Abstract

God is not a man that He should lie, or a son of man that He should repent. Has He said, and shall He not do it? And has He spoken, and shall He not make it good?

Num 23:19

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 09, 2000
Saturday, 20 May 2006

The Religion of Jesus

The complaints of priests against the stirrers of sectarian conflict are prompted by a desire to keep their flocks in ignorance and pursue their mercenary activities unrecognized. The real issue for Christians is whether the Word of God is the Word of God. What satisfies them that it is not just the later word of the people who have adopted the profession of saving souls for practical pecuniary reasons?

How are they sure that what they believe is really the religion of Jesus? Perhaps they will answer that the bible tells us. Well, millions of fundamentalist Christians believe an agonized mother of a stillborn baby must accept that the soul of her child will burn in hell forever because it had not been baptized. What is the basis of their belief? Where is it in the New Testament, and was it Jesus or some parroter that said it? Jesus, god though he might be, took a terrible risk with this rule, did he not, because he left his own baptism until he was thirty?

No one can find a statement in the gospels that absence of baptism leads to hell fire. On the other hand, if the devout Christian takes baptism to be merely a symbol of repentance and people who are unrepentant will burn, then millions of insincere Christians are burning in hell too, including many Fundamentalists, but an innocent child who has not lived long enough to sin will be living in the balmy place.

Evidence of the lateness of the teaching that is attributed to Jesus is nowhere clearer than in one of the most famous texts of the New Testament. The writer attributes a pun to the prophet of Nazareth:

Thou art Peter [Rock], and upon this rock I will build my church.

Jesus, as an Essene probably so delighted in puns that it is a wonder there are not many others. Just as, for English speakers, the pun does not make any sense unless the Greek name Peter is translated into English, it seems unlikely that Jesus could have made the pun in Aramaic, but Peter is simply the Greek translation of the Aramaic for a stone, Cephas, so the pun does work in the original language of Jesus. Paul prefers to call Peter by the nickname that Jesus gave him and not its Greek equivalent. Anyway, the Christian, especially the Catholic, Church stakes its legitimacy on that pun. Yet, the word, “church”, is used again in Matthew 18:17, where a man who has a quarrel with his neighbor must submit it to “the church”.

So, the Church Peter was to build already existed and Jesus was a part of it! And if Jesus was part of a church, and also expected the world to end soon, why should he be appointing Peter as the rock upon which another church would be built. The Greek word put in the mouth of Jesus is “ecclesie”. The word is used by the Greek translators of the Old Testament (Dt 31:30 and Ps 22:22). The only Aramaic word corresponding to this meant the general assembly or convocation of the Jewish people, or an assembly of the Essenes (“qahal” or “yahad”), so a genuine reference to “the church” by Jesus meant that he was an Essene.

Paul

Christianity did not begin with Jesus but with Paul, and there are few biblical scholars who will dissent from this. Jesus was sent by God, yet Christians have to believe that Paul was then sent by Jesus, though the evidence is so inconsistent and unreliable, it simply would be thrown out of court if brought as evidence in a legal case. Why wouldn’t God have taken the chance He had when he sent His Son, Jesus, to pass on all the key messages? It is far more sensible to believe He did! Who then sent Paul? A supporter of Paul, Luke, explains how Paul was called by Jesus, in this absurdly unnecessary additional calling:

But the men traveling with him had been standing speechless, indeed hearing the voice, but seeing no one.

Acts 9:7

A second account of the same incident is quite different:

But those being with me indeed saw the light, and were alarmed, but did not hear His voice speaking to me.

Acts 22:9

Luke who was a companion of Paul relates this since he is traditionally the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and is said by Christians to have been a careful historian, yet seems not to notice that the two accounts are fundamentally different. In one case, the men accompanying Paul heard the voice, but only Paul, it seems, saw Jesus, whereas in the second, the men saw a light, but heard no voice at all, only Paul heard it. Luke must have been relating what Paul had told him of this incident, and so Paul must have had two different stories. Jesus supposedly tells Paul to arise and go into Damascus and receive instruction (Acts 9:6; 22:10). But the accounts of the incident are not yet over. A third telling of it, to king Agrippa, does not say what the men heard, though they saw the light, and he says that Jesus instructed him there and then (Acts 26:16-18).

Paul is the man who truly founded Christianity, the man who took the religion into the Roman empire, and utterly changed it from the one that Jesus was teaching a few years earlier. The threefold telling of the story in Acts is a deliberate emphasizing of Paul’s supposed commission from God in the form of the Son, yet God could have done anything He wanted with no human help at all. He is, after all, God! It is human confidence tricksters who claim to be commissioned by God. Paul boasts he is “all things to all men” (1 Cor 9:22), which is, at best, a low expediency, and, at worst, is plain confidence trickery.

No court of law would accept such a witness as being reliable, yet the believers in Christianity will believe the testimony of this man—a man, not one of the Trinity—above one of the Trinity that Christians believe constitute God, namely the Son, Jesus! The reason is that Paul makes it easy for believers in him, but Jesus knows it is hard and does not pretend it is easy at all. According to biblical myth, God had sent a law for people to live by via His prophet, Moses. The law of Moses, is really the law of God, and Christians, as followers of Paul, have to believe that God is half-witted because having sent a law that would make people good, He then sends His own son to repeal the law He had already sent. Paul teaches that God’s law is a curse:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us, for it has been written, Cursed is everyone having been hung on a tree (Dt 21:23), that the blessing of Abraham might be to the nations in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

Galatians 3:13

and

Then we conclude a man to be justified by faith without works of Law.

Romans 3:28

Of course, we can agree that the law was the law sent to the Jews, and not to other nations in the world, and it seems persuasive that Paul was sent for the other nations, but against that we have that God is almighty, and could have made a law for the other nations if He had wanted, and that God appeared in person to the Jews, confirming the law, not repealing it, except in places in the gospels that are considered to be interpolations. If Jesus annulled the law, then why do Luke and Matthew emphasize the opposite, even saying that heaven and earth will pass away before the law becomes void?

Do not think that I came to annul the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to annul, but to fulfil. Truly I say to you, Until the heaven and the earth pass away, in no way shall one jot or tittle pass away from the Law until all comes to pass. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of these commandments, the least, and shall teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom of Heaven. But whoever does and teaches them, this one shall be called great in the kingdom of Heaven.

Matthew 5:17-19

But it is easier for the heaven and the earth to pass away than one point of the Law to fail.

Luke 16:17

Has heaven and earth yet passed away? For Christians, this is God speaking, as reported in Matthew and Luke. Not only is God in the shape of the Son telling people that the Mosaic laws are obligatory for all time, but He says categorically that no one who wants to be appreciated in heaven should relax them or teach anything against them. But who does teach against them, claims to be a devout Jew, and is believed by the Christians above their own God? Paul! How can Christians hypocritically say they worship Jesus the Son of God, a divine man and an aspect of God Himself, yet ignore what he said while he lived on earth, on the basis of nothing more than the grossest expediency, and the excuse of Paul, a mere man, and not an admirable one at that, unless you are a Christian. There is no honest way of rejecting the direct words of God, or so Christians say they believe, in favor of those of a fallible man, even if they do consider him to be great. By all means abandon ancient and outdated laws, but do not at the same time pretend to be honoring the man who advocated them as an infallible God.

God appears in person on earth but, though He is almighty and omniscient, all He does is get crucified. There is an important job to be done, namely saving sinners, yet God leaves it to a liar and a rogue, by the very criteria God, as the Son, has given. It is ridiculous, even more so when God is repeatedly adamant, in Isaiah that only He saves:

For I am Yehouah your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

Isaiah 43:3

I, I am Yehouah, and there is no Savior besides Me.

Isaiah 43:11

Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

Isaiah 45:15

And there is no God other than Me, a just God and a Savior. There is none except Me.

Isaiah 45:21

And all flesh shall know that I Yehouah am your Savior and your Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah49:26

You shall know that I, Yehouah, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:16

“Isaiah” means “Yehouah is Savior”, or “Yehouah Saves”!

Paul even boasts that he is not subject to any power, even of God:

All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

1 Corinthians 6:12

The Greek translated as “any” is “tis” and literally means not just men but anything at all. No one could imagine the Jesus of the synoptics sounding like Paul, though the Jesus of John is so blasphemous in Jewish terms that he is quite impossible. John is the last of the four gospels, and Jesus was already being openly made into God. In the synoptics, he was still the pious Essene that he was in history. The Jesus of John might have spoken like Paul, but not the Jesus of the earlier gospels. Why cannot Christians see that they have been duped? It is because they have an easy religion to follow simply requiring a blind and foolish faith in a false gospel, but how will it help them to be saved when it is wrong?

Christians follow the teachings of Paul not those of Jesus, and the teachings of Paul are mainly incompatible with what Jesus said. Any confusion over Jesus’s words are likely to be misunderstandings and interpolations by the later church to suit Pauline doctrine. The best argument against Pauline Christianity is what Jesus is reported to have said in the New Testament.

1. He did not say he was divine—“son of man” is not a divine title, but is simply a modest self reference as a human in Aramaic. “The son of man” means “I” or “me”.
2. He did not say he was a unique son of God, seeming to consider all men as sons of God.
3. He never mentioned any Holy Trinity.

Now Jews are required by the Mosaic law to love God with all their might:

Hear, O Israel, Yehouah our God is one Yehouah. And you shall love Yehouah your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5

But the Son of God, teaching his disciples in Mark, is more demanding, saying they must love God…

…with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

Mark 12:30

Jesus has an additional way of loving God. He says Christians should use their heads too. It seems likely, if he was indeed guided by his heavenly Father, that the Father had foreseen that avaricious rogues and opportunist cheats would foist themselves on to the innocent followers of the Son, and divert them from the Way and along the wrong path. By using their heads they could avoid it. Unfortunately, the Devil seems to have been clever enough to realize that they would not use their heads, and invented blind faith, a notion diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ to exercise their minds in loving God. The most ironical truth of all is that the author of 1 Thessalonians, thought by most Christians to be Paul, actually writes:

Test all things, hold fast the good.

1 Thessalonians 5:21

Moreover, Paul avers that God is not in favor of confusion in the Christian congregations (1 Cor 14:33), so how much less would he be in favor of confusion of thought. The Jesus of the synoptics spoke simply, yet Paul with his convoluted reasoning succeeded in reversing almost everything the Son had said, without a glimmer of testing by Christians, or, if they did, they decided that God had nothing sensible to say, only Paul had. No wonder he turned out to be rich and the friend of kings and governors! Like all Christian evangelists he must have laughed all the way to the bank. He knew full well that they did not have the gumption to test anything.

Jesus and God

Let a fundamentalist go carefully through Matthew without a preacher to befog him, and they will realize a strange thing—most of their cherished beliefs are not even in the bible they consider infallible, and many of them are not the teaching of Jesus but of Paul, the Jewish scriptures, or Christian theologians. The contrast of the teaching of Paul with the teaching of Jesus, simply from studying the gospels and epistles, is so glaring that Christian scholars of great distinction and authority can conclude that Paul knew nothing of Jesus in life that he was willing to admit to. Paul was the first theologian. Fundamentalism is based on Paul.

Where does Jesus say he is God? He does not, and the nearest the gospels get to it is when Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) when he has put his hand in the wound. If the appreciation was general among the assembled disciples that Jesus was God, then why was he ever called anything else? If he was recognized as being God, then the title “Son of God” is superfluous. The answer is that the passage is questionable. Some early manuscripts leave out the article before God implying a lesser meaning like saint or angel, and the disciple is expressing amazement too—he is exclaiming in surprise, and people do it in shocking language out of shock. A pious Jew should have had the presence of mind not to blaspheme, but we are not certain these disciples were pious Jews. We are told many were sinners, publicans and harlots—they were Hellenized Jews not devout ones. Suspicious too is that Thomas “answered” Jesus, yet he was asked no question, suggesting that something has been omitted. So, “My lord and my God” might have been the response to the omitted question.

It is impossible to accept that an almighty God would be so inept as to leave such doubts and ambiguities, especially when the featured disciple is noted for doubting. He should have been given not only no cause to doubt, but the account of it also should have been unequivocal. There is little doubt over the aim of John being to persuade us of Christ’s divinity, and even identity with God, but often the evidence itself is tainted with doubt. The whole book is beyond belief, if Jesus was supposed to have been a pious Jew, because no pious Jew could have survived as long as he did with the attitude that John gives him. Nor could the early church have survived within Judaism as the Jerusalem Church, if it had preached blasphemies against the Jewish God. The Jesus of John is not the same man as the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but even so, we can read in John:

And this is everlasting life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.

John 17:3

It is as plain a separation of “the only true God” from “Jesus Christ” as you can get. “God sent the Son.” That is acceptable within the arguments of the author of John. “God is the Son” is not.

Taking Matthew as the most complete record of the supposed teaching of Jesus, Jesus believes in God and says that He must be worshipped in spirit, not in temples and synagogues, not with the aid of priests or ministers. This God will punish sin with eternal torment—personal sins, Jesus never mentions an inherited sin of Adam—and reward virtue with eternal bliss. Jesus believes in devils and angels, which the Jews had taken over from the Babylonians and Persians. He believes that the end of the world is near, and that God will then judge all men for their personal sins.

Few will question that this is a summary of the religious content of ninety percent of the teaching of Jesus in the gospel. That alone is significant. If the modern Christian wants to find support in the gospels for his beliefs, he has to search for short and incidental phrases, the meaning of which is always disputed, and the authenticity generally denied.

Words like “son” and “lord” have to be understood in the way the Jews at the time used them, not how the church subsequently did. It is certain that the Jews never understood a man as ever being “The Lord”, but only God. To call a man “God” would have been blasphemy, and to claim to be God, as Jesus egotistically did repeatedly in John’s gospel would have meant a savage death by stoning, not crucifixion. Since the gospel evidence is that Jesus was a devout Jew with absolute respect for God’s laws, he could never have condoned it. Gospel writers never make Jesus plainly claim that he is God, and Paul only does once, in a disputed passage. Other early Christian writings are just as shy of saying plainly that Jesus was God, only the weird Apocalypse doing so.

A son was any descendent of an ancestor, as well as a natural son, and more importantly, a son was the disciple of any master, even a master builder! If Jesus was the son of a carpenter it was likely to have been because he had been apprenticed to a carpenter. In fact the word, in Greek “tekton”, means a builder, whence our word “architect”. The Jewish sect of “Banaim” (Builders) are thought to have been Essenes, or a branch of them.

Christians say Jesus says he is god when he admits the title, “the Son of God”, but “Son of God” meant to the Jews a man dear to God—at the commonest level, any male Jew. The English bible throughout mistranslates the Greek which only says “son of God”, with “The son of God”. The Greek nearly always omits the article. Certainly, any man was a son of God, if we are to believe Luke, because God had made Adam, and Adam was described in Luke as being God’s son. After tracing the genealogy of Jesus back to Adam the author of Luke writes:

Which was the son of Enos, Which was the son of Seth, Which was the son of Adam, Which was the son of God.

Luke 3:38

So all men were God’s sons because all men were descended from Adam who was himself God’s son! Now Christians might argue that Jesus was a special son of God—he was God’s “only begotten son”. “To beget” means “to father”, so the implication is the God is quite literally the father of a human son—by procreation!

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone believing into Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:16

It is not clear to exegetes whether this is spoken by Jesus or not. Jesus begins to answer a question by Nicodemus, but the answer seems to end at verse 15, although some think it continues to verse 21, and therefore includes this verse. It looks as if John 3:16-21 is the author’s explanatory gloss, but Christians like to read them as part of Jesus’s answer because it is an admission that he is something special. One trouble with it, however, is that there is another son begotten of God:

I will declare concerning the decree of Yehouah, He said to Me, You are My Son. Today I have begotten thee.

Psalms 2:7

The author of the Psalms is considered by Jews and Christians alike to have been David, the first king of Jerusalem in the biblical myth. So God is depicted as saying David was His begotten son. Then again God instructs Moses:

And you shall speak to Pharaoh, So says Yehouah, My son, My first-born is Israel.

Exodus 4:22

The Israelites are the descendants of the patriarch, Israel, formerly Jacob. Looking in the Jewish scriptures, we find that Solomon is God’s son too (2 Sam 7:14). God repeats that He is a father to Israel (Jer 31:9) but says there that Ephraim is His first born! Since God is a Father to Israel, there are many instances of Jews who are sons of God (Gen 6:2,4; Dt 14:1; Job 1:6; 38:7; Lk 3:38; Jn 1:12; Rom 8:14; Phil 2:15; 1 Jn 3:1-2, etc), some supernatural and some ordinary men. Jesus himself tells those who hear him that God is their Father too:

Be perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.

Matthew 5:48

They all must be God’s sons. How then is Jesus God’s only begotten son, as John the Evangelist claims? In Luke, the angel addresses Mary who was to give birth to the Christian God:

This one will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of His father David.

Are we to imagine that an angel thought Jesus, the Son of God, was the son of David? The angel is taking it that Jesus must be a descendent of David, as a messiah should be in Jewish mythology, so he is using son in the sense of descendent, but automatically defeats the purpose because God is supposed to be the begetting father, and God is not a descendent of David! The stupidity of it is clarified if “the Lord God” is substituted with “his father the Lord God”, for then one father, God, gives him the throne of another father, David. Elsewhere, we read:

Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover.

Luke 2:41

Does it mean that the Lord God went with his wife Mary every year to Jerusalem for the Passover? Of course, not. “His parents” are Mary and Joseph, not Mary and God! How do people contrive to believe manifest nonsense?

The proper answer of the puzzle over the son of God is that all men were sons of God, and that is why Jesus called God his “father”, called God “your father” too when addressing an audience, so God was not just his father but everyone’s, and as if to prove it spoke of God as our father:

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father…

Matthew 6:9

When he spoke of his father, therefore, Jesus was simply doing what he considered everyone could and should do. He was not making out that he had a unique relationship with God. And when everyone has the same father, they are all brothers and sisters, whence the notion of a brotherhood of like-minded people. The Essenes were just such a brotherhood, and it is scarcely refutable, except by Christians, that Jesus was a member of this or a similar brotherhood:

For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.

Matthew 12:50

Lastly, Jesus himself argued against the Jews that he meant he was divine when he called himself a son of God:

Jesus answered them, I showed you many good works from my Father. For which work of them do you stone me? The Jews answered him, saying, We do not stone you concerning a good work, but concerning blasphemy—because you, being a man, make yourself God. Jesus answered them, Has it not been written in your Law, I said, you are gods (Ps 82:6)? If He called those gods with whom the Word of God was, and the scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, You blaspheme, because I said, I am a son of God?

John 10:32-36

The Jews wanted to stone Jesus for the blasphemy of calling himself a son of God. Jesus pointed out that anyone who had the Word of God were themselves gods, and that was written in the Jewish scriptures. As a man who did only what was God’s will, he could quite properly call himself a son of God. No pious Jew would have needed telling this, so, if the story is not a fabrication to suit the Church’s growing anti-Semitism, the attackers must have been an ignorant mob, in fact.

But some men were Sons of God. The initial capital shows that they were men who had special roles in life. They were kings and priests! They were not supernatural beings. The very word “messiah” means “born of Yehouah”, if an Egyptian influence is admitted—and Judah was most often in the sphere of influence of Egypt—but the Jewish messiah was always a man, never a god. Those who were kings and priests were messiahs and so were “anointed” into the role, a type of coronation (Lev 4:3; 1 Sam 16:13; 1 Kg 1:39). David was anointed a Son of God because he was the mythological Great King of the Jews. The psalmist, not David—mythical figures cannot write songs—acknowledges that such a great figure was a Son of God. In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus the Great of Persia was called God’s anointed—he too was a Son of God, and for Jews was the messiah. Jesus was a Son of God in this sense according to his followers, Jews all of them, but the gentiles in the Roman empire, either wilfully or in error, made out that Jesus really was a Son of God by birth, and so at least a supernatural demi-god, and soon God Himself, by a bizarre transformation, and the invention of the Trinity.

Even Paul, who played up the divinity of Christ did not claim he was a god at first. Writing to the Romans, he says unequivocally that Jesus was of the seed and flesh of David. Paul says the title son of God was not Jesus’s by birth but by God’s and the Holy Spirit’s influence on his life’s deeds:

Concerning His Son who came of the seed of David according to flesh, who was marked out the Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord;

Rom 1:3-4

The case from the bible itself is unarguable that Jesus never claimed to be God, and few even Christian scholars now actually believe he did. If all the cases where John and Paul suggest otherwise are true, you have to ask why the many instances, some of which have been given here, ever got into the bible. It makes no sense at all to suggest that some Christians did not believe the message that Jesus was God, and got contrary statements written into the bible, contrary to the wishes of the true Christians who knew all along that Jesus was God. Far more likely is the reverse. That Jesus did indeed deny he was divine and later Christians who liked the idea, got it written in. Their trouble was that no one ever had control of all of the biblical books to allow them to make consistent changes, until it was too late. The extant words were by then considered themselves divine, and so the contradictions were fossilized.

The Trinity 1

If the Son is God, then the monotheism of Christianity is challenged, but the bishops wanted the Son to be God. Their answer was the archetypal fudge. God would be both the Father and the Son, the Son being the Father incarnate, and then the Spirit was added in as the overall presence and activity of God in the cosmos. All three would be equal, and the whole was eventually achieved by making them all of the same substance but with different personalities. Christians say the main step was announced in John when Jesus said:

I and the Father are one.

John 10:30

The Christian likes to be spoonfed in tiny morsels, but any that can take a little more might have read the previous verse, where Jesus, speaking about his sheep, says:

My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to pluck out of my Father’s hand.

John 10:29

Once again Jesus plainly bows to the superiority of God, then says, “I and my Father are one”, a seeming contradiction. But the full context is the explanation of “the works which I do in the name of My Father”, on behalf of the sheep, which “bear witness about Me”, and the plain and unquestionable intent is that Jesus is of one purpose with God in their works for the sheep! It simply does not mean that Jesus and God are the same person or of the same substance. If they were anyway, and, although John prates constantly on this theme, this passage is not evidence of it. Indeed, in John, the general theme of oneness or unity encompasses all believers when Jesus promises to pray for people…

…that all may be one, as You are in me, Father, and I in You, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that You sent me.

According to this, God is a “Universality” because all are one. If everyone saved joined with God in heaven, as Christians seem now to believe, the use by God of the plural in the Jewish scriptures would simply imply that He was speaking to, and on behalf of, the assembled multitude of saints in heaven. That was surely never the right interpretation but it is just as sensible as the belief that God is a tripersonal God speaking to his other two personalities.

Jesus here again acknowledges that he was sent by God, showing that they are not equal, but does he combine himself with God by using the pronoun “us”? Possibly, but every believer seems to join with God:

No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love having been perfected is in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because of His Spirit He has given to us.

1 John 4:12-13

So, the reference might simply imply that he, Jesus, thought to have been a perfectly loving man, would be joined with God before them—since he was about to die—and subsequent joiners would be joining with those who were already there in heaven. It is through this joining the body of Christ that many more metaphors were coined by Paul, until the concept was adopted as an understanding of Christianity as the whole—they call themselves the body of Christ.

Note also that the verses from 1 John explain that everyone loving has God within them because of the Holy Spirit. If that is so, then Jesus could have been using “us” in the simpler sense that he had God’s Holy Spirit within himself, and not because he was a third part of God in some way. Moreover, the writer of 1 John is adamant, like the writers of the books of the Jewish scriptures that no one could look upon God. That is a serious obstacle to Christ being considered as of the same substance as God because that substance simply cannot be looked upon. Indeed the very same sentence appears also in John, the gospel, with the explanation that it is because of this that Christ appeared on earth to intermediate for God:

No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, that One declares Him.

John 1:18

It is then in the sense that Jesus is declaring the Father, the purpose and wishes of God, that he identifies with God. Jesus is quite clear and explicit about it:

The one seeing me has seen the Father! And how do you say, Show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The Words which I speak to you I do not speak from myself, but the Father who abides in me, He does the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me. But if not, believe me because of the works themselves.

John 14:9-11

The sense is precisely that explained by the author of 1 John. Jesus is not saying that he is the same as the Father, in substance or in personality, but he is the same as the Father in spirit and purpose, and the proof is that his final remark is that believing in God’s works is sufficient. They are God’s purpose, and there is no need for God to trisect Himself to do it. The same is clear also when Jesus replies:

If you had known Me, then you also would have known My Father.

John 8:19

The one believing into Me does not believe into Me, but into the One sending Me. And the one seeing Me sees the One who sent Me.

John 12:44-45

And the inverse is obviously true:

The one hating me also hates my Father.

John 15:23

Finally, Matthew makes it clearest of all, when Jesus explains the commission of the apostles:

The one receiving you receives me, and the one receiving me receives Him who sent me.

Matthew 10:40

Each one of those apostles is not God surely? What they are is the receptacle for the message of God passed through Jesus and then his disciples. That surely is exactly Jesus’s point when he calls himself the Way:

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also, and from now on you do know Him, and have seen Him.

John 14:6-7

Jesus declares himself to be the conduit by which people reach God. This is a metaphor. He is not a physical way, like a drain or a freeway, his teaching is the metaphorical way of getting to God. Parables are metaphors, so we know that Jesus was fond of them, so why does the exegete have to take simple but obvious metaphors literally? Earlier in John we read:

I am the door.

John 10:9

Should Christians be worshipping the Holy Door? No one would argue that Jesus was literally a door. It is a metaphor of salvation, of that there is no doubt. “If anyone enters through me, he will be saved.” The healing miracles can be simply explained as salvific metaphors that Christians long ago took as literally true. There is no need to think Jesus could perform miracles, and he denied that he did when they asked him for a sign! What he insisted on, even in John, was that God did the miracles not him;

Jesus lifted his eyes upward and said, Father, I thank You that You heard me. And I know that You always hear me, but because of the crowd standing around, I said it, that they might believe that You sent me.

John 11:42

What need is there for a Trinity? What need even is there for God to work through any human agency? God is God Almighty. It seems believers do not believe it!

Several places in the New Testament show that “seeing God” is a metaphor, rather like our own when we ask someone to whom we have been explaining something, “Do you see?” “Seeing God” cannot be literally “seeing” Him, if the Jewish scriptures are right that God cannot be seen. So, “seeing God” is a metaphor for understanding His purpose and acting accordingly:

Not that anyone has seen the Father, except he who is from God. He has seen the Father.

John 6:46

“There you are”, the Christian bent scholar will cry. “Jesus had seen the Father.” Well the passage does not say “I” here, even though the author of John likes to make Christ into an egomaniac, something the Christ of the synoptic gospels would have abhorred. It says “he who is from God” sees the Father. “Yes”, the Christian will cry, “and that is Christ”. Well, Christians are fond of using one bit of the bible to interpret another, and they can clarify this ambiguity by the same method. John, a few chapters later, explains what he meant by “he who is from God”:

He who is of God hears the Words of God, therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God.

John 8:47

Christ’s questioners, he says, cannot hear the Word of God because they are not “of God”. Anyone who hears the Word of God is from God. Christ is not the only one who is from God in the sense being used here. Making a special case out of something that is manifestly general is called “special pleading” in logic, and it is a method loved by Christian exegetical liars who know their sheep are too mindless to challenge anything they say, even though the refutation is there for them to see for themselves.

Some Christians will turn to the Authorized Version to confirm the biblical statement of the Trinity:

And the Spirit is the one witnessing, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three bearing witness in heaven—the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three who bear witness on the earth—The Spirit, and the water, and the blood, and the three are to the one.

1 John 5:6b-8 AV

It looks very convincing except that modern bibles read something quite different because the AV has had 1 John 5:7 interpolated at a late date. It is a bogus insertion to prop up the non-existing Trinity. Few biblical scholars dissent from this judgement. A modern reading is this from the RSV in which verse 6b becomes verse 7 and the false verse 7 is omitted:

And the Spirit is the witness because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree.

1 John 5:7-8 RSV

The three witnesses in these passages are not the three parts of the Trinity, but the Spirit, the water and the blood of Christ, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, all right, but with the water standing for baptism and the blood standing for the Eucharist. G Johnstone in Peake’s Commentary observed that the interpolation was never used as evidence in the longstanding early controversies over the Trinity, an absolutely incomprehensible fact if the passage existed then. It did not exist in any Greek MS of respectable provenance. Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, writing in the commentary of Gore, Goudge and Guillaume, says no Greek or Oriental manuscript had it before the fifteenth century, and the Greek and African Fathers of the Church who made exegetical comments on 1 John knew nothing about it, but Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine all used a Trinitarian exegesis of the original passage here. Nor did Jerome observe especially on this verse when he researched the old Latin texts. It took almost four centuries of doctrinal evolution for the Trinity to emerge but by the third century, the lunacy for biblical codes already well established, the number three was considered to imply or conceal the Trinity every time it occurred in the bible, and this verse yelled it out. So, from a gloss copied by Priscillian in a late fourth century Latin text circulated in Spain and Africa, it entered the Vulgate in the middle ages, and thence it entered a later edition of the New Testament of Erasmus. Gibbon complained that the three heavenly witnesses should have been arrested for perjury.

At the very beginning of John is a threefold sentence that some people seem to think shows that God is a trinity:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1

The sentence has three parts but refers only to God and the Word, and simply to get two thirds of the Trinity, the Christian has to know that Jesus is the same as the Word. But is the verse actually identifying the Word, whether or not it is Jesus, with God. The Greek is less assertive, the better translation of the verse being that “the Word was divine”, not that it was God, because the word “god” (theos) in the Greek has no article. Bible publishers now will not easily give up the translation Christians like and have gotten used to, but some bible authorities are more responsible, and try to be truthful. Moffatt’s bible, for example, says simply that the Word was divine. But it is unusual for Christians to prefer honesty over dissembling, especially in matters of their core beliefs. They repeatedly show they prefer lies to truth, even when the truth is demonstrable.

Besides that, Jesus brusquely distinguished himself from God in this way:

And, behold, coming near, one said to him, good teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life? And he said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good except one, God! But if you desire to enter into life, keep the commandments.

Matthew 19:16-17

And he having gone out into the highway, running up and kneeling down to him, one questioned him, good teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? But Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good except one, God. You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery, do not commit murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and mother (Exod 20:12-16).

Mark 10:17-19

Mark repeats the main commandments for the Christians because it is the earliest gospel and most gentile readers would not have been familiar with Christianity or the Jewish scriptures.

If Jesus was one with God as the Trinitarian idea holds then why did he object to being called good? Jesus is God, the Christians say, but Jesus did not think so, and declared that only God was good, while he himself objected to being called good. He was not therefore God or even a part of God on this criterion. Jesus talked and even prayed to “his father” often (eg, Mk 14:32; Mt 26:39; Lk 3:21; Jn 17:9). Was he praying to himself? Does it make any sense that an almighty being, a god, should pray? And does it make any more sense when the god is not almighty but is only one of three equals in the same substance? When Jesus prayed, he distinguished himself as inferior to God:

Not as I will, but as thou wilt.

Matthew 26:39

Most compelling of all is that the co-equal third of the Trinity, the Son, calls another third of it “my God”. Speaking to Mary Magdalene, Jesus says:

Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and my God, and your God.

John 20:17

Here again Jesus speaks of a brotherhood, his brothers because they all have the same Father—each of them is, in Aramaic a “Bar Abbas”—and insists that his Father is also Mary’s Father. Similarly, when he is dying on the cross, he cries out, asking why his God had forsaken him, surely a superfluous question when the three are one.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Matthew 27:46

If the Son is a part of the Father, then the Son does not know what the Father is up to, even though they have spent the whole of eternity together. And in John, the gospel in which Jesus most blatantly identifies himself with God, we might be surprised to read this:

You heard that I said to you, I am going away, and I am coming again to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced that I said, I am going to the Father, for my Father is greater than I.

John 14:28

Not only that but the Christian can read several times in the New Testament that Christ is His inferior because he is His servant:

Behold My servant whom I chose, My Beloved, in whom My soul has delighted!

Matthew 12:18

The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified His servant Jesus

Acts 3:13

Here the Greek word is pais rendered as “Son” when used of Jesus, though huios is usually “son”, and, in other contexts (Lk 1:54; 69; Acts 4:25), pais is given as “servant”. Christian translators are typically dishonest.

Can Christians explain why their God the Son, an equal third of the substance of God, should want to pretend to them that he was not God at all? Should we worship a god that lies? Is that why Christians never stop lying to each other and everyone else, claiming to know what they cannot, because their God approves of it? Or are the Son and the Father a mutual admiration society?

Jesus spoke these things and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may also glorify You.

John 17:1

If the Father and Son are part of the same unitary God but have different personalities, you get this sort of bizarre thing. Can we seriously believe it? The trouble is that the one God has three personalities, although the third one of the Spirit never manifests itself properly. The other two though are like the heads of conjoined twins, addressing each other, praising each other, conversing, and yet the Son, aka the Word, often seems to be in the dark for all that. Though Christians believe Jesus would come to judge the world when it came to an end, Christ himself says that he did not know when the world would end:

But concerning that day and the hour, no one knows, not the angels, those in heaven, nor the Son, except the Father.

Mark 13:32

That ought to make it unarguably clear that Jesus was not on a par with God. He could not begin to do his main task, purifying and judging the world, until God told him it was time. Co-equal? If Jesus was a god in his own right then he did not need to be assisted by God, did he? Well, the New Testament repeats over an over that Jesus worked miracles through heavenly assistance, and not by himself:

• the spirit of God assists him—Matthew 12:28
• his power is given to him—Matthew 28:18
• the finger of god assists him—Luke 11:20
• Jesus admits he could do nothing himself but only be the will of the Father than sent him—John 5:30
• Jesus admitted he did nothing himself but only as his Father had taught him—John 8:28
• Jesus worked through his Father’s name—John 10:25
• Jesus was a man approved of God by miracles and signs that God did by him—Acts 2:22

In this last instance, the apostle who knew Jesus best, and became in tradition the founder of the Roman Catholic Church, Peter, declares unequivocally that Jesus was a man.

The Trinity 2

Confusing the issue of God by making Him triune ought to have made potential converts suspicious, but far from it, the more impossible the beliefs have to be the more mysterious they are and the more people accept them. The clever confidence men of this world depend upon it. We ought to accept what Newton said about religious gullibility:

It is the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.

Sir Isaac Newton

Moreover, why did the Father, the only element of God the Jews had ever been persuaded to consider, even though they were God’s chosen people, insist repeatedly in the Jewish scriptures that he was one only. Ancient people were perfectly familiar with trinities of gods, so it would not have been hard for them to understand that God was really three persons. They had understood moon goddesses to be triune for millennia. Yet the supposed advance the Jews made was to reject any such complications and realize that God was one, and monotheism was putatively better than polytheism. Christians will say that God is indeed one, but he is three persons, but that is precisely what the goddess was. She was one goddess but manifested as the maiden, the mother and the old wise crone. That was not hard to understand, but the message we read in the Old Testament over and over is that God is one!

You shall not have any other gods before Me.

Exodus 20:3

For you shall not bow to another god, for Yehouah whose name is jealous, He is a jealous God.

Exodus 34:14

Know today, and turn back your heart to it, that Yehouah, He is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath. There is no other.

Deuteronomy 4:39

Before Me there was no God formed, nor shall any be after Me. I, I am Yehouah, and there is no Savior besides Me.

Isaiah 43:10-11

I am the First, and I am the Last, and there is no God except Me.

Isaiah 44:6

I am Yehouah, and there is none else. There is no God except Me.

Isaiah 45:5

There is none besides Me. I am Yehouah, and there is none else.

Isaiah 45:6

I am Yehouah, and there is none else.

Isaiah 45:18

I am God, and there is no other.

Isaiah 45:22

These are categorical statement with no hint of a concession to any Trinity. Why should God have been so adamant over this when really he was three. Does God have to be three, or is it just the way he has decided to be? He is three persons but one substance, according to Christian doctrine, but although he is a conjoined set of triplets, to be three persons means three personalities, and that then is three gods, despite them being conjoined.

Almighty God insists He alone is God for centuries to the Jews, then quite suddenly starts telling His priests and prophets when they become Christians to say something utterly different. Christians take God to be an idiot, but they ought to suspect who the real idiots are. How can the Son and the Father be one? Perhaps the Holy Ghost is the only true God! The gospels are a tissue of contradictions on the divinity of Christ.

Jesus in the passages from Mark and Matthew cited above also told the man to keep the commandments, meaning all of God’s commandments not just the ten that Christians choose to accept, along with a few others they like such as burning witches, having endless unwanted kids, and bashing queers. The whole of the law of Moses consists of commandments of God. Moses did not bring down only ten from the mountain, and he makes long speeches explaining the fullness of these commandments in detail. Jesus also answers another questioner:

What is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is: Hear, Israel. The Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment (Deut 6:4-5). And the second is like this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18). There is not another commandment greater than these.

Mark 12:28-31

The first commandment is the Jewish Shema thought to come directly from the Jerusalem temple, and repeated by all devout Jews. In it Jesus uses the possessive “our” with no qualification, as he did when he told people to pray to “our father which art in heaven…”. If Jesus were himself God or part of God then the unqualified “our” is absurd. He was only asked for the first commandment but gives another one too, to love your neighbor, a necessity because all men are sons of God, and so all men are brothers. Christians seem to think Jesus meant only your literal neighbor, and certainly Arabs living in Iraq are counted out on this criterion, and can be freely bombed from ten miles high with no divine consequences for the bombers’ salvation. Well, if Jesus really is God, they had better look to the good of their own immortal souls, because no one could accept any such interpretation, especially as laid down by a perfect being. No one save God can be the judge of His own children, not even a Christian.

Another commandment that Paul had to abrogate to make it easy for gentiles to become religious is the necessity for circumcision. According to the Jewish scriptures, it was God Himself, as Abraham’s part of the covenant with Him, who made circumcision a necessity. It was a necessity!

This is My covenant which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: Every male child among you shall be circumcised. And you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin. And it shall be a token of the covenant between Me and you. And a son of eight days shall be circumcised among you, every male in your generation, he that is born in the house, or bought with silver from any son of a foreigner who is not of your seed. The child of your house and the purchase of your money circumcising must be circumcised. And My covenant shall be in your flesh for a perpetual covenant. And an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, his soul shall be cut off from his people. He has broken My covenant.

Genesis 17:10-14

Now Christians say that God made this covenant but then decided it was all too demanding and abrogated His own covenant. God is supposed to be perfect but here, according to Christians, he is anything but. He has changed His mind about a law that he said was perpetual! So, the Christian God is a liar. If he had wanted to demonstrate that circumcision was not what He had wanted at all, then He could have done it much more convincingly when he appeared on earth as a man. He could have arranged, being almighty, not to be circumcised Himself. But what does the Christian gospel tell us?

And when eight days were fulfilled to circumcise the child (Gen 17:10-14) His name was called Jesus, the name called by the angel before He was conceived in the womb. And when the days of her cleansing according to the Law of Moses were fulfilled, they took Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord, as it has been written in the Law of the Lord…

Luke 2:21-23

According to Christian doctrine, God could have abrogated circumcision in person, but He did not, he sent Paul instead! Why cannot they see Paul as an agent of the Devil, instead of a saint called by Jesus, a Jesus that no one saw except Paul Himself. Is the Devil not capable of such tricks, and cannot God expect His followers to do what He says and not what some upstart, self-proclaiming apostle tells them, in utter contradiction to what the God had plainly said Himself, when He was incarnated on earth, or through His book of laws that He had given to His prophet Moses?

Speaking of prophets, Jesus had denied he was God, the title son of God was not a divine title, and nor was the title son of man, but he freely admitted he was a prophet:

And they were offended in him. But Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his own fatherland, and in his own house.

Matthew 13:57

The Essenes, to whom Jesus was so close in doctrine that it is impossible not to accept he was not one, considered themselves to be prophets, and spent a lot of their time trying to work out the prophecies hidden in the Jewish scriptures. They also were a brotherhood with an obligation to house other brothers who were travelling. So:

The one receiving a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and the one receiving a just one in the name of a just one will receive a just one’s reward.

Matthew 10:41

There seems little doubt either that the Essenes considered themselves the Righteous Ones, or the Just Ones (Zaddikim), and used it as an honorific title. Jesus acknowledges both of these ideas about themselves held by the Essenes in this one verse. Not only that but the people accepted him as a prophet, and the Chief Priests knew it too and feared the consequences if they laid hands on him:

And the crowds said, This is Jesus, the prophet, the one from Nazareth of Galilee.

Matthew 21:10-11

And seeking to lay hold of Him, they feared the crowds, because they held him as a prophet.

Matthew 21:46

Luke explains how Jesus was a great prophet proved because he raised a man from the dead, impressing the crowds:

And fear took hold of all, and they glorified God, saying, A great prophet has risen up among us, and, God has visited His people. And this word about him went out in all Judea, and in all the neighborhood.

Luke 7:16-17

All of this suggests that the Liberal Protestant interpretation of Jesus as being a great man of his day is more true than the deification of this “prophet” by the gentile, later the Catholic, Church. In the USA now, the Protestant fundamentalists are more Catholic than the medieval Popes in their adherence to the supernatural Christ. The historical evidence matches the gospel description of Jesus as an Essene leader, a pious and holy Jew prophesying that God would intervene in the occupation of the Holy Land by impious strangers, and seeking to fulfil that expectation. He failed, but, even if rejected by the supernaturalists among the Christians, at the least, he should be honored as a great and devout Jew.

”Ah”, says the Christian, “Everyone has incurred the sentence of damnation for Adam’s sin, and the application to each person of Christ’s redemption of the race is through baptism”. Well, look again. Where does Jesus say that all men are condemned because of Adam’s sin? Where does he say that God alone could atone for it? Where does he say that that is his purpose?

Neither Jesus nor anyone else in the gospels mentions original sin or the sin of Adam and Christian interpreters and theologians for centuries denied it. It was invented by the medieval priesthood to give them power over the masses, who became sinners irrespective of what they did in life and therefore dependent on the priesthood to save their souls. The formula of baptism at the end of Matthew:

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,

Mt 28:19

was fraudulently added to the gospel when a priesthood was created, as scholars know. Jesus could not have been intent on creating a Church when he had been expecting the end of time. The fact that his expectation was quite wrong must show he was no part of God. The only passage like this in Matthew in Mark’s earlier gospel is:

And he said to them, Going into all the world, preach the gospel to all the creation.

Mark 16:15

Mark makes no mention of the three elements of God, and, in any case, this verse is in the end of the gospel which was added at a later date, yet even then the formula was not needed by the Church, showing how late the addition to Matthew is. The next verse in Mark is:

The one believing and being baptized will be saved. And the one not believing will be condemned.

Mark 16:16

So the connexion is baptism, but the Matthew formula occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. The Church of the first days did not baptize people with the words in Matthew. Peake’s Commentary says that Christ’s commission in Matthew is in the language of the Church, so the Trinitarian formula could not have been the actual words of Christ. The New Testament elsewhere describes baptism as being in the name of Jesus Christ. In Acts, for example, it might be possible to see the formula developing because two of the three elements appear, but it is all the more clear that Jesus can have issued no instruction on it, because the apostles did not know it, and complete the procedure with the laying on of hands to introduce the Holy Spirit:

And Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized, each of you on the name of Jesus Christ to remission of sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Acts 2:38

For He had not yet fallen on any one of them, but they were only being baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

Acts 8:16-17

The three elements do come into conjunction in Paul’s works, but even in Paul, it is not as if the three comprised one substance. Moreover, although Paul’s letters were written before any Christian gospel, we have seen elsewhere that Paul did not know Jesus in life, and seemed to know little and care less about what he had said during it. Besides that, there has been the same, if not rather more, chance of doctoring Paul’s letters to suit later Church teaching as there was for the gospels. Indeed, though it is unfashionable currently, excellent scholars have argued that Paul’s works are a sort of pseudepigraph in that they were really written in the second century to appear as if they were early. Paul wrote:

There are differences of gifts, but the same Spirit, there are differences of ministries, yet the same Lord, there are differences of workings, but the same God is working all things in all.

1 Corinthians 12:4

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

2 Corinthians 13:14

The latter citation is the ending of the epistle. Perhaps before Paul was converted he would end his letters with “the power of David, the wisdom of Solomon and the love of God be with you all”. It looks like a convention rather than a formula to merge the three parts into one. David, Solomon and God could not have been intended as a trinity. Paul undoubtedly acknowledges three aspects of his teaching, but he does not make out that they are three equal parts of God. Rather they are all bearers of different gifts to humanity in the salutation, and, in the first quotation, God is the overall force working to make the other elements cohere. Citing these passages of Paul does not prove the doctrine of the Trinity. At best it is circumstantial evidence of it, but God is remaining peculiarly coy in his revelation of this Trinity, and it is not clear why, if a trinity is what He is. Are we to suppose that God, the almighty being that can create the universe and helps everyone of us personally, according to the Christians, cannot express himself precisely? His revelation cannot be understood by the common man, but only by prophets who have to use every possible way of persuading common people, even using lies to save them. The supposed words in the bible need to be understood by an arcane multi-layered reading requiring a doctorate in theology before they can be read at all. Or so the pastors make out. Why cannot people see that it is Satanic misinterpretation? That, if the words are to be believed as coming from an almighty God then they must be comprehensible by anyone, and when Jesus speaks in the bible, as God, he ought to be speaking straightforwardly. In short, his words ought to be clear.

The trouble for crooked Christian pastors is that his words are clear, but professional Christians do not like them. They prefer the words to be interpreted into something quite the opposite of whatever Jesus said. So when he says that a camel can get through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven, he does not mean it at all. Oh, no! He means the opposite, and this “saying” is explained away with lies.

An almighty being able to make everything with a word of His mouth ought to be able to express Himself with sublime clarity. Since He plainly does not, in respect of the Trinity, you have to question the source of the problem. The notion still looks to be a device to make Christ into a God. No such device is needed to use the Spirit as a metaphor for how God works on earth, even if it explains nothing. The Spirit does not imply a separate personality from God’s own. As soon as a human being is introduced as an equal third of God, while God has to remain one, the problem arises. It is not God’s problem!

Another passage is sometimes cited, in this context, from the short and late letter of Jude, in which the author aims to stiffen the resolve of those being mocked for waiting for the world to end:

…building yourselves up by your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, eagerly awaiting the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to everlasting life.

Jude 1:20-21

The expectation still was that Jesus would return to judge the world, so the people were “eagerly awaiting” the event that would result in them being given eternal life. The elements of the Trinity are not only not bound solidly in a trinity, but as ever, are simply loose associations of gift-bearers, but another quality is added to make a “quartinity”, namely faith. No one will seriously argue this to be so, but it is no less arbitrary. In fact, if the Christians who offer this passage in evidence ever read these pages, they will find Jude, only a few words on, being quite certain that God is one:

…to the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty and might and authority, even now and forever. Amen.

Jude 1:25

As in Isaiah, God is Himself the savior too, so a savior with a separate personality from God is counted out here, it seems. If this epistle writer thought Jesus Christ was the savior, he must have done so realizing that Christ was not God but simply God’s instrument.

Near the end, in one of the most suspected passages, Jesus is made to say that his blood is to be shed “for many, for the remission of sins” (Mt 26:28). This is so different from the whole previous teaching of Jesus, it looks suspicious. But it does not mean “original sin”. The gospel says nothing about the redemption by atonement taught by both Catholic and Protestant Churches, and the reason for the incarnation! In the manual of dogmatic theology are two vague references to sin or sins in John. John is so late that it is worthless as a historic source of genuine sayings of Jesus. Paul, not Jesus or the gospel writers, gave the Church the doctrine of the atonement.

Original sin and the atonement for original sin—the two things which are the real bases of Christianity, since they explain Christ and the incarnation—are the two things that even the gospel writers never put in the mouth of Jesus. They are among Paul’s three characteristic doctrines—original sin, divine atonement for original sin, and the need of “grace”—which are not in the gospels.

Bousset, in his Kyrios Christos (1913), says that Paul never heard of Jesus but got his doctrine of “the Lord” and redemption from Greek and Mithraic sources. Messianic ideas blended with Greek ideas in the many Jewish societies over the Mediterranean world to supply Paul with the elements of his gospel.

After two millennia, during one of which learned people did nothing except devote themselves to this work, the most learned theologians disagree totally about what Jesus did, what he said, and what he meant. Yet, the confidence in them of their flocks, the way in which Christians declare that something has at last been explained, or some contradiction has been reconciled, is hilarious. Christianity is the most complete scam ever devised.

Gnosticism

This first statement of Christian theology is fairly simple. Paul never bothered about the precise relations or natures of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There was one God, and this God had assumed flesh in a woman’s womb, then shed it and went back to heaven. His “spirit” or his “grace” now helped men to avoid personal sins. All that they had to do was to get together in little groups of churches to practice virtue, to hold the commemoration supper, and to await the coming of the kingdom. There was now no need for circumcision, sacrifices or synagogues.

In the epistles and Acts are admissions of conflict—Peter or Paul, faith or works, resurrection or no resurrection, obligation to the Jewish law or “do as you wilt”. God had forgotten to leave instructions. His Church settled these dozen fiery controversies only to find itself locked in a terrific and protracted fight with Gnosticism.

The struggle with the Gnostics was inevitable and began early. In Acts 8 is a story of a man in Samaria who had won a great reputation by “magic”, and who offered the apostles money to teach him their magic. The story is probably as correct as the description of the Pharisees—a Christian libel. Simon may well have been a Gnostic.

Gnostics believe in spiritual knowledge—they know, or seek to know—in contrast to those who have or seek faith, like Christians. It is no less vulnerable to tricksters, and much New Age “mystery” is a variety of the Gnostic scam. Yet, Gnosis has a sounder basis than belief. Knowledge can be tested.

Gnosticism was not one philosophy or religion. The chief common feature was an intense emphasis on the contrast of matter and spirit, sin and virtue, darkness and light. The Persian religion was largely responsible for this, but Greek philosophy in Plato, late Egyptian mysticism, and Buddhism which reached Egypt and Asia, if not Greece, had the same dualism. The flesh was a contamination of the spirit which had to live in it for a time. Sin was a defilement for which the soul had to be purified and redeemed. Baptism—by water, blood, fire, or spirit—anointings, lustrations, and thrillingly esoteric rites, not to be revealed to the mob, helped. The world was full of evil spirits and good spirits—as the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians taught—and you could exorcise these by mystic formulae or even calling them by name.

Paul’s religion suited these mystics and ascetics. His contempt of the flesh and glorification of the spirit were common to them all. His gospel of a redeemer from sin was real “good tidings” to them. There was obviously a great deal of truth in the new religion. It might appeal to the poor and to slaves by its denunciation of wealth and its communism, but it also came to appeal to these “intellectuals”. Christianity spread through this esoteric world, and it set out to answer the questions which Paul and the gospel writers had left open.

The gnostics so hated and despised matter that they did not believe that God had created it. The Old Testament, which said that he had, was abandoned. Matter was eternal, in a chaotic state, as the Babylonians had said. But why did God have anything to do with the putrid stuff?

Gnostics held that a number of finite but divine things had emanated from God. One of these Æons, as they were called, had “fallen” from grace. God sent a great Æon, the Demiurgos, to put order into the chaos of matter or “create” the world as we know it. This was the Yehouah of the Jews. Then he sent an Æon of the highest rank, Soter (Redeemer or Saviour), to save the fallen Æon and rescue the elements of light, the souls of men, from their contamination with darkness. This was Christos.

But how could an Æon of supreme rank take flesh, with all its horrors? Most of them said that he merely used a phantasmal body, not real flesh. The gospel story was an allegory, they said, from beginning to end. Christos abandoned his ethereal body before it was crucified, and most assuredly there was no resurrection of it, and there would be no resurrection of the flesh for any man.

Some men of great ability rose in the Gnostic world, and for a hundred years there was a mighty struggle. The Church won but it caught the Gnostic virus. Ascetical practices like fasting were fostered by these haters of the flesh. Ritual and sacramental features were adopted. Baptism became more important and the passage was added at the end of Matthew during the Gnostic struggle. Mystic ideas or speculations about Christ crept in, as the beginning of John, the latest gospel, shows. A definite attitude toward the Old Testament was assumed. The need of authority in the Church was practically demonstrated, and the position of the bishops or “overseers” of the communities was greatly strengthened.

It was a federation, no bishop acknowledging allegiance to any other bishop, but the bishop had more control of the “elders” (presbyters or priests), and the deacons who helped at the meetings and the highest rank for women in the mainstream church. There was also now much exorcism of devils, sprinkling or baptizing with water, anointing with oil, and so on. New classes of assistants arose to share the lot (“cleros”) of the bishops and priests, new “clerics” exorcists, readers, doorkeepers.

There was little growth in the first two centuries. The gospels seem to have been completed in the second quarter of the second century, but they left doctrinal questions open. Jesus was the Son of God, and there was also a vague Holy Spirit, but there was only one God. The Gnostic attempt to define the relations of these had been so heretical and disturbing that most Christians were content to leave the matter as it was. The only addition (in John) was that Jesus had existed as the Logos “with God” for all eternity. The Jew, Philo, had spoken of this Logos or “creative word” of God. But mystics do not require—if they do not actually dread—precise definitions, and the intellectualists were killed off.

The early Christian writers, men of moderate ability like Clement of Rome, Justin the Apologist and Irenaeus, had been absorbed in recommending the simple creed to Pagans and Jews or defending it against the Gnostics. They did not enlarge it by speculations. The Apostles’ Creed fairly represents Christian belief at the end of the second century. No theologian now supposes that it goes back even to the first century, and in its actual form it is late. But an ancient Roman creed dated to the beginning of the second century is generally thought to be the one given by Tertullian:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, Our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, the third day he rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of the Father. Thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit, the “Holy Church”, the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh.

This is just a simple summary of the religion of the gospels. The Church would not say plainly that Christ was God, and the statement that he sits at the right hand of God in heaven is an expression of uncertainty of the subject. He is now said to be the only son of God. This is an outcome of the controversies with the Gnostics and Ebionites, the successors of the Jerusalem Church of James the Just, who denied the divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary, and were suppressed. The “Holy Church” is inserted, a reflection of the new organization which came out of the conflicts. The familiar doctrines of Christianity had still to be fabricated.

Banning Heresies

After the gnostics, and the struggles with Ebionism, came further conflicts with Patripassianism, Modalism, Adoptionism, Montanism, Novatianism, Sabellianism, Arianism and Nestorianism, then Eutychius, Helvidius and Jovinian, Donatus and Pelagius raised more flags of dissension, followed by the Monophysites, the Monothelites… and on and on.

Christians must have asked themselves what this “Father and Son” really meant, if there was only one God, and as soon as anyone of intelligence devoted themself to the problem, there was a new heresy. Patripassians said that it was God the Father who suffered on the cross and the bishops pronounced it a shocking heresy. Modalists, looking to the philosophy of Aristotle, said that the Son was a “mode” of the Father, and the bishops who probably did not even know what philosophers meant by a “mode”, expelled them, after half a century of quarrelling. Then Jesus must have been “adopted” as a Son, and the Adoptionists were expelled. Each time the central authority was strengthened.

Montanus denied that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost was confined to men in “orders”, and there was a terrific fight for several decades. A large part of the Christian body resented the growth of the new sacerdotalism and rightly claimed that it had no basis in the gospels. They held also that the clergy had no power to absolve from mortal sins. The sinner must be expelled from the Church and left to his fate. These deadly thrusts at their authority and at their ambition to make the Christian body as large as possible stung the hierarchy, and the fierce battle ended in the suppression of Montanism and a fresh accentuation of priestly authority. Hence the work of Cyprian. Cyprian, who received the halo of the saint, was a priest and wrote to strengthen their position. Priests and bishops had “received the Holy Ghost” and could “bind” or “loose” whatsoever they chose. They, as successors of the apostles, had to conduct the commemoration supper, which was evolving from the Messianic meal into a “sacrament.

Tertullian, a somber fanatic—the wildness of his early life had led to a morbid reaction—with a mighty power of scorn, a learned priest of the African Church, had a particular scorn of the Roman Church and the pretensions of its bishop or pope. His zeal about sin has caused him to give us some piquant pictures of the state of the Church at the end of the second and the beginning of the third century. He is important mainly as a critic, an early Protestant, but he adopted a word of the Gnostics in regard to the relation of Father and Son. He said that the Son was “homo ousios”, of the same substance, with the Father, and this would presently lead to a far more furious controversy than ever. Tertullian remained a Montanist or Puritan until he died.

Clement of Alexandria and Origen, also of Alexandria, were the first to apply Greek philosophy to the Christian story in a form which could be generally accepted by the Church. Both, especially the learned Origen, were heretics. Origen supposed that the counsels of Jesus had to be taken literally, and he had castrated himself on New Testament authority:

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

Mt 19:12

His later method was scientific—whatever seemed absurd or contradictory or opposed to experience in the new faith was to be taken figuratively. He denied the eternal torment of the wicked. Origen was deposed, excommunicated, and bitterly persecuted. Clement was more diplomatic, and remained within the Church.

At first, baptism was the only sacrament, the only form of remission of sin, and mortal sin committed after baptism could not be forgiven, the Essene belief that the penitent had to remain perfect to enter the kingdom. Smart Christians therefore deferred baptism to as near to death as possible to leave few opportunities for sin before death. Potential converts were chary and the number of converts stayed small. The clergy then discovered that God, in his great mercy, had allowed for priests to remit sin. The proof was in the gospels but unclear, so they were clarified. The Catholic doctrine of sacraments and orders was being slowly and shamelessly developed. Christianity was evolving by creative theology, a sort of creative accounting for priests.

The Evolution Of Priestcraft

One half of Christendom interprets the instructions of the Holy Ghost in an opposite way from the other half. The Catholic thinks that the Holy Ghost planned the creation of priests, bishops, archbishops, popes, the eucharist, the confessional, seven sacraments, the mass, and so on while the Protestant says that the Holy Ghost forbade all these things, admitting that for over a thousand years the Holy Ghost had fallen asleep on duty.

Jesus expected the end of the world and he never dreamed about founding a “church” that would have had the briefest of lifetimes. Christians, seeing that the end of the world did not come, built temples like their religious neighbors.

The first Christians had few “sacraments”. The Catholic doctrine of sacraments was invented by Augustine. Baptism was common in Judea especially in the form of purificatory lustrations, among the Essenes, and in most ethical religions of the time. The sacred meal was celebrated by the Essenes and several eastern mystery religions. All the other “sacraments” were priestly inventions. Cyprian effectively began the manufacture of “holy orders”. Extreme Unction and Confirmation crept up to the rank so slowly and unobtrusively that no one can retrace the evolution, except that Unction was fully admitted as a counter to the heretical “consolamentum”. As to “matrimony”, hardly any Catholic doctrine is more audacious. The Church had no control of marriage until the Middle Ages. It was a purely human matter. The “seven sacraments” gave enormous power and wealth to the clergy, as the embodiment of priestcraft—the practices of spiritual shysters who use every important occasion in anyone’s life to extract money from them.

The services grew in the same manner. The mass was said in Greek, even in Rome, until the end of the third century. Cyprian had by that time discovered that the offering of the bread and wine was a “sacrifice”, and only a consecrated priest could offer it. The Essenes and the Mithraists, both influenced by Persian religion, ate a sacred meal. Augustine is repeatedly in difficulties on that point. The Manichees also had a “consecrated host”, and Augustine repeats the Christian calumny that, to make their sacrament, the priest had intercourse with a lady of the congregation and moistened the flour with the seminal fluid!

Every new development increased the power of the clergy and the subjection of the laity. Of the two titles of the head of the Roman Church, pope and Sovereign Pontiff, the first (papa) was the common title of all bishops in the first few centuries and is still a common title in the east. The second is the title of the head of the Roman Pagan religion, which the Bishops of Rome took from the syncretistic emperors. The pope became pope only when there was no other strong bishop to oppose his claim.

The evidence of forgery and fraud is hardly less in regard to the papacy than it is in the examples of saints and martyrs.

In the early Church, the episcopal sees supposed to have been directly founded by the apostles were viewed with a special regard. The occupants of the sees encouraged this. It entitled them to the first place and the most oracular utterance in assemblies. In their churches, the tradition of the apostles existed in its purest form. Rome, where the Church was said to have been founded by Peter and Paul, the two greatest apostles, was one of these outstanding sees, but in truth, if any churches were founded by apostles, they were in the east where the earliest churches were founded, Christianity first took root, and where it had most members.

In 190 AD, the Roman bishop, pope Victor, commanded the bishops of Asia Minor to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Romans—Papal supremacy in the year 190? Many of the Church’s sins are sins of omission. Here they omit to say how the eastern bishops responded. Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 5:34 relates that the Asiatic bishops told Victor where to get off.

In 252 AD, S Cyprian, saint and martyr, backed by the African bishops, told pope Cornelius where to get off as well. Repeatedly, he told Rome to mind its own business, to drop its arrogant claim to supremacy, and to see that “each prelate has the right to follow his own judgment”. Pope Stephen tried to follow up the matter, and the African bishops, meeting in solemn council, drafted a scalding reply, still extant, which closes all question of Papal authority in the third century.

The eastern Churches never accepted the pope’s claim. The African Church, the only one important in the west, besides Italy, resisted Rome to the last. S Augustine did not say, in the Pelagian controversy:

Rome has spoken: the case is finished,

but, in his 131st sermon, he said:

The decisions of two of our councils have been sent to the Apostolic See, and a rescript has reached us. The case is finished.

His emphasis is on the protest of the two councils. The African bishops detected the pope in the use of forgeries, and told him that they trusted to hear “no more of his pompousness”. When they did hear more of it, they sent him a scornful letter about his attempt to “introduce the empty pride of the world into the Church of Christ”.

When the Christian Vandals and Goths occupied and plundered Italy, Spain and Africa, the pope became “head of the universal Church”, the wasteland west of the Adriatic Sea. The civilized world, east of the Adriatic, laughed at the popes.

In the Dark Ages, popes could rewrite history to their hearts content—and they did! The crop of forgeries appeared, the lives of saints and martyrs multiplied and the history of the first four centuries was falsified. It will never recover because much of it is deliberately destroyed. If Christians know nothing of this, their only excuse is their perpetual one of wilful ignorance.

Pope Gregory, S Gregory the Great, persuaded the new rich of Italy that the end of the world was now really at hand, and they would do well to enter heaven naked. They gave him enormous tracts of Italy. In the eighth century, the popes forged the most amazing documents ever forged, duped Charlemagne, and founded the Papal States.

Choose no religion rather than risking a wicked one.

Saviour Shirlie

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History