 Welcome everyone back to another episode of We Are Being Transformed. This is a podcast where we discuss the myriad of ways in which people transform and in turn are transformed by the culture primarily through the mechanisms of myth, lore, and ritual. Today our guest is the incredible and brilliant Dr. Ivan Moroshnikov. He did not pay me to say that. So welcome Ivan, how are you? I'm great, thank you. Glad to be here. Good, welcome. The pleasure is all mine. So Ivan is a man who knows a thing or two about a little text from Nag Hammadi that we are very familiar with and is super, super important in the lore and also the mythology of our modern world because there's so many misconceptions about it. The Gospel of Thomas. He has a monograph called The Gospel of Thomas and Plato. Highly recommended. It's available on Brill through Open Access. Anything you wanted to know about the use of icon, the word icon in middle platonic terminology that will be exhausted there. Very much came in handy and I nerded out to stuff like that. So Ivan, with the Gospel of Thomas, could you give us a brief rundown about Thomas because there's so many misconceptions like I said about the text and what it represents. So if you could just give us kind of like a no frills brief rundown of the provenance and what the Gospel of Thomas is. Right, so the Gospel of Thomas is as you said a very short text which is not really a Gospel because it doesn't have any narrative, any story about Jesus but rather it's a collection of sayings and modern scholars divided this collection into 114 units. It's important to understand that this is our present day understanding of the text but these numbers are not in the text and if you look at the history of scholarship you'll see that other scholars and quite smart people would actually divide the text differently. So there is this consensus which does not necessarily mean that it is true. So it begins with an intrepid, the short kind of introductory statement which in the Coptic text goes like this. These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke in which Didmus Judas Thomas wrote down and then comes what is usually designated saying one which goes and he said whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death and then the question is who said that? Is it Thomas who said that or is it the living Jesus who said that? So this text is known to us in one Coptic manuscript which comes from the Nakhamati Discovery so it's Nakhamati Codex II and it's the text of this Nakhamati Codex II that can be divided into 114 sayings but before this Coptic text was discovered we actually had as it turns out three other manuscripts of this text which come from site in Egypt called Aksarenkas and where already in the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century a British archaeological team discovered three small papyrus fragments which come from three different manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas. So we know that this text existed in Greek and we know that it was more or less the same as what we have in Coptic although there are interesting differences but it was only after the discovery of the Coptic text that you know we the academic community actually realized that this is all these pieces of writing material actually belong to the same text bear witness to the same text. We don't really know when this text was written there are different theories some people would put it very early in the history of Christianity. They would connect it to the so-called saying Gospel Q and would say that it's like a first century you know record of what ultimately is you know mostly accurate sayings by Jesus. Other people would say that no it's a very late hodgepodge of synoptic of sayings from the Gospels that are in the Bible and that it was composed somewhere towards the end of the second century. Ultimately it's very difficult to say anything and you know for people who work with texts ancient text manuscripts it's it's evident that you know unless there is a reference to some historical event it's it's basically impossible to to be certain about dates. The thing that we know for certain is that this text was written in Greek. It has been suggested by some that there was a Syriac Fort Lagia that the original was written in Syriac but this I think has been very convincingly disproven by many scholars most recently by Simon Gathical. So this text was written in Greek like the vast majority of the Christian texts and we might discuss its textual history its compositional history. Ultimately there are two options it's I think obvious for anybody who would read this text carefully that it is actually a collection of rather diverse material and material that must come from different sources. So basically we have two options either we can imagine a compiler who sits in a library like this one picks different books from different shelves and you know produces this you know collection of various things that derive from different sources or we can imagine a graduate process of development textual development and this is indeed something that we know took place with various texts of the same genre that collections of sayings texts that do not have any particular structure right these collections tend to evolve over time tend to grow and to me the second option seems to be more plausible I would think that the Gospel of Thomas we have today is actually something that you know grew over time but as I said I would ultimately say that what we have in Greek and what we have in Coptic bear sweetness to more or less the same recension of this text and this recension was definitely around already in the somewhere in the second century that's I think all we can say about the dates and the compositional history it's extremely hard and what I think is much much more important is just to read the text and to try to make sense of it and to you know approach it not from the perspective of its hypothetical sources but to see it as a work of literature which is in its own way unique and you know fascinating Thomas you would place Thomas firmly in the genre of the wisdom sayings a word that sometimes is used is uh gnomology it's um so it's gnomology being like a collection of gnomes wise sayings um this is not the best term because the word itself was not used in antiquity uh but uh the genre definitely existed uh the word wisdom we shouldn't use we shouldn't probably use it uh you know in a technical sense history of research on the gospel of Thomas there was this trend and very important trend to see the gospel of Thomas as a manifestation of this wisdom literature tradition and there is this great book by Stephen Davis the gospel of Thomas and Christian wisdom which is an amazing a very bold attempt to basically say that the message of the gospel of Thomas is the same message that we find in you know the wisdom of Solomon and you know other texts like that um and then he would say that Jesus of the gospel of Thomas is actually a manifestation of divine wisdom that was that's a great book which I strongly recommend to everyone but I think we just cannot overlook the huge difference between the worldview we find in the gospel of Thomas and that of the Jewish wisdom literature um the most important point being of course that according to the gospel of Thomas our world is not good which is something that which is something that the authors of wisdom literature would probably not accept so uh probably not use the term wisdom in this sense uh it's not necessarily you know uh something I would use to describe the genre of our text but uh certainly when it comes to the structure to the typology uh it has a lot in common with those things collections that belong to this wisdom tradition that's how I would put it that's a great point um I think just from my own perspective when I look at something like Thomas um and these kind of floor allegium that we're drawing from multiple sources of wisdom um I think the best example for me like when I look at something like Thomas is another book in Nal Kamadi called Sentences of Sextus so we know that Sentences of Sextus I guess um is drawing from a source that porphyry seems to also have access to he he seems to draw um from these sayings in his epistle to Marcella so they're kind of using this source in common but it's for vastly different purposes and I like how it shows just how um flexible these traditions could be um it also it shows that um these things aren't as cut and dry as we uh would like to think when we try to put them into little boxes of uh quote unquote genres um we don't like to talk about talking about common sources uh that's actually another big problem for us when um we find stuff um in church fathers or in Manichaean texts so you know texts that belong to this great dualistic religion which was Manichaeism when we find stuff that is very similar to what we have in the Gospel of Thomas almost verbatim the same and uh something that is even introduced as Jesus saying and something that we don't find anywhere else but can we really think can we really claim that this is a saying that comes from the Gospel of Thomas uh that's impossible uh to say because on the one hand we know that the Manichaeans read the Gospel of Thomas uh and uh Manichaean fathers explicitly say that they are familiar with the title but because they don't say that they are quoting from this text uh it is always possible that they're quoting from something else that the Gospel of Thomas and these guys share a common ancestor and that's that's quite disappointing although um in my work I found it extremely important to look for uh you know the context in which sayings that may or may not be Thomasine uh you know exist in this other text specifically in Didmus the Blind which I think an extremely important author uh can't really say I guess um when it all comes down to where these ideas come from but they're just kind of in the air uh it also reminds me of another um text that we have a dog Hamadi that uh the Wisdom of Jesus Christ text called Eubnastus is uh the source of the Wisdom of Jesus Christ although uh I think you know this is not a universal accepted claim like some people would probably think about a different scenario and uh you know that's that's quite normal for um ancient writers to you know recycle texts recycle ideas uh in my more recent research I've been uh working on the so-called apocryphal acts of the apostles in the Coptic tradition and you can see how often a story associated with let's say Philip becomes all of a sudden a story about apostle Andrew just because for some reason the author or the the compiler of a certain text felt that this would work in in his composition uh so yeah that's that's absolutely another problem for an ancient writer to use recycle revise adapt and so forth so ultimately what's your assessment of Thomasine this model like if it is fit into this model as a as for lack of a better term a smorgasbord of different ideas um is middle Platonism just one uh one aspect of it or is middle Platonism the driving factor in Thomas there to say that I know what the driving factor in Thomas is um uh what I really like is this quote I have in the beginning of my uh book from uh Stavias uh where it says that Plato uh had uh many voices that Plato was uh polyphonic you know that when you read Plato you never hear the voice of Plato himself right you always hear voices of different characters and they together constitute uh Plato's voice so Plato is polyphonic but also but he's not you know he's of many voices but he's not of many ideas like he is still a consistent thinker and the same is true for Thomas I think ultimately uh we cannot just say that this is a uh hodgepodge of various uh sources various notions you know there is like apocalyptic Judaism's there wisdom tradition here Platonism synoptic stuff and this is all just uh you know mixed together to amuse the reader or to just confuse everybody I think that the gospel of Thomas is polyphonic but also it is in a sense symphonic so it always um points in a certain direction uh it's um actually a comparison with Plato is kind of informative here in 20th century scholarship there was this very um strong tradition of uh German in German academia uh many people would think that the dialogues of Plato uh did not really have any um doctrines right that they were just uh exercise exercises produced to show how you know philosophical research can be conducted but what Plato actually uh thought was expressed only in this so-called unwritten doctrines so the secret teaching of the academia uh that was transmitted orally um and so so the dialogues are just to advertise for you know Platonism but they don't really make any dogmatic positive claims and that's of course not far removed from what happened to Plato's academy soon after he died the academy of Plato became a skeptic school and that's how the skeptics would take it right they would think that well the the only point Plato is making is that you can basically prove anything like you know um but that's demonstrably false right like when you read Plato's dialogues you certainly would encounter problems you certainly would see that there are certain uh you know not contradictions but you know thoughts that do not necessarily immediately um are not necessarily in harmony with each other so you know even though I think if you do a bit of slow reading you would eventually find out that you know again Plato is quite consistent but in any event Plato never tells you that the world is made up of let's say atoms and void you know that's something that you would never find in Plato's dialogues there is always a certain uh trajectory a certain um you know direction to Plato's thinking and uh I'm pretty sure that the same holds true for Thomas even though sometimes we may find a certain um you know exegetical problem when we read the Gospel of Thomas the Gospel of Thomas is quite consistent in thinking that the world is bad and that there is this uh you know inner self that somehow transcends this world and stuff like that so uh definitely uh not just a hodgepodge of ideas definitely a text that was uh that reflects a certain um a certain person like something that was produced by a uh reductor let's say that had a very clear idea of what is right and what is wrong and how you know the world works so to say I was going to ask just in terms of uh getting a little bit more into Thomas's uh worldview um there are certain sayings in these texts that um are the best uh if you use middle Platonism the as the heuristic device to understand them uh for example 56 80 I think you have 19 sayings and all um middle Platonism explains these best versus uh say stoicism and cynicism so I didn't know if you could just get into that a little bit and kind of explain why um this middle Platonic thought is the wellspring of many of these Thomasian sayings and not say the thought of stoicism or cynicism at the time I think generally speaking um Platonism was just a logical ally for Christians uh Platonism teaches that the cause of this world is outside of this world right uh whereas Stoics would be naturalists right that um you know God and the world are ultimately the same and uh this does not really marry well with the Judeo-Christian notion whereas the Platonist notion uh the Platonist metaphysics um is not something that clearly contradicts uh the Christian myth I mean of course it does of course when you read uh you know this uh critics of Christianity like Salsas you would see that they from their Platonist perspective thought that you know Christianity is nonsense like the idea of like say incarnation is ridiculous because um you know gods cannot change because gods or God is perfect and therefore God cannot really transform because transformation means change from one state to another and in the case of God this would be changed from a better state to worse state why would God do that that's against the nature of God right so the whole idea of incarnation is nonsensical but even the orthodox tradition you know the one that actually accepts the notion of incarnation finally came to terms with Platonism as we see in you know the Cappadocian fathers and uh you know later developments uh ultimately in the gospel of Thomas and in many I think many other early Christian texts we just see the first steps towards this happy marriage and in the case of the gospel of thomas it of course makes even better sense because the gospel of thomas is not really uh big on flesh and uh the notion of incarnation is not something that you can easily find in the gospel of thomas I mean you can argue that it's there that it's hinted at um and we can discuss that but uh with the gospel of thomas which for instance never uses the term Christ when when talking about uh Jesus right it's always Jesus or living Jesus uh so the gospel of thomas is in a sense uh more open uh the the religious feeling the this uh metaphysical sentiment so to say we find in the gospel of thomas is more open to Platonism simply because the gospel of thomas does not seem to be that into those elements of Christian religion that actually made uh Platonist very angry so uh when I was defending my dissertation I was supposed to offer this so collection so I was supposed to give like a 20 minutes talk about something related to my research and I I thought that it would be fun to play this uh you know uh game to do this mental experiment what if salsas uh you know what would happen if he read the gospel of thomas would salsas find the gospel of thomas not acceptable and I think ultimately salsas would say yeah that's okay like the gospel of thomas does not talk about the things that make salsas angry and that's very interesting um so yes I would say that the gospel of thomas uh for for people behind the gospel of thomas platonism was a natural ally uh I wouldn't say that who these people wore platonists in any meaningful way not in the sense of um you know the people behind this so-called platonizing certain texts that you discussed with Dylan recently uh but uh I would say that uh the platonist tradition somehow probably indirectly made its way into the uh you know uh the world view of these people and uh even though it's not like present in the totality of thomas and sayings it's present in a important part of them and that's I think significant uh but as I said before I wouldn't say that there is a driving force in the gospel of thomas and you can easily say that you know the uh biblical myth is as important uh biblical narrative you know improved by supplemented with various apocryphal traditions about biblical characters is as important for understanding the gospel of thomas as a text it's just it so happens that usually people who work on the gospel of thomas are more familiar with the bible and with the apocrypha and with the stuff like that than they are with the platonist tradition so that was my kind of goal to show that there is this element in thomas that needs to be understood so you heard it here folks calces would definitely approve of the gospel of thomas it's the stamp of approval from calces um so thank you for that dr morosh dakov that's a that's a first I will credit you endlessly for that uh yeah but just getting into what you're saying I mean they're not uh I don't like just like nobody would say I'm a sephian christian or a sephian gnostic probably at the time nobody's going to say I'm a platonic christian or uh um I have a a friend of mine and a great scholar dr m david luah uh he has this model called dynamic cultural exchange and uh in this a good way of looking at it is you know early christians and jews and you know also pagans wouldn't consciously admit to using the building blocks of their culture like for instance if early christian jewish christians are using the building blocks of deification and imperial cult right um they're not going to consciously admit that um that they're using those and their conceptualization of god but it's also very interesting you know these things were ubiquitous in the ancient world you know you have the gods everywhere you have these thought processes if you if you even go through the smallest um bit of paide at the time you're going to be exposed to these middle platonic concepts um you're going to be exposed to these allegorizing ideas um and these wisdom saying so it's very interesting just the dynamics that are going on so what i'm thinking my next question would be to um ask you specifically about two sayings that are kind of parallel in tomas that i really like that you pointed out in your book sayings 56 and 80 so i didn't know if you could kind of go through those a little bit and kind of explain what's going on there um these concepts because it's very fascinating you go through the the philosophical terminology of the greek and what what it would mean to certain readers versus others so the two sayings that he mentioned are so-called doublet so there was this icelandic scholar aus girson who i think his dissertation was um dedicated to the rhetoric of tomas and it's it's a difficult read um but it's ultimately i guess the only study that talks about the poetic side of the gospel of tomas um and the thing is that the gospel of tomas certainly uses certain set of rhetorical formal devices so even though the text is not structured as a narrative it has certain elements which i also discuss in my book like you know chiasm or parallelism in general and so there is also this thing called the doublets when you have sayings that are very similar and of course one could say that this is because they come from two different sources so somebody compiled them used these two sources and just didn't notice that it had the same material which is i think somewhat disrespectful of these ancient people and i think if this text has this twice then there is a point to this so sayings uh 56 and 80 uh saying 80 and i'm gonna read from london's translation jesus said he who has recognized the world so the world is cosmos right it's a greek word has found the body and he who has found the body is superior to the world so here uh the world is identified with the body and the first part of the saying would not be a problem to anyone uh familiar with greek philosophy because that's something you find not only in play though but in fact in in the stoic tradition as well uh the notion that the world is a body but the thing is that the world according to these people is never just the body it's a body with a soul it's a living being so even in play though who you know he's talking about the demi-orge and the world uh that is uh transcendent to our world even for play though the world has a soul right and the same is for stoics the world is a living being so that's why it's so interesting to write to read saying 80 uh together with uh saying 56 together with zdovet because saying 56 says uh jesus said whoever has come to understand the world has found the corpse and whoever has found the corpse is superior to the world so this is interesting because here we learn that the world is just a corpse that there is no uh you know there is no divine element to this world and again when we read the saying together we can easily conclude the world is a corpse the world is a body and therefore a corpse the notion that our bodies are corpses is again something that we find in uh philosophical literature specifically in in platonic tradition uh starting as early as Aristotle who may have actually came up with the metaphor um this notion is repeated again and again in in multiple middle plateness texts um in Aristotle it is connected with this very vivid image of pirates who capture you know people capture as ships and then they would tie their victims to corpses and you know somehow torture them in this way so you know this is like an experience a horrific experience uh that you know people captured by pirates have right so what Aristotle says is that we are the same we are people tied to corpses so you know the the the human element would be our inner self and the corpse element would be our body uh but this metaphor is never applied to the world because as we know the world is not just a body it's actually a living body so so what is interesting is that the gospel of thomas is playing uh is is aware is recycling this notions that uh we find in in uh you know Hellenistic text in in platonic specifically platonic texts you know goes a step further it says uh the world is actually just a body uh there is no uh element that is salvageable uh to this world uh no redeeming element in this world uh and by doing so uh it seems the gospel of thomas is even inventing a pun that i i don't think exists anywhere else so in in play though we find this famous play on word soma and sama uh which is usually understood as the body is a tomb but um in in reality uh i mean it's difficult because sama can have other meanings but ultimately sama is this sign that you put above above the someone's grave so i mean and ultimately this is how this saying was understood by later interpreters of play in play though we find the sema soma uh you know pan or moto whatever you call it uh interestingly in later platonic tradition we find a similar uh play on the words demas and desmos uh so demas would be one of the words that you can use when talking about a body and uh desmos means uh chain or bond so again there's this attempt to encapsulate uh the platonist notion that the body is a prison and the body is a tomb encapsulated in a uh short and memorable formula right so soma sema demas desmos and then the gospel of tomas uh probably invents or maybe follows a tradition that just didn't survive but the gospel of tomas uh has this other pun soma ptoma which i think is a really remarkable and which shows that the gospel of tomas is actually a rather creative texture like the people behind the gospel of tomas were actually rather creative um so to sum up uh what i'm trying to argue uh in my book is that the gospel of tomas is drawing upon this platonist tradition uh but at the same time is uh not it remains faithful to its basic um message the message that uh is actually in some respects different from uh you know what a platonist would normally say um although of course this is not the whole truth so according to the gospel of tomas the world is a corpse but and this is another thing that does not have a direct relation uh to platonism but i think it's it's it's just important to say here that according to the gospel of tomas there is still somehow certain salvific element present in the world even though it is not of this world and in my dissertation i i discuss this notion of like a certain secret a certain code uh that an attentive reader of the gospel of tomas uh can decipher so that they can find this salvific element in the world and i think this is uh what quite a few sayings in the gospel of tomas are all about so for instance uh the saying that is at the very end of the text in uh 113 uh where jesus says that the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it and i think the same point actually um is uh of those sayings where jesus is talking about uh you know i am um when jesus says that you know lift uh lift a stone and i'm inside uh split a piece of wood and i'm there because this is is again not um uh just random imagery wood and stone is actually um something that a classical author would normally use to talk about something that has no soul something that is lifeless uh something that is opposed to human virtue human spirit uh in blue dark uh spartan kings say that we don't need walls that are made of wood and stone because uh sparta is protected by the spirits of its citizens so we don't need this lifeless stuff so when jesus says that he is within logs and stones he is making the same point i think that he is definitely not logs and stones but somehow mysteriously there is this salvific element hidden within encoded in this in this uh you know uh material stuff so so the gospel of thomas is playing two fields it's working with the various sorts of material including the classical plateness material and at the same time it's always staying true to its own message which is i think also very important i think that leads into uh my next question which is just the figure of jesus and how gospel of thomas portrays him like this isn't the jesus that you find in something like the gospel of judas um or something like uh the apocalypse of uh or the secret revelation of john you know this is a very uh i don't know how to describe him but but thomas has a very um unique way of presenting jesus so i didn't know if you could talk about that briefly this book that i already mentioned um uh the one by steven davis um so steven davis says that um the jesus of the gospel of thomas is basically the um the wisdom the divine personified wisdom of the old testament and uh indeed there are some hints in the gospel of thomas uh that i think should be taken seriously that actually pointed that direction right like when jesus said that you know people were looking for me and uh they couldn't find me which is a direct quote from uh from the wisdom literature of the old testament so jesus is actually saying the same thing that wisdom is saying in the old testament um so there's that but then of course um jesus is definitely more than uh personified wisdom because again and again the gospel of thomas is trying to stress that it is not possible to actually describe or define jesus for instance the most famous saying is in this regard saying 113 uh sorry 13 right the one that's um a dialogue between jesus uh matthew simon peter and thomas and uh you know simon peter thinks that jesus is an angel matthew says that he is a philosopher and somehow we realize that this is not entirely true it's important to know that to point out that the gospel of thomas does not explicitly say that this is not true like if you wish you can see a certain angelic element to jesus or certain philosophical element to jesus um but of course it is clear that the answer that thomas gives is the correct one and then thomas says that his mouth is incapable of saying who jesus is that's important there is this um uh this there is this negative theology in the gospel of thomas where ultimately when we talk about uh the uh things divine the ultimate reality there is nothing positive that we can say about it right um there is this uh other saying that has been uh quite a problem for many interpreters that's about this um gold coin with the face of caesar on it right so the same stuff that we find in the synoptics uh so saying 100 uh so it goes jesus they show jesus a gold coin we don't know who they are gospel of thomas doesn't say who they are uh they show jesus a gold coin and uh say to him caesar's man demand taxes from us and then and then uh jesus replies give caesar what belongs to caesar give god what belongs to god and give me what is mine so there are different ways to understand this people would think that this is a reference to uh uh you know nostic dualism right to the notion of the demurge that jesus uh who is obviously divine is somehow different from uh god right that his realm is somehow completely separate from that of god and therefore this god must be the god of the old testament the god of creation um but that doesn't have to be the case um and obviously you can come up with different interpretations the one that i enjoy even though of course uh here i must confess it's very difficult to say something uh you know with certainty uh the one that i like is that um this saying obviously presupposes the existence of what we have in the uh in the synoptic gospels and it makes basically a correction um the word god is not something that you find in the gospel of thomas very often the point is about words like as long as as soon as you name the ultimate reality as god you apply certain positive notions to it and somehow the gospel of thomas is not fond of it so in the sense he is saying you know there is this god that you talk about that you apply positive um ideas to there is me and then about me you cannot say anything because i'm you know beyond speech and therefore you know give god what belongs to god and give god give me what is mine so jesus somehow is different but not in this ontological sense so to say but in the geoseological sense uh so the jesus of the gospel of thomas is is uh elusive but as i said i guess the most important thing is that he's never is is what the gospel of thomas doesn't say about him so the gospel of thomas doesn't never says that uh he is christ the gospel of thomas doesn't use this jewish epithet and this is part of uh very strong empty jewish sentiment uh expressed in many uh thomas sign sayings uh the gospel of thomas never says that uh jesus rose from the dead except maybe in one instance uh where we have a difference between the greek and the uh koptic version it is very unclear whether or not the gospel of thomas uh claims that jesus was crucified it's not impossible but even if he was crucified this is not important and even if he was resurrected it is not important the important thing is what jesus says and uh what john clappenbord called the sub-idential research so the important thing is the exegesis of the words of jesus and the intellectual effort that allows you to comprehend the truth inside these words and you know receive salvation join the ultimate reality so yeah absolutely you can say that jesus is what he says right i think it's almost like a parallel in a sense to some of the hermetic uh corpus like just in terms of like the interaction between the reader and grasping and wrestling with those words and kind of um trying to understand what's going on there my final question dr maroshnikov is a more general one but i think it needs to be asked it would should we consider the gospel of thomas a gnostic text it's difficult to say um i wouldn't um i personally do not enjoy the term gnasticism uh but if we say if we define gnasticism the way it's usually defined right like this dualistic belief in you know the ultimate reality and uh a the emerge of the old testing right these these two different elements uh i don't think there is this sort of dualism in the gospel of thomas although as i said if you really want to you can find this dualist element in some of the things you can see some of these things in the gospel of thomas as a hint at this um dualist worldview and obviously in the uh when the gospel of thomas was discovered it was immediately i'd recognize it as a gnostic text right uh for instance yertner this uh swedish uh theologian wrote his commentary on the gospel of thomas which is actually not that commentary he would just assume that this is all about you know the demerge and he would just immediately proceed in this direction which shows at least that this text definitely uh would be enjoyed could be enjoyed by people of dualist conviction right like the manikin's for instance you know we know that the manikin's read the gospel of thomas um but nothing in the gospel of thomas clearly points at that and um i i don't think this is the best strategy uh to to label the gospel of thomas as gnostic uh that's i think the most important thing is about the gospel of thomas it's it's really it resists any labeling people tried different uh categories so you know you know there was an attempt to place the gospel of thomas within a school of thomas or thomas sign trend in early christianity that somehow it was produced by a certain community of thomas sign christians and the same community would produce the acts of thomas and the book of thomas and uh you know but this all is extremely unlikely and implausible and the same holds true for all these ideological labels you know nasticism apocalypticism uh wisdom tradition uh and even platonism you know obviously platonism is not the only tool uh to be used when working with the gospel of thomas so i would again say that the gospel of thomas is a very uh polyphonic text and you know it needs to be considered in its uniqueness and i think it's actually and that's something i i i would like to stress i think the gospel of thomas is good literature and it's actually produced by people who were uh familiar with rhetorical devices and who would be very cleverly used these devices and in this sense you know we we should really study the gospel of thomas on its own in its very unique very particular um you know profile i think ultimately like the jesus of the gospel of thomas um what thomas is as a whole is really difficult to keep a grasp on and that's that's part of the beauty of it though i think it's it's an amazing text to read it's like along with wisdom uh the wisdom sayings like from thunder perfect mind it's one of my favorite of those time um dr moroshnikov this has been amazing feel free to use this time to plug anything you're working on where people can find you anything you feel we should know about um my dissertation which was published as a book is available in open access at brill so you can anybody can download it for free legally and uh the same holds true for uh this volume uh women and knowledge in early christianity which is a um a fast drift to my uh dr fater anti marionne and uh which discusses all sorts of things but includes among other things my article about thomas 114 and uh i think it's great that my former employer the university housing key actually invested into making all this stuff open access uh hopefully you know uh this is something that will ultimately be the case with most of scholarship i think you know today it's really disastrous how how many important studies and tools are behind the paywall so thank you for your scholarship thank you for lending your time and expertise to the show it's been an honor and a pleasure thank you so much have a great evening thank you so much and i'll be happy to come again absolutely