The notion of being chosen is one of the most baffling concepts, particularly because of the obnoxious way it has traditionally been treated by Christian theology, implying that God plays favorites. That is not the meaning of the phrase however, and perceptive readers could have guessed that, for it is so evidently contradictory to everything Jesus teaches, as in e.g. the parable of the prodigal son. Here is a critical passage from A Course in Miracles, which may shed some light. Notice that the "I" person is Jesus.

It comes up in Thomas as Logion 23, It is very interesting to see how Pursah's comments to Gary, which I discussed in my book, are a close parallel to what the Course says about this issue. The logic is that there is a reciprocity here, which really means we have to opt in. Jesus makes this clear in the Course in a variety of ways that it is all about our choice to want to find another way. Until we do that, we stick to the counsel of our ego, and we throw Jesus out as far as we can throw him. Only when we find out our way may not be working as advertised, are we able to give ourselves the option to find "another way." This is very logical. As long as we think that what we're doing works, there is no incentive to try something else. So Jesus, or the Holy Spirit do not force themselves on us. They are available to us by our invitation only. Conversely our invitation means a willingness to listen. So we choose ourselves whenever we take the earphones off and stop listening to the pre-recorded music of the ego, so we can start listening to the Voice for God.
Accordingly what this saying means is that Jesus "chooses" the ones who listen, and by choosing to do so they will literally unite, for joining with Jesus is to choose for the oneness of the sonship, instead of for the multiplicity of our separate identities. So we will indeed stand with him as a single one. Logion 13 emphasizes the same idea in a different way,  by indicating that even among the apostles not all are ready to hear the whole story. So again, it is our preparedness to hear, in which we choose ourselves to be available for the message which is always there, and never changes.

While the purpose of this site is to be an extension of my book Closing the Circle, and provide more material that was simply too detailed, or just too voluminous to be included in the book, I do feel compelled to maintain a certain sense of balance. I have noticed over time that some of the Logia have not come up in other contexts, and I realized that it might be fun at this point to expand on some of them beyond what was in the book. The whole thing is becoming a sort of a tapestry in which these sayings are becoming the repeating patterns. I'm beginning to sense that while the collection per se is not an organic whole, or in any way a complete representation of the teachings of Jesus, but rather an unfinished collection of pearls of wisdom, the way this site has grown, it is beginning to demonstrate more of an inner consistency among the collection, which tends to demonstrate how it does form a certain pattern we can recognize.

So, in that spirit, I just took an inventory of the Logia which have not yet come up in conversation, and they are respectively, 23, 32, 36, 40, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 70, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 92, 94, 95, 97, 103, 106, 107, 109. It'll be interesting at this point to see if I recognize any pattern among this collection. Pursah does point out in her comments in Gary's books that some of these sayings are not as easy for the modern western reader as some others.

So, the next few posts will be devoted to these stragglers. Meanwhile, I want to report here that I have begun to get reader feedback, complementing my own experience, strengthening my belief that for me the Pursah version of the Thomas gospel is the definitive edition. I was really very delighted recently to get a strong confirmation of that from a reader who evidently had a strong inner experience that this is the case. As I reported in the book, my original inclination had been to include a translation based on the Nag Hammadi texts, but when I encountered all kinds of difficulties with that, in particular in terms of getting the necessary permissions, I sensed that this might not be practical, in particular since the exercise would have to be repeated for every translation of the book. It seemed too much work and effort for something that was absolutely not material to the book, but more a matter of courtesy. Funnily enough, I naively assumed that in a field where there are 10+ Thomas translations circulating in most languages, I thought that the publishers of whatever text I chose would be happy if their edition got a boost from being thusly included in my book, and so I figured I was helping them. Hilariously, some of these folks thought I should pay them for the privilege. Some others did not even respond at all to the inquiry. So I gave it up. Initially I thought it was a sacrifice of convenience for the eventual reader, but then I realized it was a highly beneficial streamlining. No use carrying that ballast. This is how the comments about the comparison with the historical text have ended up being made in very general terms, so that everyone can do their own individual comparison with their own favorite translations. The bottom line is you'll do it only once, if that, and then you know. There is just no comparison.

The corollary to this information is our own reading experience, which also finds expression in this blog, in the sense that the more you commune with the text (in Pursah's version), the more you get the feeling I described above, which is that while the Thomas Gospel is not a complete text of Jesus' teachings even in the historical sense, as Pursah also addresses with Gary in his books, the more you work with it, the more consistent and coherent they seem to be, as if they were indeed repeat patterns in the embroidery of this particular tapestry. They very clearly belong together and come from the same place, and this becomes even more clear when you have the context of A Course in Miracles, and Gary's two books, now soon to be three, or even four.

This is an always mysterious quote, which has intrigued people, and most of the time it is being horribly misinterpreted, because in our western traditions in particular, there is little tradition of introspection to give us a clue. The overly literal interpretation came about for the same reason as the Pauline tradition in Christianity, which is the dominant one, has consistently maintained (although Paul did hesitate, and at times pondered the other possibility), their interpretation of the resurrection as an event on a bodily level, which clearly was not the point. And so his "church" became a building, not to mention a real estate empire (tax exempt, no less).
It also isn't about a table at Starbucks where we meet with friends, and somehow symbolically keep a seat free for Jesus, like the seat kep for Elijah at a Passover Seder. And going to church isn't the answer either. Sometimes you may have a lovely experience, but you realize in the end that it's not guaranteed by being there, regardless how many people are there, for who knows what mental state they (or you yourself) are in, and Jesus may not at all be front of mind.

Essentially the Course, and the teachings of Jesus as a whole, are about mind training, about learning to "follow him," namely as opposed to following our own counsel. To make room for Jesus or the Holy Spirit means in essence to suspend our own judgment. It is the advice of Logion 42, "Be passersby." And, of course, following him in that sense also means to follow him out of this world, to his Kingdom not of this world. Non-judgment is the first step on that road. So human adulthood here is not seen in the usual sense of "knowing how to judge for yourself." The practical meaning of that is merely -- to cite Jed McKenna -- to be frozen in the mentality of a twelve year old. It all revolves about judgments of what is or is not good for me. Growing up in the spiritual sense only begins when we realize that our judgments are at the cause of all the troubles we have, because they set up the experiences which we call our life. To have a different experience begins then with taking different advice. This is also why Jesus in the Course often addresses us like little children, who are just doing the first feeble steps on our spiritual journey.

So again, he can give us his vision only if we defer our judgment, which is tough, because we are very addicted to it, and this again is why the Course calls itself a course in mind training. It definitely takes a lot of practice to learn new habits, but this is the essence of the "miracle," the change of mind (NT Greek: metanoia), of which Jesus speaks. The Course says it as follows:

Our non-judgment clears the way for the miracle, for it is our judgments which are the obstacles to love's presence.

All our meetings with our brothers will be "the same" because we meet them as spirit and in spirit, so Jesus will be in our midst. We leave our judgment home for the occasion, and the more we do so, the happier we'll be, until we truly accept the atonement for ourselves, and our years will be "all the same," namely happy, because we are in the real world. It is often through chance meetings, where we are not burdened by our judgments that we learn in practice how much freer we feel meeting in an "open field" without any burdens of the past, which is really our judgments. That contrast can teach us that some day we could always live that way.

For me at least Hitler has been one of my favorite ways of looking at the ego thought system, and somehow I just managed to finish the major biography in about six months. It took me about six years to read the first quarter of it, and then I suddenly read the remaining three quarters in six months. For good measure I then plunged into Richard J. Evans' history of the Third Reich. Having grown up just after WWII, and in Rotterdam where the results were still very visible all around from the original bombardment during the German Blitzkrieg-invasion in 1940, and the town was being rebuilt still when I went to high school. I had to bicycle for about 40 minutes through the center city, where you could still always see the charred outer walls of the remaining old buildings, while the inner city was all new construction. And there were endless stories at the dinner table of how my parents and their parents survived under the occupation.

I note here that this is one thing the Thomas Gospel does not give us, the full view of the insanity of the ego thought system, although it will touch on the fact that the (ego-) world resists what Jesus has to teach. So this is also why  Pursah in Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, makes it very clear that the Thomas sayings are just little vignettes, not the full thought system, but that A Course in Miracles clarifies the whole thought system. And the Course in turn spends a lot of time teaching us how the ego system works, and teaching us how to look at it with forgiveness, which in the end means not taking it seriously at all. So The Mouse that Roared is in the end a better analogy for the ego than anything else, it turns out to be just totally ridiculous, which we do not see as long as our denial protects it. Hence the Course consistently advocates that it is looking at the ego with Jesus (forgiveness), not with judgment, which ultimately deflates the "power" of the ego, and thus enables us to choose once again, for the thought system of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus advocates. What the Course calls the little willingness, is that willingness to consider that Jesus was right and we were wrong. Until we are willing to see that, we continue to be impressed by the ego's antics. And we all have that little Hitler inside, for that is all the ego is, it is the one true slave driver, who keeps us in bondage, and the external oppressors we experience in the world are only the reflection of that inner choice, for if we were free inside, we would not be impressed. Jesus was the example of that, for he knew there was nothing to be defensive about, since he was no longer buying into the illusion that there is anything at all of value here.

To come back to WWII for a moment, which is full of interesting lessons of how the ego works, the German magazine, Der Spiegel, just published an excellent series of articles under the title Why Wasn't Hitler Stopped, at this time which is the commemoration that the Polish Invasion is now 70 years ago, paying special attention to how appeasement enabled Hitler to do what he did, and how at many times in the run-up he was all bluff. The French could have easily wiped him out in the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine, etc. It is interesting to see how with the growing distance there is more and more willingness to see the mistakes that were made on all levels. That also tells you that it will take several generations before people will get honest about the wars being fought today. What often gets too little attention are experiences of grace such as the stories of Corrie ten Boom and her sister, and also Victor Frankl's experiences. In the end the story is always a form of resurrection story, in which spiritual renewal is born out of the destruction. The way out lies through the fear, for the fear is maintained in power by running from it. That seems counter intuitive, but it's always through. The answer is not bravery, or bravura, but forgiveness, that is the only thing which takes the air out of the balloon, and we have nothing to forgive but fear itself (pun intended - it was just a silly mistake).

When writing recently about my reading experiences with Ian Kershaw's Hitler biography, I commented to someone that what stood out most to me was the complete and absurd banality of the whole thing, and the fact that quite clearly Hitler had absolutely nothing to offer, but always managed to manipulate people into all or nothing choices, in which he bamboozled them into thinking there was actually something in his empty hand, not to mention the fact that really both his hands were empty. All of this came into real focus for me in how he managed to completely manipulate the army, which had been quite an independent institution, with a certain pride and professionalism, but he managed again and again to get them on his side to an almost incredible degree, or at least not object, even while his choices at times were bereft of common sense from the professional military standpoint.

Today friend sent me this picture, which kind of says it all.

This should be required study material in all Marketing curricula, it is a better story even than the Tylenol scandal. It's the story of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular.

Original material  of Jesus warns that the world is not too interested in his real teaching. In the Thomas material it is Logion 13 in particular, where Jesus warns the disciple Thomas to expect no ready acceptance of his real teaching, and in fact tells him to shut up about it, even to his fellow apostles, for they are not ready to hear it. The same theme comes  up in A Course in Miracles in a variety of ways, and of course there is the famous story of Helen Schucman who was the scribe of the Course, and who thought that maybe a handful of people would ever get it. She clearly understood the enormous resistance against the teaching. Here is one of the key passages from the Course which gives form to this issue:

Obviously Jesus is being cute with "not everyone is ready to accept it," you might just as well say: "Nearly nobody is ready to accept it," but his way of wording it represents an open invitation, because it implies that it can be understood if you really want to, while also making you aware of the tremendous resistance that the world has against it. And of course the world is "too much with us," a lot of the time, so we cling to it, and shut Jesus and his message out. So what is the world to do? Clearly Jesus's completely unconditional love was an attraction to many during his ministry, even if his teaching wasn't always well understood, and several instances of his warning people not to blab to the neighbors about his healings etc., even made it into the canonical literature. To the established powers, Jewish and Roman alike, his teaching was a threat, for he taught (and teaches) of a Kingdom not of this world.

So what is the world to do to counter this? I wrote recently about the fun book Operation Messiah by Thijs Voskuilen, which on one level, literally, I don't take seriously, but in a symbolic level it makes a lot of sense, namely that Paul would have been a secret agent for the Romans, sent out to corrupt the Jesus movement, and teach them proper subservience to Rome, so that it would have been an accidental success that a Roman Emperor subsequently adopted the religion himself, and eventually it would become the official religion of the empire. Thus a religion founded in the name of Jesus, who taught give to the Emperor what is the Emperor's ( a few shekels), and give to God what is God's (your heart and mind), turns it around completely by having the state co-opt the religion, and so to win the hearts and minds of a potentially too independent movement. That process of turning things completely upside down really begins with Paul, who cleverly implies that he speaks on Jesus's behalf, and obliterates all distinction between his interpretation of Jesus and the things Jesus actually said and did. Naturally this only could happen after Jesus was dead, for it would not have been convenient if he could talk back and speak for himself, as their is no evidence that he ever intended to found a religion of any kind. Paul's pretend humility by leaving the impression that he was only saying what Jesus said is a classic literary device, similar to what Plato used with Socrates, and which was very common in the classical world. From a marketing persepective it is brilliant, for it ensures that Paul himself does not become the issue. Jesus however advocated essentially "when in Rome do like the Romans, except don't take it seriously, as in Logion 6 (which in the Pursah version is a contraction of 6 &14 in the Nag Hammadi version).

The tour de force really was to reinterpret Jesus so as to imply that he validated the world, and this is accomplished through reinterpreting his teachings which were all about the mind and our spiritual life, and refocus them into worldly concerns. The central feat was to undo Jesus's teaching of the Kingdom as something immediate, and something of our inner reality, our spiritual life, as you will find it in his original words in the Thomas Gospel, as in Logion 3, et al. and turn it into something external, which however would arrive at a later date, so that it became an event in time, again validating the experiential world of space and time. The clincher then was to create the teaching franchise, called the church, based on the nonsensical logic of the apostolic succession, the logic of which is in direct contradiction to the teachings of Jesus, if you look e.g. at Logion 99, where Jesus poohpoohs family relations and blood relationships as an irrelevancy, saying that his brothers and sisters are those who are doing the will of the father, for that is the only thing that brings us together. Lastly, the closing stone of the arch is to interpret the resurrection and the second coming as something of the body, so that instead of us joining Jesus in the resurrection by accepting the atonement for ourselves, now the story is turned around to where he will physically come back to get us in his second coming into the world (which all the time he was telling us to leave, so why would he bother to come back?).

Voilà, here you have the creation of one of the most powerful business concepts and marketing brands in the world. While the teacher is absent, the church claimed a monopoly on teaching his message or at least their version of it, and the buy in was that by joining with them you basically bought yourself a ticket to the second coming and all the good stuff that would come afterwards. In this process all personal responsibility for changing our mind as Jesus has advocated, is now wiped out, and replaced by a passive process of waiting for him. The church of course has a vested interest in his not coming back, so this is how the ego puts itself in charge as the vicarious spiritual authority, borrowing the authority by claiming a unique right to it, and maintaining its sway over the ego which lives on borrowed time anyway, in short the church becomes very much a worldly authority, not a spiritual one. Hence all the conflicts between church and state over the long history of Christianity. Now in turn the church can serve the Emperor instead of Jesus, performing various civil functions from blessing marriages, to meting out punishment and or validating it by its teachings of sin, guilt and fear, and in a worldly high point to the Emperor Constantine and his "In Hoc Signo Vinces" which is always mischaracterized as a triumph of Christianity, though it was certainly the most abysmal betrayal of everything Jesus ever taught. The phrase continues to be proudly sported by Catholic buildings such as St. Helena's Church close to my house, (named after Constantine's mother, Helena). So there you have it, the most spectacular marketing story in the world. Procter and Gamble, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs may be masters of branding, they are mere pikers by comparison.

None of the above is to deny the many good things that have also been done by churches. This is not about that at all. What it is about is to separate the church as a worldly institution from the teachings of Jesus, which are purely about our inner life, not about our worldly pursuits. Following him means to shift the anchor of our life from our worldly persona, which likes to believe it came first, to the primacy of God, our source, as expressed by Jesus in Logion 99, but also in the famous first commandment that has been retained in the New Testament,

The crux of the matter is of course that the world invariably puts the second one of these always first, because we substitute the special relationship to ease God out. What Jesus meant however was what is expressed in the language of the Course as "I choose the second place to gain the first." (ACIM:W-328):

Annelies wrote about  Logion 18 in her Dutch blog, in a post titled Het onmogelijke heeft nooit plaatsgevonden (Tr.: "The Impossible Never Happened" - She does have common sense!). The  post provides there an important connection with the Course, as well as some great music (Bach).

Logion 18 reads as follows in the Pursah rendering (from Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality:

The Course passage she connects this to is the following:

Eternity - the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks - has neither a beginning nor an end. Only time seems to have a beginning and and end and all things certainly have beginnings and an end within the scope of the space-time framework. The "beginning" in terms of the thought system which Jesus teaches in ACIM is the thought of separation from God, aka. the ego. As a spiritual discipline, to get back to that thought, to learn to see where we made that choice, is absolutely necessary in order to make the other choice. Or, to put it differently, a mistake can only be corrected if you understand what the mistake was. Until then, you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off, for you'll be fixing everything except that one mistake. The above passage portrays just exactly how that thought starts in the mind, and sets us up with the set of expectations that is part of our experience in this world. Undoing that thought is possible only by means of a return to the original decision moment, as implied also by Logion 18.

And so life is a bit like a labyrinth, and we are busy finding our way back to the beginning, for if you know how we got into this mess, then you have found the way out as well.

First of all, Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler is exemplary in terms of its even-handed presentation. His absence of judgment lets us see how banal the ego really is, in all its insanity. Throughout, you wonder why people gave this nobody their faith, and certainly after the reverses set in, in the winter of '41, his all or nothing approach became so evidently idiotic, when he always argued "all" but the evidence was showing that he was achieving "nothing," yet his generals constantly went along with him, despite some grumbling, and so always maximized the disasters. Reading his life this way becomes a sobering reflection on the ego-insanity that drives us all. For if we do believe in the ego, if we do believe we are lonely individuals in a hostile world, separated from God, their source, we always do fall into the conflict of Cain & Abel all over again. That can be dressed up "scientifically" in terms of the "survival of the fittest" and some of that type of rationale was only too evident in Hitler's approach, but it's always the same. And the fundamental logic of the ego is always all or nothing. So why our allegiance to it? Why if any clear mind could see that it's only leading us to perdition? The devil we know versus the devil we don't? And we continue headlong into disaster? Why? Why? Why? There has to be another way!

Once you look past the enormity of the situation, realizing that differences of degree are not material, it begins to make more and more sense why the Course calls the ego a "tiny, mad idea." And, it is nothing more than that, an idea, a dream, and the mind is thoroughly capable of making another choice:

In the context of the Thomas Gospel, Logion 87 reminds us of how much special relationships, the relationships of the ego, which are substitutes for our one holy relationship with God, make us miserable, and keep our soul mired in misery in the world. It is the perfect picture for the criminal cameradery of something like the Nazi "leadership" in Germany, and the world repeats this a thousand times. These are false relationships based on the ego's despair. Logion 67 reminds us how the ego's "all" is really nothing. And again, the example of Hitler is only an extreme example, but the pattern is always the same. All the conquerors of the world always end up with nothing, for the world is nothing. And the need to conquer the world permanently pits brother against brother, for it is born from scarcity and will therefore only yield scarcity. Logion 56 reminds us of this in starkest terms - if you've conquered (understood) the world, all you've found is a corpse. Once you figure that out however, you will transcend the world. Logion 45 reminds us that the world's logic is always false. War and scarcity only beget war and scarcity, never anything good. Logion 26 meanwhile is always a good reminder that our job is not judging our brother, but rather to remove the "log" from our own eye, for else we can never be of help to anyone. As long as we judge any of our brothers at all, we exclude them however, and we continue to exclude ourselves from Heaven, but oneness speaks of a very different reality:

This is just something I have to write down periodically, for it is one of my favorite things in all of spiritual literature.

When Franz Rosenzweig was working with Martin Buber on their famous new German translation of the Bible (Old Testament), they would meet mostly once a week, and since Rosenzweig had an illness which made it impossible for him to speak, and he would type out his notes for Buber, so they could discuss them.

On December 10th, 1929, Buber came in for his weekly visit, and found Rosenzweig slumped in the bed, with his typewriter, and the usual paper sticking out of it, except he had stopped in the middle of typing, for he had died overnight...

here is what he wrote:

It always reminds me of the Course:

Or, in terms of the Thomas Gospel, among others Logion 113 is a reminder of the simplicity we overlook...

Knowledge is often times misunderstood as the knowledge of things. Hence people think there is such a thing as computer knowledge, and people do not understand that the term itself is an oxymoron. The Greek word was "gnosis." It was preserved in the term gnosticism, as a denominator for a set of philosophical/religious groups which existed among the mixture of religions around the time of Jesus, and in which the idea of gnosis, as an inner knowing, that is quite different in quality from the objective knowing of "things." This type of knowledge is an inner knowing that reflects a connection to our Self, it is the knowledge that is able at some point to recognize the Christ in our brothers, and to recognize Jesus, because we know at an ethereal level that he Is, what we Are in reality, pure spirit. As the proto-orthodoxy of Paul and Peter gained more prominence, gradually numerous forms of gnosticism were dismissed by these early would-be Christians as heresy, and ultimately their literature was to be excluded from the New Testament. As so often it became a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In the Thomas material we find Jesus using this word gnosis, knowledge in this original sense, starting in Logion 3, as knowing yourself, Logion 5, as knowing what is "in front of your face." This knowing is different than knowing the price of beans, it is an inner knowing, understanding. In the later gnostic tradition this usage becomes distorted again sometimes as if after all it is a something to be known, even in the sense of tradition. That is not the meaning it has in the Thomas Gospel, and clearly Jesus was not a gnostic. Conversely however some of the gnostics quite evidently did a better job of retaining some of the teachings of Jesus, than the so-called Christian orthodoxy which was to become the church later. An example of that might be the Roman teacher Valentinus, whose 2nd century Gospel of Truth is quite remarkable, and reflective of the original spirit of Jesus's teachings. But Jesus was neither a Christian, nor a Gnostic, that was not the point of his life and his resurrection. Jesus is who we know we would be as and when we do remember that we are the Son of God, so he is the living example of who we could be and should be. Hence he refers to himself sometimes as "the living one," since we have lost this consciousness, this inner knowing of who we really are in truth, and he is there to remind us and to wake us up from our stupor. Logion 28 reflects that sort of view of the human condition. 

Something within us knows however, and Logion 108 powerfully gives expression to our ability to fully learn who he is and thus to become like him. Our awareness is capable of shifting from our identification with the ego-self, to identification with our true Self, and on this path he is the teacher. This change of mind is the metanoia the Course talks about, and it is NOT a conversion of faith, or repentance, it is a total shift of thought-system, to a completely different frame of reference, that of the Holy Spirit. In A Course in Miracles he presents himself as an older brother, which implies a sense of recognition and familiarity. The difference between him and us is thus merely in the fact that he knows the way home and we don't so we'd be well advised to listen to him more. It is that inner sense of recognition of authenticity and of our own essence, which gives us the knowing, the certainty to proceed, while our ego still yanks us in every other direction, but meanwhile cannot offer us that quiet, inner calm of knowing, just knowing. If you truly know, you don't doubt, you don't have to defend your position to anyone, for the truth is never harmed by anything that seeks to contradict it. It just is. This is why inner peace is such a huge tip off of living in truth. There is nothing to defend, just like Jesus had no need of defend himself.

This is the closest way I could describe the feeling, which I've known in various ways in my own life, when I've recognized that voice, sometimes through others, sometimes within myself. One of the moments that stands out for me was a time when I was in my early twenties, and contemplating learning Aramaic and Coptic, simply because I was then very interested in the Thomas Gospel, as well as in Aramaicisms in the New Testament, and suddenly I "heard the thought" (that's one very descriptive expression for this phenomenon), that if Jesus really was who I thought he was, no way would I or anyone have to learn Aramaic, or Coptic, or some other dead language, in order to be able to understand him. Obviously he could speak to me in my own language right then and there. The thought itself of course attested to the truth of the statement. That sort of completeness within itself gave it a finality, where you don't doubt what the source is, you just know. Of course later I was to find A Course in Miracles, where he certainly speaks quite at length in contemporary language. Just to be sure, through Gary and his teacher Pursah, we also now have a very good contemporary version of the Thomas Gospel.

P.S. The title of this blog was chosen with the unforgettable song from the J. Geils Band "It Ain't What You Do (It's How You Do It). I could not find it on YouTube, otherwise I would have included a link to it here.