Jesus’ Teachings about the Father. Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels

However, the time has come to free Jesus from the magnificent gilded grave, built over the centuries and millennia and forming the bulk of His tombstone, consisting of churches and temples. Time to free His Teachings about the Heavenly Father – from the ancestral religion of the Jews with their fabulous “god” Jehovah: the Santa-Claus type, except an evil and vindictive one – on the one hand, and materialistic magicians who rely on some secret knowledge, some on the training of “spiritual practices” such as asceticism and other arbitrary rules to establish their being without God – on the other. Time has come to release the truth out of the bushel of sewer deposits accumulated for centuries of false “Christianity” by limping Judaism and Gnostic magic – and to show the world the true teaching of Jesus, namely: CHRESTIANITY (from the word Chrestos – Good Lord, as the first Christians called Jesus until the fourth century)[19]. And this is what we will do, without further ado.

To do this, let’s select from the Gospels what has at least some chances of authenticity! And what is inherent in Jesus and His Teachings of the Son of God, sent by the Father to proclaim to mankind the Good News about the Kingdom of Heaven and Eternal Life for those chosen by Jesus by faith in Him – and let’s see what we get.

So, we have three sources of our sought – ChrEstianity: Thomas, John and Marcion, as the most reliable. Let’s look at them – what are they?

Ev. Thomas, apparently, the most ancient of the three, is presented in the form of a kind of common conversation between Jesus and his disciples – such is the form chosen by the evangelist (or evangelists). At the same time, mind the fact that the gospel was originally written in Greek and subsequently translated into the Said dialect of the Coptic language, which itself is a certain dialect of Greek. That is, all this was definitely not written by the apostles, by the illiterate Galilean fishermen from the God-forgotten outlying province of the Roman Empire, who spoke (and, doubtedly, wrote) Aramaic. At the same time, if we discard the artificial search for deep secret meanings connecting this set of sayings and dialogues with an allegedly secret semantic subtext and treat reading with an open mind, just like a text, then the modern reader – me – has a persistent feeling of a rather chaotic set of individual, in no way interconnected sayings, phrases, remarks, thoughts and random dialogues about everything and nothing – this is not a conversation at all, but a heap of all sorts of scraps of memories of Jesus, and probably not first-hand. This text, does not at all look like any kind of harmonious doctrine, it lacks not only internal coherence, not only a single composition of meaning, but the records themselves often look like a set of random, unrelated phrases.

I personally think and believe that this is precisely an unedited record of accidentally collected, whatever the writer was able to find, witness memoirs. They are the very oral “records of Jesus” that the narrators heard either from Jesus Himself or, rather, from one of the disciples, or even the disciples of the disciples about Jesus. That is so distorted an information set that to extract from it a coherent and consistent Teaching is the same as building a modern expensive convertible with the help of the wind blowing from a car scrapyard, so to speak.

To put it simply, this is a collection of folk wisdom, drawn from stray sources, recorded (in Greek) by no means – unfortunately – by a witness of Jesus, and not even from the words of His living witnesses, but only attributed to Jesus by popular rumor. And, perhaps, there will be echoes of the Teachings of Jesus in it, like grains among the husks of threshing, which will still have to be blown in the wind of common sense in order to reap a clean harvest. The task is not easy. And it is further complicated by the fact that the original listeners, the disciples of Jesus, were ignorant, illiterate and underdeveloped people who belonged to the bottom of the working people, and by no means to the top of the intellectual elite. And therefore the conceptual apparatus that they had at their disposal was by no means sufficient to accommodate the radically new Teachings of Jesus about the Unknown God, Eternal Life and the godlike immortal fate of Homo sapiens. This, I believe, explains the abundance of what can be classified as riddles, the solution of which should lead the reader to the saving through the Gnostic secret knowledge, which, as the Gnostics interpret, it is said in the prologue: “He who has found the interpretation of these words will not taste death.” I do not think that Jesus set himself the task of asking his disciples unsolvable riddles without solving them in order to deliberately confuse and torment, or thus train them in interpreting his riddles – apparently, they simply could not contain what He was trying to tell them using analogies, which, he hoped, would be more understandable to them than highly intellectual philosophical reasoning.

In addition, layering of both Jewish and Hellenic wisdom, mixed with gnostic wisdom, add difficulty to the task of separating the seeds of the Teachings of Jesus Himself from the chaff of alien teachings attributed to Him for the use of His authority.

And one more remark. During his lifetime, Jesus did not consider it necessary to initiate his disciples not only into the mysteries of heaven, but even into how the world actually works. However, according to the Gnostics, having appeared to them as the Risen One, for some reason he told in detail in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library[20]about the heavenly structure and the war of the gods, forgetting, however, to tell something as simple as that the earth is round and revolves in the void around the sun. I personally consider the Gnostic wisdom that was forcedly imposed on Jesus in the Gnostic texts as a forgery no less shameless than the Judaizing falsification of the synoptic gospels carried out by the newborn church orthodoxy at the turn of 2—3 centuries.

So the more something mysterious in the records of Jesus in St. Thomas – the less we should trust it as the testimony of the living voice of Jesus. We will proceed from this logic in our selection. From the above, it becomes obvious that what is selected from this ancient gospel can be used only as an addition to something more solid and similar to a single harmonious logical construction, having at least some semblance of teaching as such.

As such a basis, I think, may well serve the gospel of John, which is, of course, a later attempt to unite scattered memories of events associated with Jesus, discussions, speeches, thoughts expressed by Him united by a common thoughtful philosophical and religious system, on which, being strung in a certain order, it turned into a kind of narrative that claims to be the story of Jesus’ teachings; narrative of a process of perception and cognition of the Master by his students, so that later they themselves become its evangelists. Such systems of views, of course, were created and cultivated for more than one year in the circle of the closest disciples of Jesus and their disciples and followers who had already gathered around them. This gospel, apparently, is the work of a whole team of authors, which, however, could have a single leader and inspirer, whose name was given to the gospel in his name, “from John” – or, perhaps, someone else who became the Teacher of apostles after Jesus. There is, however, the hope that this John was the beloved disciple of Jesus, John the Theologian, a young man who remembered many living facts and real events that were reflected in the gospel of his name. But there is another version, which we will consider in the course of our study of the gospel of John.

Finally, the Gospel of Marcion is, most likely, an artificial construct of the narration about the history of Jesus ‘preaching, made in the name of uniting the information about Jesus of the most varied reliability collected by the author into a single whole consistent teaching of the Good News, at least with the help of the chronological sequence of events in which Jesus’ utterances are written. In addition, by placing Jesus’ statements in an event context, the author strove to make it easier for readers to understand complex, often very abstract ideas and philosophical constructions of Jesus with the help of examples from everyday life circumstances. So it is hardly possible to take seriously the fantasy eventful surroundings of this rather late, in comparison with the two previous sources, as real events – especially if there is simply no mention of anything like this in the two previous sources.

A comparative example is the calling of the disciples in John and Marcion. Marcion (2,1—11; 3,13—16) (and the synoptics who copied him, Luke 5,7 …) describe the calling of disciples as a one-time phenomenon, very schematic, the reality of what is happening is very conditional. Something like this: Jesus preached, the surrounding people pressed him, he got into a boat that sailed from the shore and continued preaching until he finished. As a token of gratitude, he ordered to throw the net and rewarded the boatmen with an unprecedented catch – a miracle! Then he said; follow me, I will make you fishers of men – and they, abandoning everything, followed him, to where is unknown. All this gives a very deliberate edification, firstly, and secondly, the lack of vitality, stasis, sculpturality of the scene frozen in marble.

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.