Why the Gospel of Thomas Should Be Admitted as Canonical

If some international, ecumenical body of Christian Churches decides to do a Revised Standard Version of the Bible for the 21st Century in vernacular languages, they must, as has been argued earlier in this blog, take into account the Codex Sinaiticus, our oldest surviving Bible (which indicates a feminist St. Paul as the original voice of his epistles), but it must also must accept into the biblical fold, The Gospel of Thomas, the most accessible and "orthodox" of the gospels and other writings discovered in a clay jar in the oasis of Nag Hammadi in Egypt back in the late 1940s. There are several essential justifications for doing so. Scholars have proven that it has a linguistic provenance with the earliest Christian Gospels. This relates to the fact that its phraseology and ideas are expressed in an original form and belong to the days of early Christianity. Though the form in which we now have it is in Coptic (the language of the Pharaohs that survived in Late Antiquity), scholars find that its diction and semantics easily translate back to the Aramaic original that must once have existed (Aramaic being the language of Jesus and his disciples). The basic moral, cosmological and theological teachings of Thomas are consistent with the Canonical Gospels in general. Moreover, the wisdom and mystical content is not at odds with the already established teachings of Jesus himself. There are those who will say: well, the Ecumenical Councils of the Ancient Church did not accept it, most especially the Council of Nicaea (the one under the auspices of Emperor Constantine), which crystallized the Christian Church as we know it. Well, that was then, this is now. The fact of the matter is that the New Testament already contains multiple ways of conveying central truths. Each of the Canonical Gospels takes its own viewpoint and introduces its own original ideas about Jesus, what he taught, what he claimed. This amounts to a clear precedent for the inclusion of alternate perspectives. Some say, well there is no Crucifixion in Thomas, but the rebuttal is: well, there is no Nativity in John. Psychologists today have established a basic fact of human existence: as a species, not all of us approach the world with the same form of intelligence. This is a good thing. It gives us more mental tools, collectively speaking, with which to solve the variety of problems and challenges we face as a society. As it stands, each of the Canonical Gospels addresses itself to this reality that has always existed, even before it was consciously and scientifically realized. Why isn't there just one Gospel in the first place? Why isn't there one version of Jesus' life and teachings? Christianity from the beginning was a religion embraced by a vast international community of cultures: Latin-speaking Romans, Koine-speaking Greeks, Aramaic-speaking Jews, Coptic-speaking Egyptians, and many other cultures and ethnic groups in between. The four gospels in our Bible are an artifact of this multicultural origin of Christianity, and they each emphasize different things concerning Jesus. So what does Thomas have to offer that they don't? Maybe something that would have saved us from a lot of grief in the past: the concept of personal responsibility for one's salvation. The Gospel of Thomas teaches us our role in effecting the liberation of one's own soul through a clarity of understanding of moral relationships. One of the beautiful things about Christianity that was correctly identified by Martin Luther is the fundamental power of faith itself. However, that is just the beginning. The mental articulation of that faith is the hard work of daily life. Unfortunately, too many people, once they have had that wonderful insight that God is real, Jesus is real, love is real, they surrender that inner light that revealed this to them to some aggressive authority figure. Well, not everyone is capable of teasing out the mysteries of moral existence. We are all differently gifted. The author of this article is incapable of teasing out the mysteries of the universe in terms of physics and mathematics (though the author surely appreciates that some can and delights in the discoveries they make). But whatever, form of intelligence a person has, if they are religiously persuaded, they should never wholly depend on a religious authority figure to dictate their actions and decisions. We are most of us capable of learning from experience, contemplating the results of our actions and those of others. We should never become dependent on a person claiming religious authority to tell us what to think or do, or how to judge our fellow human beings. Preachers, ministers, pastors or priests function properly in Christian moral terms when they provide compassionate guidance, and remind us that we must otherwise follow the conscience God gave us. If this balance is valued, respected and protected, Christianity will be less likely abused for political agendas, which are anything but moral or what Christ would have wanted for us. If we institute, if we canonize, if we include, finally, The Gospel of Thomas, there will at last be a corrective for this tendency in Christianity (both among Protestants and Catholics) to abdicate personal conscience in favor of some hierarchical or charismatic clerical figure. Thomas demands that we turn toward our inner light and not allow ourselves to be deceived once we have passed through that wonderful threshold into the intuitive light of faith. There is a reason that the monks in that desert monastery in Egypt did not simply burn The Gospel of Thomas when the Emperor and his Council of Bishops declared it an heretical text. Those monks knew it contained truth, and so they put it into a time capsule for us today, living in a more tolerant and enlightened age, to rediscover its merits. As a Christian, the author feels it was meant to be that is should now once again be a part of our world. So let us now accept it from the hands of the scholars who have been interpreting it for the past sixty-five years and bring it into the care of the Christian People themselves. Let us have it in our Bible, where it will find a complimentary home among the four other accepted gospels, there to perform the same function of greater wholeness in diversity that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John have been doing for nearly two millennia. Let us make it Mark, Matthew, Luke, Thomas and John -- a philosophical pentangle of ancient perfection!