The Encyclopedia of World Religions

450 S Thor

originally had many ideas about who Jesus was, what he taught, and what it meant. In other words, there were originally a great variety of different Christiani ties. The Gospel of Thomas is sometimes said to be a book belonging to Christians known as Gnostics ( see G NOSTICISM ). According to one scholar, Elaine Pagels (b. 1943), its basic message is not that Jesus is God but that God dwells in all of us. As Jesus says in Thomas, “There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world” (verse 24). Further reading: The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, Marvin Meyer, trans. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992); Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003); Stephen J. Patterson and James M. Robinson, The Fifth Gospel: The Gospel of Thomas Comes of Age, Hans Gebhard Bethge et al., trans. (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998); Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas, Risto Uro, ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998). Thor A god of ancient Germanic and Scandina vian mythology. Thor was associated with thun der, rain, and farming, and was a champion war rior. He personified the values of the warrior class: He was hospitable, a defender of the weak, and quick to respond to any slights to his honor. He rode a chariot drawn by goats through the sky, and wielded the hammer that was his symbol. Rough and redbearded, Thor was robust though not as profoundly wise as W OTAN (Odin); perhaps for this reason he was the most popular of gods among ordinary people who saw in him a divine figure more like themselves. His name is perpetuated in our day Thursday. Tibetan religion The religions traditionally practiced in the cultural expanse of Tibet. Besides the political territory known as Tibet today, this area includes territories to the east annexed by China in the 1950s along with adjacent regions in Bhutan; Mongolia, and the former Soviet Union.

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS The other gospel supposedly written by Thomas is simply known as the Gospel of Thomas. From the point of view of scholars who study Jesus, it is much more important. In 1945, a complete man uscript of this gospel turned up in the desert of Egypt as part of the Nag Hammadi Codices. (Codi ces are ancient books; Nag Hammadi is the place in Egypt where they were found.) The Gospel of Thomas contains 114 sayings of Jesus—or at least sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of them are familiar from the Bible. For example, in Thomas Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” and he tells a parable about a man who goes out to sow seed. Other sayings, however, are cryptic: “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human” (verse 7; scholar’s translation). The last saying in the gospel, which some scholars think was added later, even presents salvation as for men only. The apostle P ETER questions M ARY ’s right to be among the apostles, because she is a woman. Jesus assures him that he will first make Mary into a man, for women who become men can participate in the kingdom of God. The Gospel of Thomas is important for several reasons. First, scholars long thought that ancient Christians had made collections of Jesus’ sayings ( see Q SOURCE ). Now they have evidence for that idea. Second, some of the material in Thomas appears to be very old. For example, scholars had long expected that Jesus’ parables were at first remembered only as parables and that the expla nations in the Bible came later. Thomas contains one simple version of the parable of the sower and no explanation. In fact, some sayings in Thomas may record what Jesus said more accurately than the Bible does. Perhaps Thomas is most important, however, because it tells something about the earliest Chris tians. After several centuries the Christian church eventually came to adopt certain books and ideas and to reject others. But Thomas shows, Christians