Ask, Seek, Knock

I just discovered that this line from the Bible in Matthew 7:7-8 which I quoted earlier is often referred to shorthand as “Ask, Seek, Knock”:

    (7) Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. (8) For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

That reminded me in turn of the 2nd saying in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas which says:

    2. Jesus said, “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.

Fantastic Planet has some commentary on this saying. Also, check out this wonderful resource I just found. It’s GospelofThomas.com and has not only excellent commentary from both scholars and visitors, but also various translations. I rather like the following interpretation of this line from Thomas, left by a visitor to that site named Crimson731:

    There is an old saying in science that “The more I know, the more I learn I don’t know.” The Gospel writer is telling us that Jesus understood eternity in this way. Seek an answer, don’t give up; you will find one. However, when you do, you will be astonished to learn that the answer you seek is not an end in and of itself; it only leads you to ten more questions; seek those answers; for each answer there is ten more questions and on and on and on. Eventually, you will get it–there is no end to questions, to life, to God. To know this truly inspires wonder.

It relates very much to what I was saying about exploring religion from the perspective of a search engine technology in a previous post. Anyway, there’s some other decent interpretations of this saying on that site also. This also relates directly to one of my favorite quotes of all time by Alan Moore. This part is prefaced by him saying that there’s no such thing as a false religion, just like there’s no such thing as a false language. He relates “magic” as being the “linguistics” of religion:

    To some degree, I take the quantum position that ALL of them are right in a sense. In order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic, in this sense, is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. … And you follow these chains of ideas. You do that long enough, you start a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. And you start to see things in a different way. You start to put things together differently.’

This Gospel of Thomas site as has a really handy feature which shows you parallels in other gnostic gospels as well as mainstream Christian ones and other sources. It made me realize that the G of T actually has an even closer parallel to Matthew 7:7-8, in saying 94

    Jesus [said], “One who seeks will find, and to [one who knocks] it will be opened.”

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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on January 17, 2005 at 8:48 pm.

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