There was a game, you may remember, that schoolteachers had us play as kids where a person at one corner of the classroom whispers a sentence to the next person, who whispers it to the next person and so on until it is whispered to the last person, who says out loud what he thought he heard in his ear. The teacher then reads the original sentence, which of course bears little resemblance to what the last person thought was said.The words of Jesus have no doubt suffered a similar fate, passing through decades, even centuries, of ears and minds before being written down. Yet miraculously, the essence of his teachings has survived, and contained within the sayings attributed to Jesus Christ are some of the most profound and moving pointers to Truth ever voiced. After his death, the words and teachings of Jesus lived on in a diverse and vibrant oral tradition. Sects formed around different aspects or interpretations of the teachings, and over the next few hundred years, thousands of manuscripts appeared claiming to contain the words and teachings of Jesus, each emphasizing and embellishing those aspects most important to the writer and the sect to which he belonged. There were arguments between sects, of course, as to which among them should be considered the true church, and over time several powerful contenders emerged. Not surprisingly, the group backed by the Roman emperor eventually came out on top. In 325 AD they convened a council at Nicaea and declared themselves the one and only Christian Church. They issued a creed specifying official Church beliefs, and from the thousands of Christian writings in circulation, chose twenty-seven to become the approved canon, the New Testament. The rest became
apocrypha, from the Greek, meaning, "those left out." Most of these writings were declared heretical by the new Church and many were ordered destroyed. Sects that taught an aspect of Christianity in conflict with official Church doctrine were forced underground. Copies of some apocrypha texts have survived, mostly in fragments, but they are still largely ignored by the modern Church. Interest in apocrypha texts among individuals, however, both Christian and non-Christian, has increased dramatically in recent decades, due mainly to the discovery of thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices found buried in a cave near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. The wife of the farmer who discovered them burned one of the codices as fuel for cooking, but twelve survive, containing over fifty ancient Christian texts. Now popularly known as the Gnostic Gospels, these books, The Gospel of Thomas chief among them, have become the focal point for a new examination of the essential teachings of Christ. In them are sayings that exhort us as individuals to experience directly the Truth of God for ourselves, and thus become a Christ, a Son of God. Interestingly, once we see this teaching expressed more clearly in some of the apocrypha, it is easier to see that it can be found throughout the New Testament as well. Christian mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart experienced first hand the truth of this teaching, and wrote about the wonder of discovering that, as Eckhart puts it, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." Or as Jesus says, "He who knows himself, at the same time knows the Totality of the All."This is the teaching that drew me to the project that has become
Christ Sutras. I hope you enjoy it.
