Meister Eckhart and the Gospel of Thomas: Two Voices, One Teaching
Around the year 1300, the most celebrated preacher in Germany told his congregations that God gives birth to his Son inside the human soul, and that the birth is happening now. Six centuries later, an Egyptian farmer dug up a banned gospel teaching that the kingdom of God is inside you, spread out and present, waiting to be noticed. The preacher never read that gospel. Nobody in his world could have. By his lifetime every known copy had been sealed in a jar beneath the desert for roughly nine hundred years, and it stayed there for six hundred more. Put his sermons beside its sayings, though, and the two begin finishing each other’s sentences. ...