Jump into the Satori Stream

Flip to the front of almost any Bible and you’ll find a table of contents split into two halves. Old Testament, New Testament. Most of us never ask who decided there should be a second list at all, or why the first one stayed. The answer runs through a rich shipowner from the Black Sea coast named Marcion. In the second century he drew up the first Christian canon we know of, a short list of books he considered authentic. He left out the entire Jewish scripture on purpose, because he’d concluded it was the word of a different God. ...

Most of us have spent a few minutes hunting for reading glasses that were on our heads the whole time. Nothing about the situation needs to change in that moment. You don’t need new glasses, or forgiveness for losing them. You need to notice something that was already true. Two old traditions, one from India and one from the Mediterranean, built whole religions on a version of that moment. Buddhism calls the problem avidya. The Gnostic Christians called it agnoia. Both words mean not-knowing, and both traditions put it at the bottom of everything that goes wrong in a human life. ...

On April 6, 2006, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost gospel had been restored and translated. It was the Gospel of Judas, and the story that ran everywhere that spring was simple enough to fit in a headline. Judas wasn’t the traitor. He was the one disciple who understood Jesus, and he handed him over because Jesus asked him to. About a year and a half later, a Rice University scholar named April DeConick wrote in the New York Times that the translation had turned the text upside down. In her reading, the Judas of this gospel was a demon. ...

“They call us unspiritual, common, and ecclesiastic.” That’s a bishop talking, around the year 180. Irenaeus of Lyon is complaining about Valentinian Christians who still sat in his congregation and took communion with everyone else. They just treated him as a man who couldn’t follow the conversation. If you’ve spent any time with Gnostic texts, you’ve probably met the charge that grows out of complaints like his. Gnosticism, it goes, split humanity into the saved few and the hopeless many, and the few decided they were the few. I want to give that charge its full weight, because some of it lands. Then I want to show you a few texts that pull hard the other way. ...

A lot of spiritual writing seems to come from people who’ve never had to make rent. It talks about letting go and renouncing the world, and then you close the book and there’s an invoice due Friday and a manager who wants the report by noon. The Gospel of Thomas has a reputation for being that kind of book, mystical and otherworldly, a string of riddles about light and solitude. But scattered through its 114 sayings is a handful that talk about money with almost no metaphor at all. They mention merchants, rent, loans, and a man planning his investments. I’ve been reading them as a set, and they add up to something I didn’t expect, which is advice for people who still have to go to work in the morning. ...

Picture the church in Rome around the year 140. There’s no cathedral and no Vatican, just a scatter of house congregations that speak Greek, argue constantly, and look to a handful of gifted teachers. One of the most gifted is a man from Egypt named Valentinus, and by one ancient account he expects to be made bishop. He wasn’t. Someone else got the job, and within a generation Valentinus had become a favorite target of the heresy hunters. Bentley Layton, whose translation of the fragments I’ll lean on throughout, says that if things had gone the other way, “the whole future of Roman Christianity might have been unimaginably altered.” ...

Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written. If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit. ...

Halfway through the Gospel of Truth there’s a parable about moving house. A family packs up, and some of their jars turn out to be bad ones that crack on the way. The owner doesn’t grieve over them, because the full jars made the trip, and those were the ones worth carrying. Then the parable gets restless. A great disturbance breaks out among the jars, “for some were empty and others were filled, some were ample and others were depleted, some were purified and others were broken.” I read that line on my laptop with a row of tabs open above it, each one too narrow to show its title, and I had the uncomfortable sense that the text was describing my screen. ...

The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped. I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did. ...

Most sayings in the Gospel of Thomas survive in one place, a single Coptic manuscript dug up near Nag Hammadi in 1945. Saying 22 got around. A version of it turns up in a sermon preached by an ordinary second-century church leader, and another in a lost gospel that Clement of Alexandria quoted around the year 200. So whatever “make the two into one” meant, Christians on very different sides of the later fights about orthodoxy were repeating it and arguing over it. I want to look at what they heard in it, and then at what I hear. ...