John 20:19-31
Muslims believe that the Qu’ran was revealed by Allah to the prophet Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel, a single text with a single author, whoever you believe that author to be.
Mormons believe that The Book of Mormon was engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets, and revealed to Joseph Smith in what is today Manchester, New York in 1827, during a period of religious fervor we know as the Second Great Awakening. With no other hand involved, and no one else ever seeing the plates, Smith becomes either the sole author of the text, or at least the sole transmitter and translator.
In both cases, the founder of the religion produced a single text that is authoritative.
The closest we come in the Judeo-Christian traditions is the claim that Moses wrote the Torah, which was dictated to him by God, though this is generally understood as a fiction. And the Torah is only one small but authoritative part of the Tanakh, the Jewish Scripture composed of the Torah, the Nevi’im or Books of the Prophets, and the Ketuvim or Writings, a miscellany that includes the Psalms and Proverbs.
Interestingly, the major histories in Jewish Scripture are placed with the Prophets, while the Book of Daniel is placed in the ‘Writings.”
Christians add a second collection of texts, a Christian Testament or Covenant. In the Christian tradition, the Jewish Scripture is re-ordered to emphasize messianic prophecy, and the two testaments together form the Bible.
All conservative forms of these religions depend on the idea of direct revelation, the claim that God revealed teachings and laws to humans, directly or through an intermediary, and controlled the formation of the texts. Some Christians even go so far as to believe that God controls the translation process, or at least controlled that process for their favorite translation in their own language.
In the United Church of Christ, and broadly across progressive forms of Christianity, we accept that humans played a role in composing and authorizing texts. This last process, authorization, is technically called canonization, the same term the Roman church uses when officially declaring someone to be a saint. The books in the Jewish and Christian Testaments are described as being part of the Biblical Canon.
We know there were other texts. For example, there is a collection of fourteen texts known as the Apocrypha that were composed after the Babylonian Captivity, during what is known as the Hellenistic Period, including important accounts of the Hasmonean Rebellion. These are sometimes included in between the two testaments in Christian Bibles, though the texts, their titles, and their order varies across Christian traditions.
The Jewish Scripture refers to at least nine other texts that do not exist. We assume Paul wrote many letters, with only a handful included in the Christian Testament, and several of those attributed to Paul doubtful or certainly not from the hand of the apostle. Many texts that existed in early Christianity were eventually excluded from the canon, and there are countless forgeries, fake texts, sometimes pious in intent. Occasionally, a new one emerges, producing scandal and debate, and authors like Dan Brown write fictional tales about fictional texts, confusing those who cannot tell fiction from fact.
One of the most famous and to some notorious non-canonical texts was and is the Gospel According to Thomas. It is mentioned in two early Third Century works, one by Origen of Alexandria, considered one of the Church Fathers. Both denounce the Gospel According to Thomas as heretical. It didn’t seem to really matter, as no one had a copy of it. And that is the way it was until 1945.
That year, Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman, an Egyptian teenager, discovered a sealed clay jar containing several leather-bound codices on papyrus at a place called Nag Hammadi. A codex is a type of early book, the first step from a scroll to what we have today. al-Samman’s story was inconsistent, and many suspect he was actually grave robbing. His mother claims to have burned some of the volumes as fire starter.
The manuscripts that survived and landed in the hands of scholars were in Coptic, a mostly lost Egyptian language written with a modified Greek alphabet. Most were non-canonical texts, like The Second Apocalypse of James and The Dialogue of the Savior. And there, among them, was a complete copy of the Gospel According to Thomas, containing sayings attributed to Jesus and very little of the familiar narrative found in the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Once they had a manuscript of Thomas, biblical scholars realized that three mysterious Greek text fragments found at Oxyrhynchus in 1898 were from the same work.
There continues to be scholarly debate about the Gospel attributed to Thomas. Some, including my late professor Helmut Koester, see it as a very early text, possibly pre-dating the canonical gospels. Some classify it as a gnostic text, a religious approach that could be found in many religions of that age, based on secret knowledge, though even the term gnostic can trigger other scholars, who find the category useless.
Our study of Thomas this morning offers three important insights.
First, there was never one true Christianity. It seems clear that Jesus understood himself in the framework of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, as a reforming prophet, possibly as an eschatological figure, the Son of Man or Human One from the Book of Daniel, and if we are to accept the historicity of some gospel passages, maybe even as an incarnation of the divine.
The texts in the Christian canon record confusion on the part of his disciples, debate about who Jesus is, and that continues in the non-canonical texts and centuries of debate and sometimes conflict.
The idea of a through-line from any single Christianity today back to Jesus is a fiction and a fraud. The religion has evolved constantly as human culture evolved. The same is true for Judaism, or more properly, the several Judaisms.
It is true that there are bottleneck events that narrow the definition of a belief system, but there has always been variation, certainly since the death of the religious founder, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or Joseph Smith, and that is assuming these men were clear and consistent during their own lifetimes, which is not what I see in the history.
Diversity, even within one faith, is natural.
Second, if Thomas was lost for centuries and reflects an understanding of Jesus that was rejected, we might ask what other texts and other understandings were lost?
We know some non-canonical texts are frauds, like the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, a papyrus fragment taken seriously by Harvard scholar Karen King but proven to be a forgery from a con-man in Florida.
But, in addition to non-canonical texts that were preserved or rediscovered at places like Nag Hammadi and Qumran, we have a body of texts referenced but still not found, like a version of the gospel known as “Secret Mark” that contains an initiation ritual in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Then there are the countless heresies, described in ancient texts called “apologies” that survived, while the texts and beliefs deemed heretical largely disappeared into the fires of history, and sometimes the fires of book burning.
There is ample evidence that women played an important role in early Christianity, just as they had in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, but women’s voices were largely erased as patriarchy controlled canon. They even tried to give the powerful church leader Junia a sex change, deciding that she must have been male because she was a church leader!
Listen for the lost voices.
Third, what are we to make of this particular story from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, though most certainly not written by an actual disciple, a gospel that is weird in its own way, has also been accused of gnostic influence? Thomas, insisting on direct observation, looks like the rational one.
Is this just a way for later authors to discredit those who understood Jesus in a way associated with Thomas and Mary Magdalene? And if so, is there any historic memory involved, or is it all fabrication?
What other stories should we question as strategic fictions, meant more to position what became authorized and orthodox belief from what was deemed heresy?
We suspect the passages targeting the Pharisees have as much to do with the situation in which the gospels were written as they do with the historic context of Jesus, over three decades before the disastrous Jewish War. What about the passages positioning Jesus in relation to John the Baptizer? Do they reflect a historic relationship, actual cousins as reported in scripture? Or possibly competition for followers after both men were executed?
Texts written decades after the events that they describe inevitably reflect their own context, and we read them through yet a third context, our own. Humility is a critical virtue in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the fruit of humility is curiosity. Curiosity takes courage. Certainty is easy, lazy, even if it is a lie.
In a Tik-Tok-ified world, we want truth in 30 seconds. Are we willing to sit with scripture? To live into the questions?
And one final challenge: his name is Jude or Judas Didymus Thomas. Jude or Judas is his name. Didymus is Aramaic for twin. Thomas is Koine Greek for twin. His name is Jude the Twin.
The Bible lists four brothers of Jesus: James who goes on to lead the church in Jerusalem, not to be confused with James the disciple, as well as Joseph, Simon, and finally, Jude. Was Thomas actually Jude, the brother of Jesus? And if so, who was his twin?
We live in mystery. May we learn to live in mystery. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
in this season of Eastertide,
we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
executed in April of 1945
after months in prison.
We pray for all of those in detention today,
for political prisoners in Iran,
for detainees in ICE warehouses here,
for those swept up in the retributive justice
of mass incarceration across America.
We pray for the innocent:
the civilians killed in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine.
We pray for members of our own community,
slowly dying of despair,
the grinding death of inherited trauma,
the cancers of poverty and exploitation.
Jesus blessed the poor,
then did something about it,
feeding and healing,
entering the cemetery
where the mentally ill man lived,
and challenging the un-righteous self-righteous.
We pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father…