Hidden Things

Four days ago, I posted a minor correction to my Academia piece "Letter-Counts of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and Its Sayings". The following day I posted a notice of it to my Facebook group "Gospel of Thomas Studies" and shared that with another FB group that I belong to, "The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature" (NAASCAL), run by Tony Burke. I was gratified that they accepted it, BUT it got far less response than another item posted at the same time that asked the pressing question "What are your thoughts on the Book of Mormon?" This in spite of the fact that the finding that the main body of Coptic Thomas has 16800 letters is the single most exciting and consequential discovery about that text ever. Folks do read the information, but they don't seem to know what to make of it.

Be that as it may, the subject here is "hidden things". One of those is something that didn't occur to me for a long time about the number 16800. Back in January, 2020, when Martyn Linssen and I came up with that count for the size of the main body of Coptic Thomas, I knew immediately that it was divisible by 210 (the value of IC, a nomen sacrum for IHSOUS) and 800 (the value of XC, a nomen sacrum for XRISTOS), but I failed to put two and two together until I wrote the FB notice, now two and a half years later. The key isn't that 16800 = 800*210 - it doesn't - but that the only numbers that are divisible by both 210 and 800 are multiples of 16800. So 16800 is the lowest number that can show veneration to both IHSOUS and XRISTOS. There can be no stronger proof of letter-counting by the authors of Coptic Thomas than that. And that in turn must necessarily lead to an entirely new way of looking at Coptic Thomas. It can no longer be regarded as other than carefully designed and inscribed.

Now as to "hidden things" implicitly referred to by the text itself, I'm convinced that they are all in the text. The prime example, I suppose, are the mysterious "three words" that IHSOUS spoke to Thomas (Th13). People have made all kinds of guesses as to what "words" (could be whole thoughts, BTW) external to the text these might be. But I think it's fairly clear that the three "words" in Th108 are those being referred to in Th13 (see Reflections on the "Three Words" of Gos.Thom.) 

Consider what Coptic Thomas tells us about itself in Th5: "Know what's in front of your face and what's hidden from you will become clear to you." This is one of the few places where the singular "you" is used. We don't have that distinction in English, but the Coptic reader would have taken this as referring to him/herself personally and singly. What was it telling him/her? As usual, there would or could have been both extra-textual and intra-textual meaning to it. I believe that the intra-textual message was that whatever was hidden in the text would be revealed to the reader if he/she would just pay close attention to it, understood in the right way (Th1).

There's a lot I don't know yet. I don't know, for example, what the textual "five trees in Paradise" might be, but I'm pretty sure they're there - or will be, when the puzzle is completed. Recently, however, I have identified what I believe to be the "treasure hidden in the field" mentioned in Th109. You'll notice in the second line of the image up top that there's a gap after the letters 'CW'. It's actually a gap within a four-letter word that starts with 'CW' and means 'field'. Could be an imperfection in the papyrus, of course, but it's very suggestive that (1) the gap occurs in the word 'field' and (2) that the gap separates the four-letter word into two two-letter words that are meaningful in themselves. I suspect that this is the literal textual "treasure in the field".

The Hidden Underside of the Gospel of Thomas

Above is an image known as 'Rubin's Vase'. To the left is how conventional commentators see the Gospel of Thomas. To the right is what it actually is. The vase itself represents "public Thomas". That side or face of Thomas is externally-directed toward the actual world, in the normal fashion expected. But I've happened to be able to discover another side to Thomas that was deliberately hidden by its composers. That side was internally-directed toward its own textual "world" (i.e., talking about itself rather than the external world) and intended for "insiders" to transform into a "perfect" textual world, according to clues in the text that only they would be aware of.

The "clues" I refer to are of two kinds: linguistic and numeric. The linguistic clues were there to be seen, but wouldn't readily be recognized for what they were. One such type of linguistic clue was what I call "catchword at a distance". Conventional Thomas commentators know about catchwords, but they're defined as words occurring in two adjacent sayings (or sub-parts of one). In the world of private Thomas, however, catchwords also exist between non-adjacent sayings. The reason for this was that the "insiders" weren't intended to just read the sayings, but to do something physically with them - things like rewriting them, adding to or deleting from them, changing their position, etc.

With respect to the numeric clues, they're of various kinds, but the most common is simple letter-counts. There can be no doubt that the composers of Coptic Thomas were numerically knowledgeable folks who counted things, most notably letters. Consider, for example, that the Coptic manuscript contains 500 occurrences of Greek loan-words and that those words contain 2400 letters. Furthermore, the main body of text (without the Prologue) contains 16800 letters - a number not only again divisible by 100, but of enormous symbolic significance (see my website). Is it possible that these three independent numbers just all happen to be divisible by 100? Yes. Given how combinatorial probability works, there's a one in a million chance that that is so. It doesn't take a logician like myself to tell you that that miniscule possibility means nothing against such overwhelming likelihood. The counts, therefore, must have been deliberate, and painstakingly arrived at and maintained. Furthermore, a letter-count divisible by a power of 10 appears to have been one of the marks of "perfection" when one was trying to transform an imperfect piece of text into a perfect one.

There's one other thing I should touch on here, namely the existence of intra-textual meaning. It coexists beside extra-textual meaning, although in some cases the latter is flimsy indeed. Take for example,  "If you become my disciples and listen to my words, these stones will be ministers to you" (Th19.2). What is the extra-textual meaning of "these stones"? Are we supposed to envision an historical occasion when Jesus pointed at some actual physical stones? That's pretty thin, but consider the likely intra-textual meaning, namely that the "stones" in question are the sayings themselves. So yes, the textual Jesus is here being made to refer to some "stones" (of a metaphoric kind) which are actually right there in the text! In a later note, I'll explain how the prologue was likely considered to be a "stone" which the "builders" (i.e., puzzle-solvers) were directed to move, but which would constitute the "capstone".

Introduction

This is an experiment. With a background in Logic and retired from a career in IT, I've worked on the Coptic Gospel of Thomas for over 30 years. Most of my work has been posted at https://wayne.academia.edu/MichaelGrondin. Other than that, my current online presence consists of the website The Gospel of Thomas Resource Center and administration of the Facebook group Gospel of Thomas Studies. This blog is an attempt to reach out to a wider audience, as well as to provide a place where the Puzzle Theory is the main focus. Those other questions about Thomas (dating, dependence, etc) which almost universally consume commentators need to be left at the door. This is new territory.

Why do I refer to the Gospel of Thomas as a 'mystery puzzle'? Because over the years I've found significant evidence in the Coptic manuscript - exactly as inscribed - that it had a second "side" or "face" to it other than the public side/face that has so far been the sole focus of Thomas studies. This private, inwardly-directed, side/face was evidently an essential part of Thomas' reason for being. As Hippolytus wrote in the earliest testimonium to the Gospel of Thomas by name:

"They (the Naassenes) say that not only the mysteries of the Assyrians and Phrygians, but also
those of the Egyptians support their account of the blessed nature of the things which were, are,
and are yet to be, a nature which is both hidden and revealed at the same time, and which he [the
Naassene] calls the sought-for kingdom of heaven which is within man. They transmit a tradition
concerning this in the Gospel entitled According to Thomas ..." (Wendland translation, emph mine)

"Both hidden and revealed at the same time" is a perfect description of what I've found via careful content analysis of the Coptic manuscript. An unexpected level of intratextual meaning co-exists with the extratextual. In a word, the thing talks about itself as well as talking about the external world. It's an ingenious work wherein textual pieces of various sizes were evidently intended to be altered, moved about, and/or combined in various ways with the goal of bringing order and "perfection" to a chaotic and imperfect text. This intended "perfect text" thus essentially constitutes a "Secret Thomas" awaiting the finding - or rather, the putting together. Fortunately, we don't have to blindly play around with things that can be done with the text (which would be futile), because the composers of the text have included clues and confirmatory indicators of what things should be done.

Folks who've worked with Coptic Thomas think it's just a rather sloppy translation. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has anomalies to it that are in some ways similar to the jagged edges of jigsaw puzzle pieces. They were intended to be there, to hook into each other. Why? Because the "private readers" of this text - almost certainly insiders in some obscure Christian mystery sect - were apparently intended to be "builders" of a new textual "world," in part by "healing" imperfections in the existing public text. Perfecting the text via the intended transformation of its parts was evidently a mental and manual exercise intimately related to the personal transformation of the disciples/students themselves.

So much for an intro. You can find out a lot more by perusing my Academia site. I'll continue to post here from time to time and will entertain questions as long as they're reasonable and relevant to the focus of the blog.