Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: And there's a wisdom to that insecurity.
ROBERT WOLFE: Yes, absolutely. In fact I think Alan Watts had
a title of a book to that extent, The Wisdom of Insecurity.
PAUL NAGY: In your more recent book you've devoted yourself
to, was it retranslating the Gospel of Thomas. What is it that you
did with that, because I haven't actually seen the book yet?
ROBERT WOLFE: Yes. I should clarify that. No, I did not
retranslate the Gospel of Thomas, there's a very adequate
translation which the scholars use, you can look it up on the
website, Thomas O Lambdin, has done the translation which is
most commonly used. Let me give a little background.
I was raised as a Baptist and baptized when I was 13. I became an
atheist by the time I was 20 seeing the hypocrisy in the church.
[Laughter] But I've always wondered about how much of what the
bible told us about Jesus and what he is purported to have said
was true, and I'm not the only one who's wondered that because
there are hundreds of scholars around the world who do nothing
but try to determine who Jesus was, how he lived, and what he had
to say. And so there are a lot of books, there's a whole library of
books on what's called the historical Jesus. I've read quite a
number of those books, and when in 1945 the Gospel of Thomas
was discovered, for those who aren't familiar with it I should say a
little bit about it.
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection, scholars have broken it up
into a 114 sayings purportedly of Jesus, and in fact virtually every
one of them begins, Jesus said, and then has some quotation.
Many of these appear in the New Testament, but many of them do
not. And the ones that do not appear in the New Testament are
quite different. And this document that was discovered in 1945 in
an earthen jar in Egypt has been dated back to about 300 AD, but
it was evidently translated into Coptic, which is an Egyptian
language from Greek. And the Greek manuscript may go back to
the time of Jesus, in other words within say 50 years of Jesus'
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