The Last Line of the Gospel of Thomas Will Make Your Jaw Drop

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]in justosition to other books that were floating around bearing the names of Jesus and the apostles that just had no credibility.

[00:00:08]>> What are those?

[00:00:09]>> Okay, so like the the Gnostic Gospels or things like that like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas.

[00:00:16]>> I don't even know if I know about these.

[00:00:18]>> Okay, so the podcast is not done.

[00:00:20]>> Okay, but then then it can be done. But what is this? Yeah.

[00:00:23]>> So there were other books at the time written by other eyewitness people. So no. Okay. So you have the first century, you have the gospels and even then the understanding is that there's one gospel message, right? That's the message of who Jesus is and what he came to do.

[00:00:39]>> But the idea is that those gospels are according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. One gospel but four accounts of it.

[00:00:46]>> Eventually gospel literature is kind of framed in an understanding of it looks a particular way. But there were groups in the subsequent centuries after Jesus's death that aimed to appropriate Jesus and the disciples. So they wrote documents that tried to shoehorn the credibility of adding Jesus into their philosophical systems >> in order to kind of bring Jesus into the mix. So interestingly enough, they always almost always portray Jesus as a pagan mystic >> and that's very palatable for the pagan mystical world. And so at even face value we can go okay is it more likely that the first century Nazarene rabbi itinerate Jesus of Nazareth was actually a pagan mystic that later people tried to paint as a Jew or >> is it the opposite right that he's clearly you know born in Bethlehem growing up in Nazareth wandering around Galilee that in this Jewish saturated Hebraic world and that later people are like let's make him into a little bit more of a like a pagan philosopher. I think that's what's going on, right? But you have uh documents, even early documents, something like the Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings. Um it's one of the more famous ones because in 1945 it was discovered in the Nagamadi Desert, what's known as the Nagamadi library. Also contains other documents like uh the secret gospel of John and the Gospel of Philip. But the gospel of Thomas is one of the more kind of famous well-known ones. It's not a gospel in the formal sense of like a birth, life, death, and resurrection, but it's 114 sayings of Jesus, >> but the this gnostic group, which so the the term gnostic comes from the Greek word nosis, which means knowledge. And the idea is within historical biblical Christianity, salvation is something that is done external to you on your behalf by the finished work of Jesus.

[00:02:49]Gnosticism comes from the east. It makes its way into the the Roman world and it starts to appropriate and include individuals into its system. And so by the second century, Jesus gets kind of by osmosis grouped into these philosophical systems. And though there's a whole bunch of dozens of different gnostic groups which don't even agree with one another, the kind of central thread is that salvation is not something external to you. It's actually innate about you because it's not just that Jesus is God, but Michaela, you're divine. And the way you unlock that is by secret knowledge.

[00:03:32]So you listen to the secret knowledge once it kind of clicks and you become enlightened then you realize I'm actually a divine being.

[00:03:39]>> Oh this is whatnosticism is >> sonosticism is about sonostic literature often has Jesus uh he he's very secretive and unlike the the more public ministry that we see in the biblical gospels Jesus is whispering the secret knowledge into the ears of whoever is the claimed individual.

[00:03:58]Interestingly enough, it's never the individuals that are are the key people in the biblical gospels. It's never uh Peter, James, and John. It's it's always the it's always Judas or Thomas or Philip. It's kind of the other background here, Mary Magdalene. Um in a way that kind of is trying to ostracize the key figures in the biblical gospels and actually say, you know, you guys think it's Matthew and Peter and James.

[00:04:23]It's actually it's actually Philip or Mary Magdalene.

[00:04:27]>> Oh, interesting. Um, but the Gospel of Thomas has a number of key features to it. It's I mean, right off the bat, all of these are written when people that are associated with their names are long dead.

[00:04:39]>> So, Thomas is dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas is written, >> which is a key indicator that, you know, this isn't reliable.

[00:04:46]>> Um, but then it has teachings like the last line of the Gospel of Thomas >> has one of the disciples saying to Jesus, "Let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life." Okay. So, starting off on a good note. And then Jesus replies and says, >> "Don't worry >> because I will make her appear male as you males." And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, "Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

[00:05:12]>> Wow. They're really ahead of their time now.

[00:05:15]>> I know, right? But it's this kind of stuff. So, so when you have these these other pieces of literature that are are they're they're trying to kidnap, they're trying to put words on the mouth of Jesus that Jesus never said. And interestingly enough, early Christians are well aware of these guys like write treaties like against heresies where he stipulates that there is a book called the Gospel of Thomas and it's nonsense.

[00:05:42]It's heresy. It's silly. And for a long long time until 1945, we had no like tangible artifact evidence for the Gospel of Thomas. But when eventually that comes to light, what does it do? It confirms that what Erenus was talking about with the silliness of the Gospel of Thomas >> actually happens. And and we have we have evidence for that also in the the Gospel of Peter. Um the Gospel of Peter pops up also discovered in the 19th century. And when we discover it, we have um a particular church leader uh I believe he's in Turkey and he's writing to there's a church in roads that writes to him and says, "Hey, we've come across this Gospel of Peter. We're not sure what this is." And he says, "Okay, well, you keep reading it. I'm going to look into it." And then he finds a copy of it and then writes immediately to them and says, "This is heretical." Like all the way through this thing, it doesn't represent anything that's accurate about Jesus. stop reading it within your church community. Now, we don't find the actual copy of the Gospel of Peter until long long long long long long time after that. But then once again, what does it do? It confirms that when we discover the Gospel of Peter, >> it has these kind of gnostic esoteric denying that Jesus ever had a physical body. And so Jesus is on the cross and he's kind of chilling. He's floating because he's like the ancient world had no problem with believing Jesus was God.

[00:07:05]But believing that Jesus was a man, that's the actual hang-up. And so, >> okay, >> if Jesus, if Jesus denying the incarnation was a central point to a lot of this stuff because the physical is evil and the spiritual is good. So you wow this idea which is once again why you read the book of Acts and you get to Acts 17 Paul is preaching on Mars Hill at the Aropagus and it seems that his audience of like Jew of of Greek philosophers are tracking with him until he drops the word anastasis resurrection and then all of a sudden they're like no we're out and it's because an idea of a bodily resurrection they're like that's the opposite osite of what we're trying to attain. I'm stuck in a meat prison because I'm a spirit that is stuck in a body and I death actually releases me from this. So this whole Jewish narrative idea of a resurrection of the dead, I I want nothing to do with that.

[00:08:02]>> And so this is a Platonic thought that is adopted by Gnosticism. And so they have no they have no hangup with Jesus being God. They just deny entirely that he was physical.

[00:08:13]>> Wow.

[00:08:15]Wow.

[00:08:16]It's no wonder you've gone deep on this.

[00:08:18]It's kind of tempting. It's kind of tempting. Wow, that was cool.