What Did Jesus Really Say?

Or, Thomas Jefferson’s Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas

Pages from the Gospel of Thomas - Image from Wikipedia

As part of our ongoing focus on books, today I bring you a fascinating and thought-provoking piece written by Anthropologist, Geoffrey Clarfield. Some Woke Watch Canada readers, who may be Christian believers, may find this post to be somewhat, possibly, questionably, slightly blasphemous. However I don’t think so for two reasons. First, this is history, and even true believers should learn as much history as possible - there is nothing un-Christian about that. The second reason has to do with with the term “cultural Christianity.”

A few weeks ago a video clip of the infamous atheist Richard Dawkins explaining how he is a cultural Christian went viral (in truth, Dawkins has been using that term for over ten years). The clip got me thinking. It is my view that the supernatural aspects of Christianity are what prevent many from reading the Bible, and embracing even a cultural version of Christianity. I think that is a shame.

I also think that Christianity and the Bible contain the most powerful anti-woke message possible. It has even been argued that wokeism is a consequence of secularism. Either way, my own Christian ministry is to appeal to people to read the Bible from both a historical and cultural perspective. If you have trouble with the idea of faith and the supernatural, I don’t think there is anything I can say to change your mind. I’m not going to thump you with the Bible, I’m simply placing it in your hands, and saying, for now, don’t concern yourself with the supernatural bits, focus on the moral instruction.

In other words, short of taking that leap of faith, there is another way to immerse yourself into the poetry and ethics of the Bible. It simply involves re-orienting ones mindset and coming at the Holy Scriptures from the perspective of one who seeks to gain historical knowledge and understanding of the moral framework that inspired Liberalism and modern human rights.

Maybe at some point in the future you will find faith. Maybe not. This is not my concern. If I attempted to push faith on you, I would push you away. I know that. And further, becuase I truly believe Christianity (like the Liberalism it inspired) is about the individual. Your personal relationship with God is your business. It is none of my business if you decide to not have that relationship. But most importantly, if you do decided to walk with Jesus, it is far more meaningful if you do it of your own volition. I will say no more on the matter of faith.

Geoffrey’s piece deals with two books, separated by thousands of years, but both sharing a unique similarity: the words of Jesus sans the supernatural. For non-believers this might be a way for you to take in the word, without needing to accept belief in something you are not ready to believe (or may never believe). And for Christian believers, this is another fascinating thread in the story of Christ and His people.

James Pew

What Did Jesus Really Say?

Or, Thomas Jefferson’s Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas

By Geoffrey Clarfield (Anthropologist at Large)

(A shorter version of this article appeared in the National Post on Thursday, December 24, 2009)

In the Bible  we read that Jesus once said, “If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole.” You do not have to be a theologian to see the value in these words. In the 21^st century so much of our lives and livelihood depends on finding the right people to give us the right advice, as none of us can be a specialist in all the fields that one must master in order to live a full life in this overspecialized world of ours. Or, consider the obvious truth that informs every thinking person’s quest for meaning in these words of Jesus, “One who seeks will find, and for one who knocks it will be opened.” Such wisdom has supported the faith of millions of Christians for almost two thousand years. For most of the faithful these and other sayings are part and parcel of Jesus’ divine nature and are interpreted by many as a sign of both its cause and effect. Nevertheless, other admirers of Jesus have accepted his words but at the same time have rejected every supernatural event or phenomena that are reported in the Gospel narratives. One of the most controversial was Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States of America. 

Jefferson believed that for more than fifteen hundred years the words of Jesus had been obscured by the original editors and later interpreters of the New Testament. He decided to edit out every supernatural aspect of the Gospels, leaving us with the bare narrative of Jesus’ life and death and everything of note that he said. After an early attempt at a rewriting of the New Testament, in 1820 Jefferson presented a few close friends and family members with a text that he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. I have spent part of this pre Xmas season reading an online version of the document provided freely to the public on the web site of the University of Virginia, located close from the estate where Jefferson prepared his manuscript. It is an austere intellectual tract and very much in the spirit of the deism of so many 18^th century men of letters in both the New and Old Worlds. In this version of the Gospels there is no miraculous birth. Jesus is clearly not described as a deity of any sort.  There are no angels, there are no miracles and there is no resurrection. As we say today, there is not a shred of anything supernatural or mysterious in what has come to be called Jefferson’s Bible.

Despite the restrained presentation of Jesus’ life, words and death in Jefferson’s Bible, in Jefferson’s private correspondence he was quite passionate about what had driven him to commit such a radical act. No doubt having just defeated Great Britain, the greatest empire in the world in the military and political arena, he had no problem subsequently taking on the theology of the Catholic Church and every Protestant sect known to have existed until his time. Jefferson was anything but modest. In a letter to the second president John Adams in 1813 he wrote:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics , the Gnostics and scholastic, their essences and emanations , their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female with a long train of …or shall I say at once, of nonsense.  Jefferson told Adams that as for Jesus of Nazareth he was abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.    

Make no mistake about it. Jefferson was supremely confident that until his masterful editing job, every Christian scholar and theologian was wrong and he was right. It is therefore no surprise that he kept the text hidden from the general public. Had he published it while still living it would no doubt have triggered an unending public outrage that would have made Darwin’s later suffering at the hands of Church authorities, a sideshow of a sideshow. So it is no surprise that it languished in the private papers of Jefferson’s descendants until it was rehabilitated as a historical curiosity, finally published and made available to the wider American public in 1895. For some decades after, it was published by the Congress of the USA and given as a gift to first term congressmen as they entered office. Perhaps this was in unconscious recognition that Jesus is never once mentioned in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence, for one hundred years ago, most congressmen would not have thought twice when describing the United States as a Christian nation.

A careful reading of Jefferson’s Gospel describes a religious teacher who is dedicated to a cluster of basic values. These include an intolerance of hypocrisy, recognition that the world’s material and materialist values are not part of the Kingdom of God and a host of moral exhortations that tell us to be just, treat people the way we would want to be treated, work towards peaceful resolutions of conflict, recognize the value in non material things, restrain oneself from holding grudges, live modestly, refrain from judging others and give out of generous motives. Despite Jefferson’s radical doubt, he believed that Jesus was still the greatest moral teacher who ever lived and worthy of imitation. 

Jefferson’s Gospel would have become a curious footnote in the intellectual history of 18^th century thinkers had it not been for recent archaeological discoveries that have turned the world of Biblical scholarship and Protestant belief and practice, inside out and upside down. While the US Congress was giving out copies of Jefferson’s Bible, two intrepid Englishmen were digging up fragments of ancient papyrus in the sands of Egypt at a site called Oxyrhynchus. Between 1897 and 1903 Grenfell and Hunt found fragments of a manuscript dated between 130-250 CE. They were Greek fragments of an ancient version of the Gospels. One of the fragments says, “These are the… sayings… the living Jesus spoke… also called Thomas.” 

Until that time scholars of Christianity had been aware of the previous existence of a manuscript called the Gospel of Thomas, as it had been denounced by the third century AD Christian theologian Hippolytus. No doubt it had been destroyed after the first Christian emperor Constantine, had established by decree the final text of the New Testament in the third century. This eventually resulted in the adoption of the Nicene Creed by his newly declared Christian Roman Empire. A few decades later the Bishop of Alexandria sent a letter to Egyptian Christian monks asking them to destroy their now “heretical” manuscripts. No doubt the Gospel of Thomas was one of these banned books and so instead the monks hid them near the Nile, until they were discovered by Egyptian peasants who brought them to the world of scholarship just after WWII in their Coptic versions. 

The Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas neatly incorporates the Greek fragments found by Grenfell and Hunt. Many scholars believe that the Coptic version is a translation from the original but now fragmented Greek version. Stevan Davies is one of the world’s scholarly experts on the Gospel of Thomas. He believes that it may have a first century origin, suggesting that it existed at the same time that the four Gospels were being edited. Davies believes that the content of the Gospel of Thomas preceded these gospels and that many of the sayings and parables in the gospels came from the Thomas manuscript. What is more earth shattering, is that he argues that they may constitute the original words of Jesus, something that was hinted at by the early Church historian Eusebius who in the third century vaguely quoted a first century Christian Bishop in Egypt who described something akin to a  previously existing “sayings of Jesus document.”  

After a careful reading of the Gospel of Thomas I noticed that it is an even more radical version of Jefferson’s Gospel. In Thomas there is no historical narrative whatsoever. Once again there is a conspicuous absence of miracles; no loaves and fishes, no bringing Lazarus back from the dead, no angels or any miracles to speak of and no resurrection. There are also no “Jews” in the Gospel of Thomas, no high priests of the Temple handing Jesus over to the Romans and no crucifixion. In this gospel the Jews are clearly not the bad guys (as Jesus was clearly Jewish!) and there is only one mild criticism of Pharisees in the entire text  suggesting that they are mystically challenged and unable to use their knowledge to enter the kingdom of God; all in all pretty mild stuff. Instead, we are confronted with a tantalizing set of sayings and commentary that bares a curious family resemblance to the writings of the Chinese Daoist mystic Lao Tzu. Yet to those of us familiar with the conventional New Testament some of the overlap with sayings found in New Testament is uncanny. Some scholars suggest that the Gospel of Thomas is the first historical manifestation of the sayings of Jesus which scholars call by the letter “Q” suggesting an oral source for all later gospels.

Clearly Davies is suggesting that at the beginning of Christianity there was a Jesus who spoke. And if this is the original gospel then Jefferson may have been closer to the truth than he ever imagined, for some of the most erudite of modern Christian scholars such as Bart Ehrman have suggested that the Gospel narratives that suggest the Jews had it in for Jesus were later ideological supports that justified a Greek speaking church that followed Paul as opposed to the Aramaic speaking Church that followed Jesus brother, James in Jerusalem. They may therefore have little basis in history.

I am intrigued by the Gospel of Thomas. It seems to be about a mystical struggle to get in touch with the sacred that is in all of us. To my untrained theological mind it asks us to look inward and find the kingdom of God that is inside each and every one of us. One does not have to be a Christian in the conventional sense to contemplate this journey. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says, Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven. He also tells us to Love your brother  like your soul, guard him like the pupil of your eye. Most strikingly he tells us, If those who lead you say to you ’See, the kingdom is in the sky’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you 'It is in the sea’ then the fish will precede you. Rather the kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you.

The recent publication of versions of the Gospel of Thomas has had a dramatic effect on a growing number of North American Christians and it has been discussed in popular magazines such as Time Magazine. Harold Bloom is a scholar of religion and literature at Yale University. After reading the Gospel of Thomas he wrote that the popularity of the Gospel of Thomas among Americans is another indication that there is indeed “the American religion”: creedless, Orphic, Enthusiastic…If you turn to the Gospel of Thomas, you encounter a Jesus who is unsponsored and free. No one could be burned or even scorned in the name of this Jesus, and no one has ever been hurt in any way…

Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gospel of Thomas is a dynamic text. It is one of those discoveries that are not only changing our view of the past but our conceptions of who we are, and what we may become, whether we are believers or skeptics.  It is worthwhile holiday  reading.

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Thanks for reading. For more from our ongoing series on books, read The Novelist Anthony Trollope as a Guide and Moral Support for an Unpopular Political Argument

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