This week we’ll hear part two of my interview with gnostic John Munter. He’s very much a follower of the Gospel of Thomas, which is one of the more popular gnostic books. John offers a unique method of interpreting the Gospel of Thomas. His books are called The Integral Gospel of Thomas Made Easy and The Samaritan Jesus. You’ll find that modern gnostics are still working these things out, and John and I come up with different interpretations of many passages of Thomas. I also found John’s comments on my book very interesting because he and I have such different points of view on many particulars and our conclusions are often divergent, yet he found A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel quite stimulating.

I’d like to remind you that knowledge is basically a collection of what I call memes, or information. Bundles of knowledge come as a package or set from various traditions, teachings, and books. This Gospel According to Thomas is one of those collections of memes. These are supposedly the secret teachings of Jesus. Now, personally I don’t believe that there are secret teachings of Jesus. If the Father wants to be known, he wants to be known by everybody. If the Christ came to redeem us, he came to redeem everybody. I don’t see why the Father or Jesus, or any other gnostic apostle or proponent would keep secret knowledge from us.

In my way of looking at these things, the only reason some gnostic knowledge is hidden is not because it’s being kept a secret from us, it’s because we have filters that block it out. So the hiddenness is generated by our inability to listen or understand or conceive of this gnosis that comes from God. The secrecy of gnosis I don’t think should be considered as being purposely kept from us, because it is God’s will that we know. It is God’s will that we do remember. So I just wanted to add my two cents in there at the beginning of this discussion with John about teachings from the line of Gnosticism that he is an expert in.

You will also notice that there is a big difference between the historically-based theories that John presents and the conceptually-based theories that my Simple Explanation focuses on. My explanations are based on a first cause principle–consciousness itself, the Father–and then develops logically outward from there. I think this is the way the author of the Tripartite Tractate thought about these things, because my Simple Explanation model dovetails perfectly with the Tripartite Tractate. These principles are also upheld by the New Testament itself, although not generally studied or recognized this way.

p.s. John noticed that he misspoke a detail he would like to correct for you scholars out there: It was actually the FIRST Apocalypse of James where Gospel of Thomas got Sayings 30 and 50, not the Second Apocalypse of James.