A final word

 A final word  

 from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 437) –

 Appendix viii — Concluding with a bit of whimsy.

In the zany cult classic, Archaeologisticus (1974), the hero Luke Marion, played by Dwayne Hickman, discovers a fragment of a scroll we shall learn later in the movie is Pseudo-Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem II, which contains — not in Tertullian’s Latin or even his less-often-used Greek but in hieroglyphics! — what follows. (Shining his flashlight on the torn papyrus, Marion reads haltingly at first, then ever more confidently and finally fluently, into English.):

Jesus was in the synagogue, and the reading from the scroll was this: ‘While the people were in the wilderness they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. And those that found him gather sticks brought him to Moses and to Aaron and to the whole congregation. At first they held him because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, The man shall be put to death; the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.’*
     Afterwards, Nathanael, who had been in the synagogue with him, asked Jesus, ‘Is the kingdom of heaven like this?’ And Jesus said, ‘No. It has never been like this.’

Commentary

How does that also zany Gospel of John end? Let me paraphrase: There are many other things Jesus said or may have said or someone thought he should have said. But if every one of them were to be collected and commented on, the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.

05.01.22

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* The reading is from Numbers 15, verses 32 -36. For links to other biblical commentary from Rantrage, click here.