Reading the Secret Teachings of Jesus on Death Row
The Gospel of Thomas teaches that all of humanity is connected to the divine Source.
Two years ago, while opening my mail, I found a surprising invitation. Would I come to Tennessee to talk about the Gospel of Thomas—one of 52 ancient texts that scholars call the “Gnostic gospels”—in a class called “Education for Ministry,” with prisoners on death row in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution?
I thought of that letter last week when I heard that the same prison had tried and failed to execute a woman, Christa Pike, after she had spent more than 30 years on death row in Tennessee for a brutal murder she’d committed at the age of 18.
The letter came from the Reverend Joseph Ingle, who’d first volunteered for prison ministry as a student at Union Theological Seminary in 1972. Since then, he has devoted more than five decades to working with incarcerated people and advocating for prison reform. He explained that members of a men’s class he was teaching, hearing that I’d written a book about the Gospel of Thomas, had asked him to invite me to discuss it with them.
I went with Alan, my husband, to Tennessee in the fall. After checking in with multiple forms of identification and being searched for weapons, we entered the maximum-security wing through a maze of steel doors and razor-wired walkways. The class was sponsored by the Episcopal bishops of Tennessee, and we were accompanied by Kevin Riggs, a pastor whom Joe was mentoring. Recently, a trauma therapist had advised Joe to stop what he’s been doing for decades: visiting and making friends with these men, who would then ask him to witness their execution. Such a practice is inimical to sanity. Joe is now 80, and he invariably refers to execution as “killing.” As he told us, even the death certificates for state executions refer to them as “homicides.” Shortly before we met him, Joe had published his most recent book, Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned Inside the Southern Killing Machine.
Inside, Unit 2 looked just as such places tend to in movies: a gallery above with about 14 cells, and more below. We entered an open space where about a dozen chairs had been arranged in a circle for the class. Behind the chairs were two iron cages; four prisoners filed inside, and the cages were locked. The other men walked in, most of them white, a few Black, dressed in loose, off-white jumpsuits and pale-yellow vests. After they welcomed us with formal handshakes and ready smiles, I walked over to the men in the cages and shook their hands through a square hole between the bars, though their wrists were shackled with chains.
A thin, intense Black man who had been incarcerated for several decades sat beside me and introduced himself. To protect his privacy I won’t name him here, but his cellmates called him “the Chaplain.” He had a large Bible on his knees and helped me find passages to quote for the class. During a break, he told me that the prison authorities used to update death-row prisoners every two weeks on how many days remained until their execution. This had recently been changed to a monthly notice—“as if we could forget,” he added.
Tennessee had a record of botching executions long before it failed to kill Christa Pike. At the time we visited, executions in the state had been halted for several years while lethal-injection protocols were investigated and updated. But everyone was well aware that a new administration was coming to Washington and would likely push for more executions. Although these men had been convicted of homicide, I was also aware of their dignity and individuality, as well as the warmth of their welcome.
I’d come to share with them what the Gospel of Thomas offers as secret teachings of Jesus: the conviction that human beings were created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–28). Someone asked the crucial question “What does that mean? What image?” The Bible’s creation story first tells how “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Yet, as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, this cannot refer to the light of the sun or the moon, because the Genesis story shows that these had not yet been created. Instead, Jesus interprets that primordial light as an image of the divine energy that originated at the beginning of time and brought forth the whole universe—galaxies and stars, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, and human beings. Jesus also speaks of himself as embodying that energy: “I am the light that is before all creation; I am all things. Everything came forth from me, and everything returns to me. Split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift up a rock, and you will find me there.”
Whereas the New Testament’s Gospel of John declares that Jesus alone is “the light of the world,” the Gospel of Thomas says instead that whether we know it or not, every one of us comes from that same divine Source. The “image of God” hidden deep within each of us, Jesus says, is “light”—that is, divine energy that connects every one of us with the divine Source from which we all come.
And yet, when asked “Who are you?,” we ordinarily answer with our first and last names, and whatever else identifies us—gender, date and place of birth, ethnicity, address. We respond with everything that makes me different from you and from everyone else, with what we might call our “personality,” our social self, fabricated in the world.
In the Gospel of Thomas, however, Jesus speaks differently of our spiritual identity. Here, he says, “You will find the kingdom; for you are from it, and to it you will return.” Then he adds, “If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’ say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light first came into being.’ If they say to you, ‘Who are you?’ say, ‘We are children of the light … We are the chosen of the Living Father,’” like Jesus himself. Instead of referring to any one specific person, this is who “we”—all of us—are.
Yet because this connection between our ordinary self and the Source of all life is not obvious, not on the surface, many of us live in oblivion and feel as if we are in a nightmare, isolated, lonely, and terrified. Those who live that way live in fear, poised to attack and perhaps even kill other people. How, then, do we find our spiritual potential? We must look for it, searching within to discover who we really are, because, as Jesus says, “you come from it, and to it you shall return.” Nevertheless, he warns that those who seek within themselves likely will encounter resistance, feel troubled and distressed, then astonished, when they find what they do not expect—a hidden link that connects us to one another, and to the divine.
The Gospel of Thomas teaches that this experience of discovering the deeper self is not a matter of what we believe or don’t believe; nor is it a matter of who we are, or what we have done or not done. Rather, it teaches that every one of us has the potential to discover our connection with the Source of life, even in the deepest solitude.
It was because of this message that I went to speak to the men on death row—people who are treated as if they deserve to be caged and killed because they have been identified for decades only by the worst things they have done. Only model prisoners were allowed to take the class. Horrifying as the crimes—most of them committed in youth—were, the men we met many decades later had changed.
Alan later wrote about what we found during those hours of conversation in Riverbend: “Some of these men seemed to have connected with their deepest selves, despite, or perhaps through, the crucible of their circumstances.” Although we had entered “expecting darkness, agitation, and chaos, that is not what we found.” Instead, he described “the light in the faces of the men, coming powerfully from them, that surprised me for its equanimity and grace.”
This is by no means an endorsement of the purpose or conditions of such incarceration or of the death penalty. Rather, it testifies to the truth of which the Gnostic-gospel sources speak. And when we left Riverbend, the Chaplain, despite the imminence of his appointment with death, was joyful as he embraced us, and the others thanked us, and there were tears and gratitude on all sides—theirs and ours.