Thank you so much for your reply!
I despised that movie, I have to say - stories about the eeeevil Catholic church suppressing some revelatory theological truth get really old after a while.
No kidding. Seems like many of the scripts out of Hollywood want to paint the bad guy as religious. I'm very glad that Mel Gibson is bucking the trend!
That doesn't surprise me. As the Thomas FAQ suggests, the perspective of the text is a sort of lite-beer version of gnosticism - basically, that the Kingdom of Heaven is all around us, if only we can open our eyes to it, and not in some otherworldly place. An interesting perspective, to be sure, but not exactly orthodox.
I'm certainly not "orthodox" - but I am clearly Fundamentalist Christian because I know the Bible is inerrant. But I find my reading is sometimes out of sync with my brothers and sisters in the Lord, whatever their denominational stripe (which is plenty ok for reasons I've offered several times before.) Yours is an example. As I mentioned at 2177, I see the firmament as the separation between the spiritual realm and physical realm and not a geometric boundary (space/time.) Hence, I find myself largely in agreement with that statement as Spiritual truth, that the spiritual realm is co-existent.
I do not however see the Kingdom of God as arrived - the Lord's Prayer and the book of Revelation, etc. indicate that all that is not the name of God (person, character, etc.) must be culled before His Kingdom comes.
I do hope you get a chance to read the Pseudepigrapha. It’s in two volumes, edited by Charlesworth. With each ancient text, they go through language, history, provenance, theological importance, relationship to canonical books and apocryphal books and so much more.