Out of the eart

Out of the earth
By Professor EM Blaiklock MA Litt D

CHAPTER THREE
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SAYINGS OF CHRIST

PART TWO

The Logia and the Gospel of Thomas
Non-Biblical sayings of Christ from Moslem Sources-the tradition of such sayings—-the papyrus logia-the Gospel of Thomas.

THERE are other words of Christ which find their way into few sermons. They have come to light, a scanty and unproven heritage, from strange sources outside the pages of Scripture, but often with the marks of truth upon them. Two of the most remarkable non-Biblical sayings of Christ, for example, are preserved by Moslems, one in an ode of the poet Nizami and the other woven into the arabesques above the gateway of an Indian mosque. Both carry a subtle flavour of authenticity.
One evening, says the Mohammedam poet, Jesus came into the crowded market-place. A crowd was gathered, as idle orientals will, about some object of interest in a corner, and the Master, coming up unobserved, saw a dead dog at their feet. It was a revolting sight. The dog in the ancient east was the object of loathing and contempt. "Am I a dead dog?" one asked in anger at insult or derision. And there was a dead dog. And more than dead. The animal's ribs were bare, its ears torn, its ragged hide stained black with mud and blood. A frayed and filthy end of rope was about its neck. Jesus stood unobserved behind the group and heard their disgusted comments on the ugly sight." "His eyes are blear. His ears are foul. His ribs are bare." Then quietly He said, "Pearls cannot rival the whiteness of his teeth." Men turned startled and rebuked. "This," said someone, "must be Jesus of Nazareth." The tribute was eloquent enough. He had a way of saying things which burned the heart. One remembers another famous story. "Let him that is without sin among you throw the first stone." And as He waited, writing with a finger in the sand, the accusers, their spirits stripped bare before Him, dropped their stones and slunk away. The saying recorded in the Moslem poet is a genuine echo.
In a town twenty-four miles west of Agra is a big mosque with a magnificent gateway one hundred and twenty feet high and broad. In the scrolled decorations of doorposts and plinth an Arabic sentence is written. It runs: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said, "The world is merely a bridge, ye are to pass over it, and not to build your dwellings upon it."" How came the saying to the Indian mosque? There is a tradition, so strong as to be almost certainly true, that Thomas and Bartholomew, preached the Gospel in India. There is a strong and ancient branch of the Indian Church which antedates modern missionary enterprise. This Christian community Akbar found when he took up the reins of India. Akbar was an enlightened Moslem. Like the Roman Emperor Severus, who had statues of Abraham, Christ and Orpheus, along with the pagan deities, in his private chapel, Akbar tried to fuse the religions of his realm, and even invited a Portuguese missionary from Goa to preach there. The saying of Christ over a mosque which Akbar founded is a relic of this policy.
What did the saying mean? The only river in Palestine is the Jordan, and it is crossed not by bridges but by fords.
Where did the Lord, who always linked His teaching to known, familiar things, see a bridge? It is recorded in the Gospels that He once preached at Tyre. Tyre in those days was a sorry ruin of the mighty commercial city of the Pheonicians who held Cyprus, founded Carthage, sent ships to India and Britain, and supplied the master-builders and the great cedar beams for Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. Tyre was an island until, more than three centuries before Christ, Alexander came. In the pride of her strength Tyre closed her gates, and bade the Greek do his worst.
Alexander responded with his usual dynamic energy.
He built a causeway across the water, took his engines and assault troops across to the walls and stormed the city.
The causeway, widened by the drifting sands to a full quarter of a mile, exists still. In Christ's day, it still had he appearance of a bridge. Was it in this connection that Christ uttered His word? The causeway of Tyre was a road to somewhere. No one, as on old London Bridge, built houses on it. So, according to the saying, is life. We have here "no continuing city." Like Abraham we "look for a city which hath foundations." In search of it we wander like nomads.
It has always been known, apart from such chance records, that much which Christ said and did formed no place in the brief records of the Gospels. In one version of Luke's Gospel, one such lost saying, a striking remark on the Sabbath, actually intruded. Who slipped it into the Codex Bezae is not known, but it runs thus: "On the same day, seeing someone working on the Sabbath, He said to him: Man, if you know what you are doing, blessed you are. If you do not know you are accursed, and a transgressor of the law." It is odd that more such sayings did not find their way into the text, for John himself remarked that he "supposed the world would not hold the books" if the whole story were told. Paul quotes "the saying of the Lord Jesus 'It is more blessed to give than to receive'," and the saying is not in the record of the Evangelists. Luke, too, speaks of " many who have taken in hand to draw up a narrative," and tradition has it that Matthew, before he wrote his Gospel, made a collection of sayings of Christ. There is stranger confirmation. In his spirited history of the Third Crusade the French knight De Joinville, who himself swung his sword for Saint Louis, tells the story of a brave monk. High up in the Lebanon lived the Old Man of the Mountain, and Brother Peter was sent by the French king with a message to him. The King was, in point of fact, uneasy. The Old Man kept a secret police. He doped its desperadoes with hashish made from hemp, and sent them out with daggers to interfere by assassination in foreign affairs. From the name of the drug they were termed "hashishim" whence, as one may guess, the English word "assassins." When the monk arrived at the Old Man's stronghold, no mean act of courage, he found the ancient scoundrel with a book by his bed. It was " the words of the Lord unto Peter," and it is a pity he failed to secure a copy. Such collections, then, existed in A.D. 1248 in the Syrian hills.
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the first papyrus sheet came to light. Two of its sayings ring amazingly true. Said the Lord to an ancient audience: "Thou hearest with one ear, but the other thou hast closed." He might say it still. The other saying was a word for the lonely: "Wherever there are two they are not without God, and if one is alone anywhere I say that I am with him. Raise the stone, there thou shalt find Me: cleave the wood and there I am." What did He mean by those last words? Did He mean that a Christian faith, that God's grace and purpose, could sanctify and glorify the toil of the humblest, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the "scorned and rejected, the men hemmed in with the spears"? Or did He mean that the cloven log and the river-washed stone are full of the wonder of the Creator's hand for the eyes that are open to see? The meaning of such sayings need not be limited. This one takes its place among the world's wise words.
From a second sheet of sayings found in 1904 another word may be chosen. It runs,
"Let him who seeks cease not till he finds, and when he finds he shall be astonished; astonished he shall reach the Kingdom, and having reached the Kingdom he shall rest." An ancient tradition retains another saying of Christ which similarly links wonder and spiritual progress. "Wonder at the things before you," it makes him say, and comment: "This is the first step to the knowledge that lies beyond." The saying links Jesus with Plato, who said: "The mark of a philosopher is this-wonder.
“And how true! James
Watt "wondered" about a kettle, Newton about an apple, Archimedes about a bath-and science leaped forward. Life can only be true and meaningful with wonder.
The Kingdom of God is for those who seek. In the wonder of it, in Mrs. Browning's phrase, “every common bush" is ablaze with Him, while " the rest sit round it and pick blackberries." Wonder is the mark of the questing soul who treads the highway to truth, and "astonish-ment" is his reward.
"This treasure," wrote Saint Paul in a well-known passage, "we have in earthern vessels." He was referring to the storing or concealing of valuables in sealed jars, a practice of which the Qumran Scrolls provide illustration. Similarly hidden was a parcel of papyri unearthed at Naj Hamadi, between Cairo and Luxor, late in 1945.
The fact that the contents are at last reaching the West,
full fourteen years after a large clay jar was unearthed by fellahin digging near the site of a fourth-century monastery, is due to a Belgian scholar, Gilles Quispel. It was his enterprise and patience which found its way through the sinuosities of the lamentable black market in antiquities, and persuaded the jealous librarians of Egypt to release information which they most reprehensibly withheld.
The major treasure in the earthern vessel from Naj Hamadi, was the so-called Gospel of Thomas, some inkling of which had appeared in a papyrus find of Grenfell and Hunt in 1903.
The document is a collection of one-
hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus in the form of isolated dicta or brief conversations, some known, some entirely new.
Like the logia of earlier discovery, the sayings from the Naj Hamadi papyrus must be judged on their merits.
Some are inconsiderable, and contain none of the edge and patina so characteristic of the biblical utterances of Christ. Others, on the contrary, are fresh and pungent, and may represent a genuine tradition.
A few illustrations of the latter order will make the point clear. "Jesus said: Whoever is near to Me is near the fire, and whoever is far from Me is far from the kingdom." The words coincide with more than one warning from the Master that true discipleship can lead to persecution and loss, but that it is also true that the discovery of God lays in the acceptance of His lordship.
It is a strange fact about Jesus Christ that, contrary to every saintly character of common humanity, He never betrayed consciousness of sin in word, or thought, or act.
He faced His hostile critics calmly with the astounding challenge: "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" He looked open-eyed up to Almighty God and said: "I have glorified you upon earth." It is striking to find in the sayings attributed to Thomas a similar claim to sinlessness.
"They said to Him: 'Come and let us pray today and let us fast.' Jesus said: 'Which then is the sin that I have committed, or in what have I been vanquished?'"To meet such words is to be sharply reminded of the superhuman psychology of One who could so testify without arrogance, absurdity, or rapid refutation.
Here is another striking saying: "Jesus said: 'Become passers-by.'" The words in no sense commend the attitude of the priest and Levite who passed the wounded man on the Jericho road. It is in tune rather with a saying of Christ already mentioned, preserved amid the arabesques of a Moslem mosque: "Life is a bridge.
You pass over it but build no houses on it." These words likewise speak of Christian detachment, the obligation to hold material things with a light hand, the readiness, for Christ's sake, to avoid involvement in the tangle of wordly living, the willingness, in a word, to set the eyes on the prize set before, and walk the mundane path in the spirit in which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews bids his readers run the race.
All these sayings have the ring of authenticity. So do such words as the new Beatitude: "Blessed is the man who suffers. He finds life." And the reproach to the Pharisees:
"Woe to them, for they are like a dog sleeping in the manger of oxen, for neither does he eat or allow the oxen to eat." The figure of the dog in the manger is Greek, but here is Christ quoting it in Israel. And vividly, if one remembers the wolfish pariah curs of Palestine and forgets the sleek fox-terrier of the well-known painting.
Some of the sayings reproduce those already known.
And sometimes they present a slightly worn appearance, natural enough if one remembers that the collection is dated about A.D. 140, a full half-century after the Canon of the New Testament closed. Compare, for example, the well-known Parable of the Sower and the Seed with this
slightly attenuated version: "See, the sower went out, he filled his hand, he threw. Some seed fell on the road, the birds came, they gathered them. Others fell on the rock, and did not strike root in the earth, and did not produce ears. And others fell on the thorns. They choked the seed and the worms ate them. And others fell on the good earth, and brought forth good fruit. It bore sixty per measure, and one hundred and twenty per measure." The closing words are a little obscure, but note the Semitic method of counting... sixty, one hundred and twenty. • •
' This is obviously a different tradition, held, no doubt, by the Christian community which, according to tradition, escaped from Jerusalem before its fall in A.D. 70, and quite independent of that which is so richly represented in the Gospels. It is a remarkable testimony to the trustworthiness of the Bible.