Gospel (137 page)

9
. Judas Didymus, or Judas the Twin, called Thomas to keep him from being confused with the other two/three Judases who were disciples. (The editor has rendered him “Thomas” throughout.)
   Thomas is thought to have evangelized the Medians (modern-day Iraq) and the Parthians (Iran) as well as the Indians, and his tomb for 1500 years was preserved at Mylapore and later moved to Edessa, though Indian Christians say Thomas's relics are still with them. Syrian-descended Christian communities in India, among the oldest anywhere, claim Thomas as their founder; it is a church of the highest social caste, using Syriac as a liturgy and with Nestorian (anti-Mary) elements. Indian Christianity's very existence is one of the great fascinations of Church history; see L. W. Brown,
The Indian Christians of St. Thomas
(Cambridge, 1956).
   Thomas's role as skeptic and doubter was fixed by the Second Century and the
Gospel of John
(ca. 110
C.E.
), with its famous scene of Thomas doubting Jesus' resurrection, but also the less celebrated passages in
John
11:6 and 14:5, where he cynically predicts Lazarus's death, and is confused concerning Jesus' mission. Tradition has him martyred by a spear in July 72
C.E.
, but no such martyrdom is alluded to in this gospel.

10
. Modern-day Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, leading to the Red Sea.

11
. Throughout this document, one can find ample evidence for how intertwined the upper-class Jews had become with Grecian ways and customs. The official Judean line on Greece had been enmity until the time of Herod the Great. The Maccabees spent their careers warring with Greeks; John Hyrcanus forcibly converted Greeks in Idumaea and Samaria, destroying Scythopolis for the crime of speaking the Greek language; Alexander Jannaeus pillaged the Decapolis. However, all this forcible conversion and intermingling, ironically, resulted in the Hellenization of the Jews.
   By Jesus' time, it was common for men to have Greek names, dress in Greek fashion, prefer Greek art and architecture, speak Greek, read their Bible (the Septuagint) in Greek, conduct trade, print documents and histories in Greek (as Philo), and have recourse to the Sanhedrin, a Greek-titled institution. Herod the Great appeased Hellenistic Jews and his own tastes by reviving the Olympic Games, building
gymnasia
and Greek theaters, and restoring the Temple of Apollo at Rhodes, though this pro-Hellene stance pleased only the wealthy class. Many scholars (see M. Hersch,
Josephus,
Hebrew Univ. Press, 1991, pp. 340–47) think the source of the Jewish Revolt that led to the destruction of Judea was less anti-Romanism than anti-Hellenism; the age-old Maccabean struggle against Jewish cosmopolitanism.

12
. Echoing
Ezekiel
16:33.

13
. In his late teens, Josephus attempted the ascetic life under the hermit Banus, according to his
Life,
2. It is unlikely, from Josephus's description, that Banus was an Essene.

14
. As in all Ebionite scriptures, the Jewish Christians considered Paul the Great Heretic and innovator. For the author's more detailed attack on Paul, see below 3:11–12.

15
. The incident alluded to is unknown in the Scriptures. Ophists (from the Greek
ophis,
for snake) have a pedigree as old as Minos and Ancient Egypt; some degree of snake cults occurred wherever Judeo-Christianity and Egyptian or Cycladic cultures met.
   One still finds the snake and the cross intertwined today in Haiti, Africa, in the
santería
of Brazil and Latin America, and in the Southern United States (the Holy Ghost People in West Virginia and Pentecostals in the Carolinas), where Christians practice snake-handling as sacrament, taking as their inspiration
Matthew
10:16 (
Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,
) as well as
John
3:14
(And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so must the Son of Man be lifted up.…)
and the latter-day affixed ending of Pseudo-
Mark,
16:18 (
They will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them.
) Paul escapes the consequences of a snake bite in
Acts
28.

16
. Crete and Cyrenaica had been centers of the Minoan snake and fertility. There is little difference today from the popular Mediterranean statuary image of the Virgin Mary treading upon a serpent (having redeemed the sin of Eve) and depictions of ancient Minoan priestesses (ca. 2000
B.C.E.
) treading upon a serpent.

17
. The semi-Zoroastrian cult of Mithra (from the 500s
B.C.E.
) was direct competition for Christianity, and hence Christianity compromised with it. Mithra, born of the Heavenly Virgin, was a Sun god, born on December 25. The Mithraic birth ritual involved the chant: “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!” Vermaseran (
Mithra the Secret God,
London, 1963) identifies the Communion-like meal with Mithra's prayer, “He who shall not eat of my body and drink of my blood … shall not be saved.” Mithra performed miracles and healings, and the cult emphasized chastity, charity, and an afterlife. Underneath one of the earliest Christian basilicas in Rome, St. Clement, the catacombs have as their centerpiece a Mithraic altar, suggesting there was a Mithraic variation on “orthodox” Christianity.
   The Church's line on Christian appropriation of Mithraism has never been convincing, i.e., Tertullian, who claimed Mithra and Attis were made to flourish before Christianity by design of Satan, so that future Christians would wonder about the similarities and have doubts!

18
. Second to Mithra, the cult of Attis, a variation of Adonis, also influenced and detracted from the Early Church. Attis was the son of the Great Mother born through Nana, a virgin. Attis castrated himself under a pine tree and then bled to death in the prime of life. Three days later the divine Son was resurrected on March 24—the date most of the Early Church chose to celebrate Easter for centuries. All this coincided with the spring equinox and innumerable vegetation-god ceremonies for the renewed blooming of the land.

19
. In an age when one plague, war, or earthquake could eliminate a people, an age in which fecundity was worshiped as the means to perpetuate the tribe, nothing could have been more radical and unthinkable than self-castration. Yet for all the patriarchal weight against it, it caught on in most ancient societies during the First Century, as did flagellation and masochistic rites. Jesus' suggestion that
there are eunuchs that have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven
(
Matthew
19:12) found a receptive audience among ascetic young men.
   Origen, it is thought, castrated himself to remain pure; Justin Martyr recorded many who volunteered to castrate themselves so that no rumors of sexual misconduct could obtain; see H. Chadwick,
The Sentences of Sextus
or R. Koenig,
Female Eunuchs and Castration
(New York, 1989), which shows castration-mania having its last peak in the 200–300s
C.E.

20
. Compare the rites of Attis in Rome. During frenzies of bloodletting and flagellation, the celebrants severed their genitals (penis
and
testicles, often) and flung them upon the revered pine tree or the image of the Cruel Goddess, jagged and blood-soaked. In the self-castration rites of Cybele in Syria, the celebrants would run through the town and hurl their organs into a house, which would mean the family had the honor of supplying the novice with new robes for his priestly role.

21
. Sporus had himself castrated for the love of Nero and disguised himself as the late Empress Poppaea (whom the Emperor had personally kicked to death); Pindymion is unknown, and Dareus is likely the boy-eunuch who accompanied Caligula (Gaius Caesar) in his costumed pageants, Bagaos to the Emperor's Alexander the Great. (See Suetonius,
Gaius
19,
Nero
28.)
   For someone who declares himself above Rome and its degeneration, the author has an amazing depth of knowledge concerning her gossip.

22
.
Aρσ
ɛ
νοκο
ται,
which is not “homosexual” strictly, for which the ancients had no word or concept, but rather the passive male prostitute Paul condemns in
1 Corinthians
6:9.

23
. Probably modern-day Somalia, the Horn of Africa.

24
.
Matthew
5:18.

25
. Carmania was the Iranian side of the Straits of Hormuz. A rebah had the importance of, say, the U.S. nickel.

26
. Parthia was the irresistible magnet of Roman vainglory. Crassus, of the First Triumvirate, lost 20,000 men there ignobly, another 10,000 to slavery; was killed in 54
B.C.E.
, carved up, and his body parts used as props in a performance that night of Euripides'
The Bacchae.

27
.
Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Peter? 1 Corinthians
9:4–5.

28
.
The Wisdom of Solomon,
7:24.

29
. Thomasine writings all make use of the Apostle's journeys to India. Less authentic are an
Acts of Thomas
recounting Thomas's miraculous adventures in India (its origins are ancient but obscure); and there is an
Apocalypse of Thomas
(there is a 5th-Century Viennese fragment, probably originating from that time but some make a case it is quoted in Jerome in the 4th Century).
   But more interesting is the Nag Hammadi
Gospel of Thomas,
which seems to have elements of the First Century, and is certainly no later than 140
C.E.
Koester at Harvard suggests parts of
Thomas
may even precede the Synoptics; see
Nag Hammadi Library,
Koester's introduction to the
Gospel of Thomas
(New York, 1977).

30
. The Disciple Judas/Jude/Lebbaeus/Thaddeus was the son (according to
Acts
1:13 and
Luke
6:16) or the brother (according to
Jude
1) of James bar-Alphaeus. This gospel sheds no light either way.
Matthew
and
Mark
list him but do not give any relation. Jesus had a brother named Judas, too.
“Is not this the … brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?”
say Jesus' countrymen in rejecting him,
Mark
6:3. As the Scriptures can agree neither on the name nor relation of this man, later attempts can only be legendary; hence, his being titled “the Obscure” and his patronage of lost causes. He and Simon the Zealot were supposed to have converted the Persians and to have been martyred there, but one gathers from this account that this never happened.

31
.
Exodus
4:10.

Chapter 3

1
. For the Greek, see Appendix A. Matthias has lifted these notions from the far superior
Book of Tobit
(100s
B.C.E.
); i.e.,
For Jerusalem will be built of sapphire and emerald/And her walls of precious stones/her towers and battlements of pure gold/and the streets of Jerusalem will be paved with beryl … and all her lanes shall say “Hallelujah”
(
Tobit
13:16–18).

2
. This is highly derivative of
Song of Solomon
1:12–14, and one suspects the author had no clue as to the sexual nature of his borrowed descriptions.

3
. There is no other interpretation that can be put upon the words
σ
ɛ
ι
α
ματος;
one cannot construe this as a raising of the dead. The phrase is identical to the phrase used for the woman with an issue of blood in
Mark
5:25. It is curious in any event that
Mark,
the first gospel, and
Matthew
(the orthodox rewrite of
Mark
) have no mention of Lazarus's raising; it is only in the later
Luke
and
John.