Yeshua bar Yosef healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, and performed other miracles. He also taught that people should develop their own relationship with God, independent of religions and religious leaders. His name’s pronunciation changed over time until it evolved into the pronunciation we use today, Jesus.
People are revisiting Yeshua’s teachings with the realization that he was not a god who insisted that people worship him. Instead, he revealed messages that will make a difference for humanity if we hear and learn from them. In this series of videos, I present his profound teachings, as written in the Gospel of Thomas, which have been borne out by what we are learning today from communication with people in the afterlife about the nature of this life and the next.
This video contains explanations of sayings 51 through 60 from the Gospel of Thomas Y
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Transcript of the Video
Saying 51: His disciples said to him, “When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?” He said to them, “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.”
The Gospel of Thomas is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language spoken in Roman Egypt in the first centuries CE. The word translated as “repose” means a state of inner peace, stability, and unity with God. It is the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey. This state of repose is what he refers to as entering the Kingdom of God or Heaven. Yeshua repeatedly tells the disciples that Heaven is within them rather than in a future destination. Yeshua’s disciples are asking when those who have left their bodies behind will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Yeshua corrects their misconception. Heaven is within, he said, not a future destination. He told the disciples they will enter the kingdom of Heaven when they have a metanoia, Greek for a change of heart and mind, so they live in love, peace, and joy with all others. In Saying 113, Yeshua amplifies this truth. He is reported to have said, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” Heaven is here now, within us, if we just realize that and enter our individual Heaven on Earth. And eventually, when all people live in love, peace, and joy, the Earth itself will become the physical Kingdom of Heaven.
Saying 52: His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke through you.” He said to them, “You have omitted the one living in your presence and have spoken only of the dead.”
Yeshua was saying to the disciples, you have before you the living prophet, offering words of wisdom to you. Yet you are choosing to invoke the words of dead prophets of the Hebrew canon. Their words were written for different people at different times. Yeshua is saying that the disciples should listen to his teaching and evaluate it based on how it applies to their lives now, not as extensions or additions to the teachings of the past.
Saying 53: His disciples said to him, “Is circumcision beneficial or not?” He said to them, “If it were beneficial, their father would beget them already circumcised from their mother. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become completely profitable.”
Christianity was a Jewish sect that rapidly diverged from Jewish practices. Paul, the primary evangelist whose writings have come down to us in epistles, tells his primary audience, the Gentiles, that circumcision is not a requirement for their inclusion in the Christian community. His followers were justifiably confused. Should they follow the Jewish practice of circumcising infants or not? Yeshua responds by saying that if God the Father had intended for males to have no foreskin, he would have created them without it. Instead, Yeshua states that his followers must have a change of heart and mind, not a change to the body. The Greek word for a change of heart and mind, translated from his Aramaic statements, is metanoia. Experiencing a metanoia means having a change of heart and mind to live in love, peace, and joy with all others. Having that change of heart and mind is the act that Yeshua refers to as circumcision in spirit rather than circumcision of the body.
Saying 54: Yeshua said, “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”
Yeshua most often taught in parables that involved the poor, downtrodden, and marginalized. He was saying that God’s kingdom belongs to the poor, not because they are righteous, but because they are poor. This saying reverses a common view that God is blessing the righteous with riches. Today that is called the prosperity gospel. Wealthy church officials, including Catholic clergy and Evangelical televangelists, justify their opulent wealth by saying God blesses true believers with prosperity. Yeshua did not suggest that. He suggested quite the opposite, that his followers should give up all they have and give it to the poor. Today’s church officials and televangelists would have none of that. Yeshua often referred to poor people in his teaching. He is reported to have said he came to proclaim the good news to the poor. He promised that the hungry and sorrowful would be satisfied and happy. He said that serving the poor is the same as serving God. He instructed his followers to invite the poor, crippled, and blind to their banquets. On the other hand, Yeshua often condemned the love of money and the wealthy. He told a rich young man to sell what he owns and give it to the poor. Of course, the reality is that poor people can be as self-absorbed and cruel as wealthy people, so it is clear Yeshua was referring to the extremes as examples of the fact that the inner nature of a person is all that matters, not wealth or status, and a person truly devoted to following his teachings by showing compassion for others will give up everything to help them.
Saying 55: Yeshua said, “Whoever does not hate his father and his mother cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross in my way will not be worthy of me.”
In this saying, Yeshua is telling his disciples that to live in love, peace, and joy now, we must be willing to reject everything having to do with the physical realm. The Gnostics felt that people are conditioned by society to remain trapped in the world by desires, expectations, sentiments, and norms. The Gnostics regarded these forces as keeping us in a self-inflicted prison from which we must break free. These desires, expectations, sentiments, and norms are keeping us from living in love, peace, and joy now. To break free of this prison, we must give up on the world so we relax into living in love, peace, and joy with all others. That is the Kingdom of God within us. We must reject the most seductive entrapments that are keeping us in a state of imprisonment and illusion. Only by sacrificing everything in the physical realm, including family when necessary, will we be able to break that cycle of self-absorption and live in love, peace, and joy with others.
Saying 56: Yeshua said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”
This saying aligns with Gnostic teaching that when people are consumed by expectations and desires in the physical realm, they live in a self-imposed prison of ignorance. This world is just dead scenery in which the drama of our lives plays out. The things we desire in the illusions of the physical realm that result in discontent, dissatisfaction, and greed appear desirable, but there is no life in them, only temporary satiation of desires that inevitably re-emerge even more strongly after the short-lived satisfaction wears off. Yeshua then says that when a person realizes that what the world teaches us to desire is just a lifeless corpse, the person will rise above the physical realm and be superior to it. Freed from the desires and enticements of the physical realm, the person will live in love, peace, and joy with all others. That is our birthright if we just claim it.
Saying 57: Yeshua said, “The kingdom of the father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest, the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.”
As infants, we are tabulae rasas, blank slates. We love those who nurture us unconditionally, especially our mothers. We know nothing but love as infants. As we grow in the physical world, we acquire desires and expectations that set us apart from others. We learn to be selfish and self-absorbed. The normal state of love in infancy is the good seed. The thoughts and behaviors we are taught that make us self-absorbed and selfish are the weeds that grow up as we grow. Yeshua is saying the good wheat and the weeds together make up who we are during our stay in Earth School. They remain together in our lives and sentiments until we mature to the point where we can recognize and reject the self-absorbed thoughts and actions that result in selfishness and separation from others. When we reject them, our true, loving nature that we had as infants emerges naturally. It was always there. It just needed to have the false thoughts and actions we were taught to be swept away. We will then live in love, peace, and joy with all others, without reservation or impediments. After we leave the Earth, we will go through a period of in-depth reflection on our lives, experiencing and feeling events from the points of view of other people involved. That will be the time when we will pull up all the weeds in our lives and look at them thoroughly, casting each into the fire as we grow from our understanding of the events and release ourselves from them.
Saying 58: Yeshua said, “Blessed is the man who has suffered and found life.”
The Earth realm is a crucible in which uncomfortable flame and heat separate the slag, or impurities, from the refined metal of our lives. We grow in wisdom, love, and compassion when we go through the painful smelting that forces impurities to the surface, where we become aware of them and can discard them. These impurities are not part of our nature. They are taught to us in our early days on Earth. We are taught from childhood to be self-absorbed and selfish. As we grow to understand who we are in eternity, our true relationship with others, and the destructive consequences of the selfish sentiments we adopted from childhood, we cast off these mistaken sentiments that cause turmoil in our lives. What emerges naturally is the love, peace, and joy that were always basic to our nature, but were obscured by what we learned from the physical realm.
Saying 59: Yeshua said, “Take heed of the living one while you are alive, lest you die and seek to see him and be unable to do so.”
Yeshua was telling his disciples to grow mentally and spiritually while they are alive on Earth. Now is the time to grow into having lives filled with love, peace, and joy. This life is a crucible with tragedies, disappointments, conflict, pain, and selfishness that we can overcome so we become spiritually and mentally wise, compassionate, and strong. Adversities are necessary conditions for such growth. When we go on to the next life, the adversities will be removed. It will be a time of reflection to continue our growth by understanding what happened during the struggles of our Earth lives. Therefore, we must now persevere now through the difficulties to acquire the wisdom and maturity that can only come from overcoming adversities during our lives in the crucible of Earth life. While we will learn to understand the challenges, triumphs, and failures of our lives after we leave Earth, we will not experience the growth that can come only from the difficult process of overcoming the challenges and learning from the failures that we experience during our time on Earth. We are to take heed of the living now.
Saying 60: <They saw> a Samaritan carrying a lamb on his way to Judea. He said to his disciples, “What will this man do with the lamb?”
They said to him, “Kill it and eat it.”
He said to them, “While it is alive, he will not eat it, but only when he has killed it and it has become a corpse.”
They said to him, “He cannot do so otherwise.”
He said to them, “You too, look for a place for yourself within repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten.”
Yeshua is referring to the repose or rest we enjoy when we fully realize the gnosis or knowledge the Gnostics refer to. As with the other sayings, Yeshua is referring to our lives here, now, not to the period after the death of the body. He presents the truth that we are eternal beings having a physical experience in a body. The body is of no consequence. When the body stops functioning, it becomes a corpse. But the person is unaffected because we live on apart from the body. That realization is the repose or rest that allows us to enjoy life without the fear of the death of the body. Fear of the death of the body is like being a corpse that is eaten just as a lamb that is dead is eaten. The saying ends with the suggestion that if you believe you are nothing but the body, your conception will result in your fear and worry, like a corpse that is eaten. When you know the truth, you will have rest or repose in your confidence that you will live on after your body dies.
These teachings by Yeshua bar Yosef have been lost in today’s Christian church, which bases its doctrines on narrow interpretations of the four canonical gospels. The Nag Hammadi Gnostic documents teach clearly that Christians may communicate directly with the divine without the intervening control of a church. Yeshua’s mission was to show humanity the way that would lead to enjoying lives filled with love, peace, and joy. We are just now realizing this wonderful message in the Gnostic writings that was lost for 2,000 years.
