One of the most mind blowing things I learned looking into apocrypha was that the debate between religion and evolution goes all the way back to… Jesus (yeah, really).
50 years before Jesus is born Lucretius writes De Rerum Natura, where writing in Latin he can’t rely on the Greek word atomos (‘indivisible’) so he uses the word for ‘seed’ to describe indivisible parts making up all matter.
At the same time, as a naturalist philosophy, he writes about how there’s no intelligent design and what we see around us is just the result of these seeds randomly scattered and interacting.
Specifically, he regularly talks about how it was only what survived to reproduce which continued to develop, and in book five talks about how there were intermediate freaks of nature who weren’t successful at surviving and so died out because “For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.”
In book 4 he talked about how a grandparent’s traits might come back from either parent’s side because “For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother.” He also in book 4 talks about failed biological reproduction as if it “turns the furrow away from the straight and true Path of the ploughshare, and the seed falls by the wayside too.”
So what the heck does all this have to do with the infamous Jesus?
Well, there’s a heretical sect of Christianity that owes itself to a tradition from a female teacher and was following a collection of sayings that included female disciples that sounds quite a lot like Lucretius. See, cannonical Christianity was fairly adamant women should be silent (1 Cor, 1 Clement, 1 Timothy). But what those women were allegedly talking about was pretty wild given the above context.
Here were the described ‘heretical’ beliefs of the Naassenes regarding seeds:
And so it is that these (heretics), placing the originative nature of the universe in causative seed […]
They affirm, then, concerning the substance of the seed which is a cause of all existent things, that it is none of these, but that it produces and forms all things that are made […]
That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed […]
…the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow. And some fell by the wayside
Pseudo-Hippolytus’s Refutations book 5
Wtf!?
Not only are they explaining the parable about the “smallest seed” as referring to an indivisible point just like Lucretius, the parable of the sower is allegedly about naturalist origins of the universe, and seems to have even bogarted Lucretius’s metaphor about seed falling to the wayside of a path.
In fact, the text this group is following, the Gospel of Thomas has several sayings that are probably best understood in the context of Lucretius, and even one saying directly regarding the origins of life, where it describes naturalism as a greater wonder over intelligent design:
If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.
Gospel of Thomas saying 29
That explanation of the sower parable where what survived to reproduce is what multiplied as about the origins of the universe? That’s literally the only extant explanation from the first few centuries CE other than the official one, which is presented as a secret explanation for what was a public saying (sus), and was the only secret explanation for a parable in the earliest cannonical gospel.
It’s even more obvious what the parable was about given the context of the two sayings before it as it appears in the Gospel of Thomas:
“Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”
And he said, "The human being is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish.
Gospel of Thomas sayings 7-8
So no matter who eats who the end result will be human, because the human being is like a big fish selected from smaller fish (it’s definitely the fish and not the fisherman as this seems to be employing a twist on the metaphor in Habakkuk 1, and in Matthew the - yet again - secret explanation for this parable also has the human as the fish)? Followed by a parable about how the seed which falls by the wayside doesn’t survive to reproduce and only what survived to reproduce multiplies?
There’s a significant amount of tragic irony to modern Christianity having come from roots of conservative and misogynistic propaganda against a version of Jesus kept alive by a female teacher engaging with contemporary Roman and Greek proto-evolutionary philosophy 2,000 years later being used to try and suppress those very same ideas, this time in the face of even greater evidence it’s actually true.
It reminds me of another saying about seeds:
…is like a person who has [good] seed. His enemy came during the night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The person did not let the workers pull up the weeds, but said to them, ‘No, otherwise you might go to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be conspicuous, and will be pulled up and burned.
Thomas saying 57
This too has a secret explanation in canon (see a theme?). Though given elsewhere in Thomas it mentions harvesting ‘understanding,’ it’s evident which understanding about seeds in all the above which may not have been clear at the time if it was wheat or weeds has since turned out to clearly be wheat, and which understanding turned out to be weeds that should be discarded as trash.
TL;DR: Even a historical Jesus probably would have been against schools trying to undermine teaching evolution with religious hogwash.
This was a damn good read. I’m gonna have to follow up on your sources before I start quoting your gospel, but I’m pretty fucking pleased that you wrote it. Thank you.
The best thing to do is to read De Rerum Natura (very much worth reading for its own right given its relative importance to the history of modern scientific thought), and then check out both the Gospel of Thomas and Hippolytus book 5 (keep in mind by then they’ve picked up a lot from the post-Valentinian Gnostics so there’s weird crap mixed up with the unwitting Lucretius references).
It’s IMO a huge oversight in scholarship right now. For example, in Miroshnikov, The Gospel of Thomas and Plato (2018), he lists the research on philosophy and Thomas to date which is absent any considerations of Epicureanism, and even goes as far as saying “In other words, a Stoic reading of the Gospel of Thomas does not seem to have any particular advantage over an Epicurean reading of the Gospel of Thomas nor, for instance, that from the perspective of an Isis worshipper. Similarly, there seems to be no reason to think that sayings 56 and 80 presuppose certain Stoic concepts…”
Let’s look real quick at those sayings:
56. Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.”
80. Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered the body, and whoever has discovered the body, of that one the world is not worthy.”
While it’s a good work and there certainly are Platonist concepts in the text, Miroshnikov spends two chapters trying to bend over backwards to tie these sayings to Plato’s “living world” while having just totally dismissed looking at it in an Epicurean light.
Here’s Lucretius in book 5 lines 64-67:
To resume: I’ve reached the juncture of my argument where I Must demonstrate the world too has a ‘body’, and must die, Even as it had a birth.
(Also worth pointing out Lucretius begins each of the books basically praising Epicurus who founded the school as being like a god among men for his insight, so the Thomasine sayings are in keeping on that aspect too.)
The Gospel of Thomas has what’s called an over-realized eschatology where it claims the end of the world already happened (too complex for this comment). And it’s saying the world is not only a body, but a dead body. And Lucretius was saying “the cosmos is like a body that will one day die.”
I don’t need two chapters for that connection.
It makes perfect sense that a Jew in Judea would be familiar with Epicureanism. It’s the only school of Greek philosophy named outright in the Talmud, where a 1st century rabbi says “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.” And of the three sects of Judaism at the time the Sadducees shared the Epicurean belief there was nothing after death and that God didn’t care what they did or didn’t do. And in Josephus he claims the favorite Sadducee passtime was debating philosophers.
But the overall study of Thomas was just butchered by the first 50 years of scholars thinking it was ‘Gnostic’ and it was only after 1998 they realized it wasn’t, and now just label it “proto-Gnostic” without bothering to actually identify the grounding context beyond that. And even today you have respected Biblical scholars telling their peers who do study texts like Thomas “why do you bother with that nonsense?”
So your best bet is to just read Lucretius and then look at the texts in question with your own eyes.
One of the most mind blowing things I learned looking into apocrypha was that the debate between religion and evolution goes all the way back to… Jesus (yeah, really).
50 years before Jesus is born Lucretius writes De Rerum Natura, where writing in Latin he can’t rely on the Greek word atomos (‘indivisible’) so he uses the word for ‘seed’ to describe indivisible parts making up all matter.
At the same time, as a naturalist philosophy, he writes about how there’s no intelligent design and what we see around us is just the result of these seeds randomly scattered and interacting.
Specifically, he regularly talks about how it was only what survived to reproduce which continued to develop, and in book five talks about how there were intermediate freaks of nature who weren’t successful at surviving and so died out because “For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.”
In book 4 he talked about how a grandparent’s traits might come back from either parent’s side because “For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother.” He also in book 4 talks about failed biological reproduction as if it “turns the furrow away from the straight and true Path of the ploughshare, and the seed falls by the wayside too.”
So what the heck does all this have to do with the infamous Jesus?
Well, there’s a heretical sect of Christianity that owes itself to a tradition from a female teacher and was following a collection of sayings that included female disciples that sounds quite a lot like Lucretius. See, cannonical Christianity was fairly adamant women should be silent (1 Cor, 1 Clement, 1 Timothy). But what those women were allegedly talking about was pretty wild given the above context.
Here were the described ‘heretical’ beliefs of the Naassenes regarding seeds:
Wtf!?
Not only are they explaining the parable about the “smallest seed” as referring to an indivisible point just like Lucretius, the parable of the sower is allegedly about naturalist origins of the universe, and seems to have even bogarted Lucretius’s metaphor about seed falling to the wayside of a path.
In fact, the text this group is following, the Gospel of Thomas has several sayings that are probably best understood in the context of Lucretius, and even one saying directly regarding the origins of life, where it describes naturalism as a greater wonder over intelligent design:
That explanation of the sower parable where what survived to reproduce is what multiplied as about the origins of the universe? That’s literally the only extant explanation from the first few centuries CE other than the official one, which is presented as a secret explanation for what was a public saying (sus), and was the only secret explanation for a parable in the earliest cannonical gospel.
It’s even more obvious what the parable was about given the context of the two sayings before it as it appears in the Gospel of Thomas:
So no matter who eats who the end result will be human, because the human being is like a big fish selected from smaller fish (it’s definitely the fish and not the fisherman as this seems to be employing a twist on the metaphor in Habakkuk 1, and in Matthew the - yet again - secret explanation for this parable also has the human as the fish)? Followed by a parable about how the seed which falls by the wayside doesn’t survive to reproduce and only what survived to reproduce multiplies?
There’s a significant amount of tragic irony to modern Christianity having come from roots of conservative and misogynistic propaganda against a version of Jesus kept alive by a female teacher engaging with contemporary Roman and Greek proto-evolutionary philosophy 2,000 years later being used to try and suppress those very same ideas, this time in the face of even greater evidence it’s actually true.
It reminds me of another saying about seeds:
This too has a secret explanation in canon (see a theme?). Though given elsewhere in Thomas it mentions harvesting ‘understanding,’ it’s evident which understanding about seeds in all the above which may not have been clear at the time if it was wheat or weeds has since turned out to clearly be wheat, and which understanding turned out to be weeds that should be discarded as trash.
TL;DR: Even a historical Jesus probably would have been against schools trying to undermine teaching evolution with religious hogwash.
This was a damn good read. I’m gonna have to follow up on your sources before I start quoting your gospel, but I’m pretty fucking pleased that you wrote it. Thank you.
The best thing to do is to read De Rerum Natura (very much worth reading for its own right given its relative importance to the history of modern scientific thought), and then check out both the Gospel of Thomas and Hippolytus book 5 (keep in mind by then they’ve picked up a lot from the post-Valentinian Gnostics so there’s weird crap mixed up with the unwitting Lucretius references).
It’s IMO a huge oversight in scholarship right now. For example, in Miroshnikov, The Gospel of Thomas and Plato (2018), he lists the research on philosophy and Thomas to date which is absent any considerations of Epicureanism, and even goes as far as saying “In other words, a Stoic reading of the Gospel of Thomas does not seem to have any particular advantage over an Epicurean reading of the Gospel of Thomas nor, for instance, that from the perspective of an Isis worshipper. Similarly, there seems to be no reason to think that sayings 56 and 80 presuppose certain Stoic concepts…”
Let’s look real quick at those sayings:
While it’s a good work and there certainly are Platonist concepts in the text, Miroshnikov spends two chapters trying to bend over backwards to tie these sayings to Plato’s “living world” while having just totally dismissed looking at it in an Epicurean light.
Here’s Lucretius in book 5 lines 64-67:
(Also worth pointing out Lucretius begins each of the books basically praising Epicurus who founded the school as being like a god among men for his insight, so the Thomasine sayings are in keeping on that aspect too.)
The Gospel of Thomas has what’s called an over-realized eschatology where it claims the end of the world already happened (too complex for this comment). And it’s saying the world is not only a body, but a dead body. And Lucretius was saying “the cosmos is like a body that will one day die.”
I don’t need two chapters for that connection.
It makes perfect sense that a Jew in Judea would be familiar with Epicureanism. It’s the only school of Greek philosophy named outright in the Talmud, where a 1st century rabbi says “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.” And of the three sects of Judaism at the time the Sadducees shared the Epicurean belief there was nothing after death and that God didn’t care what they did or didn’t do. And in Josephus he claims the favorite Sadducee passtime was debating philosophers.
But the overall study of Thomas was just butchered by the first 50 years of scholars thinking it was ‘Gnostic’ and it was only after 1998 they realized it wasn’t, and now just label it “proto-Gnostic” without bothering to actually identify the grounding context beyond that. And even today you have respected Biblical scholars telling their peers who do study texts like Thomas “why do you bother with that nonsense?”
So your best bet is to just read Lucretius and then look at the texts in question with your own eyes.
Kromem fucks