mlinssen wrote: ↑Sun Nov 29, 2020 8:41 am
That is the pointer. A dismissal - and no one has ever, to the best of my knowledge, managed to link the awkward "heaven and earth came into being because of him" to the dodgy James the Just who isn't mentioned at all in the Synoptics
For the lazy who can't be bothered to download my ATP
The Jesus of Thomas is miffed and lashes out at the dumb disciples who desire any teacher, as long as there is one; that is most definitely not what Thomas has in mind. Where the disciples ask a question about a certain moment in time, Thomas directs them to a place, a physical
location, and pigeonholes them: if you seek a rabbi then just go to Judaism! He points them to Jacob, the poster child of Judaism, and Israel:
Genesis 25: 21 And Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren. And the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived. 22 The children struggled together within her, and she said, "If it is thus, why is this happening to me?" So she went to inquire of the LORD. 23 And the LORD said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger." 24 When her days to give birth were completed, behold, there were twins in her womb. 25 The first came out red, all his body like a hairy cloak, so they called his name Esau. 26 Afterward his brother came out with his hand holding Esau's heel, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. 27 When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents. 28 Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob. 29 Once when Jacob was cooking stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was exhausted. 30 And Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of thatred stew, for I am exhausted!" (Therefore his name was called Edom. ) 31 Jacob said, "Sell me your birthright now." 32 Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?" 33 Jacob said, "Swear to me now." So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. 34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.
And thus, Jacob acquires the birth right of Esau. ֵםָּ ֵת is usually translated with 'blameless', not 'quiet' - and so should it be here. Jacob is quite the character, really:
Genesis 27:1 When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau his older son and said to him, "My son"; and he answered, "Here I am." 2 He said, "Behold, I am old; I do not know the day of my death. 3 Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me, 4 and prepare for me delicious food, such as I love, and bring it to me so that I may eat, that my soul may bless you before I die." 5 Now
Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, 6 Rebekah said to her son Jacob, "I heard your father speak to your brother Esau, 7 'Bring me game and prepare for me delicious food, that I may eat it and bless you before
the LORD before I die.' 8 Now therefore, my son, obey my voice as I command you. 9 Go to the flock and bring me two good young goats, so that I may prepare from them delicious food for your father, such as he loves. 10 And you shall bring it to your father to eat, so that he may bless
you before he dies." 11 But Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, "Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. 12 Perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing." 13 His mother said to him, "Let your
curse be on me, my son; only obey my voice, and go, bring them to me." 14 So he went and took them and brought them to his mother, and his mother prepared delicious food, such as his father loved. 15 Then Rebekah took the best garments of Esau her older son, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob her younger son. 16 And the skins of the young goats she put on his hands and on the smooth part of his neck. 17 And she put the delicious food and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob. 18 So he went in to his father and said, "My father." And he said, "Here I am. Who are you, my son?" 19 Jacob said to his father, "I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me; now sit up and eat of my game, that
your soul may bless me." 20 But Isaac said to his son, "How is it that you have found it so quickly, my son?" He answered, "Because the LORD your God granted me success." 21 Then Isaac said to Jacob, "Please come near, that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are
really my son Esau or not." 22 So Jacob went near to Isaac his father, who felt him and said, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." 23 And he did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau's hands. So he blessed him. 24 He said, "Are you really my son Esau?" He answered, "I am." 25 Then he said, "Bring it near to me, that I may eat of my son's game and bless you." So he brought it near to him, and he ate; and he
brought him wine, and he drank. 26 Then his father Isaac said to him, "Come near and kiss me, my son." 27 So he came near and kissed him. And Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him and said, "See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the LORD has
blessed! 28 May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine. 29 Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord
over your brothers, and may your mother's sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you!"
Three explicit lies in a row, on top of all the deceit - against his father, of all people. That is not the end of it, but it earns him the blessing of his father. Esau doesn't take it all lightly, and understandably so:
Genesis 27:36 Esau said, "Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright, and behold, now he has taken away my blessing." Then he said, "Have you not reserved a blessing for me?" 37 Isaac answered and said to Esau, "Behold, I have made him lord over you, and all his brothers I have given to him for servants, and with grain and wine I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son?" 38 Esau said to his father, "Have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father." And Esau lifted up his voice and wept. 39 Then Isaac his father answered and said to him: "Behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew of heaven on high. 40 By your sword you shall live, and you shall serve your brother; but when you grow restless you shall break his yoke from your neck."
Not a future filled with prosperity and happiness for Esau, and he is determined to kill Jacob after this - for which their mother warns Jacob. She advises him to flee, and surprisingly so Isaac agrees to that, blesses him and gives him some instructions for on the way. Shortly after,
Jacob has a dream:
Genesis 28:11 And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. 12 And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! 13 And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. 14 Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." 16 Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it." 17 And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 18 So early in the morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, 21 so that I come again to
my father's house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God, 22 and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house. And of all that you give me I will give a full
tenth to you."
Jacob has some nerve, negotiating with God after all that that same God told him in his dream!
A ladder to heaven, this is the place where heaven and earth come into being because of Jacob: the gate to heaven, according to Jacob.
At least Jacob keeps his promise, although he does do quite a bit of altar building all over the place:
Genesis 32:24 And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, "Let me go, for the day
has broken." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." 27 And he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." 28 Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." 29 Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. 30 So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered." 31 The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob's hip on the sinew of the thigh.
It is the dreaded confrontation between Jacob and - arguably - Esau. The 'man wrestling' is an angel, supposedly, who gives him a new name, Israel, and even blesses him. The odd story including the hip socket gets quite a make-over in Audlin's restoration of John - that, on a side note. Let it be noted that Jacob loses the struggle yet demands a blessing before letting go of the man! Where normal people would surrender, Jacob even makes demands.
Genesis 35:6 And Jacob came to Luz (that is, Bethel), which is in the land of Canaan, he and all the people who were with him, 7 and there he built an altar and called the place El-bethel, because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother. 8 And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel. So he called its name Allon- bacuth. 9 God appeared to Jacob again, when he came from Paddan-aram, and blessed him. 10 And God said to him, "Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name." So he called his name Israel. 11 And God said to him, "I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body. 12 The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you." 13 Then God went up from him in the place where he had spoken with him. 14 And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone. He poured out a drink offering on it and poured oil on it. 15 So Jacob called the name of the place where God had spoken with him Bethel.
A lot of altar building, a lot of naming places, sometimes even twice just like here. There is much more to the story of Jacob, the unrighteous deceiver, who gets the full righteous treatment from God on every single occasion. The twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve sons of Jacob: this is where it all started, and this is where Thomas' Jesus tells the ignorant disciples to bugger off to: the 'Israel' that Thomas so greatly despises.
It has nothing to do with the supposed leadership of the supposed brother of the supposed Jesus, the supposed James the Just - of course. Logion 12 is not in the least in conflict with logion 13 where Thomas gets all the credits; logion 12 is a marvellous putdown by Thomas to the Jews, Judaism; Israel as a whole. And in the light of my explanation of logion 46 where Johannes the Immerser sees the light, that shouldn't come as a surprise now.
On a side note, there is an enormous amount of nuances and subtleties to the story of Jacob, where his heel-grabbing is a metaphor for him being serpent-like, cunning as the serpent of Eden. Isaac, about the bless his firstborn, would actually break the covenant by doing so, and the intervention of Rebekah where she conspires with Jacob against her husband, is actually 'doing the right thing' in the eyes of God. There is even much more to it than that but the point is that 'Jacob the Righteous' points to all of Israel and Judaism, and thence is where the Jesus of Thomas dismisses the rabbi-aspiring disciples to.
Thomas makes great sense, if only not read through a Christian lens, and certainly not a Jesus lens. Take the text of Thomas, replace all occurrences of 'Jesus' by 'IC', 'Victor' or any other connotation-free word, erase your brain as much as you can, and then look at it all. And take Grondin's translation please, or that of Paterson Brown.
It has always greatly baffled me how people can think that it is about the canonical Jesus, the Churchian Jesus. Even people who embrace his self-seeking, who believe he has a 'Gnostic' touch, even those think that this is that Jesus, they think that Thomas tells us about the canonical Jesus.
Granted, the translation of Thomas has been corrupted from the start, made by people who also read him through a Christian lens, a Gnostic lens, and simply 'emended' the text where they failed to understand it. Guillaumont, Doresse, Quispel, Plisch and everyone who came after them: they read into the text as far as the limits of their imagination could carry them, and simply changed what fell outside that margin: Doresse translates Jacob the Righteous to Jacques le Juste, Guillaumont translates with James the righteous, Quispel translates to Jacobus de rechtvaardige (and that's a literal translation in Dutch, and also the identification for James the Just in Dutch), Plisch uses Jakobus der Gerechte, and that is also the German name used for James, the brother of Jesus. Half of them doesn't pay attention to the odd "heaven and earth" phrase, the other half comes up with a tentative explanation by pointing to something vague and unverifiable.
As tempting as it is to translate the Coptic Greek to the cognomen for the "brother of Jesus, James", the logion itself should be ground enough to opt for a literal translation: if the context doesn't fit the content, don't change the content! Don't change the content, period, if it is in a text that you can make little sense of.