Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.

  • @kromem
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    7 months ago

    Not exactly. The last saying is widely recognized as a later addition, and you can recognize that it is because it used Matthew’s “Kingdom of heaven” phrasing instead of the more common Thomasine “kingdom of the Father” or just ‘kingdom.’

    But you have earlier sayings like 21 where Jesus is shit taking the male disciples to Mary or saying 61 where Salome is declared as a disciple. And saying 22 has a very different perspective on gender from that last saying: “…when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female… then you will enter [the kingdom].” The latter phrasing is also echoed in Galatians 4 and the lost Gospel of the Egyptians.

    Also, the only recorded group following the text (the Naassenes), who were also following the lost Gospel of the Egyptians, claimed their tradition originated with a woman named Mary.

    The problem is the only surviving version of that text we have in full was one buried in a jar in the 3rd century CE, and the extant version is so late that it’s even combining its own sayings, such as 110 combining the adjacent but very different sayings of 80 and 81. The addition at the end was probably from a point in time where the prominent role of women in the tradition had to be explained away in an era of increased Christian misogyny (likely from the very efforts I was just talking about). Much like how the association with ‘Thomas’ was probably a second century addition to the text after the core philosophy of a dualist reality was anthropomorphized as an apostle to doubt the physical resurrection in John just as the proto-Thomasine sect in Corinth was doing in 1 Cor 15 (with significant details in common with the much later Naassenes, such as the first and last Adam).

    Also, FYI, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is probably a satire. How many kids in a Jewish town in Galilee do you think were supposedly falling off roofs to be lifted back up who were also named after the Greek philosopher known for his paradoxes of motion?

    You basically had a very philosophical text with the core of the Gospel of Thomas using Platonism as a response to Epicureanism, and then around the second century when the canonical gospels are including miraculous infancy narratives the group that denied the physical resurrection as preposterous writes a text with a tyrannical magic child smiting and resurrecting people left and right, credited to “Thomas the philosopher” that’s including a philosophy joke about Zeno? It’s making fun of the infancy narratives. Which is what makes it so much funnier that the actual Gospel of Thomas doesn’t survive the church’s filter except for said jar, but the Infancy narrative actually totally does survive and has monks copying and preserving it because they take it at face value as claiming he was resurrecting people and not as something that needed to be banned.