For anyone unfamiliar with "The Gospel of Thomas" I wanted to point
out a couple of things. First, "Thomas" is a Sayings Gospel, which
means it is not a bunch of stories about Jesus that were written by
Thomas, it's a list of Sayings that were actually spoken by Jesus.
That's why I said before that the Voice of Thomas and the Voice of
the Course were one and the same.
Second, Pursah said that about 70 of the 114 Sayings in the
surviving copy of "Thomas" were authentic. She then went on to
explain about 20 of them on pages 74-82 of "Disappearance." The only
surviving copy of "The Gospel of Thomas" was re-discovered in 1945 in
Egypt. (About a year and a half before the Dead Sea Scrolls began to
be re-discovered at Qumran.) It is not the original version, which
was probably written in Aramaic, (some scholars may say Hebrew rather
than Aramaic) but it is an expanded, Coptic language (a combination
of Greek and Egyptian) version. If Pursah is right and about 44 of
the Sayings were added on later, then some people may teach Sayings
from the Gospel thinking they were spoken by Jesus when they actually
were not. Pursah explained that you had to take into consideration
300 years of Egyptian culture and Gnostic philosophy to account for
the Sayings that were added on by others. Love and peace, Gary.
