S Peter was the keeper of the keys of heaven and hell.

The Kingdom of God 1

Persian Colonists
Asuras
Shahthra
Jesus begins his Ministry
Power
The Imminence of the Kingdom

Abstract

Jesus took up the same message as John the Baptist. It was the same message. Faith was not sufficient to enter the kingdom as theologians later claimed. Jews who wanted to be amongst “the Righteous” had to repent. He made no claim to be the messiah but simply continued John’s call to the misled Jews—they should repent in preparation for the coming kingdom—the time had come, the kingdom of God was near, repentance was needed. Christian scholars writing decades before the Dead Sea Scrolls noted that Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God had intensive elements from Persia. The kingdom was a technical term Aryan priests and theologians used for the eschatological end. God’s kingdom was on earth, though it would have been cleansed and renewed by God’s holy fire, but only the messiah and righteous Jews could bring it about. Salvation was the gift of God but it had to be earned by righteousness or sincere repentance. What Jesus meant when he spoke of the kingdom of God.

Persian Colonists

Such Christian scholars as Rudolf Otto, writing decades before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, noted that Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God had “intensive elements” from Persia. Otto refers to the idea of the “kingdom” as an eschatological end that Aryan priests and theologians used as a “technical term”.

Zoroastrian mythology explains all the elements of Judaism missing in the primitive Israelite religion—the same religion as the Canaanites. The subsequent myth was that the grandchildren of the original rulers, that were taken into exile beside the Rivers of Babylon, returned and re-wrote the Jewish myths to incorporate the new features they had discovered from Zoroastrianism. In fact, insomuch that this myth is true at all, they returned with a new religion—Zoroastrianism for Jews!

Several hundred years before Jesus, Darius II, an otherwise undistinguished Persian shah, sent officials to Judaea under the supposed mandate of the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus, to set up a temple state for Abarnahara, unite the people under a common syncretistic religion and to keep order as a Persian provincial government. The devotees of this new religion were called Yehudim—Jews. Jews who ”returned” to accomplish this task were sent by the administrators and officials of the most successful empire and one of the most sophisticated civilisations that had ever existed on earth. Darius pretended to the people he sent that they were returning to their homeland, and conceivably some were, but primarily they were people chosen by the Persian chancellery officials and sent on a mission. They accomplished it wonderfully well and these “chosen people” led to the foundation of three world-wide religions!

On ”returning,” they had to contend with the descendants of the Canaanite peasants who had been left behind when their rulers were deported by the Babylonians. They had held to their old Canaanite myths and traditions, yet found these “exiled” Jews coming back, hobnobbing with foreigners and telling everyone that they did not understand their own religion. The unworldly native Jews, dubbed the “Men of the Land” or “Am ha-Aretz”, were attached to their traditional ideas of religious worship. The ”returners” would have nothing to do with their old-fashioned ideas. They rejected them and consistently turned the native Judahites away. This was the moment in history when Judaism was born, but its birth also gave birth to a tradition of schism which lasted for centuries. The old-fashioned Jews were later to be called the “Lost Sheep of the House of Israel” and were considered as apostates, though they preserved the original traditions of Israel.

By the time of Jesus, Greek influence had become so strong that there were indeed many apostate Jews and the term was also applied to them.

Asuras

Now the idea of the kingdom of God goes back to the Aryan group of gods called Asuras. In the Aryan religion at one stage Asuras were important gods but in India their roles were taken by other gods and they declined in the Indian Pantheon to mainly minor positions. Among the Asuras were Varuna, the foremost one, Mitra, Bhaga, Amse and Aryaman. Originally they seem to have been identical, so far as we can now tell, so their names could be simply different tribal names for the same god, a manifestation of the sun. Tribal alliances that eventually led to federation will have brought the Asuras together on a par, then Varuna emerged as the Asura who could declare:

I am all the Asuras.

In India, the sun god is called Surya. Curiously, all the Asuras are sun gods. In Egypt, the great sun god was “Ra”, and a popular suffix denoting a son was “su” suggesting the speculation that “surya” or “asura” is really a word that means “son of the sun god”, the suffix being used here as a prefix. Such speculation might seem far fetched, but philologists have good reason to believe that much more widely dispersed words than these have common roots in an ancient prehistoric language.

In Persian, mazda is taken to mean “wise” in the title of the Zoroastrian Almighty God, Ahuru Mazda. It is the same word in effect as magi or “medhi”. medhi-ra corrupted to Mazda seems to say “wise-sun”, but since Ahura is a variant of Asura we seem to be getting the sun in twice in the name of the Zoroastrain God. Probably medhi-ra was renderd in Aryan as Ahura Mazda with the Ra replaced by Ahura and the medhi replaced by Mazda, the vowel denoted by “i” changing to that denoted by “a” for reasons of assonance—but both names mean the same, “Wise Sun” or “Wise Lord” since the word “Asura” came to be a secular title meaning “Lord”. Varuna is designated in the Vedas as “the Wise”. Finally, Ahura Mazda was abbreviated to Ramuzd and Ormuzd.

The god, Asura, in the Vedas is also called the king, raja, and is praised as such in many “royal psalms” akin to those in the Hebrew Psalms. His kingdom is heaven which he rules as the “Divas Asura”, the Lord of heaven (literally, the sun of heaven). The Canaanites had a Lord of the heavens called Baal Shamaim literally, Lord of the suns.

In antiquity, the sun was personified as a sun god whose origins are later forgotten, and he is abstracted as a transcendental god of the cosmos who actually puts the sun in its place at the creation. Varuna, Ormuzd and Yehouah fit this pattern. Zoroaster depicted Ormuzd as the power beyond the sun, but he seemed to have two aspects from the start, the Holy Spirit or Spenta Mainyu, and the Evil Spirit or Angra Mainyu. The basis is the sun as temperate, sustaining life, and the sun as too hot or too weak, when life is lost. The idea of one god with two opposite principles embodied within is two subtle for simple folk so Ormuzd quickly became identified with Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu obtained an independent personality as Ahriman, an old Asura reanimated as an Evil One.

Even as far back as the Vedas there was a spirit called “Ahi Budhnya”, a dragon of the earth, equivalent to the Greek god, Pluto. So, although a sinister figure, he has not, in the Vedas, evolved into a principle of evil as he did in Zoroastrianism. Ahriman was considered a dragon, and was depicted as a serpent, the earthly equivalent of a dragon.

The transcendental god finds himself opposed by an opponent who is in practice just as powerful.

But how could an Almighty God like Ormuzd find himself with such a strong opponent? The Zoroastrian theologians explained it by having Ormuzd too distant from this world, whereas Ahriman took a great interest in debauching poor mankind. When Ormuzd found out what was going on, he would correct the oversight. So, the faithful had to pray for the oversight to be corrected and for Ormuzd to right the wrongs of the world caused by the evil Ahriman.

The trouble was that Ormuzd was too far away, up there beyond the heavens, so what good was praying to him? No good at all! That is where Mitra comes in. Mitra was another old Asura who became the mediator between the two opposing gods. He was therefore more accessible than Ormuzd because he visited earth to see what Ahriman was up to. Poor humans could pray to Mithras (Mitra) because he is on the side of Ormuzd, the absolute good and is sure to tell him what is going on. Thus, Mithras became a Mediator and Redeemer of mankind before Jesus did—but the parallels are clear.

Of course, the evil spirit had to be defeated by the perfectly good Almighty God whom the Judaeo-Persian priests returning from “exile” called Yehouah, the tribal god of the Israelite nation, rather than ostenibly more powerful and longer established gods like El or Baal. Yehouah would ultimately achieve victory over the Evil One at the End of Time. Then, those who had been righteous would be resurrected into a renewed and perfectly uncorruptible world, to live forever in bliss.

Shahthra

The concept in all this in the New Testament is that of the “kingdom of God”. In the Persian myth, it is that of the “Shahthra”. In the Persian, this word signifies all of the kingdom, the power and the glory, just as it does in the Lord’s prayer. Shahthra was to come at the end of the evil world—it was the perfect world that replaced it, a continuation of the familiar world but perfected. To the righteous, resurrected into it, it is the natural world, but it is supernatural because it is perfect and incorruptible. Christians should note though, because it is the source of their belief in resurrection, that it is not somewhere else. It is not transcendental.

Soderblum, quoted by Otto, tells us that in the Avesta, when ”Shahthra” arrives there is no longer any difference between heaven and earth. The Essenes believed exactly the same thing and sincerely believed that they were bringing a little bit of heaven to earth by behaving as perfectly holy people, or saints!

In 1 Chronicles, God is the king of heaven and earth. All of this is His kingdom, and Christians have taken His kingdom to be all of this. But for Jews, Yehouah was specifically their king and Israel was the land and nation of His people. So we find, in 1 Chronicles 17:14, that Yehouah refers to His kingdom as being the kingdom of David—the kingdom of God is Israel. Then, again, the Jews came to feel that their king, Yehouah, had departed. He had been replaced by foreign princes, and they looked to the day when Yehouah would return to Zion as seemingly prophesied by the prophets (Isa 24:23; Zeph 3:15; Zech 14:16). Much of this was Persian propaganda advocating their new Yehouah, but it gelled, and was magnified in later times when Israel was ruled by Greek and Roman princes. Yehouah would become a king in His kingdom again in a sense which came to be eschatological.

We have then several senses of the kingdom of God in the Jewish scriptures, yet Christian scholars, defying all scholarship, declare that the idea of a kingdom of God was uniquely Jesus’s. They pronounce the “kingdom of God” as a “technical term” which does not explicitly occur in the Old Testament. Yehouah as an eschatological king does not invite the thought of the eschatological kingdom of God, and the absence of the technical term proves it! This is purely sleight of hand, in typical dishonest Christian fashion. The idea had obviously arisen and the idea must precede expressions that describe it. What made the expression ”kingdom of God” fashionable at the time of Jesus will have been its identification with the persistent Jewish unhappines with Roman rule and the concomitant revival by the Essenes of thoughts of restoration of the kingdom of Israel.

It is, in any case, false that the “technical term” does not appear in the Jewish scriptures. It appears in The Wisdom of Solomon 10:10 as the very place to which Wisdom guides the Righteous. It is the heaven on earth to which the perfectly righteous can aspire, and the perfectly righteous in Judaism are those who walk perfectly in the law of God—the Mosaic law.

The Christian Lord’s Prayer is quite explicit in inviting God to found His kingdom in earth:

Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.

This can only be achieved when earth becomes heaven—or joined to heaven, and when earth and heaven join together, the present world ends. The prayer is therefore a prayer for the present world to end as it is, and a new world joined to heaven to begin. Eusebius confirms this in Ecclesiastical History where he states:

Papias adduces strange parables and teachings of the Saviour, and other more mystical things. Among them he says there will be a millennium after the Resurrection of the Dead, when the kingdom of the Messiah will be set up in material form on this earth.

The idea of angels as lesser gods, subjects, emissaries and ambassadors of the great king in heaven is largely the result of Persian influence. It was a convenience for the priests of the reformed Israelite religion, because it allowed them to write the old legends with Yehouah the central figure where previously he had not been. The other gods of the old Israelite pantheon then became the angels of Yehouah, the courtiers of the heavenly court. Often they would actually convert an old god into Yehouah for the sake of the new religion. Thus the old High God, El, was considered as Yehouah whenever he appeared.

The Persian idea of a cosmic battle was also introduced into Judaism. It was apparent in the Essene outlook and was fully taken up by Jesus, since he was an Essene. The defeat of the House of Satan and his ultimate fall is a message of Jesus that came directly from Zoroastrianism. For Paul also, the real world was the world of Satan and his satraps, or Archons as the Gnostics called them.

Jesus begins his Ministry

Jesus did not automatically become the Nasi of the Essenes on his baptism. Matthew and Mark imply Jesus did not succeed John, as the leader of the Nazarenes, until John was handed over or cast into prison by Herod. Only then did he begin spreading the gospel. In Acts 10:37, Peter, addressing Cornelius, also implies that Jesus only began his ministry after John the Baptist was imprisoned. Jesus was the prince in waiting, crowned in preparation for John to stand down. The ultimate fate of John the Baptist is not told until later but he has no further role in the gospel story.

As successor to John, Jesus takes up the same message. Note it is the same message—Jesus had not changed it. It was exactly that of John the Baptist—the same task—not in the new one of God’s messiah. He makes no claim to be the messiah but simply continues John’s call to the misled Jews, simple of Ephraim—they should repent in preparation for the coming kingdom—the time had come, the kingdom of God was near, repentance was needed. God’s kingdom was on earth, though it would have been cleansed and renewed by God’s holy fire. It would be presided over by the messiah. His lieutenants would be “the Righteous” of the children of Israel—if they had died before the triumph, resurrected on the third day (Hosea 6:2). Faith was not sufficient to enter the kingdom as theologians later claimed—Jews who wanted to be amongst “the Righteous” had to repent. Salvation was the gift of God but it had to be earned by righteousness or sincere repentance.

“The kingdom of God is near” sounds pretty innocuous to us but to the Jews it was a call to arms. They expected God’s reign to be initiated by the messiah liberating the chosen people from foreign yoke. God would intervene but he only helped those who helped themselves.

No mention is made in Mark of Jesus baptizing, yet baptism was required of those who sincerely repented—a ritual cleansing to accompany the spiritual cleansing of repentance. Mark’s omission of baptism is deliberate. Christians wanted to distinguish themselves from the followers of the Baptist, who were still active when Mark wrote, as Acts proves. So they mostly deleted baptism by Jesus from the story, just as they disguised or deleted all occurrences of the Essene sacred meal until the last supper, to give a romanticized and spurious account of its origin. However, we learn from John 3:26 and 4:1 that Jesus and John were both baptizing at the same time. John the Baptist takes the news that Jesus was successful as proof that he was indeed God’s choice and it was time for John to step down (decrease)—all men come to him (Jn 3:26) and Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, an excuse for John to deny he is the messiah. Later (Jn 4:2), an editor saw a problem in John’s account of the Son of God behaving like John the Baptist and inserts a parenthesis that it was the disciples who baptized!

Note, in Mark 1:15, the phrase, “the time is fulfilled”, which implied that whoever was judging the nature of the time had reason to believe something was about to happen. The Essenes spent a great deal of energy in keeping time precisely, and in seeking clues to God’s intentions by comparing the scriptures with current events. The scrolls speak of the “End Time” as does Daniel 12:4 and 12:9. The Gospel of John speaks of the “Last Days”, and the Epistles use the same expression or the “Last Time”. If there were other apocalyptic sects at the time of Jesus besides the Essenes, it is odd that we should never have heard of them, and, if they were so small, what resources could they offer to the divining of times. The Essenes apparently had a well developed school at Qumran and a widespread organization. Only they had the resources. The conclusion must be that Jesus and John the Baptist, his predecessor, were Essenes.

The Greek translated, “is at hand”, is rendered by some scholars as, “has arrived”, which suggests that like, “the time is fulfilled”, the Nazarenes read signs which unmistakably proclaimed the kingdom in such a way that there was no stepping back. For Mark the temptation had started the cosmic battle which would terminate in the everlasting kingdom.

Mark uses the sickness convention to show that Jesus travelled widely to proclaim his message, gaining many converts and recruits for his cause (Mark 1:32-1:34):

And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils. And all the city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils; and suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him.

Note the secretiveness. They met only after sunset so as not to attract the attention of the authorities, and casting out devils—the despair, defeatism and spiritual emptiness of a defeated people. It works! The kingdom is coming! People flock to join the band, and doubters who were ill or possessed by demons are won over. Luke 4:41 reads:

And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ.

No one was allowed to suggest that Jesus was the Messiah, wherther he thought he was himself or not. If anyone were to cry out, ”Jesus, the Messiah”, they would have been potentially attracting the attention of the authorities. So, Jesus rebuked them and forbade them to speak and the disciples discouraged them with a beating. Such people were “unclean spirits”, “devils” or “demons”.

Power

The Essenes believed that God had ordained an End when he would avenge all wrong and judge the world. Did the Essenes have the idea of time ending at the End Time. No! Time ended for the present world but the new world of the kingdom of God then continued. Jesus never said that heaven and earth would pass away. He said that nothing of the law could be altered until heaven and earth passed away. He meant that the law could never be altered because heaven and earth would never pass away. The law was forever unalterable—it was given by God, so how could men change it? This was the Essene view.

Since the conquests by various foreign powers over several hundred years seemed to show that God had gone away and given up on His people, some Jews thought a clear and definitive step was needed to get God’s attention and prove to Him that His people were still worthy of His lovingkindness.

If Jesus considered the world the realm of the Devil, we can plausibly imagine that he thought the clearest manifestation of the Devil was the Roman occupation of God’s land and people—the Roman occupation of Israel. For Jews, Israel was in the clearest sense, the kingdom of God, but it had been usurped by God’s adversary, Satan. Jesus and Essenes like him can only have seen the defeat of Satan as synonymous with the defeat of Rome and this is proved in Revelations. Thus Roman defeat opened the gates of the kingdom of God. Yehouah could return to His rightful place as the king of Israel. God would be restored to Zion.

The idea of heaven uniting with earth was therefore intuitively linked with the nationalistic idea of Israel as God’s particular kingdom. Heaven and earth could only join when Israel had been freed from Satan’s earthly agents—the Roman occupiers and their allies the froward priests of Jerusalem. The messiah, the son of God, who led the Jews against Satan’s agents on earth was also the earthly king of the Jews. That is why Jesus was crucified. Those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness were precisely those who realised that fighting the Holy War against Satan in the natural world was an important part of God’s cosmic battle against the Evil One, and would serve to show the Jews as still worthy despite their history of backsliding.

So, God’s kingdom had to be a “power”, as the Lord’s prayer states:

Thine is the kingdom,
The power and the glory.

So, those pious Jews who wanted the restoration of the kingdom to its rightful ruler felt they had to demonstrate this “power” or “dynamis” to prove that they were still worthy. They would defeat the Romans then God would inaugurate His kingdom in its full power and glory. Jesus was teaching the kingdom of God as a political as well as an eschatological entity—the state of Judaea as a polis or a civitas.

Jesus was not interested in speculating about the nature of the kingdom when it came. He was solely concerned to bring it about. The rest was up to God. The kingdom of God was obviously desirable for Jews and they expected to be the new archons of the world in it, but they did not speculate unduly about what it would be like. Plainly it was a shiny and rose coloured world because it was pure, perfect, incorruptible, free of sin and free of wickedness, but otherwise it was indescribable. The point was how to bring it about, and in the gospels, when Jesus is asked about the kingdom, he does not describe it but describes how it arises. The surprising answer in the light of popular apocalyptic ideas was that the kingdom was already beginning to grow on earth.

The Essenes did not believe the world was irredeemably evil. They thought that although the world was wicked, men could try to make it perfect. God had shown what had to be done. People had to obey God’s law then they would be perfect. The Essenes tried to be perfect as God had commanded, and believed that be so doing they brought a little bit of heaven to earth.

The trouble was that most Jews did not properly follow God’s law. Many were apostates, living life according to Greek customs not Jewish one. Jesus and the Essenes tried to prove to God that there was the will among the righteous of this world to bring about heaven. It was possible for the kingdom of God to grow on earth, if healthy seeds were planted:

The kingdom of God is among you.

Rudolf Otto writing more than 20 years before the scrolls were uncovered says it is a “secret power” “working secretly and quietly” “in the germinating faith of the first community”. Otto sounds as though he is describing the secretive and undercover nature of the Essene sect for whom defeat of the Kittim (Westerners who propagated Greek culture—Romans) was a necessary requirement of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.

This is most obvious in the parables of Mark 4 where the growth of the kingdom is described in similes. The kingdom of God is likened to a seedling plant, beginning small and eventually encompassing everthing. The seed was the Essenes movement, from which the kingdom had come, and which itself had grown as a protection for God’s law, which was the ultimate spore of the kingdom, and the sense in which God’s kingdom was already on earth. Like a head of water building behind a dam, the kingdom grew almost unseen until it burst forth in a torrent when God deemed the time right. But it grew in secret first.

If the kingdom began as seeds, in God’s law and the remnant of Israel that followed it properly, then it is true to say that the kingdom was a power of God already at work. Furthermore, the Essenes considered themselves the foundation of the kingdom of God in this world. With a change of metaphor a foundation is a seed. So these “mystereia” of the gospels are explained naturally and historically without invoking any supernatural “power” of God. B W Bacon, in 1929, wrote that the parables of the kingdom in Mark express a power “already at work”, “unseen by dull or hostile eyes”, “silent, omnipotent, overtaking unawares”.

The Essenes were like the Maquis in France in WWII. They were a body of guerrillas secretly conspiring against their enemy, the occupying power. That meant, of necessity, secretly organising to bring about the kingdom of God by defeating the Romans. Only when their uprising was successful and the Romans evicted could the kingdom of God break in. Paradoxically, the “newness” of Jesus’s teaching for Christian commentators turns out to be precisely the revelations of the working of a secret organisation that would sweep away the wordly princes of Satan to inaugurate the kingdom of God. This is the sense that the kingdom was already at work.

The Imminence of the Kingdom

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.
Mark 9:1

Jesus’s most important prediction—that the kingdom of God would be seen by this generation—is still untrue today. Christian scholars have fought with this difficult verse but for the impartial observer the meaning is clear.

When Jesus repeatedly says that the kingdom of God is nigh, he means exactly that—it was due at any time. And the kingdom of God was assuredly not some fourth dimensional kingdom or mysterious kingdom only entered by faith in the resurrection. He meant that the kingdom would be here on earth within the lifetime of a mature adult. It is clearer in Mark:

I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.
Mark 13:30

The other two synoptic gospels also contain this formula (Mt 24:34; Lk 21:32). The Essenes believed the battle would take forty years, a Jewish generation, so Jesus felt sure that some of his followers, repentant and baptized as they were, would not have died before the eve of the kingdom.

If the kingdom means everlasting life for the Righteous, then those who do not die physically before it comes, never die at all, but Jesus actually says…

…they shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come,

implying that the coming of the kingdom will kill them. The day of God’s vengeance meant that everyone would physically die, but the Righteous would be resurrected on the third day of the kingdom to live for ever after. In this case, Jesus is actually saying to everyone:

The kingdom is due within a generation, so some of you will be still alive when the kingdom comes, but like everyone else, sinner and righteous, will die on its arrival in the terrible day of God’s vengeance, but only the Righteous will be resurrected in the general resurrection on the third day.

Admittedly, the author of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 does not mention the deadly effect of the coming of the kingdom:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord,
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

but nor does he exactly deny it. He would not have wanted to scare off potential converts, and this seems to show that Christians had forgotten the idea of the general resurrection on the third day.

If Jesus expected, like everyone else to die before the general resurrection on the third day, then all of his prophecies of rising on the third day are explained as a general belief and not a singular prediction.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.