Henry Imler August 6th, 2008

Scott, over at Grace is Unfair, asked his readers for book recommendations.  This is not a list of essential books, nor the most influential books I have read.  Instead, they are some good books that will help round any person.

Religious Studies

Gods of the City, edited by Robert Orsi - This is a collection of essays and case studies done on religious people in cities. It touches on all kinds of topics. There is a study of a Hindu temple in DC, a absolutely fascinating look at racial construction through a study of the Italian Harlem, the sacralizatrion of secular space by the Salvation Army, and the Japanese Presbyterian Church among others. (I have this book - can lend)

Playing Indian by Philip Deloria We constructed "Cowboys and Indians.

Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa by David Chidester: You will be blown away by this book. The anchor. The power of religion in defining the other. (can lend)

Early Christianity

Women and Christian Origins, by Ross Shepard Kraemer (Editor), Mary Rose D’Angelo (Editor) Another collection of essays; this time on women in early Christianity. Some are good essays, such as real women in the undisputed letters of Paul. Others are not so good, such as (I have this book - can lend, but I use it a lot)

The First Urban Christians by Wayne A. Meeks - Meeks looks at the earliest Xian documents (the letters of Paul) to describe tensions and texture of the first Christians, which were found in cities. The introduction is a pretty good description of NT scholarship in its own right.

In Memory of Her by Fiorenza This is a controversial work, but the best of trustful feminist scholarship. Fiorenza is a hard-nosed german new testament scholar who teaches at Harvard. This work is an excellent sociological and exegetical study of the earliest Christians. She does not damn nor whitewash Paul - a rare thing in any scholarship on the subject.

The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles translated by William Wright. This is a interesting and sometimes unintentionally hilarious collection of Syrian acts of the apostles. It isn’t all of them (no Acts of Peter, for instance), but it will give you an idea of what popular Christians were consuming and producing at the time. (as opposed to the official story of the early church fathers) This work is over 130 years old and now in the public domain. I made a copy of it on lulu which I think you might like rather than the huge volume that also contains the Syriac manuscripts tradition.

Religious History

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown

The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism by Harry S. Stout

• Religion , X of the Day , apocryphal literature
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Henry Imler August 4th, 2008

You know how they have published the Magna Messiah?  Well, I really wanna write a comic book based on some of the Apocryphal Christian literature something fierce.  They practically write themselves, you know.

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Henry Imler August 4th, 2008

Today’s hilarious “`mean Jesus’ of the day” comes from The History of Mar Matthias and Mar Andrew, the Blessed Apostles (Hist of M.& A.). Here is some of the back story.  The Hist of M.& A. was a Syrian theological work and adventure novel that belonged to a category of literature that we call the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.  The story begins with Jesus sending the apostle Matthias to the City of the Dogs, `Irka, which is composed entirely of cannibals.   When unsuspecting travelers would approach the gates, the inhabitants would seize them, gouge out their eyes, and force them to drink a drink which made the captive go mad like a beast, hence the the name, City of the Dogs.  After a month or so of being in this condition, the inhabitants of the city would then eat the traveler.

Matthias , like a good apostle, goes to `Irka and is consequently is captured upon reaching the gate, blinded and drugged.  Don’t fret for Matthew.  Jesus appears to Matthias and promises that after 27 days in captivity, Jesus will send Andrew to rescue him.  Sure enough, three days before Matthias is to be eaten, Jesus appears to Andrew and tells him to hoof it over to ‘Irka and save Matthias .    Andrews says to Jesus that he will go, but that he can’t make it all the way over to `Irka in three days.  Jesus says: “How ’bout you try anyway.”  So, unlike Jonah of the OT, Andrew goes and charter’s a boat.  Unknown to Andrew, this boat is manned by Jesus and three angels, disguised like when ole JC or the Angel of the Lord went a visiting Abraham or Lot back in the OT.

Now, after Jesus amazes Andrew by doing some crazy straight sailing and talking Andrew’s ear off, Jesus decides to take a nap.  Upon seeing this, Andrew decides to catch a few winks himself and promptly falls into a deep, deep sleep.

Opening one eye and seeing Andrew passed out like a frat boy on a Saturday morning, Jesus gets up quickly and says to his Angel crew :

“Spread out your hands, and carry Andrew and… place him at the gate of [the City of the Dogs], the inhabitants of which eat the flesh of men.”  And the Angels did as they were commanded, and took up Andrew and his disciples, and carried [and] placed them at the gate of that city, the inhabitants of which eat men.

I don’t know if you caught that - the inhabitants of this city eat men. Thanks, “mean Jesus.”  But, as is usually the case in all of canonical and apocryphal literature save for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus has good reasons for what he is doing.

Andrew and his buds wake up outside the city and show more testicular fortitude than I am capable of.  Andrew asks them what they think of the situation and, upon hearing their reply, “rejoiced [with] a great joy, that his disciples were worthy to see the great things of God.”  Andrew then prays to Jesus saying:

Pardon me, my Lord, and forgive me what I have done… Wherein have I sinned, my Lord?

Jesus answers him back, saying:

You have not sinned, Andrew; but I did these things unto you, because you said: “I cannot go to the City of the Dogs in three days.”  Now I have shown you that I am able to do everything by my power.  But [enough of this] arise, and go into the city unto Matthew your brother, and bring him and everyone else imprisoned forth from prison.  [Oh, and be prepared to suffer a whole heck of a lot, but before you start complaining, remember what happened to me when I was crucified.  I could'a moved between heaven and earth in the twinkling of an eye and punished those that beat me.] But I bore [it] and forgave them, that I might set you an example.

What did Andrew do?  “Andrew straightaway rose, and entered into that city with his disciples.”  That is some manhood, right there.  I don’t know about you, but I’d be asking for some new draws and clocking my sprinting speed because, and I don’t know if you know this, the inhabitants of that city eat men.

So, Andrew and his buddies march right up into the prison and finds it guarded by seven men.  Being the good pacifist that he was, Andrew does not fight them, but prays to God and they all fall down dead!  But wait, there is more awesomeness on the way.  Andrew gets to Matthias’ cell and finds it locked.  Not to fear, Andrew makes the sign of the cross and the gate opens right up!  People, meet Andrew, the merc from the messiah.  After being freed, Matthias says Robinesquely that Jesus said you’d bust me outta here on the 30th day and here you are - thanks Jesus!  Then true to comic-book form, Matthias asks Andrew, “What now?”

What now, indeed.  Next time we will look at what happens when the people of the city find out what has happened.  Trust me, it is crazier and more unexpected than what has happened above, all of which is true to the narrative.

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Henry Imler August 4th, 2008

Last Friday, we looked at the physical shrine of Hagia Thekla and what it said about gender roles in early Christianity.  Today, I wanna look at the actions and attitudes of the real people who lived and traveled there.  We will see that the devotees that worshiped, vistied, and lived at Hagia Thekla were from a variety of diverse backgrounds that cut across societal, gender, and geographical lines.  This attests to Thecla’s pull in the early Christian period. 

The primary sources for getting a glimpse at the patronage of Hagia Thekla are the later texts surrounding the tradition. Mining these sources will help identify those people consuming the tradition and illuminate its appeal. The author of Life and Miracles collected miracle accounts from the area that most likely date from 370-420 CE.¹  As we will see, the text paints a site that is largely patronized by women and betrays a tension with patriarchal encroachment. The book “presents a picture of pilgrimage practice and martyr cult suffused with the presence and activity of women.”²  [2] Fifteen of the miracle stories in Miracles involve women and complains in chapter 44 about not being able to collect all of the accounts. There are four classes of devotees described by these texts: wandering itinerants, pilgrims, monastics, and married devotees. Each of these types is attested to in the Diary of Life and Life and Miracles.

Sign pointing the way to the Convent of Saint Thecla in modern day Maalula

Itinerant wandering was a relatively common practice in early Christianity.³  Self-imposed exile and homelessness by Christians “provided a way of separating from the world by leaving home and stability, and embarking on a life of travel.” ⁴  Miracles 34 describes itinerants journeying to the shrine that are attacked by local bandits and saved by Thecla. These women were virgins⁵ that lived out ascetic virtues. Normally itinerant wanderers would have no particular destination in mind for their wanderings, yet Miracles 34 suggest that this wanderer was based at the shrine when Thecla asks why the men have driven this wanderer away from Thecla’s house. If this is the case, this it is possible that a section of the devotees based at the shrine practiced ascetic wandering. This would have been a fruitful method of disseminating the Theclan tradition and oral stories.⁶   It also emulates the model Thecla herself provides as both a wanderer and a monastic.⁷

In contrast to the wanderers based at the shrine, there was also an international pilgrimage centered on the shrine. Pilgrimage was a specialized form monasticism based on ascetic travel and wandering.⁸  We should be wary of importing the medieval stereotype of pilgrimage based on Chaucer.⁹  Instead, we should think of “pilgrimage and the pilgrim in the classical philosophical sense of a ‘foreigner… who want[s] to go home.”¹⁰  Dietz claims that pilgrimage was largely the domain of women.¹¹ Dietz suggests that:

It was women, rather than [men], travelers who most often set up monasteries and xenodocia. The patterns of late antique Christian travel defy out assumptions about social and gender roles. Itinerant spirituality held a special appeal to women, perhaps the relatively marginal role of women in late antique society made them ideally suited to its pursuit.¹²

The Convent of Saint Thecla in modern day Maalula, next to the supposed cave mentioned in the extended edition of the Acts of Thecla

Egeria was considered to be the quintessential pilgrim in late antique Christianity.¹³ For her, it was the journey itself not the places visited that defined the pilgrimage.¹⁴  However, after this, “perhaps the most important part of [traveling] was meeting holy people.”¹⁵  Their stories were collected and passed along; as a matter of fact, it was the continuity of holy people at a site that made the site holy, not the ground itself. Pilgrimage to the site was regular to the degree that it had become routinized by the time Egeria was traveling in the late fourth century. She records four-step liturgy consisting of an arrival prayer, a reading of the entire Acts of Thecla, prayer and the Eucharist, and departure.¹⁶  In addition to a ritualized liturgy, military protection, and increasingly regular routes to the shrine contribute to the routinization of pilgrimage to the shrine.¹⁷

View from inside of the cave at Hagia Thekla.

As noted above, Hagia Thekla had a substantial monastic community. Both Egeria and the Writer of Life and Miracles attest to this community. Egeria describes the possible community’s leader as a deaconess named Marthana.¹⁸  She is the only person named by Egeria. However, the Life and Miracles refer to male guardians on more than one occasion. Therefore it is uncertain if she lead the entire monastic community or only the female devotees. These cells consisted of both men and women;¹⁹ the females were referred to as aputactitae, or virgins.²⁰  These people served the shrine, offering hospitality to any travelers. As mentioned above, they might also have employed ascetic wandering as part of their monastic life.

In addition to these virgins, there were the local and regional married devotees of the Theclan shrine. The Miracles attest to several married women that appealed to Thecla and were granted their prayers. Once such instance is in Miracles 14 where a married woman appeals to Thecla for the religious faith of her husband Hypsistios. She does not live at the shrine nor at the nearby city of Seleucia; she traveled at least 80 kilometers. Thecla convinces Hypsistios to join the Christian community after first strickening him with an illness and then appearing to him as a chambermaid, the result of which is his confession of a Trinitarian formula of belief. Another story, Miracles 42, tells of a woman who leaves her husband and joins the theater. Losing her beauty as a result of this, she travels to Hagia Thekla and petitions her. Thecla appears to her and restores her beauty and her husband. These stories demonstrate that the Thecla tradition as it had developed in the fifth century was welcoming to married women and “despite their emphasis on ascetic values (e.g. women’s flight from family) the Miracles do not portray a clientele restricted to and elite, semi-eremitical caste of virgins or a privileged stream of visiting nuns.”²¹ One did not have to separate from their marriage nor abstain from sexual relations with their spouse in order to participate within the tradition.

Another view inside the modern day remains of Hagia Thecla

Lastly, there was a male contingent at the shrine. This group is attested to in the Miracles and in Egeria’s diary account. In the fourth century there were living quarters of an indeterminate number and percentage at the shrine before it was moved.²² Their influence in the cult is uncertain. On the one hand, it is the women that feature prominently in the narratives; on the other hand, it is possible to detect patriarchalizing patterns within the narratives. For instance, in Life “inventions of female vulgarity” is used to describe the jewelry that Thecla uses to bribe Paul’s jailers.²³ This evaluation is absent from the earlier traditions.²⁴  There are multiple accounts of the male guardians accompanying traveling women in Miracles. Other sections of Miracles describe the female in terms of reduced masculinity. For the writer of Life and Miracles the way for females to achieve true piety was to move into the realm of men. We see this in the words of the governor who witnessed Thecla’s trail of beasts comments on her “forceful and manly qualities.” ²⁵  It is most likely that these are not the overwhelming views and attitudes of the cult of Thecla, given the predominance of women at the shrine, but are the result of the attitudes of the male writer who paraphrased the Acts of Thecla and collected the oral accounts of the women at the shrine. Finally, these traces of patriarchal undercurrents demonstrate that Hagia Thekla cult did not develop independently from men.

Above we have seen that the devotees of Hagia Thekla and consequently the Thecla tradition were from a varied background; there were monastics, wanderers, pilgrims, virgins, married women, and men devotees. The Hagia Theckla shrine gave devotees a way for female Christians to express their religious views. The presence and footprint of males on the site demonstrates that the site and the cult centered on it did not privilege males over females. However, the larger feminine footprint was due to the fact that this was one of the few sites which allowed female expression. Given this varied clientele, let us know explore the roots of the Thecla tradition to see out of what this robust devotion originated.

Wednesday, we will be traveling farther back in time and looking at the text itself and looking at how it constructed and commented on gender roles.

1. Ibid., 41. [↩]
2. Ibid., 49. [↩]
3. See chapter 10 of Maribel Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," in Travel, Communication, and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. Linda Ellis (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2004). [↩]
4. Ibid., 126. [↩]
5. Life and Miracles 34 [↩]
6. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 133. [↩]
7. Acts of Thecla, Chapter 23 and 40, Acts of Thecla-Seleucia Chapters 43 [↩]
8. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 125. [↩]
9. Linda Ellis, "Reconsidering Late Antique Pilgrimage," in Travel, Communication, and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. Linda Ellis (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2004), 111. [↩]
10. Ibid. [↩]
11. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 126. [↩]
12. Ibid., 133. [↩]
13. Ibid., 126. [↩]
14. Ibid., 129. [↩]
15. Ibid., 129. [↩]
16. Egeria, "Diary of a Pilgrimage," in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer (Oxford University PressUS, 2004), 236. lines 20-25. Egeria also records a similar process at other places on her journey. [↩]
17. For a detailed argument for the ritualization of the pilgrimage of Hagia Thekla, see Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, 65-72.. [↩]
18. Egeria, "Diary of a Pilgrimage," 237. Chapter 23, Line 11. [↩]
19. Ibid. Chapter 23, Line 24. [↩]
20. Ibid. Chapter 23, Line 13. [↩]
21. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, 61. [↩]
22. "The Acts of Thecla," in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer (Oxford University PressUS, 2004), 237. Chapter 23, Line 23 and 24. [↩]
23. Life 8. [↩]
24. "The Acts of Thecla," 301. Chapter 18. [↩]
25. Life 23 [↩]

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Henry Imler August 1st, 2008

Only three nights from Tarsus, in Isauria, is the martyr shrine of Saint Thecla. Since it was so close we were pleased to travel there… Around the holy church there is a tremendous number of cells for men and women… There are a great many cells on that hill, and in the middle a great wall around the martyrium itself, which is very beautiful… I arrived at the martyrium, and we had a prayer there and read the whole Acts of holy Thecla…

- Egeria, writing in her travel diary during the late 4th century CE¹

By the early fifth century CE the city of Seleucia in southern Turkey had become home to an international pilgrimage site Hagia Thekla dedicated to Saint Thecla, heroine of the Acts of Thecla.²³  The Acts of Thecla was written in the middle to late second century CE and was nestled in the middle of the Acts of Paul.

The Acts of Thecla recounts a series of adventures, or trials, that the young, beautiful, and betrothed virgin Thecla, the very picture of Roman femininity, must endure in her pursuit of her goal of being a disciple of Paul. She is constantly tested throughout her journeys – she is often alone, abandoned by her fiancé, mother, and separated from her beloved Paul while facing perilous trials. ⁴ In each of these instances she is miraculously saved by God’s intervention as a direct result of her unyielding devotion and virtue.⁵  This series of miraculous escapes reaches its climax when Thecla baptizes herself while being attacked by wild animals. Along her way she befriends and converts the household of Queen Tryphaena, who adopts her to replace her dead daughter Falconilla at the bequest of Falconilla! After the self-baptism she dons the cloak of a man and is finally reunited with Paul, who commissions her for a preaching ministry. The story comes full circle when, after a successful preaching career, she returns home, finds her old fiancé dead, and ministers to her still living mother.  After doing so, she travels to Seleucia and “enlightens many by the word of God” and rests in a “glorious sleep.” This tradition was likely based on oral legends which were in turn likely based on a historical person named Thecla from the area.⁶ As evidenced by literary, archaeological, and material culture, the Theclan tradition was popular in Asia Minor and, to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean in during the 2nd through 6th centuries.

What were the driving socio-religious factors that lead to the rapid widespread growth and appeal of this tradition? We will answer this question by exploring the tradition back through time and narrowing our focus from the expressed cult tradition back to the written tradition and ending with the oral tradition. Firstly, we will examine the importance and makeup of the Cult of St. Thecla in Asia Minor. After exploring these social settings we will then turn to the book of the Acts of Thecla, exploring the rhetorical devices it employed and will compare it to Roman romance novels.((Several Acts and martyrdom accounts include variations on the Acts of Thecla. For example, one of the Acts of Xanthippe’s main characters, Polyxena, is a virgin who is thrown to the beasts, saved by a lioness and consequently preaches to a queen and governor.)) Lastly, we will explore the social and theological conditions that the Thecla tradition stepped into.

We will find the Thecla tradition filled an ideological hole which was created in the Greco-Roman socio-religious fabric by Early Christian Missionary movement and its radical egalitarianism.⁷ This movement fostered an expectation that females should be on par with males both in terms of authority and function. The Thecla tradition spoke to those needs and expectations and lent them the authority to bolster their claims through efficacious mediums, such as oral tradition and romance novels, which were modified to transmit the desired message with maximum effect.

In my next post, we will take a look at the cult (or devotion) of Saint Thecla in the early centuries of Christianity.

1. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land (Ariel Pub. House, 1981), 120 21. This excerpt is taken from the diary of Egeria, a Christian pilgrim writing in the late 4^th century. [↩]
2. Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. [↩]
3. The Acts of Thecla will refer to the earliest version of this work that was inserted into the Acts of Paul. When I am referring to the longer and later version extended, in part, to justify the moving of the shrine by Zeno I will use the title Acts of Thecla-Seleucia. [↩]
4. The use of the term “beloved” is purposefully ambiguous. Because of the nature of the work as an adapted Roman romance novel, it is necessary to have Thecla fall in love with Paul to maintain the standard storyline. [↩]
5. She is saved from a pyre in chapter 22, from a lioness which befriends her in 28, from wild beasts by the same lioness in 33, and by the scents of the woman onlookers in 35 from more wild animals. [↩]
6. The historicity of the Thecla traditions is not being analyzed in this post series. While the legends are definitely not historical in nature, it is likely that they were based and grew up around a historical figure of the same name. [↩]
7. See Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989). chapters four through six for a description of these movements. Where pertinent, features of these movements will be discussed in detail. [↩]

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Henry Imler July 12th, 2008

Earlier we have seen that it is not wise to mess with Jesus in apocryphal literature.  Either he kills you for brushing his shoulder in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, or he sells your sorry butt into slavery if you don’t go be a missionary where he wants you to be a missionary in the Acts of Thomas.

Well it looks like you don’t wanna mess with his twin, Judas Thomas, either.  In the 6th and 7th chapters of the Acts of Thomas we find Thomas and the dude who bought him at the wedding feast of the king’s only daughter.  Thomas refuses to look up at a free man who is standing over him.  A cupbearer comes over and smacks (smote)him on his face.  Thomas then looked at him and says: My God will forgive you this in the world to come, but in this world He will show His wonders on the hand which smote me, and I shall see it dragged along by a dog.” Then, in completely disjointed act, he begins to sing a beautiful song in Hebrew about the marriage day of the Church and Christ.

Later on in chapter 8 we pick the story back up:

And the cupbearer had gone down to the fountain to draw water, and a lion happened to be there, and rent him and tore him limb from limb.  The the dogs were carrying off his limb singly, and a black dog carried off his right hand, which he had raised against [Thomas] and brought it into the midst of the banquet-room.

People kinda freak out at this point.  A flute-girl breaks her flutes and starts tell everyone that this is either God or an apostle of God and even the king himself asks for the apostle to pray for his daughter.  By the way, this episode is how Thomas became in such good favor with the king that the king let Thomas screw the himself over in chapters 17-21.

Pretty crazy stuff, eh?

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Henry Imler July 11th, 2008

I love reading apocryphal literature.  Too many awesome and hilarious things happen in them not to read them.  Take chapter 17-22 in the Acts of Thomas.  In chapter 17, Thomas has been sold as a slave to an Indian merchant by good ole Jesus and finally having an audience with the king.  After showcasing his talents, the King says: “Will you build me a palace?” “Oh yeah,” says Thomas, as he is sketching the plans for a grand palace on the ground, “Just give me the money and I’ll build you your palace.”  So the king gives Thomas a bunch of money and leaves.  He even sends him more silver and gold from time to time.  This is where we pick up the text in chapter 19:

But Judas was going about in the villages and cities and was ministering to the poor, and was making the afflicted comfortable, and was saying: “What is the king’s shall be given to the King and many shall have rest.”  And after a long time, the king dispatched messengers to [Thomas], and sent [the following] message to him: “Send me word what you have done and what I shall send you.”  And Judas send him word:“The palace is built, but its roof is wanting.”  Then the king sent to [Thomas] silver and gold, and sent him word: “Let the palace be roofed.”  And the Apostle was glorifying our Lord and saying: “I thank you Lord who died that you might give me life, and who sold me that I might be a liberator of many.”  And he did not cease to teach, and to relieve those who were afflicted, saying: “May your Lord give you rest, to whom alone is the glory; for he is the nourisher of the orphans and the provider of the widows, and he ministers unto all those who are afflicted.”

In chapter 20 people start getting word to the king that Thomas isn’t building anything and that instead, Thomas was giving to the poor, teaching them about a new God and healing the sick among other things.  “And when the king heard these things, he smote his face with his hands, and was shaking his head.”  In chapter 21 the king calls Thomas over and is like: “Thomas, my son (I called him son), have you built me my palace?” Thomas says: “I have built you the palace.”  Then the king is like: “When can we go see this awesome palace you built for me with my money?”  Thomas responds: “You can not see it now, but when you have departed this world.”

That is just great.  What an excellent tale about viewing material wealth as a means to minister to those in need and to further the kingdom of God on earth wrapped in hilarity.  What an powerful metaphor, considering helping those in need as building palaces of the Kingdom of God on earth; to envision the kingdom of God, not as a political kingdom, nor a physical one, but as the just lives of people living in peace, harmony, and for the Lord.  While this tale is certainly noncanonical and is not binding in the least, it does aid in teaching me a godly truth.

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Henry Imler February 1st, 2008

You know how in Texas there is a saying: Don’t mess with Texas.? Well the early followers of Jesus had something similar.  Today’s gem of wisdom comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, chapter 4, verse 1:

Next, he was going through the village again and a running child bumped his shoulder. Becoming bitter, Jesus said to him, “You will not complete your journey.”

Immediately, he fell down and died.

Never, ever, think about bumping against Jesus’ shoulder. That dude is hard-core. Always check your subway cars for child-Jesus if you wanna make it to work on time… and alive.

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Henry Imler January 21st, 2008

The following is an excerpt from chapters one and two of the Acts of Thomas.

And when the Apostles had been for a time in Jerusalem… they divided the countries among them… And India fell by lot and division to Judas Thomas the Apostle. And he was not willing to go… And whilst Judas was reasoning thus, our Lord appeared to him… [Thomas said to Jesus] “Whithersoever you will, our Lord, send me; only to India I will not go.”

And as Judas was reasoning thus… Habban [an Indian merchant] [was in town and out looking for a slave skilled in carpentry to buy]. And our Lord saw him walking in the street and said to him, “You wish to buy a carpenter? He says to him, “Yes.” Our Lord says to him: “I have a slave, a carpenter, whom I will sell to you… And when he they had completed his bill of sale, Jesus took Judas, and went to Habban the merchant… Habban… said to him: “He has sold you to me outright.” And Judas was silent.

That is some slick maneuvering on ole JC’s part, no? “Oh, whats that Thomas? You don’t wanna go to India like I told you? Well, don’t worry, I won’t make you go to India… I’ll just sell your butt to this Indian merchant! Now you are free to go wherever your master wants to go. Oh, whats that Thomas? He wants to go to India? Who woudda guessed?”

I just love that last part - “And Judas [Thomas] was silent.” I can just see all of the other Apostles snickering in the background with their little toothpicks in hand.

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