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Luke has Jesus warn that days are coming when the disciples will long to see and will not see. The Gospel of Thomas opens the warning the same way but ends it with seeking Jesus and not finding him, which is how John puts it.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Luke 17:22
New Testament
20 Now at one point the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was coming, so he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is in your midst.” 22 Then he said to the disciples, “The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. 23 Then people will say to you, ‘Look, there he is!’ or ‘Look, here he is!’ Do not go out or chase after them.
John 7:34
New Testament
32 The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things about Jesus, so the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. 33 Then Jesus said, “I will be with you for only a little while longer, and then I am going to the one who sent me. 34 You will look for me but will not find me, and where I am you cannot come.” 35 Then the Jewish leaders said to one another, “Where is he going to go that we cannot find him? He is not going to go to the Jewish people dispersed among the Greeks and teach the Greeks, is he? 36 What did he mean by saying, ‘You will look for me but will not find me, and where I am you cannot come’?”
Gospel of Thomas 1:38
Nag Hammadi
37 His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us, and when shall we see you?” Jesus said, “When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your garments and place them under your feet like little children and trample them, then you will see the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.” 38 Jesus said, “Many times you have desired to hear these sayings that I am speaking to you, and you have no one else from whom to hear them. There will be days when you will seek me and will not find me.” 39 Jesus said, “The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge and have hidden them. They have not entered, nor have they permitted those who want to enter to do so. But you—be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
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Notes and References
“... 38.2 Days are coming when you will seek after me but will not find me. For ‘days are coming’, cf. also GTh 79.3. This statement has a parallel among the canonical Gospels in Lk. 17.22 (‘Days are coming when you will … but will not …’). It is possible that Thomas or a previous tradition has here replaced Luke’s repetitious verbs of seeing (… ἰδεῖν … ὄψεσθε) with the seeking/finding language. This divergence from Luke is paralleled in John 7.34: ζητήσετέ με καὶ οὐχ εὑρήσετέ [με], which corresponds very closely to the second half of GTh 38.2 (cf. also Prov. 1.28). ...”
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