Friday, September 15, 2023

Jesus had a twin brother, Thomas (video)

Religion for Breakfast, 9/14/23; Sheldon S., Seth Auberon, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Thomas: The Secret Twin of Jesus?
What did DaVinci think about Lord J?
There goes that whole "only" begotten son business, it seems.
 But a "god" (deva), to be a god, needs to be "reborn among the gods" -- who live on many planes superior to the human plane -- and this is exactly what the Sanskrit term devaputra (Pali language devaputta) means -- "offspring of the devas" or, literally, "son of god."

The Gospel of Thomas (also known as the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, not a Lost or Gnostic Gospel but thought of as one by some) is an extra-canonical [1] "sayings gospel." It was discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in Dec. 1945 among a group of books known as the Nag Hammadi library. More

The contents of the Nag Hammadi codices were written in the Coptic [Egyptian] language. The best-known of these works is the Gospel of Thomas, of which these codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery, scholars recognized that fragments of these secret sayings attributed to [a koan-spouting Zen-like] Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898 (P. Oxy. 1), and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. More
Thomas ("Twin") really was the doubting apostle
(ReligionForBreakfast) Sept. 14, 2023: Most scholars agree that Jesus [of Nazareth, aka Jesus Christ, "Y'Shua the Anointed One"] had a brother named James. But many ancient Christians thought he had another brother, an identical twin brother named [Jude or] Judas Didymus Thomas. Where did this belief come from? And what is its significance?
Bibliography
  • Gregory Riley, "Didymos Judas Thomas: The Twin Brother of Jesus," in Kimberley Patton (ed.), Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
  • M. David Litwa, “I Will Become Him”: Homology and Deification in the Gospel of Thomas, Journal of Biblical Literature, SBL Vol. 134, No. 2, 2015. pp. 427-447

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