SPENTA MAINYU

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: "Leave your ignorance behind."

YOU ARE IN DARKNESS.
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THIS IS  THE OLD TESTAMENT

According to the historians, theologians, philologists and archaeologists who examined the Biblical tradition,  Bible is primarily “prophecy.” Therefore whether the things written in it are facts or not is a matter of secondary importance. It is claimed to be a religious message, a revelation, made known to mankind via interfaces/modems (messengers) in the languages of its time. As a prophecy it has no connection with the objective reality. The only reality it is connected with is the subjective and personal reality of its authors. Their starting point is their subjective perception of the environment. They must have been driven also by their ambitions as we witness in Paul. Gathering of the various books of the Bible took centuries. Song of Miriam (Exodus; thought to be the oldest text) may be really a genuine example of what has come down to us from the Late Bronze period (13th century B.C.) The second epistle of Peter (thought to be the latest one to be written) may not have been composed until the second quarter of the 2nd century A.D. Majority of the Biblical works are thought to be brought together to form the Bible (biblios) between the 6th century B.C. and the 1st century A.D. Beginning of some of the texts is almost certain to be farther back because of the source material they have employed, so add a few centuries to the beginning. A few decades may be added to the end of the period due to some of the books of the New Testament. Bible in reality is a collection of books written over a period of more than 1000 years, in a plurality of languages and styles. As I have mentioned earlier these so called sacred books could be likened to writing the scenario of a film after watching it.

Bible is a document of faith. Faith is belief. Belief begins where knowledge and proof cease to exist. A believer never needs proofs and evidences. A believer, a faithful, just believes. In what? In whom? He couldn’t care less. It makes the least of a difference.. The fairy tale about  “Moses receiving the Ten Commandments which were written on two stone slabs by the finger of YHVH” and all the narrations that followed it are pure inventions, created with a special purpose which I pointed out elsewhere.

Bible has started as an account of the ‘exacting’ relationship between a people and their god. The Old Testament, in the beginning, had an anthropomorphic (human-like) god; following the Babylonian exile when Ezra  completed his part in rewriting certain sections of the book, this god lost all its human-like attributes and receded to his realm up there; with the New Testament, this supreme being (the ‘father’), sent down(!) his ‘son’ to the Earth. Which meant that god was not anthropomorphic-human-like, but human, a ‘god in flesh’; and in the end of the New Testament this ‘son of god’ became lord Yshua Christ, the messiah, the redeemer made of ‘godly substance’, the god himself.

Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is a neutral or objective story of the events. On the contrary both books are very much biased. Moreover we are not sure what the real story is. We don’t know even if there ever has been an original story.

Bible contains everything. It is a mixture of the worst kind. In consequence, the inferior editing could easily be detected. It uses descriptive methods. Its language is abstract and very rich in images. The smallest, the shortest or the simplest of reports is blown up into a major story in the Bible. These stories are full of puzzling descriptions. The ambiguity is intentional, because ambiguity and incomprehensibility are fundamentals of a belief system. Do you  need an example? What do you think may be the meaning of the story on the sacrificial offering of I'zak by Abraham? It is commanded by god, but not carried out just at the last moment due to the intervention of god. Like it is written in Genesis 22: Has “god tempted Abraham”, or was it something else?

Who were the Hebrews we read in the books? As usual with the belief systems there is no clarity. Some say Abraham was the beginning of the lineage of Hebrews. Others say that the line comes from the Midianites. Some propose the people coming from Egypt as the origin of the ‘nation’.

Here is another one: In the Middle Bronze age, groups of Canaanites have moved into northern Egypt and established a local dynasty called the Hyksos. In the end they took over the whole of Egypt. In the Late Bronze Age, in about 1550 B.C. the Egyptian pharaohs expelled the Hyksos, launched a military campaign against Canaan, and brought it under the Egyptian control. In the reign of Rameses II (1304-1237 B.C), the empire was reorganized. Key strategic cities like Beth Shan and Gaza were strengthened, others were allowed to decline. Many people were made homeless and migrated to the Judean hill country, where they established small farming settlements. According to some scholars these dispossessed Canaanites, known to the Egyptians as Hapiru-Epiru (or Hebrews), have formed the basis of what was to become Israel.

Another theory which is popular amongst the Biblical scholars today is that Israel has emerged from peoples indigenous to Canaan in the mid 12th century B.C. If this is true, then Biblical history and chronology prior to 1150 B.C. would have to be thrown away. Proponents of the ‘12th century emergence theory’ claim that the Israelites did not come into Canaan from outside to conquer the land around 1400 B.C, as Bible indicates. The emergence scenario would also reject the historicity of the wilderness wanderings, Exodus, Egyptian sojourn and the patriarchal narratives. However, if Israel were an established entity in Canaan already in 1210 B.C., as the Merneptah stele implies, then the '12th century emergence theory' would be negated. If Israel was already well established by the end of the 13th century B.C., how could it have come into being in the middle of the next century?

The Old Testament is the invented and compiled history of Jews and an account of all the centuries of what Hebrews thought of themselves; how they had tried to bestow upon themselves a privileged status amongst other peoples; how they had invented a supreme creator who ‘owned’ them as his ‘chosen people’; how they  had stubbornly chased their objective of becoming a nation; and how in the end they had landed as the believers of Ahura Mazda,  presented as YHVH .

Christians see themselves as heirs to this history and philosophy as a whole. Testament  means a covenant or a bond. The Old and New Testaments outline this relationship with god in contrasting ways: The Old Testament does it according to the law, and the New Testament does it according to the holy spirit. The Old Testament revolves around submitting to the ordinances of god, while on the contrary the New Testament is based on living the faith. Christians regard the New Testament as the fulfilment of the Old. Because the figure of Yshua and the events of his life supposedly fulfil the prophecies on the coming of the messiah.

 

..AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

Let’s proceed to the boundary where we leave behind the wild world of the Old Testament where the god itself is bloodthirsty and vengeful to the extreme, and where lions slew man (I Kings 13:24 and II Kings 17:25-26), and enter the urban Roman environment of the New Testament where the ‘god’(!) is either killed by or sacrificed his life for the sake of mankind (feel free to choose your angle). The land was Israel, and the population was still Jewish, because Yshua was a Jew and the early Christians were all Jews. But with the letters of Paul and other early missionaries the Jewish origins of Christianity were transformed in a short span of time. By the 4th century A.D. all the Jewish elements were gone.

The codebook of Yshua and the early Christians (Christian Jews) was the Old Testament, but no list exists of the books it might have contained. People have tried to find out what books were in the Old Testament, from the quotations in the New Testament, which led to an uncertain conclusion regarding the state of the Old Testament ‘canon’ in the 1st century A.D. In actual fact Christians have to do a lot of thinking to realize that once upon a time there was a Christian Bible which contained neither the Old nor the New Testament. A time came and as we read in II Timothy 3:16 references began to “all scripture is given by inspiration of god” and this scripture “..is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” This statement might be taken as the indication of an ongoing editorial, scholarly, creative and compositional process. Gradually Christians felt the need to add a new collection of books to the Old Testament. But the Christian Church had to find a method of linking itself to the past, to its roots. This search for a way to guarantee the continuation of the tradition of faith has ended in the formation of a Christian canon. There were also many texts in circulation bearing the names of the apostles which had   no apostolic teaching (as it is interpreted by the Church) in them. The need to eliminate these forgeries and  to define the limits of apostolic writings was another reason why the central characters of the church movement have decided to have a canon. But one development was crucial: Heretic Marcion compiled a canon of the New Testament containing his edition of the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke. Marcion regarded Luke as the only genuine Gospel. Marcion’s Gospel has accelerated the process towards a Christian canon. This oldest Christian Gospel by Marcion does not mention Yshua's baptism. Though many evangelical churches deny the necessity of baptism for salvation, the New Testament (Paul) insists on its necessity. Do you have any idea as to the reason behind this contradiction?

When compared with the period of more than a millennium covered by the Old Testament, the codebook of Christianity covers a time span of less than 100 years. From the beginning of the ministry of Yshua to the end of the acts of Apostles is only a little more than 30 years. The New testament is  about  the lives  and sayings of a few individuals. It revolves exclusively around the supposed teaching of Yshua, his disciples and the apostles. The New Testament, written mostly during the 1st century A.D., consists of 27 books. The four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John narrate the life and teachings of Yshua; the Acts of the Apostles, where the first 30 years of the church may be found; 21 letters by the early Christian leaders to various communities and individuals, of which 13 are thought to have been written by Paul. But later research showed that many of the letters attributed to Paul were forgeries or created by editing a few genuine fragments into a whole. Yshua did not have a book or a canon. But Paul  did introduce  a canon of his own which has now come down to seven documents: Romans, I&II Corinthians, Galatians, I Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon.

Paul was never interested in the historical Yshua, he went on without hesitation with his creation of the concept of divine(!) ord Yshua/Jesus Christ. Especiallly in his letter to the Galatians Paul is in his most aggressive attitude. This letter is thought to have been written in 54 A.D., in which Paul very severely warns the Galatians (we don’t know for sure where this Galatia is) and writes, “..we or any angel from heaven, preach any other gospel..let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8); “if any man preach any other gospel..than you have received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:9). We see here the beginning of the practice of outlawing any other gospel than the one introduced by Paul. All those gospels or books or texts differing from Paul’s were not wanted, because they presented a different Yshua than what Paul wished. His pretext is explained in I Galatians ,  where he says he is “..an apostle, not of men, neither by men, but by Yshua (Jesus Christ), and god the Father, who raised him from the dead.”  So what he says must be supreme. He opposes other apostles in Galatians 2:6-15.

In Galatians 2:7-9 comes the clean break: He lays his claim to the “apostleship of the uncircumcision”. This meant the admission of the Gentiles (foreigners who were not Jews) into the Gospel  without the necessity of their having to undergo the circumcision. This was the greatest contribution by Paul, it was the final nail in the construction of a gospel of his own. This was the clean break which took the gospel out of the Jewish jurisdiction and placed it into a non-Jewish perspective. The Jewish characteristics and origins became obsolete in time as a result of this decisive act, and everything Jewish was forgotten. Another important point is also highlighted by Paul in this letter. It is the distinction between the divine law and grace. Judaism is based on the law, the law of the supreme creator. Paul in this letter makes the distinction clear with these words: “..a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ..that we might be justified by the faith of Christ and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” This is another fundamental difference between Judaism and Paulinism (Galatians 2:16). To stress his point about the supremacy of faith, Paul in Galatians 3:6 uses Genesis 15:6, and in Galatians 3:11 he mentions Habakkuk 2:4. Paul ties the knot with Galatians 3:24-26: “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For you are all the children of god by faith in Jesus Christ.” Therefore this story of the Old Testament becomes a preparation for  the concept of Christ. That is that!  This makes clear that faith came out victor from the final battle.

 

ABRAHAM, ABRAHAM.. HE IS EVERYWHERE

According to Paul (Galatians 3:16) the patriarch of the Jewish faith, Abraham, is the father of Christ; Christ is of “Abraham’s seed” [The Hagarene messenger ('Muhammad') has also laid claim to descent from Abraham] and anybody who belongs to ‘Christ’ are “heirs according to the promise”. This promise is explained by Paul in the Romans 4:9-13  “..Faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness...in uncircumcision...the promise, to Abraham and to his seed, that he should be the heir of the world was not through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.” It means in plain language that Abraham has believed in god when he was not circumcised, and he was given the world  because of his faith. Circumcision is the law, but faith is much more important than the law. That is why the believers of the Christian faith are not required to get circumcised. And this was again the crucial factor that has separated Paulinism from Judaism. Galatians 3:7-13 gives us the story: “..Those faithful are blessed with faithful Abraham...Who are of the matters of law are under the curse...And the law is not of faith..Christ has redeemed us from the curse of law.”

What is faith? Read Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Such eloquence(!) and incomprehensibility is incredible. Only the interfaces-modems-messengers between the supreme being and the mankind could manage that jargon. Kuran and the Hagarene Messenger ('Muhammad') recognize the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the messengers to whom those books were revealed(!), Moses and Yshua (as mentioned above and elsewhere Yshua did not introduce a book). The Hagarene Messenger also considers patriarch Abraham as an ancestor, in other words the head of family. Therefore this is an unbroken chain starting with Abraham and ending with the Hagarene Messenger. Which necessitates those orthodox Arab and non-Arab believers of the Hagarene Messenger, who give prominence to ‘law’, the sharia, heed this call, or at least listen to it: Faith comes first. Otherwise all those who do not observe the sharia - the law - become infidels even if they are believers and  they do have scriptures and rituals to observe, and they do worship a god particular to their faith.

Now it’s time to give the bottom line of Paul’s gospel. It is in Galatians 3:27-28: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Another serious parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity could be seen in the Hebrews.

Here Yshua is not the messenger of the Gospels anymore. He is the son of god, he is also the radiance of god’s glory and the look of god’s person(!): “the image of the invisible god, the firstborn of every creature” (Colossians 1:14). Imagine the feelings of Jews who were confronted with this description. This Christology marks another division between Jews and Christians.

The very foundations - the texts cited here - of this organissed religion we call Christianity are either unreliable narrations or creations. Here is one seemingly minor, insignificant example for some people: Did Yshua carry the cross himself or did someone do it for him? According to Matthew 27:32 and Mark 15:21 Yshua did not carry the cross himself along via dolorosa, but John 19:17 tells us that Yshua has carried his cross.

 

BIBLE : AN INSPIRED BOOK

Bible is regarded as the arbiter of doctrine by the Christian church and the place where the proper rules of church life are to be found. It is considered as ‘inspired’, meaning that although there is a multiplicity of authors and a variety of styles, what is written is thought  to have come directly from god (Nonsense!). This means,  the stories in the Gospels are the word of god. If that is so, then is there anybody out there who could explain why the all-seeing and all-hearing god is telling all those differing stories? All the principles of this belief system was introduced and formulated by Paul although he was far away when Yshua was preaching. Therefore are we to believe that Yshua has “lighted a candle in his heart when they met and in a flash of illumination Paul grasped all the essentials of what Yshua had taught”? Or do we have to think that Paul was an interface   himself? Which one is the word of god: The Gospels, the letters of Paul or the other texts in the New Testament? The acceptance of these texts as divine is the outcome of the prevailing ignorance of those days. Some take the writings to be absolute and true facts, others regard some of the stories, in both Testaments, as more allegorical and demonstrating the essence of the infallibility both of god and Yshua.

Christianity is supposedly a monotheistic faith. But this hypothetical monotheism is complicated by the doctrine of Trinity: Father, son and the holy spirit. How can a god be one and three at the same time? Mankind found the answer to its invention called Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century A.D., four hundred years after Yshua: There is one god, revealed in three persons. Father, son and the holy spirit are ‘three persons in the same substance’ and as such are united/one - but yet separate (Check the pages on the SUPREME BEING in this site). Some sections of Christianity and also some theologians do not accept this clever solution and these theologians also experience difficulty in accepting the resurrection.

Christianity is not a religion proper, but a cult because of its origins and due the fact that a person in Christianity is given the personal choice before god. A person could decide if Yshua is a god or a human being, or both, or the son of god. The individual person has the authority to decide on questions like these. To have faith or to doubt one’s faith is a personal prerogative. In short a person who wants to become a Christian, first of all, must create a god (Yshua) for himself. An act of creation of this kind is possible only in a cult. It is only in a cult that a person can create a faith and a god symbolizing it. There is nothing like this in either Judaism or Islam.

The Roman church and the other Eastern Churches accept seven sacraments: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination, penance, anointing of the sick, and mass. Protestant Churches only accept the baptism and the lord’s supper - communion (Communion has different names according to the denominations like Eucharist, lord’s supper and mass).

In order to understand the New Testament properly we have to know Gnosis, which is known as the fertile soil from which the Eastern ideas have sprouted. Gnosis grants us an insight into the workshop of some of the evangelists and into the ways in which the Buddhist material could have gained access to the writings of Christianity. The Buddhist material turns up in the New Testament independently of the discourses of the original Yshua. Gnosis is difficult to define because it is a very complex and an enormously interesting religious phenomenon. Gnosis was born in the encounter between the philosophical schools of neo-Platonism + neo-Pythagoreanism, and the syncretistic movements spreading from Egypt by way of Syria to Asia Minor, throughout the Middle East during the Hellenistic period.

Gnostic systems were mainly shaped by the following elements:

What a mixture!

The concept of rebirth (gilgul) only became established in the Jewish circles around the beginning of the 2nd millennium. Talmudists assumed that god had created only a specific number of Jewish souls, which were constantly reborn. For punishment they returned in animal bodies. According to that view a human has to live through a long series of transmigration of souls (gilgul-neschama) until redemption (tikkun - right order, harmony) is attained. According to Josephus the Pharisees have believed in ‘the power of..those returning to life’ and that the souls of the good pass on to another body. The ancient Indian pre-Buddhist belief was that a human being had to pass through many earthly existences in order to attain that degree of spiritual perfection which makes possible a ‘return’ to his or her divine home. The Upanishads from the pre-Buddhist epoch viewed that return as the realisation of the understanding that the self (Atman) is identical with the primal ground, with the highest divine totality (Brahman). For the Buddha who has rejected the idea of either a highest god or a soul, that ‘return’ has signified finding one’s way home through entering the void known as nirvana (nibbana). It was believed that before coming down to earth buddhas have existed in a heaven and returned there after their death - until their next voluntary incarnation. Yshua’s kingdom of god, viewed in terms of rebirth,  turns out to be the Buddhists’ ‘Buddha heaven’. The idea that redemption only occurs when the goal of earthly development is achieved indicates the Indian and Buddhist origins. The way in which the teaching about the rebirth is integrated into Yshua’s message and made a fundamental component in his own understanding of redemption makes the assumption of Indian roots seem very plausible. In the later centuries Church has devoted great efforts to suppressing all the New Testament references to the idea of reincarnation, without being able to eliminate them completely.

This diverse collection of fragmentary ideas; Iranian Dualism; Babylon’s astrological symbolism; the idea of rebirth; a god and a redeemer coming down to earth; magic; and mythological stories on creation; started to ferment when exposed to the catalyzing effect of the philosophical schools of neo-Platonism and neo-Pythagoreanism.

Gnosis  means ‘knowledge’, the esoteric knowledge, and is in fact the exact Greek translation of the Sanskrit word ‘bodhi’ from which Buddhism derives. Gnosis like Buddhism, viewed itself as the opposite of a religion based on belief. Knowledge (gnosis) against belief (pistis).. The Gnostic spirit of the age was like a sponge, soaking up all suitable religious convictions from the great river of oral tradition flowing from east to west. Gospels, like the apocryphal Christian literature, could not have escaped the influences coming from the east - gnosticism and the Buddhist thinking. One should mention the first conflated Gospel in Syrian or Greek, known as Diatesseron ('through four') which was assembled by Tatian around 170 A.D. He was an Encratic (A Christian sect who denounced marriage and preached the renunciation of meat). Paul attacked Encratics for having fallen away from belief ( I Timothy 4:1-4). It is quite possible that they were the ones representing a religious attitude closer to the beliefs of the original Yshua, and Paul might have been the one who had fallen away. Hyppolitus’ thoughts might be useful in clearing this matter (Check the page on YSHUA/JESUS in this site). But the church authorities found the Diatesseron unacceptable, and early in the 5th century A.D. all copies of the Diatesseron were destroyed, including the commentary by Ephraem.

When all the alternative versions were destroyed the leading churchmen have  introduced their own version of the four New Testament Gospels, and declared them canonical - of course only after eliminating extensive passages of ‘undesirable’ character.

As quoted above the Gospel of John begins with the declaration that “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god”. The Yshua of the Gospels is a Jew. No matter what he is called he is a figure (mythical or historical) within the framework and the traditions of the Hebrew Bible (the Greek Old Testament). But this logos hymn in the beginning of John’s Gospel is the source of the orthodox Christian doctrine which in turn has produced, among other doctrines, the Trinitarianism. As necessitated by this doctrine the Yshua of the belief system is not a Jew anymore. He is the second person of the holy trinity, the ‘son of god’. This divine figure with the Messiahship creates a very different figure of Yshua, which also means a discontinuity. But without the Greek Old Testament Christianity would lack its roots and the grand narrative in the Luke and Acts. The Greek Old Testament and the New Testament are the Christian scripture. In that sense Yshua is the ‘fulfilment’ of that scripture and its destroyer. This is the fundamental problem.

 

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER GOSPELS THAT WERE  LEFT OUT?

The New Testament was officially canonized in the 4th century A.D. Looking at the texts that were left out, branded as heretical etc., one can safely say that only a certain set of books were canonized. Amongst  the Gospels that were left out are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Everlasting Gospel. These are all ‘Gnostic’ gospels. They concentrate on the sayings of Yshua. Now you know why they were banned. Sayings of Yshua are the last thing the Church needs. The more they are forgotten and buried under the rubble of building a church the better. What about the accepted ones? The four Gospels are questionable in every sense of the word. The Gospel narrations are the ‘report of a report’  type. There is nothing in them to indicate the authorship. Matthew, Mark and Luke are basically very similar and called the synoptic gospels. Due to some material in both Matthew and Luke, which does not exist in Mark another older and common source, ‘Q’, has been assumed. The Gospel of Thomas is seen as a parallel source to the ‘Q’. This shows that either Mark and ‘Q’ are taken as the source texts, or Mark, ‘Q’, Matthew and Luke. Gospel of John is completely different from the others (Check the page on YSHUA/JESUS in this site).

What more one can say about a collection of books telling us mostly imaginary stories about tribes of people and also about a Jewish itinerant preacher. Those who would like to have more information could check the pages on MOSES, the OLD TESTAMENT, YSHUA and for related matters, the other pages in this site.

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