The writing of: THE LAST LETTERS OF JESUS

It could be said that the historical Jesus, the Jew on whom the Christian myth is based, has been hopelessly obscured by the teachings of the church. We are all familiar with the typical Hollywood depiction of Jesus as a Jewish peasant permanently overdosed on diazepam. In every painful scene, dripping with faux sentiment, the obligatory dramatic over annunciation strips the character of Jesus of all nuance or subtlety of meaning.

Unfortunately, the Greek and Roman misconceptions of first century Jewish culture, which inform the Gospels, have gone unchallenged for two thousand years. The narrative and miracle stories draw a cartoon picture of Palestine. Divorced of Jewish context, they make it impossible for the reader to comprehend the significance of many parts of the story or the implication of Jesus’ words.

It is true that the novel, ‘The Last Letters of Jesus’ is a work of historical fiction and for it to work, before anything else, it had to be a thrilling read. Readers of Bernard Cornwell and the Sharpe series will recognise the style of writing. However, paradoxically it is through the medium of fiction that a more realistic picture is presented. Based firmly on modern biblical criticism and archaeology, the book sets out to allow the reader to viscerally experience the reality of first century Judea.

In defence of my position and by way of an example, the Gospels imply one Jewish country ruled by Herod Antipas who governed in tandem with the Romans. As with the Old Testament, the New Testament maintains that there is only one kind of Judaism, one that was based on the cult of animal sacrifice. Trying to understand Jesus within this paradigm is like trying to understand the Second World War set against the idea of a politically and religiously united Europe.

The Sea of Galilee and the fertile hills around the Jezreel Valley were at the heart of the Kingdom of Israel; for most of its history, the city of Shechem was its religious and political capital.

Judea in the south, on the other hand, was for most of its history a waterless and barren backwater.

After the Assyrian destruction of Israel in 722 BC, of necessity, Jewish refugees fleeing south slowly turned Jerusalem into a city.

The idea of Jerusalem being the centre of the Israeli nation is a third century Judean myth that is simply not supported by the evidence. Galilee was widely Hellenised and cosmopolitan while Judea was essentially a fundamentalist theocracy.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, most serious biblical scholars have recognised that the ‘Sayings’ of Jesus come from a common source of Hebrew teachings. These ‘Sayings’ were used by the Synoptic evangelists to salt their miracle and narrative stories. Read chronologically, the stories directly reflect the evolution of Pauline Christology in the early church. Paradoxically the Pauline narrative stories contradict the philosophy of the ‘Sayings’ themselves.

It is extremely likely that the Nazarenes were Galilean. We know that they believed that the Judeans had forged the Torah. They opposed the Judean cult of animal sacrifice, were vegetarian and focused their practice on ritual purity and prayer. This Nazarene philosophical paradigm is alive today in Lurianic Kabbalah and is accepted as a legitimate expression of Jewish thought.

The book, ‘The Last Letters of Jesus’, brings these separate facts and animates them into a coherent story. This approach allows the reader to explore what might have happened in reality that could have given rise to the obvious myths that surround the life and death of the historical Jesus. 

Useful Links: 

• Luke 23:7
• 1 Kings – Abijah, Hezekiah
• Professor Israel Finkelstein – The Lost Kingdom of Israel
• Dr. Steven DiMattei – El vs Yahweh – contradictions in the Bible
• Epiphanius of Salamis – Panarion
• Keith Akers – The lost religion of Jesus and Burton L Mack – The Q-Source
• Hyam Maccoby: Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
• Herbet Marsh: 1801 – A dissertation on the Origin and Composition of our Three First Canonical Gospels
• Bart D Ehrman: How Jesus became God

Is the Bible fact or fiction? Yes!

The problem many people have is that the Jesus in the New Testament makes very little sense. The image of an anti-Semitic Jew on a donkey driving two hundred thousand people out of a temple with a knotted piece of string was obviously never meant to be history. The Synoptic Q-Source and the extra-biblical Q-Source leave us with many sayings that are almost impossible to understand if all we have of Jewish history is the New Testament.

When Jesus said ‘Judeans’ did he mean all Jews? What was his problem with Pharisees? Why disrupt the animal sacrifices? Why teach in the wilderness?

Unfortunately, the Old Testament fares little better with talking donkeys, genocidal wars and genital mutilation. History, archaeology and common sense would suggest caution when we approach these books. The Old Testament speaks of Jerusalem as the centre of a Davidic Kingdom, which stretched from Egypt to Damascus. There was only one legitimate form of Jewish religion and the books suggest that all the ills that befall the Jewish people are due to some ‘Failure’ of worship within this cult of animal sacrifice.

I would suggest that to understand what the historical Jesus might have meant and what might have been actually happening, you have to understand his past from his point of view.

Imagine, if you will, that America is attacked by China and its people seek refuge in England. Over hundreds of years it might become expedient to unite northern Europeans, both American and English, against the Asian threat. A scribe in England begins to rewrite history, downplaying the importance of America and creating a narrative where London is the centre of the world and the English church ruled over the historical kingdom of America of which England was the centre. In this narrative all the presidents were idiots and God punishes them for their failings as Anglican Christians. The legends and memories used by the scribe are based on truth but they are twisted to mean something new, which advances this English/European agenda and justifies the authority of London over all northern Europeans.

Israel was like America is now. It was based in the fertile north of Palestine and was big enough to be an Egyptian headache. Judea was an insignificant and barren wasteland centred around the village of Jerusalem (Ref 1). Israel was centred around Shechem and it was to Shechem that Davidic Kings went to be crowned (Ref 2).

Judea and Israel had coexisted for centuries. When the Assyrians invaded Israel in the north, the Israeli refugees fled to Jerusalem and we see a village with one water source explode into a city. The refugees bring with them their stories both written and oral. After the return from Babylon a movement toward unifying the Jewish people begins within the Judean elite (Ref 3).

The stories of the Israelis were spun to create the myth of Judean supremacism and a justification for Jerusalem and its Theocracy to assume authority over all Jews everywhere. It was through the appropriation of the Davidic legend that this was achieved.

Some religious movements within the Jewish people resented and rejected what they saw as the subversion of their religion, history and culture. We know from several contemporary sources that the Nazarenes rejected the Judean view, their forged books of Moses and the cult of animal sacrifice (Ref 4). When Jesus is reported as saying ‘Judeans’ it is very likely that he did actually mean, Judeans and not Jews as a whole. When he disrupted the Temple Sacrifices, it makes no sense to think he suddenly got upset about the money – this Judean cult had been running for 500 years.

In the book ‘The Last Letters of Jesus’ we get to see the temple from the Israeli perspective. It is very likely that the Judean cult of animal sacrifice was as offensive to the Nazarenes as it is to us. Suddenly many of the most obscure sayings of Jesus in the Q-Source start to make sense (Ref 5). The stories, legends and histories of the Jewish people are remarkably accurate covering, as they do, thousands of years but just like any history written at third hand, a long time after the fact, the Bible stories reflect the bias and agenda of the writer and in the case of most of the Old Testament, the bias and agenda was principally Judean. The fact that the New Testament utterly mistakes the context and implication of the words of Jesus is further proof that the New Testament was almost entirely written by Greeks and Romans (Ref 6).

References:

1. A Great United Monarchy? Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, in: R.G. Kratz and H. Spieckermann eds. 2010. One God – One Cult – One Nation: Archaeological and Biblical Perspectives. Berlin (2010): 3-28.
2. 1 Kings 12-13.
3. Prof Israel Finkelstein: The forgotten Kingdom – the archaeology and history of northern Israel.
4. Epiphanius of Salamis: The Panarion.
5. Burton L Mack: The Q-Source.
6. Bart D. Ehrman: How Jesus became God.

With thanks to http://www.bible.ca/archeology/bible-archeology-altar-of-joshua.htm For the two photos.

What are you looking for – a map or an instruction manual?

Both the advocates for religion, people like Ravi Zacharias, and those against it, people like Richard Dawkins, tend to focus exclusively on the scriptures. This has always struck me as somewhat strange, as though the written words themselves actually prove anything. I’ve always wondered what people are expecting to find in the written word? Just saying ‘it is written’ is meaningless. Ancient graffiti is ample evidence that for the last three thousand years most people have had access to literacy.

So this begs the question, ‘what are you hoping to find in scriptures? Are you looking for a map or an instruction manual?’

What do I mean by that?

Recently, I’ve noticed that long car journeys are a little like life. There are two kinds of drivers, some love the freedom and love to explore. They will take the time to look around and will be able to tell you about the journey and the things they have seen. They take a map but only use it to inform their own journey – it is their own journey that they are interested in.

The other kind of driver just wants to be told what to do; they listen to their GPS navigation system and when it says turn right, by crikey they are going to turn right – sometimes with disastrous results.

Living life from an instruction manual often means that, by the time you arrive at your destination, you have learnt very little from your journey. For this kind of traveller, only the destination is important.

For example, when I was a boy driving in cities terrified me. Finding my way and trying to make sense of a map was hard but over the years I got to know the city very well. A few years ago I abdicated responsibility and started to use the GPS navigation system. Now I have no fear. I have driven through the heart of Barcelona for years. The price of this confidence and absence of fear is ignorance. If you asked me how to get to the Rambla, I would not be able to tell you. This observation has to beg the question, which is more important the journey or the destination?

It is evident that many religious people look to their scriptures to be somewhat like a GPS system – they want to be told what to do. They want to be in the right lane, they want to be saved. If you asked them why they felt justified to kill or sacrifice an animal they just look at you blankly and quote a passage of scripture. They mistake the map for the terrain; they look to abdicate spiritual responsibility for their own life to the words of a book.

Modern archaeology has proven that Jewish history is so much more complicated and beautiful than the Bible would suggest (Finkelstein). The Jesus family tomb would seem to cast doubt on the whole resurrection idea (Talpiot). Why shouldn’t we just throw the Bible away? I would posit that it depends on whether you are looking for a map or an instruction manual. If the Torah and the Tanakh are maps and clues from our past, as most Jews believe, then we are not looking for them to be a substitute for our own journey. We do not, as Dale Allen Hoffman so eloquently said, ‘mistake the map for the actual terrain’.

So what is more important to you, the journey or the destination? Judaism believes the journey is the most important thing, as did the historical Jesus (Burton Mack: Q-Source). Buddhism is thinking two destinations ahead and desperately trying to escape this world and Christianity is busy selling tickets to the tunnel. So which is the right way for you? I guess it depends on whether you are looking for a Map or an Instruction Manual. Come to that, can you tell the difference between the map and the terrain?

Some people follow a religion all their lives, or one after another, and tell themselves and everyone else who will listen that they are ‘saved’. Often the people who know them best will tell you that they have not grown spiritually or emotionally one millimetre in their entire lifetime. People insist that ‘their God is better than yours’ – they are convinced that they are in the right lane because their sacred text, or more accurately, their interpretation of it, tells them so. They use this certainty of their destination as an excuse to pay absolutely no attention to how they live their lives.

Oh! By the way, if it’s of any use to you, a rule of thumb that I’ve learnt to apply to any scripture is simply this; do these texts increase the division between the world and me or is it the opposite? My own feeling is that if God is the life and animator of all things then if I am going in the right direction the divisions between (me) and (other) should be dissolving. If on the other hand my sense of self is hardening, I know that I’m going in the wrong direction.

A litmus test you can have fun with is a simple question that is common to most religions. Ask yourself, ‘is it now and has it ever been spiritually legitimate to sacrifice an innocent living being’? If you have to refer to the instruction manual to answer that question then you may be more lost than you think – turn off the GPS and look where you’re bloody going!

 

Two Gods and Two Countries

The recent religiously motivated massacre in Orlando, Florida, is a sad reminder of the dangers of trying to find absolute truth in the written word. All books, without exception, are only shadows of the minds of the people who write them. Whatever motivations or inspiration a person may or may not have had at the time of writing are only faintly echoed within the text itself. It is important that we use our common sense when we read any written text except when it comes to reading a religious work it becomes a matter of life and death, as we see today on a regular basis.

We know from contemporary evidence that prior to the middle of the first millennium a large proportion of Israelis believed that the Judeans had forged the books of Moses (Ref 1). The Old Testament paints a picture of a single united Jewish people. The overall narrative is that Abraham, Moses and then the Prophets advocated the God Yahweh and his cult of animal sacrifice. The Judean Priestly Theocracy insisted that all national calamities were due to some ‘failing’ in the Jewish people or due to their general lack of enthusiasm for the Judean blood cult. Jerusalem was the Davidic Capital and centre of the world. To be fair, sometimes a lie is told for the best of reasons and it is possible that this lie was told to protect the people, to unite them in the face of Babylonian invasion and exile.

Unfortunately, after a hundred years of archaeology we can now see that this Judean narrative is not supported by physical reality. Galilee and the north of the country were always the most prosperous and densely populated areas (Ref 2). Shechem and Megiddo were the major cities and it was in Shechem that Davidic Kings were crowned (Ref 3). It was the Northern God ‘El’ that gave Israel its name (Ref 4) and unlike Yahweh He was viewed as discarnate and eternal rather than anthropomorphically. Worship of El involved His feminine aspect Asherah and gifts of olive oil and incense were offered on the mountaintops and wild groves (Ref 5). Until the Assyrian invasion destroyed Israel, Jerusalem was only a small village in the godforsaken barren hills of Judea (Ref 6). The Judean nationalistic fantasy, post Babylonian return, fundamentally changed the nature of God to follow the Babylonian model of Marduk (Ref 7).

This false narrative has ensured that the actual sayings of Jesus became almost impossible to understand and this confusion between El and Yahweh, between Judean and Israeli religious understanding has led to some of the worst atrocities the world has ever known (Ref 8). The Galilean movements, which included the Essenes and Nazarenes rejected animal sacrifice, avoided eating meat, practiced ritual purity and believed that prayer was a personal and solitary affair were in opposition to the Judean Theocracy (Ref 9). The fact that the Gospels do not understand this dichotomy but follow the false narrative of Rabbinical Judaism certainly attests to their creation by Romans and Greeks much later than previously thought.

The power of the priests was weakened when first the Greeks and then the Romans invaded. By the time of Jesus a Jewish Palestinian religious reformation was finally possible (Ref 10). In this context of religious fundamentalism and political nationalism, many of the sayings of Jesus suddenly make sense. His blockade of the Temple and his execution shortly after becomes a desperate Israeli attempt to stop the horror of animal sacrifice. After the death of Jesus (Maran Yeshua) his brother James became the Rabbi to the Nazarene Yeshiva (Ref 11). After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the Judean Pharisees evolved into Rabbinical Judaism and Israeli religious belief went underground – eventually to become Lurianic Kabbalah.

Which vision better reflects the words of Jesus – a vision of God as being everything and a father to all life or a capricious God that will destroy cities on a whim? A God that demands sacrifice or a God that desires love. He cannot possibly be both. The historical Jesus taught an Israeli vision, which was later obscured by a nationalistic Jewish narrative. The situation was made worse by the emergence of a pagan cult intoxicated by its own ignorance and made blind by its own arrogance (Ref 12). In the face of such propaganda, it is vital that we read the Bible with the utmost care and use, to the best of our ability, our God-given common sense (Ref 13).

References

1. Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion
2. Professor Israel Finkelstein – the Bible Unearthed
3. Old Testament – 2 Kings
4. Merneptah Stele and Genesis 32
5. Genesis 33:20 and Judges 9:46
6. Professor Israel Finkelstein – the Bible Unearthed
7. Professor R. Reed Lessing – Yahweh versus Marduk
8. Blackman, E.C. Marcion and His Influence 2004 ISBN 978-1-59244-731-2
9. Keith Akers – The Lost Religion of Jesus
10. Professor Israel Finkelstein – the Bible Unearthed
11. Josephus – Antiquities of the Jews and Acts
12. Eusebius – Ecclesiastical History
13. Rav Abraham Kook – The pangs of cleanings

There’s more than one kind of Jew

In the first century, Judea’s days were numbered and after the first Jewish-Roman war ended in 73 AD the Romans were fast running out of patience. The Bar-Kokhba revolt of 132-136 AD sealed its fate. The Judean people were scattered over the face of the known world. Jewish nationalism and xenophobia turned inward and whispered quietly to itself in a language it hoped that no one else would understand. (Ref 1)

The group we now call ‘Pharisees’ became Rabbinical Judaism and over the next one and a half millennia, the Rabbis brainwashed their own people and the world into thinking that there was only ever one legitimate form of Judaism and everything else was ‘idolatry’ and ‘filthy fornication’ – a childish and lazy slander but nevertheless effective. Just as Christians silence any suggestion of their Jewish roots with a Pavlovian shout of ‘Legalism!’ So too do Jews recoil from any suggestion that Jesus was in fact a Jew. (Ref 2)

Unpalatable as it may be to some, but the truth is that prior to the cataclysmic events of the first century, common Jewish religious belief had stubbornly resisted the religious fanaticism of its own elites. I believe that the historical Jesus was a part of a popular religious movement and an Israeli religious school, which was firmly based in a uniquely Jewish vision of the universe and that this vision has survived hidden within the secret texts of Kabbalah to this day. Further, it is my contention that there is a relationship between the original Israeli understanding of God expressed in the images of ‘El’ and ‘Asherah’ and its modern counterpart in the eternal God and the Shekinah spoken of within modern Lurianic Kabbalah. (Ref 3)

So why would I say such a thing? Modern Jewish thought and in particular several prominent Rabbis teach a vision of God, which is without form and beyond all thought. Rabbi David Aaron, when speaking to liberal atheists, is fond of saying, “the God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either!” The horrific and violent Yahweh of the Torah is neatly sidestepped with the simple literary device of asserting that the stories don’t mean what they say they mean. A sensible but somewhat cowardly and disingenuous retort. But what if there is a deeper story hidden behind this paradox? What if, with the fall of the Jewish homeland and the rise of Rabbinical Judaism, it became too dangerous to express any vision antithetical to the opinion of the victorious Pharisees. What if the Israeli vision of God had to be hidden in order to protect it from the Judean elites? (Ref 4)

The ‘official’ story is that after the death of King Solomon, just after the turn of the first millennium BC, the tribes of Benjamin and Judah split from Israel and returned to Jerusalem, the  capital in the south. Inexplicably they renamed their country Judah . Obviously this is propaganda for a Judean supremacism that didn’t arise until the late eighth century.

The archaeology and third party texts indicate that Israel had always been a powerful kingdom in the north, while Judah had always been a ‘one horse town’ with one water source in the south. Around this time the Judeans rejected ‘El’ of Isra EL and adopted a new form of God. (Ref 5)

Yahweh was the mirror image of Marduk, a cosmic superman. This new Judean God was frighteningly capricious, prone to bouts of senseless anger, jealously and murderous rage. Where ‘El’ was without form and everything, Yahweh was a physical being. Yahweh was originally represented anthropomorphically. Where ‘El’ created through ‘word’ (Bara), Yahweh fashions with his hands (Yeser). (Ref 6)

The worship of El and Asherah was focused on the mountaintops and wild groves, not in temples. Incense and olive oil was offered on a stone pillar. Asherah is represented to this day by the Menorah, describing as it does the unity and common source of all life. As God could not be grasped or seen by mortal man, angels were the messengers of El. El appeared to Moses as a light supported on the wings of angels. From the time of Jacob, the worship of El had been at Shechem in the north of the Jewish homeland. (Ref 7)

“The hosts of Heaven” is a euphemism for the study of phases of the moon and the procession of the Zodiac through the agricultural year. Internal textual and external archaeological evidence indicate that the original religious belief of the Jewish people was expressed within the images and ideas surrounding the God ‘El’ and an understanding of the hosts of heaven.

To summarise, I believe that this ‘Elohist’ vision of God as the ‘All’ and ‘Disincarnate’ within which all life is united was possibly one of the oldest and most popular among the common Jewish people, as we have seen in my ‘True Sayings of Jesus’ lecture series, the teachings of Jesus only make sense in the context of the Elohist religious framework.

I suspect that after the murder of Ya’akob, the brother of Rav Yeshua, in the Temple in Jerusalem, this popular Israeli Yeshiva went underground and eventually resurfaced in the twelfth century as, what we now call, Kabbalah.

Obviously, after fifteen hundred years the distinctions between Yahweh and El have been eroded to the point where they are virtually indistinguishable. Unfortunately, this leaves the forged stories of the Judeans inculcating the horrific Babylonian God Marduk with his anger and punishments that, to this day, are used by people all over the world to justify cruelty beyond imagination.

References:

1. Jewish texts were kept in Aramaic or Hebrew and many Jews spoke Yiddish in the home. One of the most important reasons a people maintain their own language is to prevent full integration with the host culture. The result of this is that most Gentiles are unaware of the inherent racism and xenophobia within Rabbinic culture. The Rabbinic belief is that the Jewish soul itself is inherently superior to that of a Goy.
2. The Talmud and Tanakh are divided on this issue. However, quotes where Goyim are denigrated are too legion to list here. Examples of the underlying contempt can be found all over the social media and in the news: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/galilee-church-where-jesus-fed-the-5000-gutted-in-arson-attack-31312157.html
3. Zohar (Beresheet A)
4. The study of Kabbalah was banned by Rabbinic law until the sixteenth century. All forms of meditation were and are frowned upon despite the fact that the Torah and Tanakh are full of references to altered states of consciousness. Conservative (Judean) Jews to this day look on the work of Kabbalists with contempt.
5. In particular I would recommend Dr Steven DiMattei’s work on ‘Contradictions in the Bible’. http://contradictionsinthebible.com/steven-dimattei/ – Genesis 33:20 Ya’akob builds a an altar to El – the God of Israel in Shechem – it is worth noting that El is a proper name. When the later Judean kings destroy what they call ‘idolatry’ it is the worship of El that they are destroying. The groves and high places where the people offered incense and libations, the Serpent Staff that God had given to Moses, all of these things were destroyed by the Judeans. Namely Hezekiah the son of Ahaz (2 Kings 18:4) and Josiah. It is interesting to note that no sooner do the Judean elites complete a religious persecution of El worship on the insistence of the priests than they are condemned for regressing back to the religion of their ancestors. Both Hezekiah and his son Abijah are accused of this as are most of the original ‘kings’.
6. The similarities between Yahweh and Marduk are too numerous to list here. If anyone is interested, a ten minute Google search will prove conclusive. As an example: “He (Marduk) shall be ‘Lord of All the Gods’. . . . No one among the gods shall (equal) to him. —Enuma Elish Tablet VI:141 and VII:14 “Our God is above all gods . . . God of gods . . . Lord of lords.” —Hebrew Bible, Psalm 135:5 and 136:2, 3 – I would recommend Edward Babinski’s excellent blog for a succinct list of similarities: http://edward-babinski.blogspot.com.es/2012/07/israel-and-babylons-high-gods-yahweh.html
7. The Northern Elohist vision was characterised by the visions of Ezekiel and Jacob – angels and mystic practice lead the aspirant to a direct relationship with El – the book the Sepher Yetzirah and the Zohar are perfect examples of the spiritual practices denounced by the Judean cult of animal sacrifice. The book called Yetzirah, which, it is believed, was available in first century Galilee inculcates an understanding of the Zodiac, Numerology and Mystic self-transformation.

What did Jesus really say? A logical textual analysis.

Before I go any further, I just want to make this clear; I am not saying anyone is wrong. Everyone says that their idea of “God” is right and unless you agree, you must be wrong. I am not going to waste my time and yours telling you something you probably won’t even hear. This blog is concerned with and discusses the words of a man not a God.

43,000 denominations of Christians in the world argue about who ‘Jesus’ was and interpret his story differently. Some people have even resorted to making up their own Gospels and put ‘better’ words in the mouth of ‘Jesus’. If you are the sort of person that needs to believe in the Cosmic Christ or you need to believe in nothing, you might want to stop reading here; you won’t like where I am going.

Assuming you are still with me, let’s put our ‘idols’ to one side and just look at the facts logically. Let’s look for the original teaching of the historical Jesus using textual criticism and biblical archaeology. This is not to say that anyone else’s view is wrong, I am just saying that I am not looking for the same things as they are. I am not looking for another ‘idol’; I am not looking for a ‘God’.

I am just looking to understand, if I can, the mind of the man that said,

“The Kingdom of God is within you”

if, indeed, he did?

Looking at the Gospels we notice that there are two kinds of exposition. There are a lot of ‘narrative stories’ and there are a series of ‘sayings’. Reading the Gospels horizontally, the narrative stories do not line up. They contradict each other and make factual errors in geography and culture. Once we look at the chronological sequence of the texts we have to accept that these stories were obviously written by people who did not know Palestine in the first century and did not understand Jewish culture. What does become glaringly obvious is that the narrative stories follow the evolution of ideas within the nascent Roman Church culminating in the Gospel of John. So rather than represent the unique and coherent vision of one man at one time, the ‘narrative stories’ are evidence of an evolution of a belief.

The sayings, however, do line up; the sayings are shared by the Synoptic Gospels and also with external texts. Revealing that they were copied from a common source. The source exhibits a particularly Hebrew world view and its syntax suggests an Aramaic and Hebrew origin. What it does offer is a coherent vision, as if from one man with a unique and profound philosophy.

What is most interesting is if we look at the ‘sayings’ from the point of view of meaning something dramatic happens. Look at the ‘sayings’ separate from the narrative stories, you will soon see that the philosophy expounded by the ‘sayings’ almost exactly contradicts the philosophy of the ‘narrative stories’.

The evolved Christian dogma of the ‘Narrative Stories’

1. We are creations of God and are separate from ‘him’ and each other
2. God’s love is conditional on our obedience and worship
3. Inherent nature of life is depraved and evil
4. The ‘elect’ through ‘belief’ find ‘salvation’ from a sinful world, while the rest of creation is damned
5. Our actions are irrelevant
6. Cosmic Christ as a sacrifice for sin

Original ‘Sayings’ dogma

1. We are all ONE with God and each other
2. God’s love is unconditional and eternal – we judge ourselves
3. Inherent nature of life is divine
4. Light of the Creator is constantly available to all – requiring only that we turn toward him
5. Our actions are vital to the evolution of the world
6. The most important thing about Rav Yeshua was his sayings

Don’t take my word for it – research the texts for yourself.

It seems sad to me that many of the ‘made-up’ Gospels of recent centuries, like the Gospel of the Holy Twelve and the Aquarian Gospel, while trying to reform the Church, ultimately cling to so much that is antithetical to the original sayings, like concepts of sacrifice and atonement, that they manage to refute themselves.

Just as Progressive Christians of today are fighting so hard to change the Pauline Church into their own image while ignoring the obvious fact that the philosophy inculcated within the original ‘sayings’ already gives them the affirmation they instinctively know they deserve.

Many people can only think in terms of the Cosmic Christ and that is fine for them. I cannot visualise the eternal in terms of a Native American Indian and that does not make me any less.

I offer these observations, only to gently suggest that for some of us there might be an alternative to Atheism, the Roman Church or Calvinistic Hell. From my research, I have concluded that just the ‘sayings’ alone will take me a lifetime to come to terms with and try to understand. I feel no need to add more.

 

Are you spiritually colour blind?

 

There are over 43,000 denominations of Christian in the world and each one believes and asserts that they alone have the truth. One would assume that 42,999 must be wrong! Muslims are instructed to convert or kill the world and it is a sentiment many non-Muslims seem to share. Why can’t we just concentrate on our own correction? The Buddhist model is primarily aimed at saving oneself but they see the world as a punishment, a prison to be escaped from. So for Christians, salvation is an ‘invitation only’ club while Buddhists concentrate on their own escape plan!

I suspect that for many, the problem might lay in the direction in which we look. Some people want to have their opinions handed to them. Life is a complicated and messy place where we know from practical experience that nothing is what it seems to be; it must therefore be a great comfort to believe verbatim whatever you are told to believe.

The Reverend Mark Driscoll put it very well when he usefully pointed out that yoga is satanic! He spoke for most Christians, I think, when he said, “We go OUT to Jesus, not IN toward God.” (I paraphrase).

The problem is that whatever you go ‘OUT’ to is ultimately a construction of your own mind. For Christians, Jesus becomes whatever they imagine him to be. If you are gay, Jesus loves gays. Conversely, if you hate gays, suddenly Jesus hates gays. ‘Jesus’ becomes an extension of the individual ego and as an extension of ones own ego; we feel that we must defend it violently. What ever you make into your own idol, it will only ever be a shadow of yourself.

Jewish teachings offer information about this life and as a fundamentally Jewish teaching, the sayings of Rav Yeshua, it is evident, are entirely focused on our own relationship with the world around us. His sayings are not easy to understand because in many ways, like an opticians colour blindness test, they depend on our ability to see clearly.

In the Ishihara colour blindness test, if you have eyes to see, what seems to be random and meaningless dots, quickly resolves into hidden brightly coloured numbers. According to Rav Yeshua, for some the ‘numbers’ hidden in his teachings resolve slowly. They may take a lifetime to become clear. Unfortunately, many lack the humility, patience and faith to wait.

Too many people just want to be told the number. Looking in the wrong direction they are effectively incapable of seeing the numbers for themselves. For this reason, many people are spiritually colour blind. For them the world is a hell to be escaped and sadly for others it is a meaningless accident.

In the past, at many Buddhist monasteries, a postulant would have to answer a paradoxical question in order to demonstrate their intuitive ability and to reveal their spiritual awareness prior to being admitted for training. “What is the sound of one hand clapping” is one of the most famous Koan questions.

I would respectfully suggest that if you need to find validation in ‘scripture’, if you need to be told what to think, or worst of all, if you feel an overwhelming urge to attack other people for their understanding of the Koan, then the teachings of the Nazarene Yeshiva might not be of much use to you at this point in your journey.

To get the most out of the book, “The True Sayings of Jesus,” you will need to be brutally honest with yourself and most of all, be patient and have faith that the answer will come. Your answer might not be the same as mine but that is fine too – your view, when shared in love, adds to the prosperity of the universe. The miracle is that when you look in the right direction, we are all connected to universe.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.”

He said, “What is the kingdom of God like? To what should I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard, which a man took and sowed in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

 

The Last Days in the Desert – A Review

Like many films about Jesus, ‘The Last Days in the Desert’ flirts with the humanity of the Christian God through the lexicon of his ‘Temptation in the desert’. Rodrigo Marquez, the son of the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom you will remember for his famous novel, ‘A hundred years of Solitude’, has produced an undoubtedly watchable piece of art. His film, The Last Days in the Desert, will be released this month in America and soon to follow in Spain. Unfortunately, the film tiptoes around the idea of ‘Jesus’ like a virgin on prom night. Marquez teases the audience with hints of, on the one hand, Jesus’ humanity and on the other of an implied divinity while never having the courage to confirm or deny either. Hedging his bets and toying with ‘Yeshua’ as the Hebrew original of the Greek Jesus, Marquez petulantly alludes to a different ‘Jesus’ to the one we might complain about.

Sans commitment, we are left with Marquez obsessing over the idea of a son estranged from an all powerful and successful father. Ephemeral and yet sickeningly trite references to a ‘Father and Son relationship gone wrong’ bumps the buggy back into the well worn tracks of a BBC documentary. It may be unkind, but one can’t help thinking that the film is more a somewhat narcissistic homage to Rodrigo’s own relationship with his irascible father than a thoughtful film about Jesus. If you plan to see the film in the evening, please be aware that gems like “they don’t need us to ruin their lives” may trigger the gag responses of some of the older audience.

From an artist with a pedigree like Garcia’s, we should have been able to expect some artistic insights into the most famous story in the world. We could have had Jesus with the humanity of a prophet who gave rise to a myth or a Triune God intent on saving the world he made, but we are left empty handed and just as confused as the Church has been for two thousand years. From a stable that produced a story about a ninety year old journalist paying a drugged child to have sex, we might have hoped for a little more artistic courage. Instead we are left with a God of love who, inexplicably, has a schizophrenic penchant for anger and violence.

Ewan McGregor as Yeshua is certain that he is the only Son of God but is suddenly and inexplicably unable to hear his voice. (Effects of medication possibly?) Tempted by the devil who (in the interests of budget one suspects) is actually Ewan McGregor himself. We are subsequently treated to a demonstration of McGregor’s full repertoire, genial and charming or vaguely ironic and dangerous. After a largely pointless adventure in the desert he meets a family and has some more, largely pointless, adventures peppered with lots of clichés and cardboard characters but no real insights beyond a progressive liberal idea of sons going off to do their own thing. Confused? You will be!

Tantalisingly, at the beginning of the film, the actors and the cinematographer create a wave that we feel sure will take us somewhere totally new. With baited breath we watch as Ewan McGregor (Jesus) strides purposefully across the desert but Marquez as the Writer/Director nervously pulls back at the last moment as we feel the last wave of the day pass beneath our board with a sigh.

With a crucified Christ dying alone in the desert, we are impressed by the beauty of the film but like a Daily Mail news story, we can’t help wondering how much of the story was left out. A confused ending is thrown in like a stun grenade leaving the audience bereft of even their own imagination.

It’s such a shame that with a little more courage from Marquez, this film could have been a classic.

 

Why are Christians so nasty?

Christians constantly tell us that they are ‘saved’. They tell us that Yoga is demonic and music is ‘of the devil’. The want to kill gays. They use verses they don’t understand like weapons. They seem to have their own language, which marks them out to each other.

“I’m washed in the blood of Jesus!”  

“If you donate five dollars you’ll have a harvest.”

They have convinced themselves that belief alone will guarantee them salvation. Assuming that they are ‘saved’, why are Christians so nasty?

Apart for some notable exceptions, Christians are as messed up as everyone else? There’s obviously a disconnect between what Christians tell themselves and what is actually happening in their lives. Why is that? Is God ignoring them or are they just kidding themselves?

This argument has been going on since Saint Paul invented Christianity. I discuss this in my YouTube channel and detail some of the arguments.

So the question is: ‘Can belief alone bring spiritual change or is life a bit more complicated than that’?

Believe everything the Church says and you’ll get into heaven. On Judgement Day you’ll be able to laugh at all the sinners burning in hell. The Church has been selling exactly that ticket for two thousand years.

In the middle of the first century, Paul started teaching in the name of Jesus. He began teaching Greeks and Romans in southern Turkey that he could give them the spirit of God in exchange for their belief in his new Gospel. The family of the Jewish teacher whose name he had stolen were not happy with his plagiarism and several showdowns ensured (Acts and Romans).

Paul’s letters are a wall of words that say very little. He misquoted and lied but that didn’t stop him creating a religion that changed the world.

A hundred years ago, the scholars started to try to work out which of the Synoptic Gospels was written first. When they put the Gospels side by side.

They found that it was only the sayings of Jesus that lined up – the narrative and miracle accounts were obviously fictitious and could be dismissed from serious debate.

The writers of Matthew, Mark and Luke obviously had a book of the ‘sayings’ of Jesus from which they quoted. The younger brother of Jesus, James the Just, in his Epistle taught the same message.

Luke 17:21 reported Jesus as saying, “The Kingdom of God will not come by observation. It is not here or there, for the Kingdom of God is within you.”

Just like the Q source, the Gospel of Thomas is also a ‘sayings’ document and it expands on the same theme. The Kingdom of God is within you.

God for Paul was out there but God for the Nazarenes is everywhere.

Some of the echoes of the historical Jewish teacher still can be found in the Gospels. They suggest that Jesus went into the quiet places to pray. (Luke 5:16 – Matthew 6:6 – Mark 1:35)

From the Zen like nature of his sayings it is obvious that Jesus practiced the deep meditation techniques so popular within Jewish Kabbalah at that time. (Sepha Yetzirah)

The mind is just like a child, without discipline it is a misery to itself and to everyone else.

The Jewish tradition has a long history of meditation that existed before Rav Yeshua and exists to this day. In the Gospel of Thomas, Rav Yeshua teaches us that we must “Recognise what is before your face and that which is hidden will be revealed.”

This is a reference to the clear lake of conscious, which exist beneath the surface of the conscious thought patterns.

Christians are blind to their own evil and cruelty because they are too busy looking up for someone else to save them. If they could learn to stop talking in their heads they would hear God’s voice within and see his hand in everything. Just as Rav Yeshua said, “the Kingdom of God is like a forgotten seed or yeast in bread, it comes slowly and in unexpected ways.”

Jesus taught that anger was the same as murder and lust the same as rape. Hate must be turned into love. How do you think you could do that without learning to watch the gate of your soul?

“When you pray, go into your inner storeroom and lock the door and pray to your father in secret.” Gospel of Matthew 6:6

“The lamp of the body is in the eye. When you make the eye single your body shall be full of light.” Gospel of Matthew 6:22

“When you know yourself, you will be known and you will understand that you are children of the living father.”  Gospel of Thomas 3

“Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be revealed.” Gospel of Thomas 5

“The Kingdom of God is within you.” Gospel of Luke 17

What did Jesus teach about sin?

It’s not often that transcendental truth can be found in the eye of a Twitter storm but Joan Bakewell, the famous face of the British Progressive Left, recently and unwittingly spoke for Jesus when she had the courage (or stupidity) to suggest that anorexia is a product of our culture’s self-obsession.

“But since when is anorexia a sin?” I hear you quite rightly ask.

There does seem to be a lot of confusion about what ‘sin’ actually is. Most people will quickly answer,

“It’s a sin to break the law!”

But then we would have to ask, “Whose law?”

Laws are written by our governments but worryingly, the governments of the west take things that were sins and, almost overnight, turn them into virtues (like being Gay or Transgender). On the other hand, they take things that were virtues and turn them into crimes (like free speech and self-defence).

In America it is now a sin, punishable by death and up to a hundred years in solitary confinement, to be born white and male. The Twitter mob proscribe new words every day. What you could say yesterday is a sin today. In Twitter land, I have committed a sin by even thinking that.

Muhammad obviously foresaw the rise of the Twitterarti and he said,

“I speak for God. What I say is a sin will be a sin forever!”

At this point, it is important for the Twitterarti to note that the Prophet got last dibs and no crosses count!

Islamic law (Sharia) in many ways is similar to Jewish law (Halakha) so why can’t we just leave it to those two religious heavyweights to sort it out? If you’ve asked that question, you’ve obviously never seen anyone stoned to death. If we follow the letter of the holy books we would have to kill people for gathering firewood on Saturdays and execute our daughters for getting raped.

What about the Christians you cleverly ask!

Unfortunately, the Christians are not sure if ‘sin’ is something you catch, are born with, or something you do! The only thing they are sure of is that you’ve done it and you need their help.

“Ok then! We give up! What did Jesus teach, smartarse?”

I’m glad you asked! The words that we can reliably attribute to the historical Jesus or at least the religious movement of which he was a part are impossible to understand without first understanding Jewish thought, humour and the Secrets of Kabbalah. This is the reason that the Roman Church quickly gave up trying to understand the Jewish Jesus and concluded that he couldn’t possibly have been serious. When Jesus said, “Love your Enemies as yourself” the Latin’s shrugged and grimaced and wrote it off as some kind of first century ironic Woody Allen joke.

Rav Yeshua, in the Q-Document, said, “You will be children of God. For He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good; He sends rain on the Just and on the Unjust. Be merciful even as your Father is merciful. Don’t judge and you won’t be judged. For the standard you use will be the standard used against you.” Luke 6.

From this statement we can deduce the following:

• We are ALL children of God and shit happens to everyone. (Ecclesiastes 9:2)
• God is mercy and does not judge us, we judge ourselves.
• The action of judging others somehow pulls the trigger on judgement against oneself.

 James the Just, the brother of Yeshua, goes further. He says, ‘Let no one, when tempted, say, “I am tempted by God.” For God cannot be tempted by evils, and himself tempts no one. But everyone is tempted by his own desire, being drawn away and seduced. Then, desire, having conceived, brings forth sin, and sin, having been perfected, brings forth death. Be not deceived’. Epistle of James.

From this statement we can deduce the following:

• God is unchangingly good and is not tempted (doesn’t lose his temper) and tempts no one.
• We are drawn into ‘sin’ by our own desire and are seduced by it.
• The effect of this intoxication brings about ‘death’.
• We are deceived by our own desire.

To understand the profundity of this view we have to understand Kabbalah and to do that we will have to study a different Luke. To understand Kabbalah we must look to Luke Skywalker and Star Wars.

Luke Skywalker in the films became a master of the ‘Force’ (sort of! Pretty rubbish really!)

As an engineer who specialises in Electromagnetics and Ultrasonics, I can attest that the world you experience is an illusion created by your senses. You perceive the world as solid because of electromagnetic force. The Rope hypothesis explains how every atom in the universe is linked to every other atom by means of an electromagnetic rope. One of the reasons that the Star Wars films have been so popular is that we all instinctively know that the idea of ‘The Force’ is kind of true! We really are all connected and, at some deep level, we feel it.

To prove my point, let’s look at another popular movie but to be honest you could choose almost any film that has been produced over the last thirty years. Take the 2015 blockbuster ‘San Andreas’; Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) plays Raymond Gaines, a man of action destroyed by the death of his youngest daughter. The ‘arc of the film’ sees Ray as a lonely man, at the beginning of the film, watching the disintegration of his family. The adventures of the day lead him and his family to find the strength and wisdom to get past his self-obsession, which has pushed his wife into the arms of another man. By focusing on his loved ones instead of himself he finds redemption. We all instinctively know that this is true! This is real! This is how it works!

“But Antonio! How can we ‘all’ possibly, instinctively, feel the same thing?”

The scientists, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce in their 2009 best seller, ‘Wild Justice: the Moral Lives of Animals’ gave us a summary of scientific understanding of animal behaviour. Contrary to the opinion of the famous French philosopher and father of modern thought, Rene Descartes, animals are not just automatic machines without souls or thought. It turns out that animals have an inbuilt morality and sense of empathy that often makes them act in a way that is directly contrary to their evolutionary advantage. Namely, when put in a cage with a button to obtain food most animals would rather starve than push the button and make a friend suffer.

It seems as though all living things have an in-built Burnt In Operating System (BIOS) and instinctively deep down know what is a ‘sin’. Perhaps we are like any work of art and share the essence of our designer?

So if we understand that we are all connected by an electromagnetic force and thoughts are just electricity and if we all have a built in understanding of ‘sin’ then we can begin to understand what the historical Jesus and his brother James were saying and why.

As a people, we tend to look for entire books that explain for us subjects that are as complicated as the idea of ‘sin’. Unfortunately, Jesus and the Nazarenes didn’t teach like that. They taught in Zen Koans. They used short sentences that shocked people into seeing beyond the limitations of the mundane mind.

“If you have ears to hear, you may hear!”

The secrets of the Nazarenes and of Kabbalah can be summed up in a few words but it takes a lifetime to understand them. The Jewish Torah uses six nouns and three verbs to describe sin. Using some of these words perhaps we can now see that Mrs Bakewell was indeed right about anorexia.

When a young person becomes so obsessed with themselves (Raah) that they become anorexic, they have become intoxicated with the idea of self (Shagah). They are causing damage to themselves and their family (Chaah) and they have done something that is ‘morally’ wrong (Rasha) by throwing away their young life. They have (Like Raymond Gaines) put themselves before God and their family (Pasha). Eventually they will become twisted and stricken (Avon). It is important to note that none of these words can really be translated as the word ‘sin’ (as the Christians understand it) and by using that word we fail to understand the profundity of the Nazarene explanation and we will ultimately fail in taking the medicine of their timeless and profoundly Jewish prescription.