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The story didn't suit an editor the first time around, so back came the manuscript with suggestions about improving it. The improved version was Harper Lee's much-celebrated To Kill A Mockingbird. Its first try was called Go Set A Watchman.
Few knew of the first as millions of us fell in love with Mockingbird and the matchless Atticus Finch, his daughter Jean Louise and son Jem -- three of the most lovable characters in American fiction.
In Mockingbird, Atticus was a just and righteous attorney whom Martin Luther King Jr. later would have lauded. In the earlier version that was published many years later -- just a few days ago, in fact -- Atticus is a racist.
One or another of those characterizations can be true of Atticus, not both. The whole imbroglio now underway has to do with whether Lee's first image of Atticus the Racist was the truer one and whether or not she conceived of a new story at the behest of a publisher's editor who may have wanted a heartwarming hit to market.
What if some of the stories in the Christian gospels had undergone similar metamorphoses?
There is one clue that the answer may be a guarded yes. That clue is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to a Jesus about whom nothing else is revealed, neither of his origins nor of his personal life. Whoever the complier thought Jesus was seemed unimportant, though some scholars suggest that the audience for Thomas would have known the Jesus story, if indeed there was one.
Ongoing research indicates that the Thomas gospel may have much earlier origins than its third century CE Coptic text first discovered in 1945 suggests. A portion of it appeared in Greek during the second century, and now it is thought by some (myself included) that an early Greek version of Thomas may have been in circulation as early as 50 CE.
The Gospel according to John -- as did its canonical predecessors Mark, Matthew and Luke -- includes stories of and about a Jesus. In one of them, the author went out of his way to finger the disciple Thomas as a doubter who, against his better judgment, was coerced into believing that John's Jesus had been resurrected from the dead (see John 20: 24-29). It is not unreasonable to think that the author with barely veiled derision was trying to discredit the Thomas gospel.
Thomas has no birth or death or resurrection narrative, no mention of any overt acts some would call miracles. Just the sayings. The Jesus encountered in Thomas is somewhat baffling, a tad ornery at times and mysterious as in Saying No. 60: "Look for a place for yourselves within Repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten."
One can see how later first-century "editors" may not have found the Thomas gospel helpful in creating the myth (the Greek word is μυθος, meaning "narrative") that would be necessary to attract followers to the new movement. Stand-alone wisdom sayings, however instructive, do not a story make.
Perhaps, then, the Thomas gospel came to be seen as Ms. Lee's editor at J.B. Lippincott first saw Go Set a Watchman -- not as attractive as it could be, therefore not as saleable.
Evidence exists to the effect that the Thomas gospel was suppressed in the time of Irenaeus, the controlling doctrinal voice of the late second century, who called such documents as Thomas "an abyss of madness." Irenaeus had adopted the idea laid out in the Gospel of John to the effect that Jesus was God and that such concerns as the Thomas gospel raised were a diversion. Therefore, the Jesus of the Thomas gospel could not be allowed shelf room in the theological library of ongoing Christianity.
Oddly enough, some of John's theology appears in Thomas in these words attributed to Jesus: "I am He who exists from the Undivided. I was given some of the things of my Father" (Saying No. 61). Not incidentally, the text says that he spoke those words to Salome, who was given to reply, "I am Your disciple." Who says there is no evidence that women were not called to be disciples?
Meanwhile, we all love and respect the Atticus of Mockingbird. We probably will not like the original Atticus of Watchman, who, for all we know, may well be closer to the person or persons from whom Ms. Lee first developed the character. I wouldn't bet on the latter novel becoming the classic that the former has been for half a century already.
By the same token, the Jesuses of the familiar biblical gospels, while not necessarily representative of the ones people of the first third of the first century actually may have known, remain the familiar ones to whom believers will cling. Yet, at this remove, we cannot know with anything approaching certainty how much of what is conventionally believed about Jesus or any other characters encountered in scripture comports with what was so.
I was fortunate that the Thomas gospel became available for reading and research just as I was entering graduate school, allowing me to study it under the supervision of gifted and patient scholars. As the years have gone along and I have found myself tentatively concluding that the Jesus revealed in the Thomas sayings may actually have existed, I have come to see that if all we had by way of gospels was Thomas, we would be much the poorer.
Some time ago, I made my funeral arrangements because, among other things, I have kept in mind Saying No. 1 of the Thomas gospel: "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death."
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