Another description is given by “John” (John 1: 36—51): two of John’s disciples see Jesus passing by, whom John the Baptist points out to them as “the lamb of God,” they, interested, follow him, he invites them to visit, they spend the whole day in conversation with him, then, in the evening, they bring Peter to Him, then, in the morning, Philip, then Philip calls Nathanael … – a whole series of living and very real events. Which leads to the formation of an inner circle of disciples gathered around Jesus. Not by a miraculous supernatural calling – but by their own will they chose Him as their own Teacher, being convinced by His words in conversation with Him. He was able not to subdue them with amazing miracles, but to convince in his own words, while leaving the choice for them, to their free will. Isn’t that what the Son of God the Heavenly Father should do with his beloved brothers in humanity, rather than his despised servants?
This very true life scene does not at all resemble the cold marble of the frozen scene of the vocation of the disciples, which horrified Peter by the terrible miracle of catching the fish they caught.
So our choice of the reliability of events is left to John, he has the first word in our future narrative.
Thus, summarizing the above, it can only be concluded that Judaizm and Gnosticism of the first followers of Jesus together brought Him Teaching into the jungle of Christianity in its present form, it actually being a marginal area of messianism in Judaism, and in fact proselytizing sect of Judaism-light for the non-Jews, in the form of universal human religion of Noachism (promoted by Judaism on the basis of common roots of all “Abrahamic” religions) – Christianity without the Son of God, whose divinity the jews cannot admit.
However, the task I see and set for myself – is to extract from available sources, and, after a deep analysis on the reliability of the content of the Gospels, clean, and present in an explicit form the teaching of Jesus, which he during the three years of evangelism shared with part of humanity accessible to him. And to prove that his ChrEstianity (from the word ChrEst – the Good Lord) has nothing to do with Judaism or with Abraham-ism, nor Gnosticism, nor even with the current Christianity, nor even with whatever religions still popular with humanity, as they are all – without exception – manifestations of ancient superstitious paganism.
We are not talking about writing a new gospel – failed attempts at this have already happened in history more than once, and have never been accepted by the People of God, either disappearing without a trace, sinking into oblivion, or taking their place in a series of apocrypha, which has no faith. It is rather, as I said, about cleansing the texts of Judaizing insertions and politically expedient for a specific historical moment of deliberate editing, which shamelessly put into the mouth of Jesus and attributed to Him what He never said or did because of his complete antagonism of the Jewish religion and its “god”, whom He directly called the devil, a murderer “from the beginning”.
Such attempts to combine the Gospel teachings into a single text were made earlier, including in ancient times. One of the first is “Diatessaron” (“δia τεσσ ρων”, literally “through four”) by Tatian, the original text of which has not survived to this day. This work, created probably in the late II century, enjoyed great prestige in the Syrian Church for several centuries. In it, Tatian combined all the canonical gospels in one narrative. So, since this text was not rejected by the Church and existed in it along with the canonical gospels for the first few centuries, until it disappeared in the depths of time, then the very attempt of such an act is not reprehensible and permissible, as it is not condemned by the conciliar consciousness of the Church. The purpose of this work is a similar attempt to compose the teaching of Jesus based on an in-depth analysis of sources and a comparison of those elements that have a chance of reliability.
Criteria
Before proceeding directly to the very process of compiling a single text, it is necessary to choose those tools and selection criteria that will help us free Jesus from a heap of sacred garbage, like Michelangelo, seeing his David in a block of marble, freed him with a hammer and chisels – only we need a broom, a mop, and a trash can as tools.
To do this, we will have to briefly summarize the results of our research in recent years, point by point:
1. God Jehovah, he is same as Yahweh, he is an unnamed Jewish god denoted in writing as a Tetragrammaton, he is Sabaoth, he is Adonai the Lord and is mentioned in six other nicknames in the Hebrew Bible, in Christianity called the Old Testament, is a fairytale character in Hebrew folklore. We are not talking about any real existence of this literary hero: he is the product of superstitious fears generated by the ignorance of ancient savages who animated and humanized formidable natural phenomena. That is, who created imaginary gods for themselves in their own image and likewise – the Jewish Yahweh is one of those many, similar to him in different cultures: Baal, Zeus, Perun, and so on.
2. The same applies to other gods, angels, demons and other fairytale creatures mentioned in the Hebrew Bible – which is indisputably proven by modern historical and archaeological science and is fully reflected in the review by S. Petrov “Here are your gods Israel. The pagan religion of the Jews”. And also most of the biblical characters and the events described in the bible are nothing more than old tales of a pseudo-heroic epic, invented over the centuries of enslavement, among the oppressed marginal people, a permanent inhabitant of a remote province in the backyard of great empires. There has never been: the creation of the world by the “gods” Elohim, Adam and Eve, created by another “god”, Jehovah, the Garden of Eden with a serpent and an apple, their children Cain and Abel, Noah with the flood, Abraham with Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon, the prophet Elijah, as well as resettlement to Egypt, flight from Egypt, forty years of wandering in the desert and all the other “history” of the Jewish people, described in the Bible millennia later than the events mentioned in it.
3. Angelology, demonology and cosmology were borrowed from the Jewish pagan faith (as well as even more ancient pagan beliefs that borrowed all these fables from each other) by Christianity in a completely thoughtless and uncritical manner, and all this rubbish is still an indisputable part of the Christian sacred tradition, causing modern people ironic bewilderment, by its utterly comic archaism. However, the church cannot refuse a flat earth with a painted wooden sky on pillars today, since such ideas about the world are sanctified by the authority of the holiness of the fathers and cannot be refuted or even questioned within the framework of mainstream (catholic and orthodox) church teaching. Even a single recognition of injustice and apparent ignorance of holy teachers will cause a collapse of all the authority of two thousand years of… no less but the Divine Truth. We recognize the importance of the doctrine of the church, but question its foundation.
As for the category of angelic and demonic entities, their armies and worlds, there is a long, millennia-long history of gradual transformation from ancient superstitions into a pagan pantheon of many major gods and smaller gods, many of whom played a secondary role and performed official functions (for example, messengers, or perpetrators of punishments, executions, intimidations, judgments, and so on) assigned to the peoples under the main gods. How this evolution of myths, which ended in Judaism (IV of century BC) borrowed and learned from the Sumerian-Babylonian legends notions of whole special worlds beyond the visible world: heaven as the seat of the gods and of the angelic hosts, and hell (Sheol), as the place of residence of the souls of the dead before the general resurrection at the Last Judgment, and the demons tormenting them; enemies of the human race, led by the devil,.. all of this is traced in the most detailed way in the above- mentioned book of Petrov. S That is, there are no angelic ranks and the heavenly hosts, and there is no wickedness in high places and the world of demonic spirits, although so many believe passionately in such creatures and speak of them as the reality: – the saints, and sinners – Christians of all times and nations. All these