The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas has created an immense flurry of curiosity and speculation. Is the text real? Are these the authentic words of Jesus? If they are, what does it all mean?
This new translation is surrounded by supportive material to help scholars and students alike explore these sayings in depth. Unlike other translations, Lynn Bauman's sensitive work is not simply a "literal" translation. Based upon the principle of "dynamic equivalency," its purpose is to propel the reader/listener into an equivalent experience of language and meaning as the original Coptic text but in English, with equivalent cultural terms and ideas. It is therefore fresher, more poignant, more direct, and more understandable without being a paraphrase.
In addition, the text has with it a reader's guide. Each saying of Jesus is accompanied by a section that includes Questions for Reflection, an academic translation of each saying, and notes dealing with translation choices. This enables the student/reader to make discoveries on his or her own through suggestions and questions for consideration, meditation, and journaling.
Bauman brings this important "secret" gospel, with its radical view of Jesus as a Master of Wisdom, to life as a text to be utilized for contemporary spiritual practice.
Excerpt From the Book An Excerpt from the Translator's Introduction: Jesus, the Master of Wisdom — an essential core lost to the West and replaced by Jesus, the object of dogma — has been recovered in the sands of Egypt. Over a half century ago, a full Coptic version of the "lost" Gospel of Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi among a collection of buried manuscripts. This Gospel, long known by name, but having disappeared from history, was recovered and translated by scholars causing great excitement and much consternation. It portrayed a very different Jesus from the one we have come to know through the centuries. The Gospel was also in a primitive form — a collection of Logia (also known as Quelle, German for Source) — the written expression of an oral tradition that had been suspected to exist prior to the writing of the canonical Gospels. In Thomas' Gospel, Jesus is presented as a Master of wisdom, dissimilar from the figure of dogma that was later to grow up around his memory. As in the traditional Gospels, he speaks with authority, but in Thomas his sayings are presented without the expected context of a story-line, the narrative supplied by Gospel writers.
The "Real" Jesus Clearly precocious at age twelve (if the original canonical texts are to be believed), Jesus apparently never lost his curiosity and love of learning. A resident of Greek speaking Galilee, living in close proximity to the abundant flow of ideas and teachers (Jewish and foreign) which passed through that region, Jesus may have been privy to many spiritual influences current in the eastern Mediterranean of the first century. If the Gospel of Thomas is representative, he may also have absorbed vast amount of what he heard, synthesizing it into a new form according to some deep inner seeing. The protestation "Where did you get all this?" gives evidence of the shock that his non-traditional wisdom had on the ears of those who anticipated the expected. Thomas presents Jesus as a sage whose wisdom not only transcended local expectations, but was capable of grasping something far more universal than we have been led to believe. Could this be the "real Jesus?" No amount of scholarship will ever settle the question once and for all. The Jesus we know, some feel, has been captured by institutions that have been reluctant to give up their version of him or see him in any other way but the forms accepted in the West. The Gospel of Thomas is therefore a threat, and yet, even in the structures through which he has been conventionally received, something of his brilliant sagacity and capacity to disturb shines through and continues to perplex us. Jesus was indeed a wise man. That, at least is clear. He spoke using aphorisms and parables, the hallmark of Hebrew wisdom preserved and transmitted for centuries. In fact, some of his early students declared that without the use of parables he spoke nothing at all. We have therefore never been fully deprived of his original wisdom, though what has often replaced it is a tamer version in the guise of a great moral teacher who later substitutes as vicar of Heaven and judge of Earth, wielding authority to save and condemn. But was he ever that? Thomas gives evidence that he was not.