Jesus was a street preacher who taught through story and aphorism. Antedating the Gospels, these 105 sayings were recorded by his followers during and shortly after his lifetime. Through the immediacy of direct quotation, Davenport and Urrutia's bold translation shakes our preconceptions, reintroducing us to the living teacher whose powerful words ring anew. A new edition is available at ISBN 978-1640093454.

Gathers the sayings of Jesus from the Gospels and other sources, translated into everyday English

Jesus was a street preacher who taught through story and aphorism. Antedating the Gospels, these 105 sayings were recorded by his followers during and shortly after his lifetime. Through the immediacy of direct quotation, Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia’s bold translation shakes our preconceptions, reintroducing us to the West’s greatest teacher, whose powerful words ring anew.

The Gospel of Thomas preserves a core of authentic Aramaic sayings of Yeshua older than the earliest Christian writings. When they are isolated from the second-century Gnostic framework, they reveal many of Yeshua's inner-circle kabbalistic teachings. Scholars can restore much of the pre-kabbalistic tradition of Yeshua's era through sources like the Sepher Yetzirah, Sepher Ha-Razim, and the haggadah preserved in the Mishna, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, Philo of Alexandria, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. These were the Holy Scriptures of Essenes, Zadokites, and other messianic Jews of the period, including Yeshua and his disciples. The Psalms they chanted in worship and Shabbat Seder were not just those of our Old Testament, but the messianic Odes of Solomon and others preserved in Enochian and apocalyptic scripture. A study of this forgotten sacred literature allows modern scholars to understand and reconstruct the oral Kabbalah of Yeshua embedded in the Gospel of Thomas.

All of the extant authentic sayings and teachings of Yeshua remembered in the earliest oral Jesus traditions and collections compiled by his Jewish disciples A.D. 30-50 before they were rendered into Greek, misunderstood, and Christianized in the later Gospels. •Translated in terms of the original Hebrew/Aramaic vocabulary and idioms used by Yeshua •Explained in the context of Second Temple messianic haggadah, Merkabah, prophetic, and wisdom traditions •Organized and presented as a coherent body of exquisite spiritual teaching that was lost and forgotten in Christianity.

A new translation and analysis of the gospel that records the actual words of Jesus • Explores the gnostic significance of Jesus's teachings recorded in this gospel • Explains the true nature of the new man whose coming Jesus envisioned • Translated and interpreted by the author of the bestselling The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and The Gospel of Philip One of the cache of codices and manuscripts discovered in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Thomas, unlike the canonical gospels, does not contain a narrative recording Christ's life and prophecies. Instead it is a collection of his teachings--what he actually said. These 114 logia, or sayings, were collected by Judas Didymus Thomas, whom some claim to be Jesus's closest disciple. No sooner was this gospel uncovered from the sands of Upper Egypt than scholars and theologians began to bury it anew in a host of conflicting interpretations and polemics. While some say it is a hodgepodge from the canonical gospels, for others it is the source text from which all the gospel writers drew their material and inspiration. In this new translation of the Gospel of Thomas, Jean-Yves Leloup shows that the Jesus recorded by the "infinitely skeptical and infinitely believing" Thomas has much in common with gnostics of non-dualistic schools. Like them, Jesus preaches the coming of a new man, the genesis of the man of knowledge. In this gospel, Jesus describes a journey from limited to unlimited consciousness. The Jesus of Thomas invites us to drink deeply from the well of knowledge that lies within, not so that we may become good Christians but so we may attain the self-knowledge that will make each of us, too, a Christ.

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

Jesus was a street preacher who taught through story and aphorism. Antedating the Gospels, these 105 sayings were recorded by his followers during and shortly after his lifetime. Through the immediacy of direct quotation, Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia’s bold translation shakes our preconceptions, reintroducing us to the West’s greatest teacher, whose powerful words ring anew.