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“Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels”

Introduction

Reading the Bible, one cannot fail to notice a striking contradiction, if not to call it complete antagonism, between the legends of the Jews, who, as we read on the pages of the Old Testament (hereinafter – OT), committed reprehensible criminal acts against humanity from the point of view of modern humanism (and for this they were glorified in the OT as holy saints of the Jewish ancestral god, Yahweh) and the Teachings of the meek Jesus, who spoke of love for all people as His brothers. It is obvious to the unbiased reader that there is a terrible chasm between these two religious teachings.

However, the Christian Church in all its confessions and jurisdictions unanimously teaches that the OT, recognized in all Christian churches by the Holy Scriptures along with the New Testament, is like a “origination guide” to Jesus, tracing the human race from the biblical creation of the first people by the biblical god “out of clay” to the heights of moral sacrifice in the name of Man. That is, the development of mankind over time from a state of primitive animal savagery to the high humanism of Christian teaching, from the first man, Adam, to the second Adam, as Jesus is called in the church teaching. At the same time, attention is drawn to the fundamental discrepancy between the behavior of the biblical Old Testament heroes, recognized by the Christian “holy righteous forefathers,” and, first of all, of their God himself, to the Christian ideals of humanism; a cruel and jealous deity of the Hebrew Bible, a treacherous tyrant and a maniac acting on the pages of the OT – in The New Testament suddenly corrected itself, taking on the appearance of the All-forgiving Heavenly Father, giving Divine Love to all his children indiscriminately (Mt. Mk 5.45: “May you be sons of your Heavenly Father, for He commands His sun to rise over the wicked and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”).

The contradiction in this united teaching of the Old and New Testaments is carefully hidden in the fairytale biblical “history” of the Jewish people (and this is a horrific tale), which turned out to be a way of turning Jesus into a Jewish rabbi and Jewish messiah.

As one of the tasks of writing this work, the author sets out to expose this, to put it bluntly, the most outrageous forgery in history, which turned Christianity into a marginal “messianic” sect within Judaism.

At the same time, I would like to draw your attention to and especially dwell on the deliberate provocativeness of the topic under study, and categorically reject any attempts to accuse it of “anti-Semitism” by close-knit adherents of reverence for the special suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which happened “through the fault” of world Christianity. Without denying in the least the horrors of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, or the guilt imputed to Christianity in the two thousand-year-old suspicious and hostile attitude towards Jews as a people of “deicides”, I want to draw the attention of everyone that the topic under discussion concerns only – and only – the history of ancient peoples, and those religious contradictions that arose between peoples in those distant times. This is a purely academic study that does not imply any practical conclusions regarding the religious differences and preferences of modern humanity.

***

After many years of work[1]to expose Judaization of Jesus’ teachings, first in early Judo-Christianity in Jerusalem community, then – in the Roman church of II century, and following in her wake churches of “ecumenical orthodoxy” of the first centuries, and beyond – everywhere and all, without exception, current Christian denominations recognize the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament of their Holy Scripture; it finally became clear to me that all world Christianity has always worshiped not the Heavenly Father at all, but the Jewish ancestral “god”, the ancient pagan idol Jehovah. If you wish, you can trace the origin of this fairytale “god” to the pagan pantheons, much more ancient than the religion of the ancient Jews. The teachings of Jesus from the first century have been shamelessly forged as the continuation of Judaism, and united with the Jewish Torah together, as a confession of belief in common with the Jews, the false God Jehovah, presented by the Judaizers as God the Father of Jesus and ours.

According to church tradition, the Old Testament is the basis of the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus himself is the very Jewish Christ-Messiah, which is predicted in various books of the Old Testament. The word “Christ” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Mashiach”, which means the Anointed, or King of the Jews, since the kings of Israel were delivered to the kingdom through the anointing of the prophets who poured holy oil on those kings. However, according to another opinion expressed in numerous works of philosophers and scientists from the 17th century[2], in fact, Jesus completely rejected Judaism, “the law and the prophets,” and preached a completely new teaching that had nothing to do with Judaism. Jesus’ teachings revealed the true knowledge of his Father God, which the Jews did not know. And Jesus himself has nothing to do with those Christ=Messiah=Mashiach=Annointed=King of the Jews, which the Jews were waiting for (and still are waiting for), and whose appearance was predicted in the Old Testament by the great Jewish prophets.

“No matter how the theologians tried over the centuries to prove the” integrity “of the New Testament, in its texts there is clearly a confrontation between two religious tendencies: a sharply negative attitude towards Judaism (which, apparently, was characteristic of Jesus himself and his teachings) on one hand and a desire for combining the worldview with Judaism (which is commonly called the orthodox tradition) – on the other hand … “The Gospel of Matthew, apparently, it is no coincidence that it opens the New Testament: the Christian church needed that from the very first lines the “new”, “corrected” Christian teaching demonstrates its Jewish roots… The first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew in general seem to be a continuation of the Old Testament, the reader is completely immersed in the atmosphere of Jewish prophecies about the Messiah, as which Jesus is presented.”

I. Evlampiev “Undistorted Christianity and Its Sources”[3].

The remaining question, as part of the Christian teaching, is the one of the salvation of all those who, involuntarily and unconsciously, being deceived by church teaching, over the millennia of church history, massively worshiped this false “God” within the framework of Christian ecclesiasticality, remains open – did the Church lead their people to salvation, and did it not bring all the” ones being saved” under her shelter to that “eternal destruction”, which it threatens to all who dare to doubt the truth of its teachings, beginning with the ap. Paul, who proclaimed the very first church anathema in the Epistle to the Galatians? Galatians 1: 8: “But even if we or an Angel from heaven began to preach the gospel to you other than what we preached to you, let it be anathema.”

But this is not actually what we are talking about now – let the leaders of Christian confessions be preoccupied by this. But rather – about finally cleansing the Teaching of Jesus from the age-old deposits of Judaism and presenting it in the form in which it could be preached by Jesus to his disciples – if possible. And I must say right away that this opportunity is very limited and small.

Sources

If we look the truth in the eye, there are practically no extra-biblical historical sources of information about Jesus, except for two quotations from the “Antiquities of the Jews” by Josephus, one of which is recognized as a later forgery. As for the conventionally biblical (that is, canonical and apocryphal) sources, I consider it proven in the revolutionary works of doctors Marcus Vincent, Mattius Klinkhardtand Dieter T. Roth, as well as their great predecessors, Garnak, Whayett, Nocks and Paul-Louis Couchoud, that all synoptic gospels are late (not earlier than 150 AD) compilations of the gospel of the Lord by Marcion, dating back to 140, ie, the sources are certainly secondary and deliberately distorted, and therefore do not have value as valid. The very gospel of the Lord (by Marcion), too, has the traces of the early Judaizing, its origin, apparently, being obliged to the early Christian messianic Judeo-Christianity, originally inclined to commitment to “faith of our fathers” in the Jewish tribal god Yahweh-Jehovah. The gospel of John is earlier (this assertion will be substantiated below) and therefore deserving more trust, however, there are easily distinguishable birthmarks of editorial Judaizing edits in it as well, which, as a rule, have the form of crude illogical inclusions of categorical imperatives of the truth of the Jewish faith – we will mark in the process of text analysis. And finally, ev. Thomas, not included in the canon of the New Testament because of its clearly pronounced anti-Jewish orientation. Nevertheless, being the most ancient text of the records of Jesus, it appears more credible as the source of the greatest reliability and closeness to what Jesus really could teach than the other gospels. Thus, as our sources, we will most of all use Thomas, with reservations – John, and finally, conditionally, the Marcion gospel of the Lord, trying to cleanse all this from Judaization and preserve everything that can be attributed by us to Jesus. It is also possible to consider individual sayings from the canonical synoptic gospels, which, although they are reliable sources of the second row, nevertheless, may contain some elements of sources that have not survived to this day, but existed during the second half of the second century. An example of such a lost source is the collection of the records of Jesus in five volumes of Papias of Hierapolis, mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea in the History of the Church.

Dating sources

The classical dating of the canonical gospels, adopted in modern biblical studies, reads: “The time of creation cannot be reliably established, but …", and this “but” is followed by the coined phrase “most scientists are inclined to think” which means – more or less justified guesses. It is useless and senseless to cite literature here, it is so vast over the past approximately five centuries, starting from the 17th century almost from Spinoza – it will be enough to refer to Metzger’s cornerstone work The Canon of the New Testament. And what is this dating? Matthew – as it is believed, the earliest – is attributed to the 50—60s, Mark – to the 60—70s, Luke, respectively, to the 70—80s, and poor undignified John, considered unreliable [8]– as much as 90—100 AD.

However, the arguments in favor of these datings are very limited. In fact, upon closer inspection, there is – alas! – just one argument, considered indisputable, in favor of the early dating of the Gospels to the middle or end of the first century. This is – two citations of [9]Papias of Hierapolis (70—155), the author of lost Jesus records in five volumes, mentioned in “Church History” by Eusebius of Caesarea [10]. One claims that Papias wrote down the memories of Jesus from the oral tradition, not trusting the written evidence: “… I understood that books would not do me as much benefit as a living voice that remains in my soul.” Another is about the sources of the records he collected (this is a quote from his quotes in the “History…” of Eusebius): " In his book he also reports other words of the Lord in the transmission of the aforementioned Aristion, as well as the stories of Presbyter John. We refer inquisitive people to them, but we consider it necessary to immediately add to everything that has been said about the Evangelist Mark. Here is what the elder (John) said: “Mark was Peter’s translator; he accurately wrote down everything that he remembered from what was said and done by the Lord, but not in order, for he himself did not hear the Lord and did not walk with Him. Later, he accompanied Peter, who taught as circumstances required, and did not intend to arrange the words of Christ in order. Mark was not at all wrong, writing everything down the way he remembered; he only cared not to miss anything and not convey anything incorrectly. This is what Papias says about Mark; about Matthew, he reports the following: ‘Matthew wrote down Jesus’ conversations in Hebrew, and translated them as best he could. He also uses the First Epistle of John, as well as Peter, and tells about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins. This story is in the ‘Gospel of the Jews’. I considered it necessary to add all this to what has been said.”

From these passages, which are, I remind you, the only “indisputable” argument in favor of early dating of the Synoptic Gospels, it becomes obvious and taken for granted that these Mark and Matthew could not be the author of the Gospel; one wrote down everything in a row, and certainly not in the form of an unfolding chronological story, but in the form of separate, unrelated memories, perhaps containing some eventful episodes, but not in the chronological order of a single history; about the other Eusebius can hardly be believed at all, since today it has already been established for sure that the Gospel of Matthew, written in Hebrew, is a reverse translation from Greek. And the conversations of Jesus, in the first place, are not a composite story of His life, which the canonical Gospel from Matthew is meant to be, and secondly, Jesus Himself preached in the Aramaic, and it is unlikely that Matthew (if this is the same Matthew, the tax collector) would have written them down in the sacred language of the Jews, being a traitor to his people and an outcast, if you believe that he was a publican… One would rather believe that he wrote in Greek than in Hebrew. According to most scholars, the Gospel of Matthew was not written by eyewitnesses. And the authorship of “Luke” will be mentioned in detail later. As for the other, “controversial” arguments and second-tier evidence of early dating synoptics, they are considered in detail and convincingly refuted in the fundamental work of Dr. Marcus Vincent [11], and are summarized in the work already cited by us by Dr. Evlampiev[12]. No other direct documentary evidence of the existence of the synoptic gospels previously to 140 AD simply not exist in nature. It is necessary to understand. At the same time, we must pay tribute to the fact that modern researchers, analyzing the above testimonies of Papias of Hieropolis, come to the unequivocal conclusion that the “records” of the utterances of Jesus Christ made by Matthew and Mark, which are mentioned in quotations from his work, can not be the Gospels, that included into the New Testament.

As for the Gospel of John, let’s agree to accept the dating proposed by “the majority of scientists” and see what follows from this for us. Remember this fact: John is the end of the first – the very beginning of the second century.

Separately, I would like to note once again that according to the traditionally accepted dating of the Gospel texts, Mark is attributed to the 60s, Matthew – to the 70s, Luke – to the 80s, and John – to the end of the first century. Thus, in the tradition of religious studies, the opinion was fixed that John is the latest, and therefore the least reliable source, and even partially compiled by the synoptics, and constructed by a certain Gnostic community, possibly from the circle of the disciples of John the Theologian. However, as I pointed out above, the Gospel of Marcion is now considered a presynoptic text used by synoptics to create their gospels. At the same time, Dr. Marcus Vincent in his monograph “Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels” quite reasonably proves that the author of the Gospel of the Lord Marcion was Marcion of Sinope himself, and, according to our assumption below, it was written in Rome between 140 and 144 years. At the same time, the first mention of all four canonical gospels together by Irenaeus of Lyons [13]refers to the 180th year. Thus, the dating of the synoptics is shifted to the second half of the second century, although this does not apply to the original dating of the s. John 90—100 years, which presumably remains in its place. And here the most interesting thing begins: shifting the dating of the synoptic gospels to the second half of the second century, as secondary sources in relation to the Gospel of Marcion with a dating of about 140 and leaving the dating of John fixed at the turn of the 1—2 centuries., we get that John is not secondary in relation to the “sinoptics”, but, on the contrary, it was written off by the synoptics (including Marcion) from John.

Therefore, the gospel of John is brought to the forefront, as the most ancient of the canonical sources, its reliability is strengthened, and those borrowings that are attributed to it are overturned: now it is precisely these borrowings that should be attributed not to John from the synoptics, as before, but to the synoptics from John.

However, this is not all. As I indicated above, the proven[14]primacy of Ev. Marcion, in relation to the synoptics, shifts them to the third place: first John, then borrowing from John is ev. Marcion, and then from Marcion to synoptics. And we undertake to prove this statement in our book.

As for the gospel of Thomas, which “most scholars” attributed to the 60—140 years[15] (which is doubtful, I did not find any arguments, and I personally believe that the end of dating should be shifted at least to the end of the 1st century), then it is the form of this gospel in the form of a record of scattered and not connected by a single meaning records first of all testifies to the greatest antiquity of this document: it looks like a sequential record on a single carrier (a sheet of parchment or a papyrus scroll) of recordsrecords in the order of sequence in which they were collected by the author from the oral retellings of many of those interviewed by him. Apparently, this very form of recording was also used by other collectorsrecords, which were subsequently lost.

As for the indications of a 50% similarity between Thomas and the records that Marcion and the synoptics have, then after the shift of all synoptics to the middle of the second century, these coincidences unambiguously indicate the opposite: that the Gospel of Thomas is an early monument, which It was used in the preparation of the later texts Marcion and – further – the synoptic gospels, and may well claim a place of mysterious Q source, the existence of which is pointed out by historians and text analytics that study synoptic gospels. As for the gospel of John, its textual connection with ev. Marcion, as we will see later, is hardly visible, despite the ideological similarity, and this suggests that here we are dealing with two ancient sources independent of each other, which are, perhaps, the product of two different schools of apostolic Christianity.

Credibility

We will have to admit that ALL, without exception, sources we have mentioned are unreliable due to their secondary nature: both Jesus Himself and his disciples from pagan Galilee were most likely illiterate, and spoke Aramaic, and the Gospels were written in literary Greek, which could never be done by the disciples of Jesus even on the assumption of their subsequent mastery of the Greek language and writing. That is, the Testament is a record of oral stories of authors unknown to us by unknown collectors who recorded them in the Gospels. First of all, inaccuracy concerns gospel events, the oral transmission of which always creates the effect of a “spoiled phone”: the narrators retell what happened to one another in their own words, and they are also prone to exaggeration and direct fantasy in order to give themselves increased significance and enhance the effect of the importance of what is happening, often containing impossible details. At the same time, in the retelling of conversations and monologues, storytellers tend to simplify in the name of greater simplification to the listener. In this sense, similar simplifications of the parables of Jesus from Thomas to John and further to Marcion are characteristic: the often mysterious content of Jesus’ logic expressed in Thomas is simplified by Marcion to commonplace platitudes.

Biblical scholars deny the Gospel of John “authenticity” for example: “Most modern historians, being careful, prefer to completely put the Gospel of John out of brackets when reconstructing the image of Jesus. In subsequent chapters, we will follow this respectable academic tradition, referring to the texts of John only when the outlines of real earthly history are visible behind the mystical-theological fabric of this work. " [16]This is done under various obviously far-fetched pretexts, behind which often looms primarily a reluctance to recognize the clear anti-Jewish orientation of the Teachings of Jesus in the text of Ev. John, which so inopportunely undermines the foundations of the coherent theory of Judeo-Christian continuity, developed over the last century by “the majority of modern historians.” In particular, such a reason for the “unreliability” of ev. John refers to the “gnostic” character of this gospel. However, none of the inherent Gnosticism, professing knowledge of “secrets”, nor these “secrets” are present in the Gospel of John, and Jesus is not revealing, not reporting and not promising this.

The same applies to the ancient gospel of Thomas, also called the “fifth gospel” because of the centuries-old church litigation about its inclusion in the canon of the New Testament – it does not, in my opinion, contain any “secrets”, and the riddles it contains have the meaning of allegories of acute political and religious themes of that time, for just one attempt to discuss which, without due reverence in those wild times, one could be killed by a crowd of religious fanatics. Or philosophical parables, the interpretations of which by simplifying and flattening meanings were subsequently proposed by numerous interpreters, starting with the authors of the canonical gospels, who widely used the records from the same gospel of Thomas. However, there are no mystical secrets that have the magical power of dominion over Being by any of the interpreters, both Gnostic and Orthodox, in Thomas gospel: for two millennia it was not found and offered – which means that they are not there, and were not originally.

As for the synoptic gospels, today the secondary nature and late dating of these three independent compilations of an earlier source – Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord – with the aim of Judaization (as we will show later) of both: Jesus himself to be have origins tracing to the Davidic family, and His Teachings, as the preaching of Judaism to “all nations” (So go, teach all nations Matthew 28,19)

Thus, after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, despite His command to the disciples “go and preach to the whole world” (Mark 16,15), His Teachings were hijacked from two sides: from the side of Judaism for the sake of Jewish proselytism and from the side of Christian Gnosticism – both trends rushed to use His divine authority to advance their ideas and beliefs.

As a result, church orthodoxy has developed a monstrous hybrid of Jewish fairy villainous-Yahweh God on the one hand, the magic of the Gnostic secret knowledge the “mysteries of God” and in the middle, sandwiched on the two sides and squeezed into only one single commandment of love for God and neighbor (quite of the Old Testament origin) [17] The Good News of Jesus, the Son of God: “The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near to you.”

World Christianity has turned over time into a subsidiary of Judaism in its proselytism and preaching to the world.[18]: everyone now, whoever you ask, knows about the Jewish fairy-tale characters God-Jehovah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Aaron, David, Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, etc. – more than about Jesus. And worship Jehovah as their God-Father. And, together with the listed above, consider all of the Biblical Old Testament saints of questionable “righteousness” – describe in the OT pre-Jewish and Jewish savages, the villains, deceivers, cruel sadists, and outright criminals – to be their Christian holy forefathers. In addition, they do not even realize that Jesus, the Son of God, is declared the son of a villainous maniac-murderer “from the beginning”, Jehovah, and “through that” it means that Christ = Messiah = Messiah = Anointed = King of the Jews, whom the Jews are still waiting for, and who – whether it will be the Antichrist, or the Christ in the Second Coming, or both. And the Chrisitans do not even realize how stupid they look as “Christians” with a name, received from the Jews in the memory of the mockery of Jesus by Pilate, pinned to the cross of Jesus sign “King of the Jews.”

However, the time has come to free Jesus from the magnificent gilded grave, built over the centuries and millennia and forming the bulk of His tombstone, consisting of churches and temples. Time to free His Teachings about the Heavenly Father – from the ancestral religion of the Jews with their fabulous “god” Jehovah: the Santa-Claus type, except an evil and vindictive one – on the one hand, and materialistic magicians who rely on some secret knowledge, some on the training of “spiritual practices” such as asceticism and other arbitrary rules to establish their being without God – on the other. Time has come to release the truth out of the bushel of sewer deposits accumulated for centuries of false “Christianity” by limping Judaism and Gnostic magic – and to show the world the true teaching of Jesus, namely: CHRESTIANITY (from the word Chrestos – Good Lord, as the first Christians called Jesus until the fourth century)[19]. And this is what we will do, without further ado.

To do this, let’s select from the Gospels what has at least some chances of authenticity! And what is inherent in Jesus and His Teachings of the Son of God, sent by the Father to proclaim to mankind the Good News about the Kingdom of Heaven and Eternal Life for those chosen by Jesus by faith in Him – and let’s see what we get.

So, we have three sources of our sought – ChrEstianity: Thomas, John and Marcion, as the most reliable. Let’s look at them – what are they?

Ev. Thomas, apparently, the most ancient of the three, is presented in the form of a kind of common conversation between Jesus and his disciples – such is the form chosen by the evangelist (or evangelists). At the same time, mind the fact that the gospel was originally written in Greek and subsequently translated into the Said dialect of the Coptic language, which itself is a certain dialect of Greek. That is, all this was definitely not written by the apostles, by the illiterate Galilean fishermen from the God-forgotten outlying province of the Roman Empire, who spoke (and, doubtedly, wrote) Aramaic. At the same time, if we discard the artificial search for deep secret meanings connecting this set of sayings and dialogues with an allegedly secret semantic subtext and treat reading with an open mind, just like a text, then the modern reader – me – has a persistent feeling of a rather chaotic set of individual, in no way interconnected sayings, phrases, remarks, thoughts and random dialogues about everything and nothing – this is not a conversation at all, but a heap of all sorts of scraps of memories of Jesus, and probably not first-hand. This text, does not at all look like any kind of harmonious doctrine, it lacks not only internal coherence, not only a single composition of meaning, but the records themselves often look like a set of random, unrelated phrases.

I personally think and believe that this is precisely an unedited record of accidentally collected, whatever the writer was able to find, witness memoirs. They are the very oral “records of Jesus” that the narrators heard either from Jesus Himself or, rather, from one of the disciples, or even the disciples of the disciples about Jesus. That is so distorted an information set that to extract from it a coherent and consistent Teaching is the same as building a modern expensive convertible with the help of the wind blowing from a car scrapyard, so to speak.

To put it simply, this is a collection of folk wisdom, drawn from stray sources, recorded (in Greek) by no means – unfortunately – by a witness of Jesus, and not even from the words of His living witnesses, but only attributed to Jesus by popular rumor. And, perhaps, there will be echoes of the Teachings of Jesus in it, like grains among the husks of threshing, which will still have to be blown in the wind of common sense in order to reap a clean harvest. The task is not easy. And it is further complicated by the fact that the original listeners, the disciples of Jesus, were ignorant, illiterate and underdeveloped people who belonged to the bottom of the working people, and by no means to the top of the intellectual elite. And therefore the conceptual apparatus that they had at their disposal was by no means sufficient to accommodate the radically new Teachings of Jesus about the Unknown God, Eternal Life and the godlike immortal fate of Homo sapiens. This, I believe, explains the abundance of what can be classified as riddles, the solution of which should lead the reader to the saving through the Gnostic secret knowledge, which, as the Gnostics interpret, it is said in the prologue: “He who has found the interpretation of these words will not taste death.” I do not think that Jesus set himself the task of asking his disciples unsolvable riddles without solving them in order to deliberately confuse and torment, or thus train them in interpreting his riddles – apparently, they simply could not contain what He was trying to tell them using analogies, which, he hoped, would be more understandable to them than highly intellectual philosophical reasoning.