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Gospel of Thomas · 57 of 114 · tr. Thomas O. Lambdin

Logion 57

Jesus said, "The kingdom of the father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, 'I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.' For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned."
Themes
Anthropomorphismtheology

Attributing human characteristics, emotions, or form to the divine; embodied divine imagery.

The Kingdom of the Father is depicted through the human imagery of a man farming and speaking to his servants.

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Cosmic Dualismtheology

Ontological opposition between two primal principles (light/darkness, truth/lie, spirit/matter) as the fundamental structure of reality.

The narrative structure relies on the opposition between the good seed/man and the enemy/weeds as competing forces within the world.

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Divine Providencetheology

Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.

The man's decision to wait until the harvest to remove weeds demonstrates divine ordering of events toward an intelligible end without premature intervention.

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Paradox As Teachingethics

Using apparent contradiction, reversal, or riddle to destabilise ordinary understanding and induce insight.

The instruction to allow weeds to grow alongside wheat contradicts ordinary agricultural logic, serving as a counter-intuitive teaching device.

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Eschatological Judgmentsoteriology

Final, collective cosmic judgment as an event in which the wicked are sentenced and the cosmos restored; distinct from psychopomp_journey (individual passage at death) and emphasising verdict where Zoroastrian frashokereti emphasises restoration.

[auto] The passage explicitly describes a final harvest where weeds are separated and burned, representing the collective cosmic judgment of the wicked.

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