A founding member of the Jesus Seminar, HAL TAUSSIG is a pastor, professor of Biblical literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and professor of early Christianity at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He is the author of In the Beginning Was the Meal; TheThunder: Perfect Mind; A New Spiritual Home; Reimagining Life Together in America (with Catherine Nerney); Jesus Before God; Reimagining Christian Origins (with Elizabeth Castelli), and others.

A New New Testament

A Bible For The Twenty-First Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Contents

The Books of A New New Testament

AN ANCIENT PRAYER FROM THE EARLY CHRIST MOVEMENTS

An Introduction to the Prayer of Thanksgiving

This prayer sparkles with evocative imagery. Pulsing with spiritual intimacy, its voice likely belongs to a very early layer of Christian spiritual practice, that of a community gathered for worship around a festive meal. For Christ followers — like most other groups of that day — such a meal contained a number of prayers, said at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the gathering. The New Orleans Council, which selected the ten new books for this collection, enthusiastically proposed that the Prayer of Thanksgiving should be included as the very first text in the volume. This would fulfill the council's wish that the reading of A New New Testament begin with a spiritual entrance into the world of the early Christ movements. There are very few prayers at all in the traditional New Testament, and the council felt strongly that the spiritual practices of these early Christ movements provided vital new perspectives on the beginnings of Christianity. With their emotional language and first-person expressions, prayers — and other spiritual practices — often provide more access to the felt dimensions of life than professions of belief and theology do.

This Prayer of Thanksgiving comes from the 1945 discovery of fifty-two documents, nearly all of them Christian, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Like all of the Nag Hammadi collection, it was written in the Coptic language. It is the only known manuscript with this exact text, but there are a number of other first-through-third-century Christian prayer texts that contain some of the same sentences and phrases. Neither its location nor its exact date of composition can be known. Its author is also unknown. The title affixed to the document, like many other titles of the ancient world, was added during the copying of the document for users much later.

The prayer does not explicitly refer to Jesus, but it does refer to the eating of a bloodless meal after the prayer, a practice that the Christ movements had in common with the traditions of Israel of that era. The theme of the prayer is thanksgiving, and some of the early Christ meals themselves were explicitly called eucharists, which is one of the Greek and Coptic words meaning "thanksgiving."

The language used to refer to God in the prayer is breathtaking for the modern ear: God is called "O name untroubled," "light of life," "womb of all that grows," "womb pregnant with the nature of the Father," and "never-ending endurance." This language demonstrates the fascinating openness of the nascent Christ movements in attributing to God both masculine and feminine character traits, especially in this focus on God having a womb through which creation happens. As seen in prayers from other new documents in this volume, early Christ followers seemed drawn to a prayer language that addressed God as a Father who had breasts from which humans could receive the symbolic milk.

This originality of expression shows the early Christ people as quite devoid of the religious rigidity or hierarchical conformity that would come to later Christian generations. It also shows that these early Christ people almost certainly used a variety of prayers for their festive meal "eucharists," not the lockstep formula of later Christianity. It can inspire twenty-first-century spiritual practice that is equally original, expressive, and outside the box of conventional practice and ideas. Or, this prayer's own wording directly offers an originality for those in our day who seek expressive and creative prayer.

The Prayer of Thanksgiving

1 This is the prayer they said: We give thanks to you, every life and heart stretches toward you, O name untroubled, honored with the name of God, praised with the name of Father.

2 To everyone and everything comes the kindness of the Father, and love and desire.

3 And if there is a sweet and simple teaching, it gifts us mind, word, and knowledge: mind, that we may understand you; word, that we may interpret you; knowledge, that we may know you.

4 We rejoice and are enlightened by your knowledge. We rejoice that you have taught us about yourself.

5 We rejoice that in the body you have made us divine through your knowledge.

6 The thanksgiving of the human who reaches you is this alone: that we know you.

7 We have known you, O light of mind. O light of life, we have known you.

8 O womb of all that grows, we have known you.

9 O womb pregnant with the nature of the Father, we have known you.

10 O never-ending endurance of the Father who gives birth, so we worship your goodness.

11 One wish we ask: we wish to be protected in knowledge.

12 One protection we desire: that we not stumble in this life.

13 When they said these things in prayer, they welcomed one another, and they went to eat their holy food, which had no blood in it.

GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS'S TEACHINGS

An Introduction to the Gospel of Thomas

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS provides a fresh look at Jesus as teacher, since its entire content consists of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. These sayings are the same as or similar to about fifty in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, making more than fifty of them new to the ears of twenty-first-century readers. The Gospel of Thomas has drawn more scholarship and public attention than any other of the fifty-two Nag Hammadi documents.

The New Orleans Council wanted the Gospel of Thomas to be the first gospel in A New New Testament, because it is a near-perfect example of how these additional books offer both connections and contours: strong connections to the traditional New Testament and eye-popping new content not previously known.

The Gospel of Thomas was found along with fifty-one other, mostly Christian, manuscripts near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. The Nag Hammadi copy is the only complete copy of this gospel and is written in Coptic, but since its discovery the existence of several other partial copies in Greek have also been identified. The existence of both Coptic and Greek versions indicates that this gospel was probably well known in a number of cultures in the ancient world. Scholars are deeply divided about whether the Gospel of Thomas as it exists in the Nag Hammadi manuscript comes from the first or second century. It seems quite possible that a significantly earlier version, even before Matthew, Mark, and Luke, could have existed. Although most of the manuscript evidence comes from Egypt, a number of scholars have suggested Syria as an original home for this gospel, because of similar content in Syria-based documents and because of the devotion of early Syrians to the figure of Thomas. Although the Gospel of Thomas itself indicates Thomas as the author in its opening, there is no consensus on who actually wrote the book. In the ancient world, authorship was regularly attributed falsely to leaders of previous generations, and this was clearly the case for Thomas and a number of other early Christian books.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Gospel of Thomas lies in its form. It is a sayings gospel: it does not have an overall story of Jesus but simply offers a list of his teachings. These teachings are — like those in Matthew, Mark, and Luke — short and pithy parables, proverbs, and aphorisms. At first, scholars thought that the order of these sayings was arbitrary. Increased study of this gospel, however, now points to an overall organizing principle, but its exact shape and sense has not yet been deciphered.

Jesus, the Teacher

In a sayings gospels like Thomas, the main significance of Jesus is his role as a teacher. This dimension is worth dwelling on in order to notice how it both reinforces and challenges some conventional pictures of Jesus. Jesus does teach a great deal in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and he teaches very similar material in Thomas, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But the picture of Jesus as teacher in Thomas does not include an emphasis on his saving death, his resurrection, or his healing. The meaning of Jesus comes from the wisdom he communicates, not from any special accomplishments, his position on earth or in heaven, or what fate or triumph he experiences. Here Jesus does not teach about his own significance, or about holy scriptures, but rather on issues of everyday life and practice. Perhaps the clearest theme is that of "the realm of God," which is a direct translation of a Coptic phrase that has most often been translated as "the kingdom of God." In Thomas, "the realm of God" is likened to particular life experiences. So, even when he draws on a term that seems somewhat religious or theological, he places it within the context of ordinary life. This is also true of Jesus's teachings in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but not the gospels of John and Mary.

Thomas's approach is not at all unusual for ancient wisdom literature, which includes many such documents, sometimes with the teacher named and sometimes without a designation of a speaker. Sometimes the meaning of the saying is clear and clever, as in Thomas 53: "His followers said to him, 'Is circumcision beneficial or not for us?' He said to them, 'If it were beneficial their father would beget them circumcised from their mother.'" Sometimes the teaching is poetic, pointed, and eloquent, as in Thomas 50: "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light generated itself and established itself, and has been made manifest in their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children.'" And sometimes the teaching is so pithy it raises more questions than answers, as in Thomas 42: "Jesus said, 'Be passersby.'"

So, these teachings are evocative, but not particularly practical. They are not meant to teach us how to build a house. Even while rooted in everyday experience, they are meant to get us thinking about the intangibles of life. This kind of process of gaining wisdom from one's own thought and experience is itself described in Thomas 70: "When you give birth to the one within you, that one will save you. If you do not have that one within you, that one will kill you."

The Realm of God in Thomas

As mentioned earlier, one might characterize the theme of Jesus's teachings in Thomas as "the realm of God." The realm of God is considered in Thomas to be primarily an earthly reality, describable, at least by comparison, in events and processes of ordinary life. This is also a major theme in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and the letters of Paul. Similarly to other early Christian literature, the realm of God here is also referred to as "the realm of heaven," but unique to Thomas is the phrase "the realm of the Father."

The more than fifteen teachings about the realm of God in Thomas include these:

If those who lead you proclaim to you: "The realm is in the sky," then the birds of the sky will enter before you. If they proclaim to you: "It is in the sea," then the fish will enter before you. Rather, the realm is within you and outside of you.

The realm of the Father is compared to a woman carrying a jar filled with flour. While she was walking on the road a ways out, the handle of the jar broke. The flour emptied out along the road, but she did not realize it or recognize a problem.

[The realm] will not come by looking for it. It will not be a matter of saying, "Here it is!" or "Look! There it is." Rather, the realm of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but people don't see it.

These fresh teachings allow us to better see that Jesus's teachings about the realm of God may be far broader, even more creative, than is apparent when consulting only the traditional New Testament, and yet these lessons remain quite consistent with those well-worn teachings.

It's Not the End of the World You Need to Concentrate On, It's the Beginning

Much of early Christian literature pays attention to the impending end of the world. Images of cataclysmic destruction are found in everything from the Gospel of Matthew to the Revelation to John. The Gospel of Thomas not only ignores all such images but explicitly challenges the notion of the end of the world. In Thomas 18, when Jesus is asked by his disciples when the end will come, he answers: "Have you discovered the beginning that you ask about the end? For, in the place where the beginning is, there the end will be. Blessed is the one who takes a stand in the beginning. That one will know the end, and will not experience death."

This focus on the beginning takes on multiple images throughout Thomas. Focusing in Thomas 19 on five trees in the original garden, Jesus proclaims, "Blessed is the one who came into being from the beginning, before he came to be." In several other passages he evokes the nakedness of the Garden of Eden as a positive image. This dependence on the cosmic beginning is mirrored also in the life cycle of individuals in Jesus's teaching that "these little children are like those who enter the realm". In 50, Jesus identifies humans as those who came from where the light itself came into being.

For the Gospel of Thomas the spiritual path of wisdom does not point toward the end of time and the judgment day, nor does it hold up death as a crucial moment in the life of the individual. Instead, the origins of life and the world are the real signs of God's purpose for human beings.

Thomas's Jesus makes twenty-first-century readers do a double or triple take. Often these teachings sound very much like the standard gospels. On the other hand, between or even in what appear to be traditional sayings, something very new appears, making this gospel one that requires a fresh hearing and offers new possibilities.

The Gospel of Thomas

These are the veiled sayings which the living Jesus spoke and Judas, the Twin, Thomas wrote them down.

1 1 And he said: "Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not experience death."

2 1 Jesus said: "Let the one who seeks continue seeking until he finds. 2 And when that one finds he will be disturbed, and once that one is disturbed he will become awed, and will rule as a king over the all."

3 1 Jesus said: "If those who lead you proclaim to you: 'The realm is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will enter before you. If they proclaim to you: 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will enter before you. 2 Rather, the realm is within you and outside of you. 3 When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the Living Father. 4 If, however, you do not come to know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are the poverty."

4 1 Jesus said: "The old person will not hesitate to ask a small child of seven days about the place of life, and the old one will live. 2 For many who are first will be last. 3 And they will come to be one alone."

5 1 Jesus said: "Recognize what is right in front of your face, and what is hidden will be revealed to you. 2 For, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed."

6 1 His followers asked him: "Do you want us to fast? In what way should we fast? Should we give alms? What foods should we not eat?" 2 Jesus said, "Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate. 3 For all things are revealed before the presence of heaven."

7 1 Jesus said: "Blessed is the lion which the person eats — and the lion becomes a person. And cursed is the person whom the lion eats — and the lion becomes a person."

8 1 And he said: "The person compares to a wise fisherman: He cast his net into the sea. He drew it up from the sea full of little fish from below. And he found one large fish. The fisherman was wise. He cast the little fish into the sea. He chose the large fish without trouble. 2 Whoever has ears to hear, listen!"

9 1 Jesus said: "Look, a sower went out with a handful of seeds and sowed them. Some fell on the road. The birds came and gathered them. Others fell on the rock. They did not take root in the soil or produce ears. And others fell among thorns. They choked the seed and were eaten by worms. And some fell upon good soil, and produced fruit up to the sky. Sixty per measure. One hundred and twenty per measure!"

10 1 Jesus said: "I have cast fire upon the world. And behold! I watch over it until it burns."

11 1 Jesus said: "This heaven will pass away and the one above it will pass away. 2 Those who are dead do not live and those who live will not die. In the days you ate what was dead you were making it alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"