Episode 6: Gospel of Thomas

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

Meditation, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Contemplation, Psychology, Buddhism, Development, Thomasmcconkie, Religion & Spirituality

5 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2018

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Gospel of Thomas is a surprisingly mind-jogging text that reads more like a collection of Zen koans than a book from the Christian canon. In this episode, Thomas (not to be mistaken with Thomas) shares a saying from this ancient text and ties it to a classical Buddhist teaching. In this episode, as in life, you are invited to be happy, whole, and complete.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name is Thomas Mekonki. You're listening to Mindfulness Plus. Thanks for coming back. If you're returning, if you're returning, if this is your first time.
0:21.6	Welcome, welcome.
0:23.6	So each week I pick up a topic related to mindfulness practice, meditation, but more generally transformative practice.
0:35.6	What are the practices that transform our very being? That's a question I ask
0:43.0	here at Mindfulness Plus using meditative techniques from the world traditions as well as the most
0:49.7	recent science on human development. So welcome, welcome.
0:59.1	Today I want to talk about the Gospel of Thomas, actually.
1:08.7	This is a very unique text that was discovered quite recently in the scope of things.
1:18.0	It was discovered in an archaeological dig in 1945 just outside of Nag Hammadi, Egypt.
1:31.4	And there were, if I'm not mistaken, 46 texts that were written on papyrus and had been hidden up for 16 centuries or so.
1:37.9	What's interesting about the Gospel of Thomas is that early on, when it was first discovered,
1:47.6	it was clearly a Christian text, unlike, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947, I believe. So just a couple years after this Nag Hammadi discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish texts. However,
1:54.1	the text discovered in Nag Hammadi, or at least the Thomas text, was clearly Christian. And it was a Christian text that jogged the Christian world, both,
2:06.2	you know, theologians, scholars alike, because it was so different in its orientation,
2:12.3	similar in, you know, what we see in the New Testament, for example, the Christian canon, but different
2:21.1	enough that it really confused people. There was a lot of controversy around whether or not this
2:26.2	was a genuine text. Like what's going on here? Is it a genuine Christian text or is it a text that
2:32.4	came much later in the game, centuries after the Jesus
2:36.1	event of the near eastern world and therefore not reliably tied to the Christian tradition.
2:45.3	So what's interesting is modern scholarship is starting to build a case that the gospel of Thomas is in fact an early
2:53.9	Christian text and it lends evidence to the possibility that Christianity perhaps didn't start
3:03.7	in such a uniform way as much of the world has supposed for many centuries.
	...

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