Theosis. Группа авторов
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divine life and an access to divine power. People are made whole by their faith. In each of the seven instances where Jesus says, “your faith has made you well” or “your faith has saved you,”24 the verb is in the perfect tense, meaning that their faith has already saved them. Perfect tense refers to an action in the past with continuing effect in the present. The verb σώζω can be translated “save,” “make well,” or “make whole.” In these seven passages it occurs in the perfect tense, σέσωκεν. Your existing faith, persisting in the present, has saved you.
The recipients of healing are receiving divine power from Jesus. We see this in Luke: “All in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them” (Luke 6:19). We see the spreading of divine power in Mark as well: People who follow him around, or who know he is coming to their town, are healed by just touching “the fringe of his cloak” (Mark 6:56). When the hemorrhaging woman secretly touches his cloak, Jesus is “aware that power had gone forth from him” (Mark 5:30; similarly in Luke 8:46). There are theosis implications to this reception of divine power.
The coming of divine power is promised in this: “there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1). Since this is followed by the Transfiguration, it may refer to Jesus’ own power, but it could also refer to the manifestation of divine power in the lives of believers. People who are touched by him are changed (Mark 1:41; 8:22; 9:27). The import of these, and even of passages where people refuse to be changed, is that contact with Jesus should bring about profound change, moving people to do the will of God, restoring a person’s sanity, turning proud people into servants of others (3:35; 5:15–19; 9:35; 10:43). Mark keeps his focus on Jesus, but the implication is that discipleship brings a powerful life-change.
Theosis in Thomas and Mary
There is room for a glance at The Gospel of Thomas here, to see if it can shed light on Luke 17:21, and/or on the historical Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is a semi-independent source. Some of its material is independent of the Synoptic Gospels, but most of it seems to be derived from the Synoptics. The Greek copyists of Thomas knew the nomina sacra, the standard abbreviations for “Jesus,” “God,” “Father” and “human,”25 and they knew the contents of Christian texts as well. For instance, there is considerable material resembling Mark 4 in Thomas Sayings 5, 6, 9, 20, and 21; while the Sermon on the Mount is echoed closely in Sayings 24, 26, 32, 33, 34, and 36.
We have already said that the idea of divinity within persons does not “belong” to the Gnostics. It should not be surrendered by the orthodox, any more than the ideas of revelation, illumination, or transformation should be abandoned, just because they happen to be honored by Gnostics. In fact, the sharp distinction between orthodox and Gnostic belongs to a period later than the composition of the earliest gospels—of which Thomas is one, with roots that may go back to the first century CE.
The Gospel of Thomas moves in a gnosticizing direction, but it would be misleading to suggest that it fits wholly into a Gnostic box, having no overlap with the canonical Gospels. There is considerable intersection of ideas between Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels, as well as considerable difference. To be honest about both points (overlap and distinction) Thomas is more accurately labeled “protognostic” or “gnosticizing,” than “Gnostic.” Even someone who calls it a Gnostic work, recognizes that Thomas might include “genuine early tradition” from the historical Jesus.26
Sayings 3 and 113 in Thomas are clearly related to Luke 17:21. We start with Saying 3 (from the Coptic): “The Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves . . . you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father.”27 The Coptic text of Thomas has only “kingdom” or “kingdom of the Father,” never “kingdom of God,” but the phrase “of God” was probably present in the older Greek text at this point, although Papyrus Oxy. 654 is damaged. It reads “And the kingdom [of God] is within you, [and outside]”: καὶ ἡ βασ[ιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ] ἐντὸς ὑμῶν [ἐσ]τι [κἀκτός].28 Thus ἐντὸς ὑμῶν, “within you,” is preserved, though Thomas adds “and outside you.” This addition reduces the focus on inwardness. We see a similar passage shortly later: “when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one . . . then shall you enter the kingdom” (Saying 22).29 Mystics often assert the unity of heavenly and earthly, inward and outward, rejecting commonly accepted distinctions as unenlightened. This “unitive mysticism”30 is typical of Thomas, but is not evident in the canonical Jesus.
Saying 113 also preserves a version of Luke 17:21: “The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”31 This shifts attention away from the inwardness of the kingdom, and toward people’s ignorance of the spiritual possibilities within and amongst them. This reflects the common Gnostic theme of the ignorance of ordinary people and their religions. Rather, the locus of enlightenment lies with “the solitary one” (16, 49, 75). Again, the views seem to be more those of “Thomas” than of Jesus.
Of the three versions of the “kingdom within” saying, Luke 17 is the one that preserves inwardness most vividly; Thomas 3 diverts the message toward a mystical sameness of inner and outer. The emphasis in Thomas 113 is on the kingdom as “spread out,” and people as ignorant. Clearly, then, gnosticizing texts do not always have more inwardness than orthodox texts. These two Thomasine sayings move away from an emphasis on inwardness.
The most interesting inward-focused saying comes about as far away as it can get, sequentially, from the other two sayings: “That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you” (Saying 70).32 Although lacking the optimism of Luke 17:21, it is intriguing, is not necessarily Gnostic, and offers more promise for reflection about what the historical Jesus might have said, than do Sayings 3 and 113.
The kingdom-within saying proceeds quite far along a gnosticizing trajectory in the third century. Hippolytus reports a version that adds this at the end: “For there, hiding in the fourteenth aeon, I am revealed.”33 This reflects the Valentinian concept of the aeons: divine beings, part of the collective Godhead, the Pleroma. Thomas has “the All” (Saying 67) but neither “the Pleroma” nor aeons.34
The Gospel of Mary has Jesus warning his inner circle to watch out for those who say “‘Lo here’ or ‘Lo there.’ For the Son of Man is within you.”35 This dissolves the concreteness of Christ, completely internalizing him, and sounds like other Gnostic claims of personal deification, such as “you have become the . . . Christ.”36 Orthodox believers consider such claims of divinity to be either disproportionate or deranged. For the orthodox, deification never means that one is literally made equal to Christ, only that one takes on Christ-like qualities while still dependent on Christ, who is Lord.
The pattern of variations in the kingdom-within saying, the later ones being more gnosticized than the earlier ones, suggests Luke 17:21 as the initial source, and Gnostic imagination as influencing the later versions. This also indicates that the kingdom within was Jesus’ own idea. It was later used by Gnostics—and unfortunately abandoned or explained away by many of the orthodox.
Conclusion
Suggestions of the deification or divinizing of believers are found not only in a vivid Lukan saying on the kingdom within, a Matthean text commanding perfection (or perfecting), and a Johannine reference to people divinized by contact with revelation, but also in many texts that speak of the Spirit within, and of lives transformed by contact with Jesus. Further hints of divinization may be present in Markan records of people being “made whole” (Mark 5:34; 10:52 KJV) by faith, of Jesus imparting divine “power,” and of the kingdom of God coming “with power” (5:30; 9:1). Even more deification statements appear in the epistles.
All these sayings need to be considered within the context of the particular works in which they appear, but the teaching of the historical Jesus does seem to have provided the central concept.