Of late I’ve turned to The Gospel of Thomas. It’s taken the privileged top position on my night-stand, on which rests a mini-library of spiritual books ranging from A Course in Miracles to Ram Dass’ wonderful Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita. I read these texts exhaustively because I’m on a passionate quest to know God. Have been all my life. Admitting this sets me up for scorn and disbelief, both from people who know me and have endured my foibles, and from people who don’t know me, to whom this kind of claim sounds at best overly earnest, at worst, stupid or false. But with all my imperfections, and despite an Ivy League education, I can’t escape a persistent sense of the divine. It’s always here, a soft chord underlying the seasons and events of my life. It’s not a question of whether God exists. Rather, it’s this: what is the nature of God?

On this topic, I have a foot in different camps -- which makes me an octopus of sorts. I was born Christian and deeply experienced the forgiving grace of Christ Consciousness. I converted to Judaism before my first marriage, because the God of love and tolerance Whom I felt in my heart didn’t care which religion I practiced, but my fiancée did. I’ve come to love the practical humanism of Judaism and the sweet melancholy of atonement that is Yom Kippur. Years of meditation and a four-year school in hands-on-healing impressed me with the value of presence and emptiness, as espoused by Buddhism, and of the infinite, awe-inspiring faces of one God, as extolled by Hinduism. I’ve had past life memories as real and palpable as the recollection of the peppery arugala in my lunch salad, and I’ve practiced yoga enough to feel the fluctuations of my mind center themselves, and, for brief, treasured moments, cease. I experience a divine that is inclusive, expansive, and open, and which I approach from within my own heart. I look for sacred texts that affirm this embracing Presence.

I came to the Gnostic Gospels because of dissatisfaction with traditional texts. I can’t escape the suspicion that the Bible as is widely known was tampered with by early Church fathers. It’s not that these Testaments don’t contain eternal truths. It’s that, in the centuries after Christ, they were revised for the purpose of unifying the sects and creating a secular power base, and they perpetuate an exterior hierarchy that is separative rather than unitive. The history of the early church shows a multitude of sects with divergent texts; for practical reasons, those texts were codified into a canon that could be taught to the masses. Then that canon was rigidly defended through threats, torture, and outright slaughter. For centuries, people who questioned it were persecuted, subjected to barbaric torture, burnt at the stake, or otherwise murdered. We live now in the first period in history during which people have been able to examine the canon objectively -- and to find alternatives. The fruits of this intellectual freedom are new interpretations, new questions (Was Jesus married with children, and that fact hidden for ages? Are Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalen and his children buried in a tomb in Israel?), and wide-spread dissemination of newly found texts that offer a different perspective on Christianity, namely the Nag Hammadi books and Dead Sea scrolls.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the ancient Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered in 1945 in a jar buried in the sands of Egypt. It dates to the second century C.E and is a text from the Gnostics, a mystical group of early Christians who pursued secret knowledge, or gnosis, about God. Gnosis gives union with God, because gnosis can be perceived as the inner spark of divine light. This is exactly what I’ve experienced in a few, precious, and fleeting moments.

The Gospel of Thomas begins with the intriguing statement, "These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the twin recorded." This statement seems to promise to convey Jesus’ wisdom, and I am always seeking unadulterated sacred words. The third saying goes directly to the heart of the matter: "Rather, the kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and will understand that you are the children of the living Father." This is a directive to go within and seek understanding, and it stands in opposition to an emphasis on outward forms: purity of action and behavior, or allegiance to a hierarchical structure. And here’s where The Gospel of Thomas offers hope. It offers an alternative to the insistence on exterior purity and hierarchy, an insistence which must inevitably lead to terrorism, whether it’s the terrorism of burning heretics at the stake, the terrorism of flying an airplane into a skyscraper to protest the wickedness of an entire society, the terrorism of ethnic cleansing, or the terrorism of bombing an abortion clinic.

We live in a world beset with purity and hierarchy, though I believe that most of the people espousing those values are decent human beings. It’s my feeling that turning within to know God, as the Gnostic Gospels teach, can lead us into a more peaceful, graceful co-existence. Everyone has the right to their deeply held beliefs, but none of us has the right to coerce others into our beliefs. The Gospel of Thomas gives us that spaciousness. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you," says Jesus in saying 70, and in saying 110, "Whoever finds self is worth more than the world."

Works consulted:

Meyer, Marvin W., translator, The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels (Vintage Books, New York, 1986).

Pagels, Elaine, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, New York, 2003).

Robinson, James, general editor, The Nag Hammadi Library (HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1990).

© Traci L. Slatton, 2007

Author

Traci L. Slatton is a graduate of Yale and Columbia, and she also attended

the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. She lives in Manhattan with her

husband, sculptor Sabin Howard, whose classical figures and love for

Renaissance Italy inspired her to write a novel set during that time period. Immortal is her first novel.