Jesus’ Teachings about the Father. Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels
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Now let’s take a look at this scene through the eyes of an eyewitness. Overcrowding, dirt, stench – sick people rot for years in this pool by the water in the hope of healing, and there are thousands of them. Jesus came – and immediately the first question: He is the Son of God, merciful and compassionate – so WHY did He not take and heal ALL at once? That would be a great and socially significant miracle – and an act of divine mercy. Why was it necessary to look for some chosen one, no matter how good he was in himself. What, out of thousands of sufferers, only one was worthy of a divine visit?
Well, let’s say he healed. The one who had been lying paralyzed for almost forty years suddenly got up and went. – And then what? Yes, the fact that an unimaginable hubbub would have risen, and not just a hubbub, there would have begun a form of pandemonium, people, the whole thousand-strong crowd would have rushed to Jesus and would have simply trampled Him on the spot, tore him apart. And He would not go anywhere, would not dissolve in any crowd – that would be the end of Him. Let’s pay attention to a strange fact: the ill person confesses him as Lord before he was healed! Whom does he see in front of him? The ragamuffin alien who also came to be healed in the bath, is, accordingly, a competitor. And suddenly – Lord! The cart is again ahead of the horse.
So this scene is made up from start to finish.
This is followed by a long morality of Jesus, whom the Jews allegedly were eager to stone for breaking the Sabbath – and He reads a sermon to them in response, and they suddenly listen to him, obediently listen to “His voice” like sheep at His feet – amazing! It could be attributed to a miracle if they suddenly calmed down – but they continue to break off the chain and it is completely incomprehensible what keeps them from reprisal against Him on the spot, of course, for the blasphemy.
“18 And the Jews sought to kill Him even more because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God His Father, making Himself equal to God” – and here is the insert of the second layer, here the second editors already directly deny the Son-godhood of Jesus, without cunning approaches of the first editors
They are eager to kill Him, and He keeps speaking with them so calmly.
“19 To this Jesus said: truly, truly, I say to you: the Son can do nothing of Himself unless he sees the Father doing: for what He does, the Son also does the same” – this phrase is found in various forms in e. Jn. at least five more times. And what is it that the Father does out of what the Son does? We find the answer below.
“20 For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all that He Himself does; and he will show him deeds greater than these, so that you will be amazed.21 For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, so the Son also gives life to whom he wants”– but where, whom and when did God raise from the dead? Jehovah – no one and never, and we have not yet really learned anything about the Father from Jesus. And why is it mentioned here then? Well – as a preparation in advance for the main miracle: the resurrection of Lazarus the Four-Day, the authors of the Gospel are impatient to tell about it and they run ahead. But the Judaizers are on guard, and immediately this impatience is suppressed.
“22 For the Father does not judge anyone, but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 so that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father” – the judgment was taken by the Jews from biblical prophecies about the “end times”! And in the third chapter, any mention of the judgment in the teachings of Jesus, as an element of the pagan Jewish legend, is suppressed.
“He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” – similar to the phrase in the authentic sermon of Jesus, but we will meet it more than once.
“24 Truly, truly, I say to you: he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life, and does not come to judgment, but has passed from death to life” – impudently and unceremoniously right in the middle is inserted about judgment, which completely changes the meaning of this very important phrase, the utterance of Jesus, undoubtedly genuine, and constituting the core of his Teachings, as we will see with you in the future. This phrase should sound like this: “he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life, has passed from death to life.”
In theory, this is where the chapter should end, it’s like a summing up, period.
And here the second floor of Judaization begins (or continues): it seemed to the second Judaizers that the Son of God was developed here, they, apparently, did not understand all the subtleties of the first implementation of the Jewish editing, and decided to add from themselves direct, straightforwardly, bluntly. Well, off we go, “according to the scriptures” to the end of the chapter.
25 Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live. – Well, the zombie apocalypse promised by Mashiach suddenly sounds like the voice of Jesus – all of a sudden! And then it proceeds onto covreing all points of biblical prophecy:
5:26For as the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself: 5:27and he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man. 5:28Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, 5:29and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment. 5:30I can of myself do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. 5:31If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. 5:32It is another that beareth witness of me; and I know that the witness which he witnesseth of me is true. 5:33Ye have sent unto John, and he hath borne witness unto the truth. 5:34But the witness which I receive is not from man: howbeit I say these things, that ye may be saved. 5:35He was the lamp that burneth and shineth; and ye were willing to rejoice for a season in his light. 5:36But the witness which I have is greater than that of John; for the works which the Father hath given me to accomplish, the very works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me. 5:37And the Father that sent me, he hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his form. 5:38And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he sent, him ye believe not. 5:39Ye search the scriptures, /author:, … – Oh! What are they? Torah books, I guess? Must be, because there are at least another 100 years before the written New Testament!/
…because ye think that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of me; 5:40and ye will not come to me, that ye may have life. 5:41I receive not glory from men. 5:42But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in yourselves. 5:43I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. 5:44How can ye believe, who receive glory one of another, and the glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not? 5:45Think not that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, on whom ye have set your hope. 5:46For if ye believed Moses, ye would believe me; for he wrote of me. 5:47But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? " – another hysteria of an offended unbalanced and possibly mentally unhealthy Jew who believes in apocalyptic “prophecies” and imagines himself to be “the very” Jewish Messiah, the King of the Jews, whom the Jews were waiting for – nothing interesting for us. Digging in the trash, fishing for the insignificant words about the unity of Jesus with the Father just does not make sense – all this unintelligible preaching about this unity-identity we will encounter time and again, and may be not authentic Jesus sayings, but only gnostic reflections of the original authors of the gospels. And therefore, all this miserable semblance of a description of an event and a miracle should in the dump, except for the only phrase, in which it is still necessary to mentally separate the fairy-tale Jehovah imposed on Jesus as a father from the True Heavenly Father, which He tells us about.
“He that hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life, has passed from death to life.”
John, chapter 6
Chapter six begins with the words “After this.” If we follow the logic of the narrative, then – this is after what was stated in the fifth chapter: another unexpected rush to Jerusalem, the healing of the paralyzed in the Sheep font and a long sermon to the Jews in the temple about the right of Jesus to perform healings on Saturdays, since He is the Son of the Jewish God. The Jews wanted to kill Him for this, but for some reason they did not do it – the Evangelist explains this by the fact that “His hour did not come”. Yes, told it to the Jews.
So, chapter six.
“After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, in the vicinity of Tiberias” – that is, just like that, suddenly from Jerusalem he found himself on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and not by himself, but with a whole bunch of people that came out of who knows where. Here, the insertion of the entire fifth chapter is directly visible, since the fourth ends with the miracle of the healing of the courtier’s son from Capernaum, and AFTER this, from Cana of Galilee “Jesus went to the other side of the sea”, which in fact is not a sea, but just a very large lake. And not to the “other side”, since Cana and Capernaum, and Nazareth and even Tiberias are all on one side of the sea, the western one, and on the other, the eastern side, there is the territory of a completely different country, Syria. Apparently, the knowledge of geogrsphy was very bad indeed mong the compilers of the Gospel.
Further, in verses 12, from 2 to 13, the well-known miracle of feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fish is described. We will not cite it in full, we will dwell only on some details:
“2 Many people followed Him, because they saw the miracles that He performed on the sick” – on foot 20 kilometers from Cana? I wonder: did they go straight ahead, without even thinking to stock up on a some bread? Doubtful. And again – what kind of miracles are performed “over the sick”, who saw them and where? Since you and I have so far certified only two miracles: wine at a wedding and the healing of a child at a distance – there are “no more miracles”.
“3 Jesus went up a mountain and sat there with his disciples.” – 20 kilometers walk in the heat. Let’s suppose it happened.
“4 The Passover, the feast of the Jews, was drawing near” – how, again, the Passover? And what does this have to do with it? This is another “false insertable jaw”, so as not to forget who is the real Master here, and whose holidays are celebrated and honored here. But for some reason no one rushed back to Jerusalem – neither Jesus nor the peoples. What a bunch of sinners.
“13 And they gathered, and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves that were left by those who ate” – an interesting remark. Why did they collect it, and how did they do that – was it taken directly from people’s hands? People probably took the excess and hid it for the road back. Or they threw the remains on the ground (which is unlikely). The answer is contained in the “twelve boxes”: did Jesus and his disciples have such quantities of empty boxes in advance? Or did they run to the store to buy only to collect other people’s leftovers in them? There was no shop, no markets – nothing at all, the place was deserted. So this is added for the sake of a catchphrase, in order to convince of the proof of the miracle: here is how much is left of five loaves of bread – and this lie “as a testimony”, being exposed, undermines the credibility of the miracle itself: if someone lied in little, who will believe them in the big? And why twelve? Oh, because the twelve tribes of Israel – and the Greek author is unaware that for a long time there had been no “twelve tribes of Israel”
Okay, let’s say – why wouldn’t Jesus really feed the hungry away from home? The question is – why did He even bring them there? It seems that it remains to assume that he was fed up with all this popularity, He was tired of the enthusiastic crowd and wanted to escape somewhere to a deserted place, where no one would follow him, to hide from everyone – but they followed Him, literally dooming themselves to hunger with the children, you can’t get out of there quickly back to civilization, to get back you need to walk again on foot in the heat. And here, for sure, one portion of the distributed bread will not be enough, it is not out of order to pour manna from heaven onto a crowd of people like this, all along the way back home to Galilee.
What is the meaning of this hike outside the city remains a mystery – did Jesus decide to arrange a picnic for his disciples and admirers? Well, at least they could have stocked up on meat, or something, and fry a kebab.
In fact, all these incongruities have a simple explanation: Jesus went throughout the country preaching, and finally got to Tiberias. But did not go there on foot, accompanied by crowds…
Note that the narrative omits a huge and important period in the development of Jesus’ preaching after the first and second miracles: for more than one year He walks on foot throughout Galilee and Samaria – but does not go to Judea, they will kill anyone who dares to at least mention another god besides Jewish Yahweh-Jehovah. He preaches, works miracles, heals the sick on a massive scale throughout the country – and becomes widely known as a great prophet and miracle worker, His glory thunders throughout the country, the people rush to Him, and follow Him relentlessly and thoughtlessly, wherever He goes – the authors simply omitted all this as unnecessary. Why? Well, because all these “events” are generally needed by the authors only for the “bundle” of the narrative, which without such events would turn into a disorderly set of disparate, unconnected, utterances of Jesus of the type of e. Thomas. But the authors wanted to create exactly the narrative, the history of the development of the Teachings of Jesus as they understood it. To do this, arranging the available records in a certain meaningful order, as well as a small number of recorded testimonials about individual events that accompanied the sermon of Jesus, especially vivid, important and therefore clearly remembered, the authors, or rather, compilers, supplemented them with some connecting events that, perhaps, did not happen at all, or, in any case, the authors did not really know anything about them, having only inaccurate rumors in the form of folk tales that had developed over the decades after the Gospel events. And therefore, almost everything described by the evangelists is simply reconstructed or made up material in order to make more authentic (like 12 boxes) the narrative bundles, some events to which the already existing scattered records of Jesus’ utterances could be tied.
Such semantic connections are given away especially by the schematic description of events in them, in contrast to those few living, full of reliable details of vivid memories, which may have been entirely recorded by witnesses, presumably by John the Theologian.
Nevertheless, let’s go back to the text and see what else we can learn from it.
In the sixth chapter, this build up of events with the aim of linking them with the words of Jesus manifested itself in a particularly contrasting way: the further events described in it look very conditional.
“15 But Jesus, knowing that they wanted to come, accidentally take him and make him king, again withdrew to the mountain alone.
This is rathre interesting, if Jesus were a Mashiach, he would have grudgingly told the newcomers something like, “Well, finally, what took so long! Bring me the crown!” But he runs away.
16 When evening came, His disciples went down to the sea17 and, getting into a boat, went to the other side of the sea, to Capernaum "– here they are, they just left their Teacher alone in a deserted place and sailed away. And where did the boat come from? Or they just stole someone else’s boat and sailed away on it?
The whole story begins to look much more truthful if we assume that Jesus and his disciples sailed in a boat to Tiberias for the sake of preaching, then everything falls into place: the boat belongs to the disciples, they are former fishermen, the disciples brought Jesus from Capernaum or Bethsaida to Tiberias to preach to the peoples there. They went to the city and spread the news that Jesus was here, the people came to Him from the city a few kilometers away to the landing site – to the place where He climbed the mountain to pray, Jesus preached to them until evening, then took pity on the hungry and performed the miracle of the multiplication of loaves, to feed everyone before the way home – and then a conflict arises with the students, to whom he did not pay attention all day, and even forced them, the inner circle of disciples of the Great Teacher (in their view), to serve the commoners, to distribute bread to them. Moreover, when they informed him that they wanted him to be king in Tiberias – apparently, it was their idea – he brushed aside and went alone again to the mountain to pray. And here they were utterly offended, angry, and – they left him, deciding to take revenge on him a little: here we will sail away from You, and you get back on foot along the coast of the Sea of Galilee, the path is not so short. But, as is usually the case with those who play the offended, they did not sail far, everyone expected that He would see them sail away from the mountain, realize that he was left alone in the wilderness far from civilization, run ashore and start waving at them, asking to come back and take him with them. This suggestion stems from the ridiculous-looking remark in verse 17:
“17 And getting into the boat, they went to the other side of the sea, to Capernaum. It was getting dark, but Jesus did not come to them”– where did he not come, to the boat across the sea? They could not even imagine such a thing that He could do that. It was getting dark – that is, soon the boat would not be visible from the shore, and they would not be able to see Jesus on the shore.
“18 A strong wind was blowing, and the sea was turbulent” – and a fishing boat, a fragile boat, loaded with a dozen people, would sink into a storm like, no doubt – and they were frightened, no longer happy with their own display of grievances.
“19 Having sailed about twenty-five or thirty stages (roughly 1 stage = 200 meters, so 5—6 kilometers), they saw Jesus walking on the sea and approaching the boat, and they were afraid. 20 But He said to them: it’s me; do not be afraid. 21 They wanted to take Him into the boat; and immediately the boat landed on the shore where they were sailing”– he saw that they were in trouble and came to the rescue, they began to sink, and He hastened to help them, to save the foolish – and performed another unprecedented miracle.
In general, if you look closely, Jesus is very reluctant to use divinity, and to create miracles, granted to him by the Father, as a rule, he is forced by the disastrous circumstances of those who turn to him for help or simply the unfortunate people he met – but he always does this reluctantly, forcedly, and even with a reservation like when his mother asked him in Cana at a wedding or grumbling to a courtier with a sick son: “you will not believe if you do not see miracles”. His goal is not to surprise with fancy tricks, but to convince with his life and sermon to believe Him, the Son of God, that there is a True God, Heavenly Father, who is waiting for everyone to adopt them to Himself, as he adopted Jesus Himself.
“22 On the next day the people who were standing on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other boat, except the one in which His disciples had entered, and that Jesus did not enter the boat with His disciples, and only His disciples sailed away. 23 Meanwhile, other boats came from Tiberias close to the place where they ate bread, with the blessing of the Lord. 24 So, when the people saw that Jesus and his disciples were not there, they got into boats and sailed to Capernaum, looking for Jesus. 25 And, finding Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him: Rabbi! when did you come here?”
People who witnessed the miracle of bread went home and the news of the miracle spread throughout the city. And in the morning the crowds were already flooding, some sailed on boats, the rabble always wants bread and a show. Someone had seen that the disciples sailed away alone, and they hoped to find Jesus alone – not expecting that he went on foot around the sea. But He is not there. Then some people on boats went in search of him Capernaum, found him and were surprised that He was already there again with the people, preaching.
“26 Jesus answered and said to them, truly, truly, I say to you: you are looking for Me not because you have seen miracles, but because you ate bread and were satisfied” – and this is the end of the story, period. This is the end of the recording of the event, which was at the disposal of the compilers. Everything that is afterwards in this chapter – a lengthy monologue of Jesus with periods of repetitions – again, similarly to the two and a half chapters about miracle in Cana is bundled on top completely mechanically, using some sort of common theme that, as it seemed to the compilers, is logical: because the bread is mentioned in both places. From this ridiculous combination of scraps, the very method of composing the John gospel is clearly visible.
Apparently, those who set themselves the initial goal of compiling a single text from the scattered scraps of records in Aramaic that they had in their hands found a certain craftsman, a professional scribe who, not being a Christian himself and not understanding the prevailing Christian rituals, first arranged the available records in what it seemed to him to be a logical order in terms of content and meaning, and then, having translated it, collected it into a single text, which was difficult to change without damaging it – and that’s how it remained. Moreover, the customers, themselves not knowing Greek, could not really check what was written in it, took the word of the specialist they chose, that he translated and rewrote everything correctly, putting everything that was given to him together. Later, of course, this original text was changed many times, and by rewriting many times, it acquired many heterogeneous inclusions, but the vicious logic of the initial combination of passages, to a knowledgeable person clearly disparate, remains visible today. Further we will see that the link between the finished narration and the further continuation of the sixth chapter is the word “bread”, used according to the formal primitive logic: there is bread and here bread – so let them be together in one chapter. The compiler of the text is unaware that the used utterance of Jesus about Himself as the Bread of Heaven certainly refers to the Last Supper, at which Jesus instituted the Sacrament of Communion. And which is mysteriously absent from it in John’s gospel. In general, as we will see, there is no mention of the Communion of the disciples at the Last Supper, and this is strange – could it be that the evangelist suddenly forgot to mention such a great event, or maybe it did not exist at all? So, there is a simpler and more logical explanation for this: the entry related to the Last Supper has already been used and mechanically attached to the place where the mention of loaves was found!
This unambiguously indicates the fact that this gospel was mechanically composed by a person not familiar with Christianity, and is a hand-made event construct.
From verse 27 begins Jesus’ “sermon” about the Bread of Heaven, as I said above, clearly attuned to the incident in Tiberias by the keyword “bread”
“27 Seek not for corruptible food, but for food that abides in eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, for God has put His seal on Him " – and what is this seal? Oh, this is is an allusion to the anointing of the kingdom, to the fact that Jesus is the very Jewish Messiah.