The Gospel of Thomas

By Leonardo Paolo Lovari

The Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel that gathers 114 sayings of Jesus. His composition date is debated among scholars: some consider it a contemporary of the synoptic gospels, if not even prior to these, whose dating is not later than the end of I century; but most scholars believe that it is later, as it would show a partial dependence on the canonical gospels, and date it to the middle of the second century, in 140. The attribution of the gospel is to the apostle "Didymus Judas Thomas" (both "Didymus "That" Thomas "means" twin ", respectively in Greek and Aramaic). The vision that emerges from the Gospel according to Thomas is that the Kingdom of God is already present on Earth and that the divine light, present within all men, can allow them to see the Kingdom and enter it. The complete text of the Gospel is preserved in the Coptic museum in Cairo, in a papyrus manuscript in the Coptic language discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt; this code, linked with a method now known as Coptic ligation, dates back to around 340.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harmakis Edizioni
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9788831427050

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THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

Leonardo Paolo Lovari

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ISBN: 9788831427050

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Layout and graphic elaboration: Leonardo Paolo Lovari

THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS - ANOTHER

VISION OF JESUS CHRIST

The Gnostic Gospels are providing new ways to understand Jesus and Christianity, but the discoveries of the buried manuscripts under the sands of Egypt have given a new keystone.

In December 1945, Muhammad Ali told the story, some fellahin Egyptians arrived near Jabal el-Tarif a hill that supports the Nile in Upper Egypt. The dromedaries bound, the fellahim yes they began to dig in search of sabakh, a natural fertilizer but to their surprise they discovered more, a large jar buried by a boulder. I took for a moment the fright that the jar contained a genius who could attack them.

But then they took a pickaxe and something golden came out, it wasn’t gold but fragments of papyrus. In fact they found thirteen inside the jar codes we now call "Nag Hammadi Library". I’m written in Coptic a late form of Egyptian. This collection includes the majority of the Gnostic gospels.

Gnosticism comes from the Greek word "gnosis"¹ (knowledge). The knowledge of the Gnostic addresses the origin of man and his world and is directed to the salvation of this world. Gnosis it is therefore a doctrine of individual redemption. Its origins yes they date back several centuries before Christianity and are connected to mystery religions, to Zoroastrianism or Mazdaism, to Hermeticism, to Kabbalah, to Alexandrian Judaism, to Pythagoreanism, to Neoplatonism.

Particularly present in the original Christianity, in the teachings of Marcion, Valentine, Basilides, Cerintus, Carpocrates, Simon Mago, of the Syriac fathers, was antithetical to institutionalization of religion and, for this reason, harshly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, which tried in every way to erase its traces, failing, completely fortunately, for us. The Gnostics acted in Christianity as an initiatory initiating society secretly their knowledge and mystical interpretations. They pursued and taught an individual way to salvation that did not necessarily require participation in a church or group.

It was not a unitary movement, but was composed of several schools in which similar elements are found. It is based on a complex and articulated one vision that can be summarized in the metaphysical conflict between the two principles of good and evil, in the conception of a supreme god, unfathomable and invisible and in the presence in each of us of a seed, a spark of the divine that must be awakened.

"He who does not know himself is written in a text of the second century, not he knows nothing, but he who knows himself at the same time reaches the knowledge of the depth of the whole". When you know the inner god becomes one with what is. Until that does not it will happen, we will continue to participate in mortal life, to be subjected to the cycle of rebirths.

On one side there is an unknowable god, the true God, on the other a wicked one demiurge that would have created the material and imprisoned world our souls in bodies. The first presides over the realm of light or pleroma (fullness, divine perfection) constituted, in turn, by multiple eons (from the Greek αιών = time, duration), eternal entities, representing the multiple divine aspects, which proceed by emanations, by syzygies, pairs of opposites. The second, the demiurge evil, instead, governs the realm of darkness or kénoma (empty).

The soul, which is made of light, is enclosed in the body as in a dark prison and is in constant struggle with the matter. The whole universe therefore constitutes a demiurgic and every debauchery being incarnated is called to overcome one’s condition of suffering to return to the One through a path of knowledge, of seeking the truth.

The evil creator originated from Sophia,² a hugely large aeon ambitious that claimed to violate the unknowability of the One, Uncreated principle. Something of Gnosticism can arouse more interest?

First of all the thesis of the fall, that is, that the soul is imprisoned in a world marked by pain, created not by a charitable god but from a perfidious demiurge. From this material universe we can to liberate not by faith or by the intervention of grace, but by working incessantly on himself to reach a high degree of awareness. Secondly, from the so-called apocryphal gospels (in which the Gnostic ones are made) it is possible to reconstruct a story that has remained secret from Jesus concerning his years youth, that is, after entering the temple, when literally disappears from the canonical gospels to reappear at thirty, and those following the crucifixion, when, cured of wounds, he would have abandoned Palestine with her mother, to Mary Magdalene and to some disciples.

It seems, among other things, that the Templars had discovered under the temple of Jerusalem documents containing details not narrated, precisely, in the canonical gospels. The texts found by chance in 1945 in Nag Hammadi they are, as we will see, even more important than scrolls found in Qumram in 1947 because they frame the figure of Jesus and Christianity under a new profile. For centuries removed e hidden by a Church that haunted its readers, they suggest of Jesus the image of an enlightened person, of a