Jesus’ Teachings about the Father. Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels

In addition, layering of both Jewish and Hellenic wisdom, mixed with gnostic wisdom, add difficulty to the task of separating the seeds of the Teachings of Jesus Himself from the chaff of alien teachings attributed to Him for the use of His authority.

And one more remark. During his lifetime, Jesus did not consider it necessary to initiate his disciples not only into the mysteries of heaven, but even into how the world actually works. However, according to the Gnostics, having appeared to them as the Risen One, for some reason he told in detail in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library[20]about the heavenly structure and the war of the gods, forgetting, however, to tell something as simple as that the earth is round and revolves in the void around the sun. I personally consider the Gnostic wisdom that was forcedly imposed on Jesus in the Gnostic texts as a forgery no less shameless than the Judaizing falsification of the synoptic gospels carried out by the newborn church orthodoxy at the turn of 2—3 centuries.

So the more something mysterious in the records of Jesus in St. Thomas – the less we should trust it as the testimony of the living voice of Jesus. We will proceed from this logic in our selection. From the above, it becomes obvious that what is selected from this ancient gospel can be used only as an addition to something more solid and similar to a single harmonious logical construction, having at least some semblance of teaching as such.

As such a basis, I think, may well serve the gospel of John, which is, of course, a later attempt to unite scattered memories of events associated with Jesus, discussions, speeches, thoughts expressed by Him united by a common thoughtful philosophical and religious system, on which, being strung in a certain order, it turned into a kind of narrative that claims to be the story of Jesus’ teachings; narrative of a process of perception and cognition of the Master by his students, so that later they themselves become its evangelists. Such systems of views, of course, were created and cultivated for more than one year in the circle of the closest disciples of Jesus and their disciples and followers who had already gathered around them. This gospel, apparently, is the work of a whole team of authors, which, however, could have a single leader and inspirer, whose name was given to the gospel in his name, “from John” – or, perhaps, someone else who became the Teacher of apostles after Jesus. There is, however, the hope that this John was the beloved disciple of Jesus, John the Theologian, a young man who remembered many living facts and real events that were reflected in the gospel of his name. But there is another version, which we will consider in the course of our study of the gospel of John.

Finally, the Gospel of Marcion is, most likely, an artificial construct of the narration about the history of Jesus ‘preaching, made in the name of uniting the information about Jesus of the most varied reliability collected by the author into a single whole consistent teaching of the Good News, at least with the help of the chronological sequence of events in which Jesus’ utterances are written. In addition, by placing Jesus’ statements in an event context, the author strove to make it easier for readers to understand complex, often very abstract ideas and philosophical constructions of Jesus with the help of examples from everyday life circumstances. So it is hardly possible to take seriously the fantasy eventful surroundings of this rather late, in comparison with the two previous sources, as real events – especially if there is simply no mention of anything like this in the two previous sources.

A comparative example is the calling of the disciples in John and Marcion. Marcion (2,1—11; 3,13—16) (and the synoptics who copied him, Luke 5,7 …) describe the calling of disciples as a one-time phenomenon, very schematic, the reality of what is happening is very conditional. Something like this: Jesus preached, the surrounding people pressed him, he got into a boat that sailed from the shore and continued preaching until he finished. As a token of gratitude, he ordered to throw the net and rewarded the boatmen with an unprecedented catch – a miracle! Then he said; follow me, I will make you fishers of men – and they, abandoning everything, followed him, to where is unknown. All this gives a very deliberate edification, firstly, and secondly, the lack of vitality, stasis, sculpturality of the scene frozen in marble.

Another description is given by “John” (John 1: 36—51): two of John’s disciples see Jesus passing by, whom John the Baptist points out to them as “the lamb of God,” they, interested, follow him, he invites them to visit, they spend the whole day in conversation with him, then, in the evening, they bring Peter to Him, then, in the morning, Philip, then Philip calls Nathanael … – a whole series of living and very real events. Which leads to the formation of an inner circle of disciples gathered around Jesus. Not by a miraculous supernatural calling – but by their own will they chose Him as their own Teacher, being convinced by His words in conversation with Him. He was able not to subdue them with amazing miracles, but to convince in his own words, while leaving the choice for them, to their free will. Isn’t that what the Son of God the Heavenly Father should do with his beloved brothers in humanity, rather than his despised servants?

This very true life scene does not at all resemble the cold marble of the frozen scene of the vocation of the disciples, which horrified Peter by the terrible miracle of catching the fish they caught.

So our choice of the reliability of events is left to John, he has the first word in our future narrative.

Thus, summarizing the above, it can only be concluded that Judaizm and Gnosticism of the first followers of Jesus together brought Him Teaching into the jungle of Christianity in its present form, it actually being a marginal area of messianism in Judaism, and in fact proselytizing sect of Judaism-light for the non-Jews, in the form of universal human religion of Noachism (promoted by Judaism on the basis of common roots of all “Abrahamic” religions) – Christianity without the Son of God, whose divinity the jews cannot admit.

However, the task I see and set for myself – is to extract from available sources, and, after a deep analysis on the reliability of the content of the Gospels, clean, and present in an explicit form the teaching of Jesus, which he during the three years of evangelism shared with part of humanity accessible to him. And to prove that his ChrEstianity (from the word ChrEst – the Good Lord) has nothing to do with Judaism or with Abraham-ism, nor Gnosticism, nor even with the current Christianity, nor even with whatever religions still popular with humanity, as they are all – without exception – manifestations of ancient superstitious paganism.

We are not talking about writing a new gospel – failed attempts at this have already happened in history more than once, and have never been accepted by the People of God, either disappearing without a trace, sinking into oblivion, or taking their place in a series of apocrypha, which has no faith. It is rather, as I said, about cleansing the texts of Judaizing insertions and politically expedient for a specific historical moment of deliberate editing, which shamelessly put into the mouth of Jesus and attributed to Him what He never said or did because of his complete antagonism of the Jewish religion and its “god”, whom He directly called the devil, a murderer “from the beginning”.

Such attempts to combine the Gospel teachings into a single text were made earlier, including in ancient times. One of the first is “Diatessaron” (“δia τεσσ ρων”, literally “through four”) by Tatian, the original text of which has not survived to this day. This work, created probably in the late II century, enjoyed great prestige in the Syrian Church for several centuries. In it, Tatian combined all the canonical gospels in one narrative. So, since this text was not rejected by the Church and existed in it along with the canonical gospels for the first few centuries, until it disappeared in the depths of time, then the very attempt of such an act is not reprehensible and permissible, as it is not condemned by the conciliar consciousness of the Church. The purpose of this work is a similar attempt to compose the teaching of Jesus based on an in-depth analysis of sources and a comparison of those elements that have a chance of reliability.

Criteria

Before proceeding directly to the very process of compiling a single text, it is necessary to choose those tools and selection criteria that will help us free Jesus from a heap of sacred garbage, like Michelangelo, seeing his David in a block of marble, freed him with a hammer and chisels – only we need a broom, a mop, and a trash can as tools.

To do this, we will have to briefly summarize the results of our research in recent years, point by point:

1. God Jehovah, he is same as Yahweh, he is an unnamed Jewish god denoted in writing as a Tetragrammaton, he is Sabaoth, he is Adonai the Lord and is mentioned in six other nicknames in the Hebrew Bible, in Christianity called the Old Testament, is a fairytale character in Hebrew folklore. We are not talking about any real existence of this literary hero: he is the product of superstitious fears generated by the ignorance of ancient savages who animated and humanized formidable natural phenomena. That is, who created imaginary gods for themselves in their own image and likewise – the Jewish Yahweh is one of those many, similar to him in different cultures: Baal, Zeus, Perun, and so on.

2. The same applies to other gods, angels, demons and other fairytale creatures mentioned in the Hebrew Bible – which is indisputably proven by modern historical and archaeological science and is fully reflected in the review by S. Petrov “Here are your gods Israel. The pagan religion of the Jews”. And also most of the biblical characters and the events described in the bible are nothing more than old tales of a pseudo-heroic epic, invented over the centuries of enslavement, among the oppressed marginal people, a permanent inhabitant of a remote province in the backyard of great empires. There has never been: the creation of the world by the “gods” Elohim, Adam and Eve, created by another “god”, Jehovah, the Garden of Eden with a serpent and an apple, their children Cain and Abel, Noah with the flood, Abraham with Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon, the prophet Elijah, as well as resettlement to Egypt, flight from Egypt, forty years of wandering in the desert and all the other “history” of the Jewish people, described in the Bible millennia later than the events mentioned in it.

3. Angelology, demonology and cosmology were borrowed from the Jewish pagan faith (as well as even more ancient pagan beliefs that borrowed all these fables from each other) by Christianity in a completely thoughtless and uncritical manner, and all this rubbish is still an indisputable part of the Christian sacred tradition, causing modern people ironic bewilderment, by its utterly comic archaism. However, the church cannot refuse a flat earth with a painted wooden sky on pillars today, since such ideas about the world are sanctified by the authority of the holiness of the fathers and cannot be refuted or even questioned within the framework of mainstream (catholic and orthodox) church teaching. Even a single recognition of injustice and apparent ignorance of holy teachers will cause a collapse of all the authority of two thousand years of… no less but the Divine Truth. We recognize the importance of the doctrine of the church, but question its foundation.

As for the category of angelic and demonic entities, their armies and worlds, there is a long, millennia-long history of gradual transformation from ancient superstitions into a pagan pantheon of many major gods and smaller gods, many of whom played a secondary role and performed official functions (for example, messengers, or perpetrators of punishments, executions, intimidations, judgments, and so on) assigned to the peoples under the main gods. How this evolution of myths, which ended in Judaism (IV of century BC) borrowed and learned from the Sumerian-Babylonian legends notions of whole special worlds beyond the visible world: heaven as the seat of the gods and of the angelic hosts, and hell (Sheol), as the place of residence of the souls of the dead before the general resurrection at the Last Judgment, and the demons tormenting them; enemies of the human race, led by the devil,.. all of this is traced in the most detailed way in the above- mentioned book of Petrov. S That is, there are no angelic ranks and the heavenly hosts, and there is no wickedness in high places and the world of demonic spirits, although so many believe passionately in such creatures and speak of them as the reality: – the saints, and sinners – Christians of all times and nations. All these are the later inventions of Christian dreamers, the fruit of their inflamed imagination, warmed up on the thong of ancient superstitious legends. The generalization of all this legendary “heavenly” hierarchy was compiled within the framework of the church teaching of Christianity in a book of the fifth century called “The Heavenly Hierarchy” [26] byunknown authors under the false name “Dionysius-Areopagite”, from 70 AD, who lived in first century, obviously, and not in the fifth century, he would not be able to live for that many years even if it was a miracle. The purpose of the forged authorship of this pseudo-epigraph, apparently, was to give more credibility by the authority of the apostle himself – as all this fabulous “heavenly army” looked so implausible even then for Christians of that time.

4. There were no holy animals Kerim (cherubim) and Saraf (seraphim)[27], borrowed by Christianity from the painful “prophetic” visions of the ancient Hebrew “seers”. Moreover, all the “prophecies” of these prophets, led by no means by the Spirit of God (which – despite church teachings did not descend on any of the people, except Jesus, until the day of Pentecost), suffer either from manic mental disorders with “visions” and “voices”, or the propaganda bias of custom-made manipulators. Visions of this entire fairy-tail hierarchy, it seems, occurred only in the troubled heads of various mentally unhealthy people, including the “holy prophets and visionaries.” All these are wholly and completely fictional characters, the product of either imagination, or disease based on superstitious fears and psychiatric “visions”.

As for the conjuncture-political side, as a rule, inherent in any prophecy, then the most accurate description of all these ancient biblical “prophecies” I met in the book by Latynina[28]about Jesus: “However, one thing should not be underestimated: the extremely pragmatic nature of Jewish theology. Under King Josiah this theology reflected the interests of Josiah surprisingly well, under Ezra this theology reflected the interests of Ezra remarkably well, and under the Hasmoneans it perfectly reflected the interests of the Hasmoneans.

All the prophecies that we have already cited in this book (and those that we have not cited yet) were made exclusively in retrospect and in favor of a completely specific political addressee. Only when they did not come true, their acualization was transferred to an indefinite future” – a devastating characteristic by a Jewish writer who cannot be suspected of being committed to Christianity.

5. Here’s what follows from all this for those who read the New Testament. There are many episodes in the New Testament related to the miracles of casting out demons both by Jesus and his disciples. And conversations with Him about this, His statements on this topic, attributed to him references to the devil, Satan, Beelzebub and demons. Based on what I said above, we must make a choice: either Jesus Himself believed in all this fairy-taly hierarchy and He Himself was at the mercy of these ancient superstitions – and in that case He cannot be the Omniscient God and the Son of God. Or all this was attributed to him by those who themselves believed in it, thought that Jesus also believed, and ascribed it to Him when writing the Gospels.The choice is not rich: just out of two. However, I personally choose the latter for myself, that is, I believe that the mention of angels and demons in the Gospels is attributed to Jesus by superstitious ignoramuses. For me, Jesus, being the Son of True God, undoubtedly possessed Divine Omniscience, and knew perfectly well how the world works and everything about the Kingdom of Heaven (“If I tell you about earthly things and you don’t understand what will happen if I start talking to you about Heavenly?” (Jn 3.12)) – and therefore, for me, any evangelical events and sayings of Jesus concerning: hell, demons, angels, demons expulsion, general bodily resurrection from the dead, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, the End of the World and other eschatological expectations, again uncritically adopted into Christianity from the Hebrew biblical paganism. And as a result of this choice, I have a scalpel in my hands – the very criterion for selecting the reliability of the Gospel texts – with the help of which I can surgically cut out from the New Testament a malignant tumor of Judaism with its fairytale metastases in records, attributed to Jesus.

6. I believe that Jesus was not who He was so persistently presented both by the ancient beneficiaries of the gospel falsification, and by the current Judaizers, the seekers of the “historical Jesus”. Nothing about his ancestral Jewry, family, parents “from the clan of David”, the prophesied place and the circumstances of the birth, and his belonging to the Jewish religion since childhood: really we do not know anything from anywhere except the first chapters of the synoptic Gospels, clearly written later in front of Marcion gospel by unknown counterfeiters in the second half of the second century, when to get real facts about any of this was no longer possible. Same way how reliably nothing is known about Him at all until His appearance at the sermon. Due to the complete lack of information about the childhood, adolescence and youth of Jesus, it is simply impossible to say anything definite about this period of Jesus’ life – there is nothing to take information from, even hypothetical.

7. At the same time, it is quite grounded to suppose that Jesus the Galilean was not a Jew, because he could not be: in Galilee at that time there were no Jews-robbers hated by the population of Galilee only as gangs and military units during raids of the pagan Galileans [29]– robbers who infiltrated into Galilee. Jesus also was not a preacher of Judaism and the Hebrew god Jehovah, but denounced it, as the” devil " (John 8,44).

8. From non-biblical sources in general about Jesus, you can learn only two things: 1 – He had a brother named Jacob, which Josephus mentions[31], and therefore both mother and family; and 2 – Jesus is considered a FALSE prophet of Nazariteism[32], an ancient sect of the inhabitants of Galilee, who confessed a Mandean, non-Jewish god, whose belief was apparently borrowed from the Zoroastrians and brought to Judah from Babylon after the return of the Jews from captivity four hundred years before Christmas. But the true prophet of this religion was John the Baptist, whom, according to the Nazarene legend, Jesus betrayed as a teacher, creating his own sect and his own teaching, not Jewish and not Nazarene. John himself, apparently, was a Mandeus and Nazarene preacher of the Babylonian god Ahura Mazda [33], alien to the religion of Judaism, and was killed by the Jews precisely for this preaching. Attempts to portray him as a preacher of Judaism are obviously untenable, and the story of Herod’s impious marriage is a rather obvious “cover operation” for the murder of John precisely for preaching a “different” God.

9. Jesus was neither a disciple of John the Baptist, represented in the canonical gospels, as a Jewish prophet and preacher of Judaism, nor an apocalyptic prophet, nor the head-baptist of the sect of John after his death, as is presented in numerous writings of the “majority of scientists” of seekers of the “historical Jesus”. He confessed another – not Jewish and not Nazarene – God, the Heavenly Father, hitherto unknown to mankind, to which “He revealed” Him (John 1.18). And that is why He was declared by the Mandean-Nazarene sect of John – a false prophet.

10. Jesus himself, apparently, preached the True God, hitherto unknown to mankind (” No one has ever seen God; the Only Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He revealed” Jn 1:18), His Heavenly Father, whose Son He became through the Birth from Above from Baptism by Spirit at a conscious age, about which He Himself speaks to Nicodemus in a memorable conversation given in ev. John (Jn 3.3—5)

“3 Jesus answered and said to him: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.

4. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?

5 Jesus answered: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Jesus, I suppose, has rejected the Hebrew pagan beliefs in the fairy Yahveh and turned him aside, as the fantasy of superstition, just denouncing them as a belief in “the Devil” (also quite fantastic character[34]), worship of the “prince of this world.” He did not feel any respect for the Jewish “law and prophets”, did not fulfill the prescriptions of the Torah and the Tanakh, and, according to the Gospel testimonies (cleansing them from strained excuses of Him as a good Jew, distinguished by a special zeal for observing not the letter, but the “spirit” of the law) deliberately violated the Jewish law in front of crowds of people, from whose fanatical reprisals against Him He was saved by the MIRACLE of God, which always spoke in His favor and righteousness.

11. I presume, contrary to Church Teachings, that while Jesus did resurrect, but not in the material body as the Jewish version says should precede the general resurrection of the dead in the bodies in the new world. Body is not needed to God. While His appearance in front of disciples if it ever happened, was understood by them, as a return to life of his dead and buried (or somehow vanished) flesh. Those who were resurrected earlier by Jesus, if such actually existed, later died again, since the life of the body does not exist outside this world, and it is mortal by its nature. By the way, Thomas Didyme, who is called “Thomas the Unbeliever” in the church tradition, in his gospel somehow does not mention either the Resurrection or the appearance of the Risen Jesus personally to him. Which, we must admit, is strange, if, of course, we accept the version that this gospel was written by Thomas himself, as his personal memories of Jesus. And it is not, as we suggested above, just a sequential record of the testimonies of many different eyewitnesses collected by an unknown individual, not related to each other. The assumption that Thomas, according to the testimony of John, who put his hand into the “nail plagues” on the body of the Risen One, while writing his own gospel, could forget to mention this fact, seems absolutely incredible.

It seems quite possible that the legend of the bodily resurrection arose and took root in the Judeo-Christian environment, and was even mentioned by Paul as a tribute to the same notorious Judaization with its prophecies about the general resurrection of the dead – “on the last day”. To the contrary, the resurrection of Jesus as God in the kingdom of Heaven opened to mankind Him as the Way in which everyone who accepts the good news about the beginning of eternal life here and now, will resurrect together with Jesus as his brother in the kingdom of the Heavenly Father – “transfer from death to life” (John 5,24).

12. In the Gospel of Marcion (13.16) and the synoptics who followed him, Jesus Himself asserts that the Jewish Covenant, “the Law and the Prophets” – is before John the Baptist (Luke 16.16). While after him comes the Son of God, who brings the message of the Kingdom of Heaven, which should not be expected in the mythical coming resurrection of the dead, it is available to any person directly in earthly life, although it requires special efforts (“taken by force”). This is the new faith, understood in the most general sense of the Teachings of Jesus as the Good News of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, about it entering a person’s life here and now, and the person entering into eternal life with God immediately, without delay to an uncertain future of the Jewish prophecies. So all references to this uncertain future must be removed from the Good News of Jesus.

13. It should also be taken into account that the authors of the Gospels of John and Marcion (let me reiterate that the names of Gospels do not indicate the real authorship, who the real authors are – only God knows), not to mention the synoptics, when writing, added from themselves not only the Jewish component, but also the Hellenic one. A typical example of this kind is the whole legend of the immaculate “seedless conception” of the Ever-Virgin: in the Hellenic tradition, this is a typical way of glorifying and elevating outstanding people.[35]. For example, even Plato the philosopher was also supposedly conceived immaculately. At the same time, for the Jews, conception without a seed is folly and blasphemy. So the creator of “Luke” pandered to the tastes of both types of its customers: both Judaism and Hellenism. And even further: tended to newly-born hierarchy that appeared all of a sudden from nowhere in the Brotherhood of Jesus at the turn of the century, proclaiming itself and only itself the bearers and distributors of the Holy Spirit blessing, the heirs to the apostles of Jesus Himself, who supposedly put his hands on the disciples in order to especially sanctify them and put them as bosses of “the herd”… tended to them in support of their divine sacred origin “from apostles” through the succession of “laying on of hands.” This cunningly woven lie is very easily refuted from the fairy-tale like Acts written for the same purpose: Paul himself, who introduced this fashion of making bishops through the laying on of hands, was never placed in this way by anyone, either an apostle or a bishop, but only accepted the usual Baptism through Ananya the disciple, that is, just an ordinary follower of Jesus (Acts 9: 10—19). All this and the like, the deliberately fairy-tale content of the gospels and New Testament as a whole is subject to unconditional removal and unquestioning eradication from the compilation of the conditionally authentic Teachings of Jesus.

Therefore, summing up all of the above in the 13 points, on the basis of the system of selection that we determined and its criteria, we have to establish and highlight some of the pivotal events of ev. John and Marcion, the conditionally reliable ones, on the basis of which it is possible to build a story, while understanding all the conventionality of all the other “events” used by the authors of the Gospels to give greater event credibility to the words of Jesus, placed in certain circumstances for the sake of explaining what He wanted to say Himself, or what the authors of the gospels wanted to say through His mouth. And, finally, to place in the context of the selected events the words of Jesus from the sources listed above: the gospels of Thomas, John, Marcion, Luke, Matthew and Mark, selected on the basis of the same criteria, which we accept as conditionally reliable.

This is an approximate concept of a possible selection of Gospel verses into a single text of the future “Gospel of Jesus”.