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Jesus’ Teachings about the Father. Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels
Oleg Chekrygin
Nadeina Daria
The content of the book is the text of the author’s doctoral dissertation in philosophy in the field of theology, adapted for a wide range of readers, dedicated to the reconstruction of the Teachings of Jesus based on a critical analysis of ancient sources: the gospels of Thomas, John, Marcion, Luke, Mark and Matthew.The final part of the book contains a reconstruction of the Good News of Jesus compiled by the author from the elements of the indicated sources.
Jesus’ Teachings about the Father
Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels
Oleg Chekrygin
Nadeina Daria
© Oleg Chekrygin, 2024
© Nadeina Daria, 2024
ISBN 978-5-0062-7697-0
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
“Reconstruction of early Christian teaching based on a comparative analysis of the oldest gospels”
Introduction
Reading the Bible, one cannot fail to notice a striking contradiction, if not to call it complete antagonism, between the legends of the Jews, who, as we read on the pages of the Old Testament (hereinafter – OT), committed reprehensible criminal acts against humanity from the point of view of modern humanism (and for this they were glorified in the OT as holy saints of the Jewish ancestral god, Yahweh) and the Teachings of the meek Jesus, who spoke of love for all people as His brothers. It is obvious to the unbiased reader that there is a terrible chasm between these two religious teachings.
However, the Christian Church in all its confessions and jurisdictions unanimously teaches that the OT, recognized in all Christian churches by the Holy Scriptures along with the New Testament, is like a “origination guide” to Jesus, tracing the human race from the biblical creation of the first people by the biblical god “out of clay” to the heights of moral sacrifice in the name of Man. That is, the development of mankind over time from a state of primitive animal savagery to the high humanism of Christian teaching, from the first man, Adam, to the second Adam, as Jesus is called in the church teaching. At the same time, attention is drawn to the fundamental discrepancy between the behavior of the biblical Old Testament heroes, recognized by the Christian “holy righteous forefathers,” and, first of all, of their God himself, to the Christian ideals of humanism; a cruel and jealous deity of the Hebrew Bible, a treacherous tyrant and a maniac acting on the pages of the OT – in The New Testament suddenly corrected itself, taking on the appearance of the All-forgiving Heavenly Father, giving Divine Love to all his children indiscriminately (Mt. Mk 5.45: “May you be sons of your Heavenly Father, for He commands His sun to rise over the wicked and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”).
The contradiction in this united teaching of the Old and New Testaments is carefully hidden in the fairytale biblical “history” of the Jewish people (and this is a horrific tale), which turned out to be a way of turning Jesus into a Jewish rabbi and Jewish messiah.
As one of the tasks of writing this work, the author sets out to expose this, to put it bluntly, the most outrageous forgery in history, which turned Christianity into a marginal “messianic” sect within Judaism.
At the same time, I would like to draw your attention to and especially dwell on the deliberate provocativeness of the topic under study, and categorically reject any attempts to accuse it of “anti-Semitism” by close-knit adherents of reverence for the special suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which happened “through the fault” of world Christianity. Without denying in the least the horrors of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, or the guilt imputed to Christianity in the two thousand-year-old suspicious and hostile attitude towards Jews as a people of “deicides”, I want to draw the attention of everyone that the topic under discussion concerns only – and only – the history of ancient peoples, and those religious contradictions that arose between peoples in those distant times. This is a purely academic study that does not imply any practical conclusions regarding the religious differences and preferences of modern humanity.
***
After many years of work[1] (https://ridero.ru/link/0cS-8lAvGu5D2n)to expose Judaization of Jesus’ teachings, first in early Judo-Christianity in Jerusalem community, then – in the Roman church of II century, and following in her wake churches of “ecumenical orthodoxy” of the first centuries, and beyond – everywhere and all, without exception, current Christian denominations recognize the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament of their Holy Scripture; it finally became clear to me that all world Christianity has always worshiped not the Heavenly Father at all, but the Jewish ancestral “god”, the ancient pagan idol Jehovah. If you wish, you can trace the origin of this fairytale “god” to the pagan pantheons, much more ancient than the religion of the ancient Jews. The teachings of Jesus from the first century have been shamelessly forged as the continuation of Judaism, and united with the Jewish Torah together, as a confession of belief in common with the Jews, the false God Jehovah, presented by the Judaizers as God the Father of Jesus and ours.
According to church tradition, the Old Testament is the basis of the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus himself is the very Jewish Christ-Messiah, which is predicted in various books of the Old Testament. The word “Christ” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Mashiach”, which means the Anointed, or King of the Jews, since the kings of Israel were delivered to the kingdom through the anointing of the prophets who poured holy oil on those kings. However, according to another opinion expressed in numerous works of philosophers and scientists from the 17th century[2] (https://ridero.ru/link/bp1XA4qpRE_rWC), in fact, Jesus completely rejected Judaism, “the law and the prophets,” and preached a completely new teaching that had nothing to do with Judaism. Jesus’ teachings revealed the true knowledge of his Father God, which the Jews did not know. And Jesus himself has nothing to do with those Christ=Messiah=Mashiach=Annointed=King of the Jews, which the Jews were waiting for (and still are waiting for), and whose appearance was predicted in the Old Testament by the great Jewish prophets.
“No matter how the theologians tried over the centuries to prove the” integrity “of the New Testament, in its texts there is clearly a confrontation between two religious tendencies: a sharply negative attitude towards Judaism (which, apparently, was characteristic of Jesus himself and his teachings) on one hand and a desire for combining the worldview with Judaism (which is commonly called the orthodox tradition) – on the other hand … “The Gospel of Matthew, apparently, it is no coincidence that it opens the New Testament: the Christian church needed that from the very first lines the “new”, “corrected” Christian teaching demonstrates its Jewish roots… The first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew in general seem to be a continuation of the Old Testament, the reader is completely immersed in the atmosphere of Jewish prophecies about the Messiah, as which Jesus is presented.”
I. Evlampiev “Undistorted Christianity and Its Sources”[3] (https://ridero.ru/link/l8PXIkHw5XhWyd).
The remaining question, as part of the Christian teaching, is the one of the salvation of all those who, involuntarily and unconsciously, being deceived by church teaching, over the millennia of church history, massively worshiped this false “God” within the framework of Christian ecclesiasticality, remains open – did the Church lead their people to salvation, and did it not bring all the” ones being saved” under her shelter to that “eternal destruction”, which it threatens to all who dare to doubt the truth of its teachings, beginning with the ap. Paul, who proclaimed the very first church anathema in the Epistle to the Galatians? Galatians 1: 8: “But even if we or an Angel from heaven began to preach the gospel to you other than what we preached to you, let it be anathema.”
But this is not actually what we are talking about now – let the leaders of Christian confessions be preoccupied by this. But rather – about finally cleansing the Teaching of Jesus from the age-old deposits of Judaism and presenting it in the form in which it could be preached by Jesus to his disciples – if possible. And I must say right away that this opportunity is very limited and small.
Sources
If we look the truth in the eye, there are practically no extra-biblical historical sources of information about Jesus, except for two quotations from the “Antiquities of the Jews” by Josephus, one of which is recognized as a later forgery. As for the conventionally biblical (that is, canonical and apocryphal) sources, I consider it proven in the revolutionary works of doctors Marcus Vincent, Mattius Klinkhardtand Dieter T. Roth, as well as their great predecessors, Garnak, Whayett, Nocks and Paul-Louis Couchoud, that all synoptic gospels are late (not earlier than 150 AD) compilations of the gospel of the Lord by Marcion, dating back to 140, ie, the sources are certainly secondary and deliberately distorted, and therefore do not have value as valid. The very gospel of the Lord (by Marcion), too, has the traces of the early Judaizing, its origin, apparently, being obliged to the early Christian messianic Judeo-Christianity, originally inclined to commitment to “faith of our fathers” in the Jewish tribal god Yahweh-Jehovah. The gospel of John is earlier (this assertion will be substantiated below) and therefore deserving more trust, however, there are easily distinguishable birthmarks of editorial Judaizing edits in it as well, which, as a rule, have the form of crude illogical inclusions of categorical imperatives of the truth of the Jewish faith – we will mark in the process of text analysis. And finally, ev. Thomas, not included in the canon of the New Testament because of its clearly pronounced anti-Jewish orientation. Nevertheless, being the most ancient text of the records of Jesus, it appears more credible as the source of the greatest reliability and closeness to what Jesus really could teach than the other gospels. Thus, as our sources, we will most of all use Thomas, with reservations – John, and finally, conditionally, the Marcion gospel of the Lord, trying to cleanse all this from Judaization and preserve everything that can be attributed by us to Jesus. It is also possible to consider individual sayings from the canonical synoptic gospels, which, although they are reliable sources of the second row, nevertheless, may contain some elements of sources that have not survived to this day, but existed during the second half of the second century. An example of such a lost source is the collection of the records of Jesus in five volumes of Papias of Hierapolis, mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea in the History of the Church.
Dating sources
The classical dating of the canonical gospels, adopted in modern biblical studies, reads: “The time of creation cannot be reliably established, but …", and this “but” is followed by the coined phrase “most scientists are inclined to think” which means – more or less justified guesses. It is useless and senseless to cite literature here, it is so vast over the past approximately five centuries, starting from the 17th century almost from Spinoza – it will be enough to refer to Metzger’s cornerstone work The Canon of the New Testament. And what is this dating? Matthew – as it is believed, the earliest – is attributed to the 50—60s, Mark – to the 60—70s, Luke, respectively, to the 70—80s, and poor undignified John, considered unreliable [8] (https://ridero.ru/link/3IZqbs0x6E0A-O)– as much as 90—100 AD.
However, the arguments in favor of these datings are very limited. In fact, upon closer inspection, there is – alas! – just one argument, considered indisputable, in favor of the early dating of the Gospels to the middle or end of the first century. This is – two citations of [9] (https://ridero.ru/link/-WVgaxNtzKpJby)Papias of Hierapolis (70—155), the author of lost Jesus records in five volumes, mentioned in “Church History” by Eusebius of Caesarea [10] (https://ridero.ru/link/oZOZTzCuOsVC2P). One claims that Papias wrote down the memories of Jesus from the oral tradition, not trusting the written evidence: “… I understood that books would not do me as much benefit as a living voice that remains in my soul.” Another is about the sources of the records he collected (this is a quote from his quotes in the “History…” of Eusebius): " In his book he also reports other words of the Lord in the transmission of the aforementioned Aristion, as well as the stories of Presbyter John. We refer inquisitive people to them, but we consider it necessary to immediately add to everything that has been said about the Evangelist Mark. Here is what the elder (John) said: “Mark was Peter’s translator; he accurately wrote down everything that he remembered from what was said and done by the Lord, but not in order, for he himself did not hear the Lord and did not walk with Him. Later, he accompanied Peter, who taught as circumstances required, and did not intend to arrange the words of Christ in order. Mark was not at all wrong, writing everything down the way he remembered; he only cared not to miss anything and not convey anything incorrectly. This is what Papias says about Mark; about Matthew, he reports the following: ‘Matthew wrote down Jesus’ conversations in Hebrew, and translated them as best he could. He also uses the First Epistle of John, as well as Peter, and tells about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins. This story is in the ‘Gospel of the Jews’. I considered it necessary to add all this to what has been said.”
From these passages, which are, I remind you, the only “indisputable” argument in favor of early dating of the Synoptic Gospels, it becomes obvious and taken for granted that these Mark and Matthew could not be the author of the Gospel; one wrote down everything in a row, and certainly not in the form of an unfolding chronological story, but in the form of separate, unrelated memories, perhaps containing some eventful episodes, but not in the chronological order of a single history; about the other Eusebius can hardly be believed at all, since today it has already been established for sure that the Gospel of Matthew, written in Hebrew, is a reverse translation from Greek. And the conversations of Jesus, in the first place, are not a composite story of His life, which the canonical Gospel from Matthew is meant to be, and secondly, Jesus Himself preached in the Aramaic, and it is unlikely that Matthew (if this is the same Matthew, the tax collector) would have written them down in the sacred language of the Jews, being a traitor to his people and an outcast, if you believe that he was a publican… One would rather believe that he wrote in Greek than in Hebrew. According to most scholars, the Gospel of Matthew was not written by eyewitnesses. And the authorship of “Luke” will be mentioned in detail later. As for the other, “controversial” arguments and second-tier evidence of early dating synoptics, they are considered in detail and convincingly refuted in the fundamental work of Dr. Marcus Vincent [11] (https://ridero.ru/link/25x_ABMbd_VDI5), and are summarized in the work already cited by us by Dr. Evlampiev[12] (https://ridero.ru/link/A1mE8FfS3NuXU6). No other direct documentary evidence of the existence of the synoptic gospels previously to 140 AD simply not exist in nature. It is necessary to understand. At the same time, we must pay tribute to the fact that modern researchers, analyzing the above testimonies of Papias of Hieropolis, come to the unequivocal conclusion that the “records” of the utterances of Jesus Christ made by Matthew and Mark, which are mentioned in quotations from his work, can not be the Gospels, that included into the New Testament.
As for the Gospel of John, let’s agree to accept the dating proposed by “the majority of scientists” and see what follows from this for us. Remember this fact: John is the end of the first – the very beginning of the second century.
Separately, I would like to note once again that according to the traditionally accepted dating of the Gospel texts, Mark is attributed to the 60s, Matthew – to the 70s, Luke – to the 80s, and John – to the end of the first century. Thus, in the tradition of religious studies, the opinion was fixed that John is the latest, and therefore the least reliable source, and even partially compiled by the synoptics, and constructed by a certain Gnostic community, possibly from the circle of the disciples of John the Theologian. However, as I pointed out above, the Gospel of Marcion is now considered a presynoptic text used by synoptics to create their gospels. At the same time, Dr. Marcus Vincent in his monograph “Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels” quite reasonably proves that the author of the Gospel of the Lord Marcion was Marcion of Sinope himself, and, according to our assumption below, it was written in Rome between 140 and 144 years. At the same time, the first mention of all four canonical gospels together by Irenaeus of Lyons [13] (https://ridero.ru/link/7tSMaP1Z1tO6HZ)refers to the 180th year. Thus, the dating of the synoptics is shifted to the second half of the second century, although this does not apply to the original dating of the s. John 90—100 years, which presumably remains in its place. And here the most interesting thing begins: shifting the dating of the synoptic gospels to the second half of the second century, as secondary sources in relation to the Gospel of Marcion with a dating of about 140 and leaving the dating of John fixed at the turn of the 1—2 centuries., we get that John is not secondary in relation to the “sinoptics”, but, on the contrary, it was written off by the synoptics (including Marcion) from John.
Therefore, the gospel of John is brought to the forefront, as the most ancient of the canonical sources, its reliability is strengthened, and those borrowings that are attributed to it are overturned: now it is precisely these borrowings that should be attributed not to John from the synoptics, as before, but to the synoptics from John.
However, this is not all. As I indicated above, the proven[14] (https://ridero.ru/link/Y4d8u9KSB1BrYz)primacy of Ev. Marcion, in relation to the synoptics, shifts them to the third place: first John, then borrowing from John is ev. Marcion, and then from Marcion to synoptics. And we undertake to prove this statement in our book.
As for the gospel of Thomas, which “most scholars” attributed to the 60—140 years[15] (https://ridero.ru/link/2d1JV6wUMQmiAe) (which is doubtful, I did not find any arguments, and I personally believe that the end of dating should be shifted at least to the end of the 1st century), then it is the form of this gospel in the form of a record of scattered and not connected by a single meaning records first of all testifies to the greatest antiquity of this document: it looks like a sequential record on a single carrier (a sheet of parchment or a papyrus scroll) of recordsrecords in the order of sequence in which they were collected by the author from the oral retellings of many of those interviewed by him. Apparently, this very form of recording was also used by other collectorsrecords, which were subsequently lost.
As for the indications of a 50% similarity between Thomas and the records that Marcion and the synoptics have, then after the shift of all synoptics to the middle of the second century, these coincidences unambiguously indicate the opposite: that the Gospel of Thomas is an early monument, which It was used in the preparation of the later texts Marcion and – further – the synoptic gospels, and may well claim a place of mysterious Q source, the existence of which is pointed out by historians and text analytics that study synoptic gospels. As for the gospel of John, its textual connection with ev. Marcion, as we will see later, is hardly visible, despite the ideological similarity, and this suggests that here we are dealing with two ancient sources independent of each other, which are, perhaps, the product of two different schools of apostolic Christianity.
Credibility
We will have to admit that ALL, without exception, sources we have mentioned are unreliable due to their secondary nature: both Jesus Himself and his disciples from pagan Galilee were most likely illiterate, and spoke Aramaic, and the Gospels were written in literary Greek, which could never be done by the disciples of Jesus even on the assumption of their subsequent mastery of the Greek language and writing. That is, the Testament is a record of oral stories of authors unknown to us by unknown collectors who recorded them in the Gospels. First of all, inaccuracy concerns gospel events, the oral transmission of which always creates the effect of a “spoiled phone”: the narrators retell what happened to one another in their own words, and they are also prone to exaggeration and direct fantasy in order to give themselves increased significance and enhance the effect of the importance of what is happening, often containing impossible details. At the same time, in the retelling of conversations and monologues, storytellers tend to simplify in the name of greater simplification to the listener. In this sense, similar simplifications of the parables of Jesus from Thomas to John and further to Marcion are characteristic: the often mysterious content of Jesus’ logic expressed in Thomas is simplified by Marcion to commonplace platitudes.
Biblical scholars deny the Gospel of John “authenticity” for example: “Most modern historians, being careful, prefer to completely put the Gospel of John out of brackets when reconstructing the image of Jesus. In subsequent chapters, we will follow this respectable academic tradition, referring to the texts of John only when the outlines of real earthly history are visible behind the mystical-theological fabric of this work. " [16] (https://ridero.ru/link/kBJBLlZoeWgWT-)This is done under various obviously far-fetched pretexts, behind which often looms primarily a reluctance to recognize the clear anti-Jewish orientation of the Teachings of Jesus in the text of Ev. John, which so inopportunely undermines the foundations of the coherent theory of Judeo-Christian continuity, developed over the last century by “the majority of modern historians.” In particular, such a reason for the “unreliability” of ev. John refers to the “gnostic” character of this gospel. However, none of the inherent Gnosticism, professing knowledge of “secrets”, nor these “secrets” are present in the Gospel of John, and Jesus is not revealing, not reporting and not promising this.
The same applies to the ancient gospel of Thomas, also called the “fifth gospel” because of the centuries-old church litigation about its inclusion in the canon of the New Testament – it does not, in my opinion, contain any “secrets”, and the riddles it contains have the meaning of allegories of acute political and religious themes of that time, for just one attempt to discuss which, without due reverence in those wild times, one could be killed by a crowd of religious fanatics. Or philosophical parables, the interpretations of which by simplifying and flattening meanings were subsequently proposed by numerous interpreters, starting with the authors of the canonical gospels, who widely used the records from the same gospel of Thomas. However, there are no mystical secrets that have the magical power of dominion over Being by any of the interpreters, both Gnostic and Orthodox, in Thomas gospel: for two millennia it was not found and offered – which means that they are not there, and were not originally.
As for the synoptic gospels, today the secondary nature and late dating of these three independent compilations of an earlier source – Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord – with the aim of Judaization (as we will show later) of both: Jesus himself to be have origins tracing to the Davidic family, and His Teachings, as the preaching of Judaism to “all nations” (So go, teach all nations Matthew 28,19)
Thus, after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, despite His command to the disciples “go and preach to the whole world” (Mark 16,15), His Teachings were hijacked from two sides: from the side of Judaism for the sake of Jewish proselytism and from the side of Christian Gnosticism – both trends rushed to use His divine authority to advance their ideas and beliefs.
As a result, church orthodoxy has developed a monstrous hybrid of Jewish fairy villainous-Yahweh God on the one hand, the magic of the Gnostic secret knowledge the “mysteries of God” and in the middle, sandwiched on the two sides and squeezed into only one single commandment of love for God and neighbor (quite of the Old Testament origin) [17] The Good News of Jesus, the Son of God: “The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near to you.”
World Christianity has turned over time into a subsidiary of Judaism in its proselytism and preaching to the world.[18] (https://ridero.ru/link/ToF4lHlWlzVWfK): everyone now, whoever you ask, knows about the Jewish fairy-tale characters God-Jehovah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Aaron, David, Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, etc. – more than about Jesus. And worship Jehovah as their God-Father. And, together with the listed above, consider all of the Biblical Old Testament saints of questionable “righteousness” – describe in the OT pre-Jewish and Jewish savages, the villains, deceivers, cruel sadists, and outright criminals – to be their Christian holy forefathers. In addition, they do not even realize that Jesus, the Son of God, is declared the son of a villainous maniac-murderer “from the beginning”, Jehovah, and “through that” it means that Christ = Messiah = Messiah = Anointed = King of the Jews, whom the Jews are still waiting for, and who – whether it will be the Antichrist, or the Christ in the Second Coming, or both. And the Chrisitans do not even realize how stupid they look as “Christians” with a name, received from the Jews in the memory of the mockery of Jesus by Pilate, pinned to the cross of Jesus sign “King of the Jews.”
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] (https://ridero.ru/link/F73xkpZXnTkNgn). 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] (https://ridero.ru/link/SPOfjehGTkZ1OQ)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.
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 are the later inventions of Christian dreamers, the fruit of their inflamed imagination, warmed up on the thong of ancient superstitious legends. The generalization of all this legendary “heavenly” hierarchy was compiled within the framework of the church teaching of Christianity in a book of the fifth century called “The Heavenly Hierarchy” [26] by (https://ridero.ru/link/r5ebqTsekIDtkVTn2pZgy)unknown authors under the false name “Dionysius-Areopagite”, from 70 AD, who lived in first century, obviously, and not in the fifth century, he would not be able to live for that many years even if it was a miracle. The purpose of the forged authorship of this pseudo-epigraph, apparently, was to give more credibility by the authority of the apostle himself – as all this fabulous “heavenly army” looked so implausible even then for Christians of that time.
4. There were no holy animals Kerim (cherubim) and Saraf (seraphim)[27] (https://ridero.ru/link/qMWH-BZsPoS-atLYlloT2), borrowed by Christianity from the painful “prophetic” visions of the ancient Hebrew “seers”. Moreover, all the “prophecies” of these prophets, led by no means by the Spirit of God (which – despite church teachings did not descend on any of the people, except Jesus, until the day of Pentecost), suffer either from manic mental disorders with “visions” and “voices”, or the propaganda bias of custom-made manipulators. Visions of this entire fairy-tail hierarchy, it seems, occurred only in the troubled heads of various mentally unhealthy people, including the “holy prophets and visionaries.” All these are wholly and completely fictional characters, the product of either imagination, or disease based on superstitious fears and psychiatric “visions”.
As for the conjuncture-political side, as a rule, inherent in any prophecy, then the most accurate description of all these ancient biblical “prophecies” I met in the book by Latynina[28] (https://ridero.ru/link/H-g_aIz6Ru6Wqk3-KVPN1)about Jesus: “However, one thing should not be underestimated: the extremely pragmatic nature of Jewish theology. Under King Josiah this theology reflected the interests of Josiah surprisingly well, under Ezra this theology reflected the interests of Ezra remarkably well, and under the Hasmoneans it perfectly reflected the interests of the Hasmoneans.
All the prophecies that we have already cited in this book (and those that we have not cited yet) were made exclusively in retrospect and in favor of a completely specific political addressee. Only when they did not come true, their acualization was transferred to an indefinite future” – a devastating characteristic by a Jewish writer who cannot be suspected of being committed to Christianity.
5. Here’s what follows from all this for those who read the New Testament. There are many episodes in the New Testament related to the miracles of casting out demons both by Jesus and his disciples. And conversations with Him about this, His statements on this topic, attributed to him references to the devil, Satan, Beelzebub and demons. Based on what I said above, we must make a choice: either Jesus Himself believed in all this fairy-taly hierarchy and He Himself was at the mercy of these ancient superstitions – and in that case He cannot be the Omniscient God and the Son of God. Or all this was attributed to him by those who themselves believed in it, thought that Jesus also believed, and ascribed it to Him when writing the Gospels.The choice is not rich: just out of two. However, I personally choose the latter for myself, that is, I believe that the mention of angels and demons in the Gospels is attributed to Jesus by superstitious ignoramuses. For me, Jesus, being the Son of True God, undoubtedly possessed Divine Omniscience, and knew perfectly well how the world works and everything about the Kingdom of Heaven (“If I tell you about earthly things and you don’t understand what will happen if I start talking to you about Heavenly?” (Jn 3.12)) – and therefore, for me, any evangelical events and sayings of Jesus concerning: hell, demons, angels, demons expulsion, general bodily resurrection from the dead, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, the End of the World and other eschatological expectations, again uncritically adopted into Christianity from the Hebrew biblical paganism. And as a result of this choice, I have a scalpel in my hands – the very criterion for selecting the reliability of the Gospel texts – with the help of which I can surgically cut out from the New Testament a malignant tumor of Judaism with its fairytale metastases in records, attributed to Jesus.
6. I believe that Jesus was not who He was so persistently presented both by the ancient beneficiaries of the gospel falsification, and by the current Judaizers, the seekers of the “historical Jesus”. Nothing about his ancestral Jewry, family, parents “from the clan of David”, the prophesied place and the circumstances of the birth, and his belonging to the Jewish religion since childhood: really we do not know anything from anywhere except the first chapters of the synoptic Gospels, clearly written later in front of Marcion gospel by unknown counterfeiters in the second half of the second century, when to get real facts about any of this was no longer possible. Same way how reliably nothing is known about Him at all until His appearance at the sermon. Due to the complete lack of information about the childhood, adolescence and youth of Jesus, it is simply impossible to say anything definite about this period of Jesus’ life – there is nothing to take information from, even hypothetical.
7. At the same time, it is quite grounded to suppose that Jesus the Galilean was not a Jew, because he could not be: in Galilee at that time there were no Jews-robbers hated by the population of Galilee only as gangs and military units during raids of the pagan Galileans [29] (https://ridero.ru/link/PoZnF8vriC1yFreJfilPl)– robbers who infiltrated into Galilee. Jesus also was not a preacher of Judaism and the Hebrew god Jehovah, but denounced it, as the” devil " (John 8,44).
8. From non-biblical sources in general about Jesus, you can learn only two things: 1 – He had a brother named Jacob, which Josephus mentions[31] (https://ridero.ru/link/HaKukjQZOZGTPVQd3BFw_), and therefore both mother and family; and 2 – Jesus is considered a FALSE prophet of Nazariteism[32] (https://ridero.ru/link/T89_4Tes_sHVMkPOUMgMI), an ancient sect of the inhabitants of Galilee, who confessed a Mandean, non-Jewish god, whose belief was apparently borrowed from the Zoroastrians and brought to Judah from Babylon after the return of the Jews from captivity four hundred years before Christmas. But the true prophet of this religion was John the Baptist, whom, according to the Nazarene legend, Jesus betrayed as a teacher, creating his own sect and his own teaching, not Jewish and not Nazarene. John himself, apparently, was a Mandeus and Nazarene preacher of the Babylonian god Ahura Mazda [33] (https://ridero.ru/link/3DaSj6uxCY5v7L4k0v6Sz), alien to the religion of Judaism, and was killed by the Jews precisely for this preaching. Attempts to portray him as a preacher of Judaism are obviously untenable, and the story of Herod’s impious marriage is a rather obvious “cover operation” for the murder of John precisely for preaching a “different” God.
9. Jesus was neither a disciple of John the Baptist, represented in the canonical gospels, as a Jewish prophet and preacher of Judaism, nor an apocalyptic prophet, nor the head-baptist of the sect of John after his death, as is presented in numerous writings of the “majority of scientists” of seekers of the “historical Jesus”. He confessed another – not Jewish and not Nazarene – God, the Heavenly Father, hitherto unknown to mankind, to which “He revealed” Him (John 1.18). And that is why He was declared by the Mandean-Nazarene sect of John – a false prophet.
10. Jesus himself, apparently, preached the True God, hitherto unknown to mankind (” No one has ever seen God; the Only Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He revealed” Jn 1:18), His Heavenly Father, whose Son He became through the Birth from Above from Baptism by Spirit at a conscious age, about which He Himself speaks to Nicodemus in a memorable conversation given in ev. John (Jn 3.3—5)
“3 Jesus answered and said to him: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.
4. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?
5 Jesus answered: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Jesus, I suppose, has rejected the Hebrew pagan beliefs in the fairy Yahveh and turned him aside, as the fantasy of superstition, just denouncing them as a belief in “the Devil” (also quite fantastic character[34] (https://ridero.ru/link/Yhe1lYmUvVUIy4hHiyzVE)), worship of the “prince of this world.” He did not feel any respect for the Jewish “law and prophets”, did not fulfill the prescriptions of the Torah and the Tanakh, and, according to the Gospel testimonies (cleansing them from strained excuses of Him as a good Jew, distinguished by a special zeal for observing not the letter, but the “spirit” of the law) deliberately violated the Jewish law in front of crowds of people, from whose fanatical reprisals against Him He was saved by the MIRACLE of God, which always spoke in His favor and righteousness.
11. I presume, contrary to Church Teachings, that while Jesus did resurrect, but not in the material body as the Jewish version says should precede the general resurrection of the dead in the bodies in the new world. Body is not needed to God. While His appearance in front of disciples if it ever happened, was understood by them, as a return to life of his dead and buried (or somehow vanished) flesh. Those who were resurrected earlier by Jesus, if such actually existed, later died again, since the life of the body does not exist outside this world, and it is mortal by its nature. By the way, Thomas Didyme, who is called “Thomas the Unbeliever” in the church tradition, in his gospel somehow does not mention either the Resurrection or the appearance of the Risen Jesus personally to him. Which, we must admit, is strange, if, of course, we accept the version that this gospel was written by Thomas himself, as his personal memories of Jesus. And it is not, as we suggested above, just a sequential record of the testimonies of many different eyewitnesses collected by an unknown individual, not related to each other. The assumption that Thomas, according to the testimony of John, who put his hand into the “nail plagues” on the body of the Risen One, while writing his own gospel, could forget to mention this fact, seems absolutely incredible.
It seems quite possible that the legend of the bodily resurrection arose and took root in the Judeo-Christian environment, and was even mentioned by Paul as a tribute to the same notorious Judaization with its prophecies about the general resurrection of the dead – “on the last day”. To the contrary, the resurrection of Jesus as God in the kingdom of Heaven opened to mankind Him as the Way in which everyone who accepts the good news about the beginning of eternal life here and now, will resurrect together with Jesus as his brother in the kingdom of the Heavenly Father – “transfer from death to life” (John 5,24).
12. In the Gospel of Marcion (13.16) and the synoptics who followed him, Jesus Himself asserts that the Jewish Covenant, “the Law and the Prophets” – is before John the Baptist (Luke 16.16). While after him comes the Son of God, who brings the message of the Kingdom of Heaven, which should not be expected in the mythical coming resurrection of the dead, it is available to any person directly in earthly life, although it requires special efforts (“taken by force”). This is the new faith, understood in the most general sense of the Teachings of Jesus as the Good News of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, about it entering a person’s life here and now, and the person entering into eternal life with God immediately, without delay to an uncertain future of the Jewish prophecies. So all references to this uncertain future must be removed from the Good News of Jesus.
13. It should also be taken into account that the authors of the Gospels of John and Marcion (let me reiterate that the names of Gospels do not indicate the real authorship, who the real authors are – only God knows), not to mention the synoptics, when writing, added from themselves not only the Jewish component, but also the Hellenic one. A typical example of this kind is the whole legend of the immaculate “seedless conception” of the Ever-Virgin: in the Hellenic tradition, this is a typical way of glorifying and elevating outstanding people.[35]. (https://ridero.ru/link/HDlB5JO5Eqi-j6w6oCx0O) For example, even Plato the philosopher was also supposedly conceived immaculately. At the same time, for the Jews, conception without a seed is folly and blasphemy. So the creator of “Luke” pandered to the tastes of both types of its customers: both Judaism and Hellenism. And even further: tended to newly-born hierarchy that appeared all of a sudden from nowhere in the Brotherhood of Jesus at the turn of the century, proclaiming itself and only itself the bearers and distributors of the Holy Spirit blessing, the heirs to the apostles of Jesus Himself, who supposedly put his hands on the disciples in order to especially sanctify them and put them as bosses of “the herd”… tended to them in support of their divine sacred origin “from apostles” through the succession of “laying on of hands.” This cunningly woven lie is very easily refuted from the fairy-tale like Acts written for the same purpose: Paul himself, who introduced this fashion of making bishops through the laying on of hands, was never placed in this way by anyone, either an apostle or a bishop, but only accepted the usual Baptism through Ananya the disciple, that is, just an ordinary follower of Jesus (Acts 9: 10—19). All this and the like, the deliberately fairy-tale content of the gospels and New Testament as a whole is subject to unconditional removal and unquestioning eradication from the compilation of the conditionally authentic Teachings of Jesus.
Therefore, summing up all of the above in the 13 points, on the basis of the system of selection that we determined and its criteria, we have to establish and highlight some of the pivotal events of ev. John and Marcion, the conditionally reliable ones, on the basis of which it is possible to build a story, while understanding all the conventionality of all the other “events” used by the authors of the Gospels to give greater event credibility to the words of Jesus, placed in certain circumstances for the sake of explaining what He wanted to say Himself, or what the authors of the gospels wanted to say through His mouth. And, finally, to place in the context of the selected events the words of Jesus from the sources listed above: the gospels of Thomas, John, Marcion, Luke, Matthew and Mark, selected on the basis of the same criteria, which we accept as conditionally reliable.
This is an approximate concept of a possible selection of Gospel verses into a single text of the future “Gospel of Jesus”.
Gospel of John, Analysis
John, chapter 1. Prologue John 1,1—18
For many years, serving on Easter and reading the “Prologue” of the Gospel of John during the Easter Mass (the first 18 verses of the first chapter), I felt a sense of reverence and admiration for the greatest wisdom of mankind, enclosed in 18 lines (John 1.18) … And, having never understood anything from it, not a word at all, I hoped that someday I would grow to accommodate and comprehend this wisdom.
Be afraid of your desires, they can come true.
As part of our investigation into the origin of the Gospel texts, let us proceed to chapter 1 of ev. John.
It is important to understand that – and this is acknowledged by all biblical scholars – the Prologue is not part of Gospel from John, but only precedes him – the gospel itself begins with the 19th verse.
That is, verses 1 to 18 are not what Jesus said and taught, are not his teachings and the Good News or a story about him and his gospel – but represent a certain philosophical doctrine of God, worked out among the disciples and followers, presumably, John the Evangelist circle. It is their collective idea of the God whom Jesus preached, and of Himself as the Son of this God.
And what are these ideas? Unfortunately, here we meet as many as three levels or heaps of Jewish, Gnostic and finally Hellenic wisdom.
Let’s analyze.
Chapter 1, verses 1—2: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 It was in the beginning with God.”
