Thursday, June 24, 2010

Commentary on Thomas, Logion 87

Gospel of Thomas, Logion 87: Jesus said: ‘Wretched is the body that depends on a body, and wretched is the soul that depends on these two.’

Wretched is the body that depends on a body. We live in an age particularly obsessed with sex and bodily image. Millions of people believe that the only way to be happy and fulfilled is to be ‘in love’-- and by ‘in love’, they mean a physical relationship. This belief is supported by thousands of movies, millions of songs, and is all over TV and the global mass media. It fuels hundreds of businesses and ‘love gurus’ and ‘sex therapists’ and Freudian, neo-Freudian and non-Freudian psychotherapists.

Thousands of women--young and old--starve themselves on diets because they think their bodies are too fat. Fat is indeed a feminist issue. But we have other words as well: anorexia nervosa and obesity. And how much do we spend on creams and deodorants and all of the rest?

I also remember some years ago when an R n B star decided to pose for some nude photos in a major Hip-Hop magazine. I don’t know why she decided to do it, but I do remember observing a couple of schoolboys in Swaziland browsing through the magazine in a store in town. They were looking at the photos of the singer and commenting on her body as if it were a piece of meat. Which of course it is: our bodies are suits made out of meat.

A focus on the body as meat is the foundation of the multi-million-dollar porn industry.

But true love is beyond the body; true love is beyond the mind; true love is beyond physicality, in another area altogether.


Wretched is the soul that depends on these two. That is, wretched is the soul that thinks love is to be found in the sexual union of two bodies. We know all about rape and bestiality and ‘casual’ sex. Actually no sex is casual, but here we are concerned with love. Love transcends bodies because it is about energies--living, moving, fusing energies, kinetic energies, not the potential stored energy of bodies. Love is intimately connected with male and female, yes, but it is energies, not sexuality. And it is found in the place where male and female cease to exist, in the place where there is no longer male and female but a blurring of the two. This place, the place where there is a blurring of the two, is the concern of Logion 22:
‘Jesus said to them... you will make the male and the female into a single one, in order that the male is no longer male and the female no longer female... then shall you enter the Kingdom.’

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Thomas is Tantric, not Gnostic

As a scholar of ancient texts, it is my belief that the Coptic Gospel of Thomas-- banned by the church for political and gender-prejudiced reasons-- is prior to the gospels that we have in our New Testaments. There have been some convincing arguments proposed towards this thesis. Furthermore, it seems clear that Thomas (and John) represent the testimony most closely of Jesus' closest disciple, the first disciple to greet the resurrected Jesus, Mary of Magdala. Far from being a prostitute or a fallen woman, she was an enlightened disciple.(Download this very interesting essay)


The Gospel of Thomas has many characteristics that set it apart from the familiar gospels: there is no narrative; Mary plays an active role in it; many sayings of Jesus read like sayings of the Buddha; the sayings familiar from the NT gospels appear in an earlier form; and-- I am convinced of this-- there are traces of Tantrism in it.

However, I can't find gnosticism. I suspect the early church fathers and leaders gave the gospel the tag of gnostic simply so they could suppress it.