We were not born with a manual to designate a core belief. We are either raised in a belief construct or we select an existing established religion. Some of us are not sure what we believe in if we cannot physically see or touch a spiritual entity but believe in faith that one exist without a religion attached. Then there are those who are pragmatic. The pragmatist research religions to find the source of its content then to blindly believe what others tell them what to believe without question. There are hundreds of gods around the world and thousands of religions. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is the real God? Who are the false gods or are there no gods? The individual decides on their own what is real to them or they act out like they belong to a belief construct so to be accepted among peers and social groups with the benefits for support. The focus of this essay is my own findings on Christianity since this is the religion I was raised in as a child.
The Source
Most know the Christian bibles stories of forgiveness, of being saved and having eternal life but what about the actual mission to the stories? The man known to us as Jesus was portrayed as an anti-establishment radical of his time by the earliest writings. This man hated how Jewish sects used moral doctrine to create wealth by the elites. This Jesus wanted to contradict long standing Jewish laws so to be more compassionate to the sinner or those who broke the religious laws or establishment rituals. He hated the religious establishment as corrupt, full of abuse and harsh, unforgiving punishments. This Jesus knew that his new message of compassion will embolden those in power to kill him before he gained public support to undermine Jewish traditions. Jesus was not anti-Jew; Jesus, as a Jew, was trying to re-vision the Hebrew God as a compassionate God, one who understood man’s failings so to “resurrect” the soul to purity by forgiveness then by mortal retribution. Jesus wanted to create a new form of Hebraism that the establishment would not allow. The end times were upon Jesus and God’s wrath would weed out the corrupt and save the souls of the forgiven… but the “end of times” never came. Jesus died by the hands of the establishment and Judaism continued as it always has. The followers who survived after Jesus’s death formed a new religion to counter Judaism’s laws and old customs; not to enhance Judaism, but to replace it. In order to tie the new order with the old order, the Hebrew God would have to fracture into a “son” of the existing God, the “next generation” of old God to the new God. The only problem the early Christians had with this new concept was the math, two does not add to one so they created the unification precept: “Two persons in one God”; but even with this simple explanation, the value will always add to two no matter how it is phased.
What is Actually Known
Surviving accounts of Jesus, “Yeshu,” [yeh-shoo] in Aramaic, was a man’s “biography” account recorded decades later after a crucifixion from unknown sources written in Greek that created major religions centuries later. The surviving disciples of Yeshu must have been very influential people of their time. Many were not literate, but the impact “Jesus” made on those around him while alive were astounding. The original men, who are unknown to us today except possibly for the 1st Peter letters, were able to record some actual accounts, some by oral traditions, and maybe some written accounts produced by scribes on parchment that no longer exists that would have been written in Aramaic. Some call these sources such as “Q”, “L”, and “M” that was possibly used to create the newer Greek narratives of “Mark,” “Luke” and “Mathew” later in time as this new religion spread outside of Judah. No religion could have survived for thousands of years if those who witnessed Jesus were some of the greatest influencers of their time. These first century small Jewish groups, not yet “Christian,” spread out from Israel to surrounding empires up until the first accounts were recorded in Greek then in the native language of Jesus’s time. (1)
Some of the written content was politicalized, while others were imagined by great literary skills like with the works of the “book” of “John”. Scholars can link the age of most writings to known events in the first century and compare the varying writing styles and parchment fragments, to date and place where they were transcribed in Greek. (2)
There Is Only One God, Nameless
In Judaism, Abraham’s God, (the God with NO name), was both Just and loving yet lacked the traits that Jesus wanted to emphasize and re-enforce. Jesus, whom was a contemporary Jew, took the image of this “commandment” God to a higher level to include everyone, (non-Jews), and made God more of a loving, peaceful God, who forgives and who offers eternal life in the first person. This emphasis did not exist before Jesus’s era and he revolutionized a new “God” concept to Judah. When Christianity was first canonized, catholic, meaning “universal,” became inclusionary in its belief and doctrine but the 1517 Reformation exposed this religion to everyone and created thousands to Christ like new religions worldwide. Most of the world’s population at the time was not literate enough or even knew of a Christ like God for the exception to oral traditions or what was said in a religious service by an educated presenter with selected “readings.” One question demands and answer: If God pre-exists in all of us, as part of us with no underlining written traditions, do we even need written accounts to have faith? According to the Hebrew bible, Abraham “walked with God” before there was any established religion or written text that would create the Abrahamic religions centuries later. Some may argue that God is an inclusive spirit or a part of us so we know of him by his spirit within us without definitions or religious doctrines. This God is interwoven in all peaceful religions, and most importantly, with the individual then of any particular religion itself.
The Monotheistic Definition of a God Written by A New Testament Author:
“The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being…” Acts 17: 24-28 nrsv [taken out of context].
Most historians accept or agree that Jesus was a real person in life who died. Those who believe in an after-life, that a soul can exist outside the dyeing physical body, then the historical Jesus would also become eternal as we hope to be after we pass to our next destination.
Jesus is more than a person who started his mission mid to late life, for only about two to three years, we hardly know who Jesus actually was as the person. Most quotes in the gospels only quote that he “said” many things but it was not recorded or the content did not survive, if it was recorded in Aramaic at the time. Most bible scholars think most of what was written was through oral tradition that was widely used when literacy was un-common and the literate was only for the very few elites. We know nothing about Jesus’s whole life, just the last two years of his ministry. We don’t even know how old he actually was but most historians’ think he was, at that time, near middle age. He most likely had the onset of greying hair and looked aged of a more senior dignified statue.
Source Writings Missing
The eye witnesses of Jesus, or remembered from first had source, oral conjecture, source Q, would have been written in Aramaic of Jesús’s sayings, was sourced from the writer of “Mark”. “Mark” consolidated the writings in the narratives and had to fill in the gaps at a later time in Greek. This may be the most accurate source having Jesus’s “generation of the apocalyptic” when this could have been removed by later scribes since the “end of times” never came. “Matthew” writers took “Mark” and possible a “Q” source, turned into their own narratives filling in more gaps. Matthew added one of the birth stories that would have been third hand sourced since none of the writers were alive at the time of Christ’s birth. “Luke” uses a different birth source. The differing birth stories prove that there were many written or oral fragmentary sources existed long after the crucifixion and there is less accountability to the stories because there was very little credible source material to go by at the time they were consolidated.
Jesus Is More a Message, A Vision Of Life
Jesus represented a vision, a meaning, for those after his death to create a religion for everyone, not just exclusive to Judaism: An instruction manual consisting of forgiveness, hope, love, compassion to preform to others as a mission in life and eternal life as a reward, and also a vision of a more loving, peaceful God as a reconstituted identity. This moral compass is important in today’s religions as a contrast to that of evil and hate that societies try to suppress. In the first century, those who survived Jesus’s crucifixion, broke away from the historic God and made a God universal and available to everyone.
Religions Are Universal To Humanity
For hundreds of thousands of years, human societies had many forms of primitive religious. Jesus the “Christ” appears only in the first century and only in Israel. It took over 50 years to spread out of Judah. Just about everyone worldwide were illiterate until the 1800s. Christianity took hundreds of years to spread worldwide. Faith is more of self-identifying by one’s own understanding… then substantiated only by written, readable sources alone.
Polytheism Expansions
The Hebrew Bible doses not divide the divinity of God in parts or to a metamorphic maternal “son” partitioned to a “father” figure of a God, similar to the Homer Greek gods. Hebrews were strictly monotheistic. The Hebrew Messianic leader that was prophesied is depicted strictly as a mortal person, not as a god at all. Example, Moses was the messianic savior of the Jews in his time. Miss interpretation may have stemmed by new rising baptismal Nazirites like that of John the Baptist that was gaining popularity and the beliefs of the Essenes that God could be divisional in some form was popular during Jesus’s lifetime. While Jesus believed that he retained power over humanity, he saw himself secondary to a “Father” (the Hebrew God), by obedience, honor and praying directly to that supreme being. Jesus did offer the Jews with a new version of the Hebrew God emphasizing love of ALL humanity and forgiving all wrongs. Adding to this, eternal life beyond those connected to the Jewish faith. This was a powerful movement that began to branch off from Orthodox Judaism over 100 years after his crucifixion.
If Jesus was to become a Jewish messiah by Hebrew literary definitions, he would have become the “Moses” or the “Abraham” of the time, one of the great, if not the greatest leaders of the Jewish people but not as a new God or a division of the Hebrew God. Christianity today has no ties to Judaism at all, in its sanctuary or in doctrine, separate from traditional Jewish customs. Jesus himself did not replace Judaism, he was a practicing Jew up to his execution, but it was those after him who promoted Jesus as a “messiah,” a new divisional God, a “new church” that started to move away from Judaism after 40 CE that would include non-Jew (Gentiles). In 98 CE, Rome officially made Christianity legal by formally exempted Christians from paying the “Fiscus Iudaicus” tax that was meant for only the Jews.
The Gold Standard for Expanding The Narratives
The new plastic wrapped bible off the self contains “scriptures” that are considered divinely ordained by varying Christians religions. Most of the New Testament’s canon of books remains the same with most Christian beliefs. The final canon was set in around 367 AD but the history getting there is a fascinating story of religious evolution.
Fig.1 The origin of the New Testament
In Fig.1, shows how the New Testament developed over time. This image shows that there were many “gospels” and other source material that were used in the early churches that are unknown. Some writings are known today but are not included in today’s Christian canon like the book of Thomas. Also, by this illustration, not all the “books” were written in sequence as they are arranged today. There were many writings far older than the gospels as the church grew from a Jewish sect to a more segregated, new order of Christianity today. It took almost 400 years for bishops and community religions leaders to join to one belief, one canon and one core belief called “The Nicene Creed”: A history of debate, decisions, politics, and unification to create the standard of today. Everything has a beginning and the “Bible” is no exception.
In Conclusion
Does it really matter if God is monotheistic or divisional? Forgiveness, an eternal life, love and compassion of all humanity… in hope that there is a supreme being overshadowing the physical world connects with most of us. We can pick our own identity of this God, a sort of pick and choose passages from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles that best defines what we may believe what a true God represents and ignore what we can’t identify with. These ancient writings are written by human mortals who can, at times, become corrupt and political, but the essences of living a “Jesus” like existence among a church going family offers a wider connection of support and compassion; among the wars, riots, murders and violence, of humanity’s dark side of being mortal.
(1) When Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek (the Septuagint) and when New Testament authors wrote in Greek, they ran into major phonetic barriers: The Missing “Sh”: Ancient Greek lacked the “sh” sound (/ʃ/). Translators substituted it with a simple “S” sound (/s/). Yeshua became Yesua. The Silent “Ah”: The final guttural sound in Yeshua (“ah”) did not exist in Greek and was dropped. The Masculine Ending: In Greek grammar, masculine nouns ending in a vowel sound typically add an “s” (sigma) at the end to allow for grammatical casing. The Result: Ye-sh-u-a transformed into Iesous (pronounced ee-ay-SOOS): to 13th century English spelling; “Jesus”.
(2) While Apostle Paul did not walk with Jesus during His life, he was a contemporary of Jesus’ original disciples. In his letters, Paul notes that he met and collaborated with Jesus’ inner circle, including James (the brother of Jesus) and the Apostle Peter.
-The earliest written New Testament texts are the letters of the Apostle Paul. Specifically, 1 Thessalonians is widely considered the oldest, written around 50 AD. It was followed closely by other authentic Pauline letters like Galatians (c. 48–50 AD) and 1 Corinthians (c. 53–55 AD)
Apostle Peter, 1 Peter, 65 AD, mentions Silvanus (Silas), which suggests Peter may have used him as a secretary or co-writer to help draft or deliver the message in polished Greek.
