Bob, I think I understand what you are saying about Jesus, but you are throwing in a "born again" aspect that your may believe in, and which may comfort you. That's great if it makes you happy, but I don't believe it is original to Jesus' teachings or how he viewed the world.
Here is a little blurb from an analysis of Thomas' Gospel, which is the one I was referring to before someone else suggested Luke. This first part is by Princeton professor of religion Elaine Pagels, and moves on to another theologian. I think the emphasis Jesus put of self knowledge is extremely important. I don't find anything here about being born again, and as I said before, I don't believe this experience is necessary in order to consider oneself a Christian:
Some of these sayings
are familiar. We know them from Matthew and Luke - Jesus said, "I have
come to cast fire on the earth." Or "Behold, a sower went out to sow," and
so forth.... Others are as strange and compelling as Zen koans. My favorite
of these is saying number 70, which says, "If you bring forth what is within
you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." The gospel opens
as Jesus invites people to see....
The Gospel of Thomas also suggests that Jesus is aware of, and criticizing
the views of the Kingdom of God as a time or a place that appear in the
other gospels. Here Jesus says, "If those who lead you say to you, 'look, the
Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds will get there first. If they say 'it's in the
ocean,' then the fish will get there first. But the Kingdom of God is within you
and outside of you. Once you come to know yourselves, you will become
known. And you will know that it is you who are the children of the living
father."
In this gospel, and this is also the case in the Gospel of Luke, the Kingdom
of God is not an event that's going to be catastrophically shattering the world
as we know it and ushering in a new millennium. Here, as in Luke 17:20, the
Kingdom of God is said to be an interior state; "It's within you," Luke says.
And here it says, "It's inside you but it's also outside of you." It's like a state
of consciousness. It's hard to describe. But the Kingdom of God here is
something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means
knowledge. But itdoesn't mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two
words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of
physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like "I know that
person, or do you know so and so." So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you
could call it insight. It's a question of knowing who you really are, not at the
ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But
knowing yourself at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know
yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will
discover that the divine is within you.
The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas does appear rather different from the
Jesus we encounter in the others. Because the Gospel of Mark, for example,
depicts Jesus as an utterly unique being. This is the good news of Jesus of
Nazareth, the Son of God. The Gospel of John says that Jesus isn't even a
human being at all, but he's a divine presence who comes down to heaven in
human shape.... The Gospel of John says, "God sent his son into the world
to save the world." If you believe in him, you're saved, if you don't believe in
him you're already damned, because you haven't believed in the name of the
only begotten Son of God.
Now, [in the Gospel of Thomas], this Jesus comes to reveal that you and he
are, if you like, twins.... And what you discover as you read the Gospel of
Thomas, which you're meant to discover, is that you and Jesus at a deep
level are identical twins. And that you discover that you are the child of God
just as he is. And so that at the end of the gospel Jesus speaks to Thomas
and says, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I will
become that person, and the mysteries will be revealed to him." Here, Jesus
does not take the role of authority and teacher. In the Gospel of Thomas, the
disciples say to Jesus, "Tell us, what do you want us to do? How shall we
pray? What shall we eat? How shall we fast?" Now if you look at Matthew
and Luke, Jesus answers the questions. He says, "When you pray, say, 'Our
Father who are in Heaven, hallowed be...' When you fast, wash your face,
don't make a show of it. When you give alms do it privately and without
being showy." In this gospel, this Jesus does not answer. He says, "Do not
tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for everything is known before
heaven." Now this answer throws you and me upon ourselves.... Here Jesus,
in effect, turns one toward oneself, and that is really one of the themes of the
Gospel of Thomas, that you must go in a sort of a spiritual quest of your own
to discover who you are, and to discover really that you are the child of God
just like Jesus.
Helmut Koester:
John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and Winn Professor of
Ecclesiastical History Harvard Divinity School
One of these documents [found at Nag Hammadi] begins with the scribal
note in the margin, "The Gospel According to Thomas." And the first
sentence of that document says, "These are the secret words which the living
Jesus taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote down." And then they
start a total of over 110 sayings, each introduced by "Jesus said...." Some of
those sayings have parallels in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
Some of these have not. Some of these sayings may go back to a very early
period of Christianity, some of them may have been added later. The
document itself comes from the fourth century.... As with all gospel text, with
this one in particular, we have to remember that these texts were fluid, that
scribes could add, that scribes could leave out things, that scribes could add
comments, or add an interpretation. So we cannot with certainty reconstruct
what did the Gospel of Thomas look like around the year 100 or earlier. But
it is very likely that it existed at that time, and that a good deal of the material
that's now in that manuscript was already in a Greek manuscript that dates
back to the first century. Which of course, is very exciting because here we
have a collection of sayings of Jesus, additional sayings of Jesus, that were
not known before, and the whole beginning of a new field of studies has
opened up....
Now what is typical about these sayings is that in each instance, these
sayings want to say that if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have
to recognize yourself. You have to know yourself, know who you are. It
begins with a saying about the Kingdom of God, "if you seek the Kingdom
of God in the sky then the birds will precede you. And if you seek it in the
sea, then the fish will precede you, but the Kingdom is in you. And if you
know yourself then you know the Kingdom of God." (The Kingdom of the
Father, in fact, it always says in the gospel of Thomas. Normally the
Kingdom of the Father, not the Kingdom of God.) "But if you don't know
yourself, you live in poverty." And poverty is understood as the ignorance of
a life in its physical existence. Knowledge is understood to be the knowledge
of one's divine origin, of the fact that one has come from the Kingdom. That
we are on this earth only in a sojourn....
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