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Video Description
In 367 CE the Bishop of Alexandria sent out a letter naming which Christian books would survive and which would be destroyed. The Gospel of Thomas was on the wrong list, and a monk in Egypt disobeyed by burying a copy. This video from the Conscious Radical channel opens that recovered jar of sayings.
There is no birth story, no crucifixion, no resurrection, and no founding of a church. There are only one hundred and fourteen sayings with no narrator standing over them to explain what they mean. The video treats that silence as the text’s real power, ending on a saying still sharp enough to feel dangerous after sixteen hundred years.
Full Video Transcript
The Gospel of Thomas offers a radical message. The kingdom is already here which challenges the
authority and structure of the early church. In 367 CE Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria created
the official list of Christian books that would be kept and those that would be destroyed.
And what was kept became the New Testament. The Gospel of Thomas says the father’s kingdom is
already spread over the earth and people don’t see it but this was left out from the new testament
and the reasons given appear to be more motivated by a desire to protect certain interests rather
than in the pursuit of the truth the church not only excluded the text but also ordered it to be
destroyed as heresy luckily a few rebellious monks ignored these orders they sealed the text in a
clay jar and buried them in the sand and that’s where they stayed hidden for 1600 years until
they were found in 1945. the gospel of thomas has 114 sayings of jesus unlike the four gospels in
the bible these sayings stand alone without a story or a narrator explaining them they’re
allowed to speak for themselves and near the end one saying is so bold that it’s easy to see why
Athanasius wanted the text removed. Athanasius wrote the 39th Festal Letter in 367 in which he
named the 27 texts that would become the New Testament. Every other Christian gospel, letter
and written work in circulation at the time, of which there were many, were to be destroyed or
were deemed heretical. The list that Athanasius provided became the Bible but the scholars who
translated the berry texts in the 50s understood why they had not been included in the gospel of
thomas jesus comes across not as someone who’s trying to establish a church but someone aiming
to dismantle it now at the time the church was building a system around jesus’s memory and within
that system came rules access to the gates of heaven and a group of mediators clergy bishops
and others who held power over people’s lives and the message was you can only know god through us
but the saints of thomas go against that system they tell people not to fast or pray on a set
schedule and not to give to charity just for appearances sake they also say that salvation
isn’t something you have to wait for because the kingdom is already here now near the end of the
text at 113 it says the disciples asked Jesus when will the kingdom come this is
at the heart of Christianity the kingdom coming the Messiah returning heaven is
waiting but you just need to be patient be obedient and follow the rules the
reward is always promised for later after you die after the world ends or
after the right leader arrives it’s always in the future it’s never here and
now and jesus’s answer was this it will not come by watching for it it will not be said look here
it is or look there it is rather the father’s kingdom is already spread out upon the earth and
people do not see it it’s spread out across the earth right under everything you see the only
thing keeping you from seeing the kingdom is not noticing it consider what this idea meant for the
church in the second and third centuries if the kingdom is already here then the church’s role
becomes unnecessary there’s no need for priests there’s no gates there’s no keys we just need to
be able to see it this single saying could challenge any system built in a similar way
think about politics the wellness culture or even our work and pension schemes the message is so
often do the work and maybe you’ll get the reward someday jesus is saying the kingdom is already
present but we fail to recognize it could this be why athanasius wanted the text destroyed or
called heresy in the second century the leaders of orthodoxy saw that if this saying stayed around
the religion they were building couldn’t be based on it so it’s likely that was the reason it was
left out. But that still leaves an important question. If the kingdom is already here,
why can’t we see it? Well, Thomas answers this in several sayings and together they form a pattern.
If you followed my channel, you know I love finding patterns. So saying three says, if those
who lead you say to you, look, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of heaven will get there
before you. If they say to you it’s in the sea then the fish will get there before you. Rather
the kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves then you will be known and
you will understand that you are children of the living father. The kingdom is both inside and
outside you and seeing it starts with self-knowledge and recognising who you really are beneath your
identity underneath your habits and the beliefs that you’ve inherited. In saying 70 he says if
you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what
is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And saying five know what’s in front
of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. So what’s right in front of us
right now. It’s the present moment. It’s about paying attention and experiencing the world
as it is right here. Then there’s saying 22 which is the most philosophical. Jesus tells the
disciples they’ll enter the kingdom when they make two into one. When the inner and outer are the
same and when they break down the divisions that shape how we see the world. Above and below,
male and female, sacred and ordinary, mind and body, self and world. The kingdom appears when
these divisions disappear. When we read these sayings together they make a clear point which
is the core argument of this text. We don’t see the kingdom because we’ve been taught to look in
the wrong place. We’re told to look up, to look ahead, to look outside ourselves, to wait, put
things off and to trust those who claim to know where it is. But every time we look up or ahead
we’re missing the only place it’s ever been. It’s right in front of you, it’s inside and outside of
you and it appears when you stop waiting for something you think is missing. Other texts in
the Nag Hammadi library take this idea further. The Gospel of Mary continues the same theme.
The Apocrypha of John gives it a cosmology and the Gospel of Truth gives it a theology.
Thomas just gives you the basic claim the kingdom is already here and seen it
starts with you paying attention to what’s right in front of you not what
you’ve been told to wait for the church tried to destroy this text both
physically and in meaning it stayed hidden for 1600 years the main saying is
still one of the most boldest claims in any religious text the kingdom is
is already here spread out across the earth and we just don’t see it so what i’m saying is that
we don’t have to wait you don’t need a priest a guru a politician or even me to give that to you
we all just need to learn to see what’s right in front of us the church called these texts heresy
but heresy just means choice in greek so choose for yourself you can find the full text
linked in the description if you want to read it. Marvin Mayer’s translation is a great place to
start. There are 114 sayings and you can read them all in less than an hour. It’s a sharp,
concise and beautiful text with a touch of rebellion.
Source: The Conscious Radical