Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [284]
Many Q enthusiasts were heartened when The Gospel of Thomas was found, because this was a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus with a minimum of setting and narrative. It was, therefore, hailed as the first evidence that a “sayings source” actually existed. Although the parallels between Luke and Matthew can be understood as progressive copying of one manuscript by another under the influence of special traditions or oral influence of one Gospel on another in an intense but short history of its composition, the Q hypothesis is very vibrant today.
Resolving the existence or nature of Q is not critical to the history of the resurrection belief in Christianity.21 What is necessary to study is The Gospel of Thomas itself, which contains very important traditions about resurrection, quite different from the canonical Gospels. The Gospel of Thomas shows definitively that there were early interpreters of resurrection who emphasized the converse of the canonical Gospels-namely, that Jesus’ resurrection is entirely spiritual. The Gospel of Thomas presents us with a different trajectory of the resurrection tradition, like Paul’s in its description of the spiritual nature of the resurrection event but far more extreme in its consequences. It is a second-century document although parts of it may have been written quite a bit earlier.
The most obvious example of spiritual resurrection is to be found in The Gospel of Thomas, where vision and knowledge (gnōsis) of the Lord can be sought and, when found, reveal the spiritual nature of one’s own salvation. Although there are testimonies of its existence, it was first found in its entirety only in the Nag Hammadi corpus, a group of tiny codices discovered in a jar buried in antiquity at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and uncovered by an Egyptian fellaḥ (peasant, pl. fellaḥin) in 1947 while digging in the desert sand. Thirteen miniscule volumes, containing many different tractates, mostly written in Coptic, the last phase of ancient Egyptian and the holy language of the Coptic Christian church, were found within the jar. Though diminutive in physical size, some of the codices (i.e., books rather than scrolls) were quite long and all were jam-packed with writings. They contained much new information about early Egyptian Christianity. Letters in the binding of the covers of these books seem to date from the time period of Pachomius, the founder of Egyptian monasticism (second century). Historically, the group that collected this library were probably the disciples of Pachomius or persons communicating with him, as the letters stiffening the bindings are likely to be the autograph copies. But beyond that, we know less about them than we need to know.
Most of the documents are very strange, seemingly representatives of various stages in the evolution of a heresy we know as “Gnosticism.” The group might not have recognized itself as heretical or even understood the name “Gnostic,” as it is unclear when the term “Gnosticism” came into general usage. Some of the sayings in The Gospel of Thomas also closely resemble sayings of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. Scholars therefore consider it as an alternative version of the “orthodox” tradition.
The strange traditions found in The Gospel of Thomas describe a very spiritual, resurrected body. The strange traditions may explain the use of the disciple Thomas as the doubter in the Gospel of John. This Thomas tradition teaches a rarefied and spiritual Christianity that has little to do with fleshly wounds and literal resurrections. It is no wonder that Thomas became the one who recognized the physical presence of the Savior in the Gospel of John. How better for John to defeat this powerful, Thomasine interpretation of Jesus’ mission, death, and resurrection than by having its author, Thomas, admit that his spiritual position was wrong?22
In The Gospel of Thomas, one sees no such appreciation for physical resurrection.