Thomas by ML: terms explained

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mlinssen
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Thomas by ML: terms explained

Post by mlinssen »

As part of the final stage of my Thomas research I'll lay out all the details on this site - in order to organise them and collect them into a separate work.
The posts will be prefixed by 'Thomas by ML:', so that they can be easily accessed and grouped

There are two aspects to Thomas: Thomas itself, and its impact on the canonicals. It is important to view these aspects separately when interpreting Thomas, because the canonicals completely misunderstood him - by accident or intentionally, we'll never know.
Suffice it to say that they used his IS to model their Jesus on and used two thirds of his material to apply it to their entirely different goal, that of establishing a religion

As with any other story, there is a cast, and a theme; both will be presented at this time

Primary Cast:
  • IS: the protagonist, main character of the story. A concept, according to logion 13, to be compared to what Socrates called eidon perhaps: some form of conscience, awareness. Most certainly not a person, although he acts like one
  • Didymos Judas Thomas: a pun to the text, with both Didymos and Thomas meaning twin; one in Greek and one in Aramaic, and as such referring to the twin copies made of this originally Coptic text. Judas is the only nomen in the phrase, and given the depiction of Judas in the canonicals it is highly likely that the author of Thomas was first known as such
  • Jacob the Righteous: a (rather vile) pun on the Jacob of Isaac and Rebekah, who got to be named Israel later on in the Tanakh, and who is famous not only for his widespread deceit against his father and sibblings, but also for "Jacob's ladder" that distantiates heaven from earth, paradoxically by putting a ladder between the two
  • Simon Peter: the Rock, the typical mono-minded slavish follower of monotheism, in this case (likely) Judaism although his orthodox and conservative viewpoints are exemplary for any institutionalised group of biased, lopsided omphaloskeptists
  • Matthew: the typical disciple, https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C9683 - thaios. Gets only one line of script
  • Thomas: the one who gets it; gets one act and a big scene it is as he recognises IS for what he is
  • Mari-ham: Witness_to-Necessity, https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C9717 - https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C6603, like IS "she" is a concept and bears witness to the Need in all of us to divide, separate: ⲙⲁⲣⲓ-ϩⲁⲙ
  • Salome: Hebrew for peace, and she acts in the essential logion 61
  • Johannes the Immerser: a pun on Zedekiah and sons, who immersed Jeremiah in the mud (viewtopic.php?p=115718#p115718)
Themes:
  • Duality is the core theme. We separate shortly after birth, and give birth ourselves to Ego and Self: slaveowner and slave, in my Translation (https://www.academia.edu/42110001)
  • We must make the two one in order to get rid of these two, and get back to our own Selves
  • Becoming like a child is one of the ways to rephrase that, as is "going back to the beginning" which will end our State of Separation, and as such the end will be the beginning, and vice versa
  • Kosmos: the World as we view it, our Image, our snapshot of it. Exactly like the Greek word says, a decoration
  • House: ourselves as we view it, our own territory of ourselves, and indeed the edifice we have constructed for and about ourselves: our mental models, our Laws, our everything. Anything and everything we believe about ourselves - and none of it true
Metaphysical Cast:

There is somewhat of a secondary cast, it consists of the conceptual persons that Thomas deploys to explain who and what we are, were, and should be
  • Father: us when we came into this world, the untainted us. Unsplit, unseparated, non-dualised: you name it. One with One, whatever
  • Kurios/master/(slave)owner: different translations / interpretations, same stuff: the Ego that we created, one of the two
  • Slave/servant: likewise, the word doesn't really matter, the role stays the same: he-who-continuously-gets-his-ass-kicked would be a nice translation, albeit rather long. The slave reacts to what the slaveowner says and does, and the two dance the Dance of Duality, and make the real Us continuously choose between the two - thereby forgetting our own selves. Is this character / role our Self and are we yet another different person, or did we turn ourselves into slaves by creating the slaveowner?
    Does it really matter?
  • Child (son) of man: the Real You, hidden in there. Not binary equal to the Father as the Father once was, and the Child is now. A product indeed of Man, yourself. John Presbyter very nicely phrases that "I and the Father are one", and he is the odd one out in the canonicals, and may perhaps be somewhat of a stepping stone to the Thomas that gets explained here
Plot:

The story of Thomas basically explains how we came into being, and it puts us on a Quest starting at logion 9 (or perhaps already in logion 8 where The Great Fish turns out to be non-existent). The parables form this Quest via 5 sets of parable-triplets, with one Solo in between: 8, 9 and 20; 21, 35 and 57; 63, 64 and 65; 76; 96, 97, 98; 103, 107, 109.
In between, Thomas lashes out very frequently at anything Judaic or pertaining to Judaism, he surely hates them with a passion. Not a chance is missed to put down the disciples who continuously confirm the teacher-disciple paradigm by trying to get (yet another) repeated lesson in biased conservatism, but the IS of Thomas keeps deflecting their questions, rejecting their viewpoints, and injecting his vile counters that point to the way he thinks the Way leads: always to your Self, by yourself

At first it may seem like a cryptic story, but there is splendid logic and sequence to most logia, and coherence among all of them - in the eyes of the unbiased reader

To be continued; watch the threads starting with

Thomas by ML:

(search.php?keywords=Thomas+by+ML%3A&ter ... mit=Search)
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