h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Was the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (as opposed to the Coptic) found in the codices, or did it come from somewhere else?

The Infancy Gospel written by Thomas is not the same as the Gospel by Thomas found in the Nag Hammadi Codices. Whereas the Infancy Gospel is just a nice to read collection of usual holy Legends, with a lot of stories about the young Jesus in the ages between 5 and 12, the Gospel of Thomas is serious work.
The movie 'Stigmata', that hit the cinema last year - a great one, by the way - actually refers to the Gospel of Thomas and cites Jesus, who said something like not needing a house of stone for God, but God is in everyone of us, and not needing a church of bricks, but the curch are we.
I would appreciate if anyone would know of a nice place to find the text of the Nag Hammadi on the net - here in Germany you only may get a very expensive book of almost 50 Euros, though I'd like to have the text...

By the way: thanks for this excellent article! Especially the point, that the Nag Hammadi cites Sokrates. There was one thing I never understood, being a line in Politeia, were Sokrates said, that the most just man will be crucified. I always thought Jesus could not know of this passage, and so it seemed like a little wonder to me, considering his death. But now the whole thing shines in another light - thank you!

You didn't mention, when the Nag Hammadi was written. I guess, it was before 70 AD, reading the facts in your article, but when, do you know?

(Excuse my English, it's neither my native language nor did I learn it in my native language

The Infancy Gospel written by Thomas is not the same as the Gospel by Thomas found in the Nag Hammadi Codices. Whereas the Infancy Gospel is just a nice to read collection of usual holy Legends, with a lot of stories about the young Jesus in the ages between 5 and 12, the Gospel of Thomas is serious work.
The movie 'Stigmata', that hit the cinema last year - a great one, by the way - actually refers to the Gospel of Thomas and cites Jesus, who said something like not needing a house of stone for God, but God is in everyone of us, and not needing a church of bricks, but the curch are we.
I would appreciate if anyone would know of a nice place to find the text of the Nag Hammadi on the net - here in Germany you only may get a very expensive book of almost 50 Euros, though I'd like to have the text...

By the way: thanks for this excellent article! Especially the point, that the Nag Hammadi cites Sokrates. There was one thing I never understood, being a line in Politeia, were Sokrates said, that the most just man will be crucified. I always thought Jesus could not know of this passage, and so it seemed like a little wonder to me, considering his death. But now the whole thing shines in another light - thank you!

You didn't mention, when the Nag Hammadi was written. I guess, it was before 70 AD, reading the facts in your article, but when, do you know?

(Excuse my English, it's neither my native language nor did I learn it in my native language

I know they aren't the same, I was asking if the infancy gospel was included in the codices as well as the coptic. I infer from your comments that it was not. I could see how it would not be. Still, I wondered...

I don't think the codices were written before 70 AD. If Gnosticism were well enough established to have a set of writings before 70, Paul's letters (written mostly in the 60's) most likely would have made reference to the gnostics. But they are not really discussed until 1 John, which would definitely be after 70.

There is only one Gospel of Thomas in the Gnostic collection, and it doesn't fit the description of you Infancy Gospel. I have to admit that this is the first I've heard of it.

The Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi collection is a sayings gospel. It is full of Jesus quotes... parables, speeches, etc. Its discovery was rather shocking, since it lent credence to the previously improvable hypothesis to the existence of the sayings gospel 'Q'.

The dating of the Gospels is much like the dating of the Bible... the dates are all over the place. The work of Plato, for instance, predates most of the rest. Each tractate tell its own story, and was written in its own time. The only thing we can be sure of is that they were no longer being written by the 4th century CE, since that was when their religion was destroyed by the Christians. It's also probably when the documents were hidden.

There are, however, references to the Gnostics in Paul's letters, but you have to read a bit carefully. I believe there are also ready references in the Acts book. I'd have to go dig out specific references, and get back to you on them.

Please do, I would be interested to see them.

As for dates, I realize we both referred to the whole codices but I at least was only thinking about the coptic gospel of Thomas.

Personally, I prefer to think of Q as more of an oral than a written thing. Oral tradition was much stronger back then, and I would be very surprised if a disciple (not just the 12 but all the people following Jesus) or two wasn't taking pretty good mental notes.

I would like to ask everyone’s opinion... who do you think is the most truthful to the real Jesus, Christianity today or the original Gnostics. It maybe that I do not fully understand the whole idea but in my search for the uncorrupted, non-misinterpreted ‘Truth’ I only found confusion.

I'm confident that ddombrow will offer the other opinion, but I lean to the Gnostics. Today's Christianity is based on Paul, and Paul didn't come into the picture until after Jesus was dead. Gnosticism was the original Christianity... Paul's Christianity was the heresy.

Then again, I wouldn't say that either has any particular measure of "Truth." I don't think there's any such thing as a capitalized truth, to begin with. If that's what you're really searching for, you might as well stop along the way and pick up a Holy Grail or two.

To say that Paul invented modern Christianity is a bit extreme, even on secular scholarly grounds. Besides, most of what we Christian know directly about Jesus is from the Gospels, and those mostly those predate Paul. As the Colonel has pointed out before (though not in this conversation) the Gnostics were the first Christian heretics, and the reason is that there beliefs were divergent from the teachings of Christ. They had every reason to paint a different picture of Christ, because a true picture of Christ would point out their divergent message.

Oops, that was a hastily made statement. The Gospels do not predate Paul. However, the Gospels were written within the lifetime of a number of eyewitnesses. Paul was not an eyewitness to the life of Christ. So why would what he has to say affect the current view of Christ's life?

SO you would say that the Gnostics was on the 'wrong' path, not adhering to Christ's teachings?

The Gospels aren't really the basis of most of Christianity's beliefs. The bulk of Christian dogma comes not from the Gospels, but from Paul's letters. The Gnostics accepted the tale of the Gospels, but interpreted events differently. For them, resurrection was not a literal thing, but a metaphor for a spiritual rebirth. Christianity is based on a literal interpretation of this event.

An interpretation we derive from the Gospels directly. I realize I may be far removed from the twelve disciples in both time and culture, but if I saw a man who I knew to be making some fantastical claims about being God die and then saw him again a few days later, alive, there would be no interpretation about it. The Gnostics took events that they heard about and fitted them into their own beliefs, nothing more.

Or, Paul, the Roman citizen, heard such things, and adopted them to his own worldviews. He had no understanding of the cultural backgrounds for the stories.

Remember also, we have no copies of the Gospels that predate the 4th century, so we can hardly reliably claim that the Gospel stories of the ressurection predate Paul's involvement.

Neither can you reliably claim they weren't.

Oh, and Paul was a Jew, too.

Oh and Fibonacci:

Yes, that is waht I would say.

You mean Paul of Tarsus? Tarsus was not a particularly Jewish town. It was the birthplace and center of the cult of Mithras.

Considering the many parallels between the Jesus cult and the Mithras cult, it's obviously not a coincidence. The Catholic church, upon being confronted with the evidence of the Mithras cult that ascribes many of Jesus "original" traits to a creature who predated Jesus by about 3 centuries, could only reply that the Mithras cult was an invention of the devil to discredit Christianity *before* it could even be.

What town was a particularly Jewish town? Jews were spread all throughout the area.

Which traits was it that Mithras had? Charming good looks, no doubt?

Born on December 25th. (The circumstances prove Jesus couldn't possibly have been)
Born in a manger.
Born of a virgin.
Visited in his crib by three astrologers, who were guided from the east by a star.

And then there's the whole ressurrection thing, which isn't all that important, considering that gods were dying and rising all over the Western world at the time of Jesus, although, so far as I know, he was the last to achieve it. His predecessors include Mithras, Dionysis, Osiris, Zarathustra, and many more. Jesus also performed miracles, but even the Bible has its hordes of miracle workers and sorcerers.

As for Tarsus and Judaism, Rome may have had Jews, too, but it was still Rome, with an overwhelmingly predominant belief in Roman mythology. The Mithraic cult was highly successful, and was the most popular religion in the Roman Empire at around the 2nd-3rd centuries CE. Tarsus was the capital of the religion, just as Jerusalem to the Jews, or Mecca to the Islams. Tarsus' very name comes from taurus, the Greek word for bull, if you know your zodiac. Mithras' slaying of the bull is their cult's equivalent to that of the Christian cult and the slaying of Jesus.

A theory worthy of consideration, to be sure.

So, to facilitate my own research on the matter, would you mind sharing some sources (names of books, etc.)?