Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In a sermon clip that was posted last week on X, U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico said this.

In the Gospel of Thomas, which was later omitted from the Bible by church officials,

the Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying,

When you make the male and female one and the same, when the male is not male and the female

is not female, then you will enter the kingdom of God, end quote.

Now, what he's offering here is what might be called a zombie argument.

It's a claim which, like monsters and movies, keeps getting up and shambling around,

no matter how many times they're

killed. Other examples of zombie arguments include calling an unborn child just a clump of cells,

though sonograms and ultrasounds have shown for years, it's not true, or that the same-sex

attracted are born this way when even advocates of the movement abandoned that slogan years ago. In truth, most scholars

have never considered the Gospel of Thomas as being on par with the actual Gospels. And yet,

those seeking a feminist revisioning of Christianity continued to claim it as a legitimate source

of what Christians believe before it was suppressed by the authorities. The truth is, if we borrowed

Voltaire's quip about the Holy Roman Empire, the Gospel of Thomas is neither a gospel nor of Thomas,

nor is it Scripture. It's also neither Christian nor feminist. First, despite Talarico's claim that

the Gospel of Thomas was kicked out of the Bible, it just isn't so. In fact, it was never in the

Bible in the first place. It's a second century document, which, despite being named after an

apostle, was written by people who never knew Jesus, nor even by a friend of a friend of him.

As someone commented on X, this is like a fan fiction of Jane Austen written today, being

...