.

Here we have a case where the actual sayings of the earthly Jesus, (Q) were mixed with Christian interpretations of his words.

Then, various popular sayings and words of wisdom of the time, and the purported words of the risen “Christ” were all collected in a primary work which started out with the synoptic gospels of Mark, then Matthew and Luke.

After these three gospels, things took an even sharper turn and went in the direction of our modern version of Christianity with the apocalyptic works of John.

The authors of the gospels were actually anonymous, (Except for Paul) but for convenience sake, we use the traditional names of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

The first gospel -Mark, is loosely based on the first three or four decades of oral tradition plus “Q,” and the “Gospel of Thomas,” which was passed down to the author(s)

The first gospels were written largely in an attempt to provide some standard collection of the stories circulating about Jesus.

All, that is, with the exception of the Gospel of John, which is apocalyptic and more concerned with making a theological statement.

These gospels were not immediately recognized as authority.

As late as 96 A.D. Clement, the Bishop of Rome proclaimed the only authoritative texts of Christianity to be the Old Testament and the various sayings attributed to Jesus then in circulation.

The Gospels did not appear in purely Christian writings (as opposed to Jewish writings) until around 135 AD.

The same lack of authoritarian certification can be said of the Gospel of Thomas, which might well be the most informative discovery about Christian origins in modern history.

The Gospel was often mentioned in early Christian literature, but no copy was thought to have survived until the discovery of a Coptic manuscript in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

Portions of Greek versions of the Gospel of Thomas were found in Oxyrhynchus Egypt about one hundred years ago and these can be dated to about 140 C.E. or somewhat before.

A complete version in Coptic (the native Egyptian language written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet) as we mentioned, was found in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945.

That version can be dated to about 340 C.E. This Coptic version was a translation of the Greek version.

Thus most, if not all, of the Gospel of Thomas was written well prior to 140 C.E.

Thomas is a pure sayings gospel; that is, it consists only of a collection of the sayings of Jesus without any extended narrative or explanation.

While Thomas is not Q, its discovery proves the theory that such collections existed in the early days of Christianity.

The discovery of Thomas as part of a Gnostic library has led many to believe it a Gnostic creation.

However, very little of it would have been considered unorthodox to the early church. What little questionable material can be found is probably a later addition.

Thomas does represent 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 we can only become spiritual enough to see it.”

One of these 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 with 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, and 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!

We cannot reconstruct with certainty what the Gospel of Thomas looked like around the year 100 or earlier.

It is very likely that it existed at that time or before, and that a good deal of the material that’s now in that manuscript was already in a Greek manuscript that dates back to the first century.

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! To know yourself is the knowledge of our Divine origin.

“The fact that we have come from the Kingdom of the Father.”

What does it mean really to know oneself?

To know 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.

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 also unsubstantiated reports of his having visited a monastery in India and studying Eastern Philosophy!)

TOMORROW: The Gospel of Thomas and "Q"

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Deep and Important

A lecture from Dr. Michael Tkacz

Where are the Thomists?

A few years ago I received a phone call from Dr. Stephen Meyer, then on the philosophy faculty at Whitworth College. He had just returned from an international conference devoted to challenges to evolutionary biology from Intelligent Design Theory.

There was a bit of urgency in Dr. Meyer’s tone, so I agreed to meet him. As it turned out, he had something of a complaint to make, for he opened our meeting by showering me with a series of questions: Where are the Thomists? Where are the Catholics? How come you Thomist guys are not out there defending us Intelligent Designers? After all, we are on the same side, are we not?

Asking Dr. Meyer the occasion of this outpouring of questions, he explained that he and the other organizers of the conference had invited several Thomists to participate and he was dismayed that, far from expressing sympathy with the Intelligent Design Movement and its challenge to Darwinism, they were quite critical of the Movement. Perhaps feeling a bit betrayed, he wanted to ask me, a Thomist, just what was going on.

The debate between Creationists and Evolutionists has been going on for a long time now and neither side has been especially interested in what Thomism—a minority position to be sure—has had to contribute to the discussion. To the extent that philosophers working in the Thomistic tradition are considered at all, both sides seem to have been dissatisfied.

Secular Darwinians often view Thomists as just another species of literalists attempting to substitute the Book of Genesis for good biology—indeed, the only difference between Thomists and Protestant Creationists, on their view, is that Thomists do it in Latin.

On the other hand, Protestant Creationists have often viewed Thomists as already half-way to secularism and naturalism—no doubt due to insufficient attention to the reading of scripture.

Now come the Intelligent Designers who have revived the debate with evolutionary biology on scientific grounds. This new challenge to Darwinism attempts to show that the biological evidence supports gradual evolution of species less than it does direct creation by a Divine Designer.

Given the philosophical sophistication of their arguments, it is perhaps natural that Intelligent Designers would assume that they had allies among traditional Thomists who are known for their systematic defense of the doctrine of creation.

Yet, Thomists have not generally been quick to jump onto the Intelligent Design bandwagon. As Dr. Meyer discovered, the Intelligent Design Movement has, overall, not been well-received in Thomistic circles.

So, the question is: Why? Why have Thomists, who share with Intelligent Designers so many of the same concerns about the secularization of our society, not been more supportive of the Movement? Why have so many Thomists hesitated to join Intelligent Design Theorists in their campaign against Darwinism?

Why do some Thomists, far from being supportive, appear even a bit hostile to the Intelligent Design project?

A bit of attention to the Thomistic philosophy of creation may help to answer these questions. More importantly, investigating the coolness of Thomism toward Intelligent Design Theory may help to move the debate away from its polarized Creation vs. Evolution state toward a discussion that is more philosophically productive.

A look at the Thomistic understanding of God’s relationship to nature may even suggest a third alternative to the already well-known positions of the Darwinians and Intelligent Designers.


Thomas Aquinas on Creation

Back in the days of Thomas Aquinas himself, there was a scientific revolution that seriously challenged the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. From the time of the early Church, orthodox Christians have held that the universe was created by a transcendent God who is wholly responsible for its existence and the existence of everything in it.

In fact, this is a teaching that Christians inherited from the Jews and shared with those of the Islamic faith. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, a great historical change came to Western Europe as the works of the ancient Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians became available in the Latin language for the first time.

Especially important among these works were those of Aristotle who had worked out the basic principles of nature and developed a methodology for scientific research that promised, in time, to unlock the secrets of the universe.

This scientific revolution caused great excitement among the Latin-speaking scholars in the then new universities of Europe. They avidly pursued research in many of the natural sciences and, essentially, founded the historical tradition of experimental science that continues today.

It was not long before progress was being made in such fields as mathematical astronomy, optics, meteorology, botany, zoology, and other sciences. At the same time, the new science was a cause for concern, for some theologians saw in it a challenge to the doctrine of creation. Specifically, many held that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the claim of the Greek naturalists that something cannot come from nothing and the Christian teaching of creation ex nihilo.

Indeed, the Greek philosophers used their fundamental principle as grounds for arguing that the universe is eternal: there can be neither a first nor a last motion. It certainly appeared to many of the contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas that one cannot have his Christian cake and scientifically eat it too; Christianity and natural science seemed to be incompatible and one must choose between the two.

Into this medieval debate comes Thomas Aquinas. He pointed out that the Christian conception of God as the author of all truth and the notion that the aim of scientific research is the truth indicates that there can be no fundamental incompatibility between the two.

Provided we understand Christian doctrine properly and do our science well, we will find the truth—not a religious truth and another scientific truth—but the truth, the way things actually exist and function. Yet, what about the apparent conflict between notion of creation from nothing and the scientific principle that for every natural motion or state there is an antecedent motion or state?

Thomas points out that the judgment that there is a conflict here results from confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that I call the “Cosmogonical Fallacy.”

Those who are worried about conflict between faith and reason on this issue fail to distinguish between cause in the sense of a natural change of some kind and cause in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. “Creatio non est mutatio,” says Thomas, affirming that the act of creation is not some species of change.

So, the Greek natural philosophers were quite correct: from nothing, nothing comes. By “comes” here is meant a change from one state to another and this requires some underlying material reality, some potentiality for the new state to come into being. This is because all change arises out of a pre-existing possibility for that change residing in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a taking of something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe.

Rather, creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.

Strictly speaking, points out Thomas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something.

On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist—it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates, not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.

In this way, one can see that the new science of the thirteenth century, out of which our modern science developed, was not a threat to the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. To come to know the natural causes of natural beings is a different matter from knowing that all natural beings and operations radically depend on the ultimate cause for the existence of everything: God the Creator.

Creation is not a change. Creation is a cause, but of a very different, indeed unique, kind. Only if one avoids the Cosmogonical Fallacy, is one able to correctly understand the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo.