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]. 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
