tags:
Dolores Cannon
Jesus and the Essenes
Essenes
Suddi
What is real?
Early Christianity
Dead Sea Scrolls
Nag Hammadi scriptures
Early Christianity scholars
Gary Renard
“Q” sayings gospel
Gospel of Thomas
Disappearance of the Universe
gnostic
I’ve been fascinated for years, decades, with the early Christian story from all sorts of angles. A moment of crystallization of these interests was when I discovered Dolores Cannon’s Jesus and the Essenes, which was based on her past-life regressions of a young woman who relived many past lives, but especially that of a man, Suddi, an Essene, who taught Jesus and his cousin John the Torah at Qumran from the ages of 6 to 11 or so. An electrifying read for me. It both convinced me of the veracity of the account, while throwing me huge curve balls of incredulity. Push come to shove, this book set me on the way of follow-up: Can this be true? It intrigued me too much to let it go. What, if any corroborating material may be out there? What death blows could destroy this new tale of Jesus?
I’m not a Christian scholar and certainly knew little more than Dolores Cannon when she began her project. But it was always for me, “Let’s take the next step and see where it leads.” Like a many, multi-faceted crystal, my explorations led in so many directions. At the bottom of it all might be the question: “What is true; what is reality, after all?” As Opal Whiteley was fond of saying, “Let’s go on explores!”
Early Christian scholarship
I delved into this realm, though I read no Greek and have no current intention of doing so. However, there is a lot of this material in English for laypeople these days, much spurred by Christians seeking a deeper meaning to their faith in this secular time, and much spurred by the discoveries in the late 1940’s of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. These finds would be studied in the light of two centuries of critical Protestant studies of Old and New Testament scripture, and other related and contemporary ancient manuscripts.
I studied this early Christian work ravenously. Today, I want to focus on certain limitations of this well-established study. The biggie is that it is limited to written manuscripts. The advantage of this of course is that the evidence is right in front of you. Its disadvantage is the same: it is limited to what’s on the page. You can gather evidence, but you can’t see the whole situation, or the whole person behind the text. And any conclusions the scholar may reach may be based on fragmentary, or biased information.
The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard
A case in point. This recent book by Gary R. begins with him alone in his apartment in Maine one night. His girlfriend is at work. He looks up and finds two people sitting on his couch. He is astonished. And he’s in for more: They claim to be angels sent to him, and they will be giving him spiritual teachings that he was to transcribe and eventually publish. When they finished after a few years of intermittent contact, he would see them no more. They claimed this teaching was the current, updated teaching of Jesus.
The book presents this teaching. It is very intelligent; some would find it compelling. (Why don’t I?!) About 30 pages into it, I realized that this was the strongest case for a gnostic perspective I had ever read, though they did not specifically label it as gnostic. Further, in asides from the dictation, we learn that these “angels” had once been disciples of Jesus. The man had been known as Didymos Thomas, the woman had been a lesser-known disciple who had been Thomas’s male assistant then, and female, now.
To me, this was fascinating. At this point, I knew two things: that the most major find in the Nag Hammadi trove was a full text of a document claiming to be The Gospel of Thomas, known as Didymus, the twin of Jesus.
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Thomas created an earthquake in New Testament scholarship when it was found in the late 1940’s outside the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, a trove of 40-plus ancient texts, most of them previously unknown–an earthquake in New Testament scholarship, for many reasons. Firstly, it corroborated a theory, exemplified in a posited document called “Q”, that pre-Gospel Christian texts may have simply been collections of sayings attributed to Jesus after he died. The gospels of Matthew and Luke show clear signs that they incorporated this same “Q” text in their gospels. There is nothing about Jesus’ life in them, no stories, no fills. Just sayings. The Gospel of Thomas is almost entirely sayings.
Now here was an “angel”, Thomas, claiming to have been one of Jesus’ disciples, telling Gary Renard that he himself had written The Gospel of Thomas.
Dating the Gospel of Thomas
Once the Gospel of Thomas appeared, the many Christian scholars had a field day trying to, and trying not to, date the text. Most set the date that would conform best with their own religious convictions. Many did not want Thomas to be what would very possibly be the earliest existent gospel, because it had material in it that would be deeply unsettling for many modern Christians. Most upsetting was that it had clearly gnostic aspects to it that some generations later, institutionalizing Christian teachers and groups would assiduously eradicate from their texts. Until the Nag Hammadi find, almost all that was known about the early Christian Gnostic teachings was from those very heresiologists who’d dedicated their lives to eliminating them.
So here on Gary Renard’s couch is an “angel,” claiming he had been Didymos Thomas himself, and through this new dictation he gives juicy tidbits of that lifetime. And the new text presents a gnostic (though unacknowledged) worldview.
What does “Didymos,” the Twin mean?
One thing Gary Renard’s “angel” Thomas clarifies for us is why he was called Didymos. Much modern conjecture has puzzled over Jesus’ relationship to Didymos, “The Twin.” He is mentioned as “the Twin” in John:11:16. Was he really Jesus’ twin, i.e., his twin brother? His “spiritual” twin? His closest disciple? It’s one of so many little mysteries and controversies in New Testament scholarship inviting so much! speculation, since there is so little data to work with.
Wikipedia:
The Nag Hammadi copy of the Gospel of Thomas begins: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos, Judas Thomas, recorded.”
Thomas first speaks in the Gospel of John. In John 11:16, when Lazarus had recently died, the apostles do not wish to go back to Judea, where some Jews had attempted to stone Jesus. Thomas, “known as Didymos,” says: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
In Renard’s book, this latter-day Thomas angel just scoffs at all this: He was called the Twin because physically he looked almost identical to the Master. They were often mistaken for each other, he says. He even occasionally stood in for Jesus when the Master was indisposed.
Well, as a student of this sort of thing, I nod with a smirk: so much over so little! — If it’s true. But this small thing makes sense. Were there other points of correlation with the Thomas we know, or think we do, from early Christian scholarship that would strengthen or debunk my sense that this “angel” might be who he claims? What more can he tell us than what we already know? “Didymos” is an unexpected and promising start.
Bruce Proctor: Life, Photography, Spirit 