Now, Christians TODAY will automatically assume that this is speaking prophetically but stop and think about it. Would the author of that book have been concerned with events occurring 2000+ years into the future? And if he had … would he NOT have couched his expression IN a prophetic setting, just like the author of Revelation did?

The fact is … those people at THAT TIME were of the firm conviction that they were living in ‘the last days’. And those last days didn’t meant the end of our planet earth but rather, the end of their particular political/religious system.

So … the church, or churches of that time had a problem on their hands. Disillusioned believers were starting to leave their faith in significant numbers. Something HAD to be done if Christianity were to be saved from disintegration.

They came up with a bright idea. How about if they found a suitable candidate in the former wannabe messiahs … dusted him off and dressed him up a bit … and made HIM into the promised Messiah who had simply been dismissed because of a misunderstanding of God’s word and will? Yes, all former potential messiahs had been killed -including this one- but … there was a very good but MYSTERIOUS reason for his death! He was killed as the sacrificial lamb of God to take on the sins of the world! And this is where the script departed entirely from the Jewish version of “Messiah”!~

To get a good look at this human Jesus Christ implant … check out Gerald Massey’s excellent essay on THE HISTORICAL JESUS (and mythical Christ).
https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/HistoricalJesusMythicalChrist_GMassey.pdf

One might argue that Massey’s messiah doesn’t fit the bill because the DATING is completely out of whack … but therein also lies the “key” to the 3 synoptic gospels’ accounts of this man.

The three gospels -Mark, Matthew and Luke- tell the story of one man and often in identical wording so that the reader can’t help but get the impression that 3 writers COPIED their words from a single source … but then, the three gospel writers also diverge so significantly that their stories actually contradict each other!

For example, Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth. (The other two gospels don’t). These two writers know EXACTLY what angels and parents and a King and a rabbi thought and said … but the stories are quite different from each other AND … the BIRTH of this baby is different by about 12 years! The two guys don’t seem to know WHEN Jesus was born!
Matthew has Jesus being born BEFORE Herod the Great’s death and Luke on the other hand, has him being born AFTER Herod’s death and right after Herod’s son being expelled from office 6 years into his mandate … by Rome.

But a little LOGIC applied here will show us that BOTH authors wanted to establish the BEGINNING of a new era. Matthew thought it good enough to have Jesus be born at the end of the last great king of Israel -around 6 BC- … while Luke thought it would be more appropriate to have him be born after the last king of Judea had been swept out of office and replaced with a foreigner … Pilate of Rome … around 6 AD.

The point here is that the Gospels’ Jesus is real in many respects but then completely lacks credibility in many other respects. He is an amalgam … of actual history and convenient fiction. This is what makes him such an enigma! Did he or did he NOT exist? Yes and no!~~

So now let’s go on to the 4th gospel … the gospel of John (and the other writings of the Johanine group or sect … whatever it was).

THIS gospel and group no longer attempted to establish the existence of a human living Jesus Christ but instead, began to promulgate a brand new theology based upon this assumed person. It’s almost like … if you get enough cobweb as a base … you can actually build something of substance on the dubious foundation!~

Well, ok but … in order to BECOME a member of this new theology, it was necessary for followers to BELIEVE and profess to believe that … Jesus Christ HAD come (or arrived) ‘in the flesh.’ In the flesh meant that the Messiah no longer existed purely in the ethers or in ethereal form as an anticipated savior; he was now a real flesh and blood human being who had actually been born, lived and had died and then gone back to heaven again.

This was a bit much for a lot of the former WAY believers to swallow and so we see a schism developing in the “little Johns”. I quote …

1 John 2:18 Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.
1 John 4:3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.
2 John 1:7 For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

I often wonder why Christian leaders make such a huge issue out of the word “antichrist”? (Chuck Baldwin included. Indeed, his dissertation on “antichrist” is what inspired me to write a response here).

These 4 verses are the ONLY reference we see to “antichrist” in the entire Ntestament. As far as ((I)) can make out … “antichrist” simply means what the above verses say about it! It was a denial that Jesus Christ HAD actually come in the flesh!

Interestingly enough, as a devout Christian years ago, I got involved with casting out of spirits a couple of times and I USED 1 John 4:1 as a basis to “try the spirits”. I would ask, “Is Jesus Christ come in the flesh?” Not surprisingly to me at the time, these spirits would scream, “NO!!” But honestly, I had NO IDEA what I was really asking!!

Today, I fully understand that this was simply a question to differentiate between the OLD believers of an anticipated messiah … and NEW believers who assumed that this Messiah HAD arrived (and then left again, to “sit on the right hand” of his father in heaven on a throne of some kind).

Thus, many of my former Christian experiences which I still believe to have been very real … where NOT exactly what I perceived them to be in my own faith but rather … a kind of translation from my BELIEF into the “reality” of what actually transpires behind the spiritual scene. In other words, just because we experience something doesn’t make it true in the framework of just OUR OWN belief system. The same experiences occur for people of other beliefs quite different from our own.

Yes, I wonder a lot about the perception of this antichrist being some huge beast or snake or whatever!~ I don’t doubt that such a beast probably exists behind the scenes but is that REALLY “the antichrist”?

And finally … I’ve gotta bring E. Michael Jones into this as well!~ Ha, can’t resist. He’s always talking about “the logos” … but never clarifies what he means by that. Does he actually KNOW what he’s talking about … I wonder? Does he -at least- have a clear concept of what he understands the logos to be?

Here again, we get this concept of the logos from the Johanine community -in THE GOSPEL of John- as they attempt to brush-stroke the new Jesus Christ into existence.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:2 The same was in the beginning with God.

The word “WORD” here is translated from the greek word “logos” and that word in turn is derived from the word “logic”.

I’m sure that Jones will have a far more elaborate concept of the logos idea … and possibly quite an honorable and even correct one too … but to me, the word logos simply implies something that makes absolute sense because it’s been squeezed down by the application of logic.

In other words, God’s creation or the gods’ creation exists on a foundation of logic. Without logic, it CAN’T exist.

Therefore, whenever we want to evaluate the merit of something or the truth of something we can DO IT by the application of pure logic. If something doesn’t make logical sense … then it’s not true … period. We don’t need Phd. degrees or trusted sources or authority or experts to TELL us what is fact and what is not … we can do it ourselves with the careful and patient application of logic.

And so if/when we look at the beginning of the Gospel of John and try to analyze what EXACTLY they meant by this Jesus being the fulfillment of logic … it requires quite a “leap” to get there! Can we actually jump that far?

Well, my own take on it is that the IDEA of a savior being there to forgive us of our sins and taking all of our sins on himself etc. … teaches us the concept of laying down our own eccentric desires … in order to serve the interests of the world around us and thereby teaches us the value of our human connectedness with each other. In other words, it teaches the value of an “agape” love. And THAT makes logical sense. It makes more sense than teaching that we’re all the product of evolution … that we’re all just animals and that it’s simply a case of raw competition and the fittest will survive.

I think our own human experience teaches us that when we have love … we are fulfilled. When we have only competition and greed, we can “gain the whole world” in monetary values … but we’ll never be fulfilled. It’s far more valuable to have a soul and to be creative and loving than it is to simply horde stuff to ourselves.

And this “sense” is a logos or logic of life. It’s kind of hard to get such a logos from atheism and evolution I think.

At the same time, I wish that Christianity wouldn’t insist on teaching that everything written in the Bible is actually “God’s word” … because it certainly isn’t! It was all written by humans! The only thing that God ever wrote was on some stone tablets … which stupid Moses threw on the ground and broke.

The logos is (possibly) the application of metaphor in order to more deeply understand the meaning of life. Christianity isn’t fact; it’s mostly fiction. Yet, it seems to serve a good purpose a lot of the time. If we could somehow teach it AS a metaphor instead of fact that we MUST believe or go to hell … I think it could do quite a bit of good.

Christians make mistakes and theologians, because of their bigger role in guiding Christianity … make even bigger mistakes!~

I’ve wrestled with “the problem” for nearly 20 years now, trying to decide whether Christianity is a good thing … has a potential to make the world a better place … or whether it’s just another form of bondage and method for blindering people.

Even the expression “theologian” is misrepresented because the word “Theos” (from which that word derives and which our English Bibles have translated as “God”) … does not mean a single entity or even a triune single entity but rather it means a FAMILY of divine entities which we would describe as “gods” in English. Is there a difference between God and gods? Think about that, carefully!

The Old Testament, interestingly enough, says exactly the same thing about “God”. That word -coming from the Hebrew word “Elohim”- means exactly the same thing as “Theos” means in the Ntestament Greek language -a family of gods- and there’s a good reason for that too because for a few hundred years, the Jewish population relied entirely on a Greek translation of their scriptures, known as the Septuagint … because their own Hebrew scriptures had disappeared.

The word “God” in both the old and new testaments always refers to Elohim (Hebrew) and Theos (Greek) and they mean exactly the same thing: the gods. The only time when a single entity is referred to, it’s “Lord God” or just “Lord” in the old testament and in the new testament, the single entity is “the Father.”

The “Lord God” was Jahveh or Jehovah and he was the JEW’S choice of THEIR god whom THEY served.

The Ntestament “Father” on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have the slightest resemblance to Jahveh whatsoever. In my opinion, the old and new testaments’ chief god are completely different.

Does a preacher today, whom we’d describe as a “theologian” preach about the gods … or about a perceived single triune GOD? You decide!

There’s another misperception which is common and -one might even say- MANDATORY for today’s Christian belief and that is the trinity involving the EXISTENCE of a human fellow who is spoken of in the Ntestament as “Jesus Christ” and who is said to be the very essence of God the Father rendered in a human form … who died on the cross for our sins etc. etc.

This was NOT always so in the annals of early Christian belief. Perhaps we should call their belief a MESSIANIC belief instead of “Christian” because the earliest believers of this philosophy described themselves as “followers of the way” with the label of “Christian” being laid on them by outsiders, rather than them choosing it themselves. (Maybe a bit like “conspiracy theorists” are labeled today?)

Followers of “the Way” didn’t believe in an existing human who was god incarnate but rather, they believed in the COMING or manifestation of such a person arriving on the scene at some time (soon) who would be taking control of “the world” in their time … as they perceived their world to be. When this person would arrive -they believed- it would be the end of their world (system) and a divine system would be ushered in by this human messiah fellow. The perceived messiah would be someone like their beloved King David … who had brought about the original Kingdom of Israel. So their Messiah was an ANTICIPATED human being but one who had not yet arrived. There were lots of wannabe messiahs but they always ended being eliminated by getting killed … and the true Messiah would be someone who COULDN’T be killed.

The Ntestament can roughly be divided into two “eras” … with the 4 Gospels and the beginning of the book of Acts describing the human arrival of this Messiah … and the rest of the Ntestament speaking entirely of the ANTICIPATED arrival of a human Messiah. It’s a bit “backwards” in its genesis, LOL. After the Gospels are finished … the REST of the Ntestament never once mentions the RETURN of human Jesus Christ but always, only … the COMING, APPEARING and REVEALING of the anticipated human who would be the incarnate Messiah or “Jesus Christ.” Even the revered Apostle Paul was preaching ONLY the ‘ethereal’ Jesus Christ who existed exclusively in visions, dreams and gnosticism. (But of course, how does one distinguish between reality and fantasy in gnosticism? What’s really real and what isn’t? This is the big question of faith, isn’t it?)

This continual anticipation but disappointment at the deferred coming of the Messiah eventually took its toll on the followers of the Way. We see this expressed in the book of 2 Peter, ch. 3 vs. 3 and 4

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

Now, Christians TODAY will automatically assume that this is speaking prophetically but stop and think about it. Would the author of that book have been concerned with events occurring 2000+ years into the future? And if he had … would he NOT have couched his expression IN a prophetic setting, just like the author of Revelation did?

The fact is … those people at THAT TIME were of the firm conviction that they were living in ‘the last days’. And those last days didn’t meant the end of our planet earth but rather, the end of their particular political/religious system.

So … the church, or churches of that time had a problem on their hands. Disillusioned believers were starting to leave their faith in significant numbers. Something HAD to be done if Christianity were to be saved from disintigration.

They came up with a bright idea. How about if they found a suitable candidate in the former wannabe messiahs … dusted him off and dressed him up a bit … and made HIM into the promised Messiah who had simply been dismissed because of a misunderstanding of God’s word and will? Yes, all former potential messiahs had been killed -including this one- but … there was a very good but MYSTERIOUS reason for his death! He was killed as the sacrificial lamb of God to take on the sins of the world! And this is where the script departed entirely from the Jewish version of “Messiah”!~

To get a good look at this human Jesus Christ implant … check out Gerald Massey’s excellent essay on THE HISTORICAL JESUS (and mythical Christ).
https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/HistoricalJesusMythicalChrist_GMassey.pdf

One might argue that Massey’s messiah doesn’t fit the bill because the DATING is completely out of whack … but therein also lies the “key” to the 3 synoptic gospels’ accounts of this man.

The three gospels -Mark, Matthew and Luke- tell the story of one man and often in identical wording so that the reader can’t help but get the impression that 3 writers COPIED their words from a single source … but then, the three gospel writers also diverge so significantly that their stories actually contradict each other!

For example, Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth. (The other two gospels don’t). These two writers know EXACTLY what angels and parents and a King and a rabbi thought and said … but the stories are quite different from each other AND … the BIRTH of this baby is different by about 12 years! The two guys don’t seem to know WHEN Jesus was born!
Matthew has Jesus being born BEFORE Herod the Great’s death and Luke on the other hand, has him being born AFTER Herod’s death and right after Herod’s son being expelled from office 6 years into his mandate … by Rome.

But a little LOGIC applied here will show us that BOTH authors wanted to establish the BEGINNING of a new era. Matthew thought it good enough to have Jesus be born at the end of the last great king of Israel -around 6 BC- … while Luke thought it would be more appropriate to have him be born after the last king of Judaea had been swept out of office and replaced with a foreigner … Pilate of Rome … around 6 AD.

The point here is that the Gospels’ Jesus is real in many respects but then completely lacks credibility in many other respects. He is an amalgam … of actual history and convenient fiction. This is what makes him such an enigma! Did he or did he NOT exist? Yes and no!~~

So now let’s go on to the 4th gospel … the gospel of John (and the other writings of the Johanine group or sect … whatever it was).

THIS gospel and group no longer attempted to establish the existence of a human living Jesus Christ but instead, began to promulgate a brand new theology based upon this assumed person. It’s almost like … if you get enough cobweb as a base … you can actually build something of substance on the dubious foundation!~

Well, ok but … in order to BECOME a member of this new theology, it was necessary for followers to BELIEVE and profess to believe that … Jesus Christ HAD come (or arrived) ‘in the flesh.’ In the flesh meant that the Messiah no longer existed purely in the ethers or in ethereal form as an anticipated saviour; he was now a real flesh and blood human being who had actually been born, lived and had died and then gone back to heaven again.

This was a bit much for a lot of the former WAY believers to swallow and so we see a schism developing in the “little Johns”. I quote …

1 John 2:18 Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.
1 John 4:3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.
2 John 1:7 For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

I often wonder why Christian leaders make such a huge issue out of the word “antichrist”? Chuck Baldwin included. (Indeed, his dissertation on “antichrist” is what inspired me to write a response here).

These 4 verses are the ONLY reference we see to “antichrist” in the entire Ntestament. As far as ((I)) can make out … “antichrist” simply means what the above verses say about it! It was a denial that Jesus Christ HAD actually come in the flesh!

Interestingly enough, as a devout Christian years ago, I got involved with casting out of spirits a couple of times and I USED 1 John 4:1 as a basis to “try the spirits”. I would ask, “Is Jesus Christ come in the flesh?” Not surprisingly to me at the time, these spirits would scream, “NO!!” But honestly, I had NO IDEA what I was really asking!!

Today, I fully understand that this was simply a question to differentiate between the OLD believers of an anticipated messiah … and NEW believers who assumed that this Messiah HAD arrived (and then left again, to “sit on the right hand” of his father in heaven on a throne of some kind).

Thus, many of my former Christian experiences which I still believe to have been very real … where NOT exactly what I perceived them to be in my own faith but rather … a kind of translation from my BELIEF into the “reality” of what actually transpires behind the spiritual scene. In other words, just because we experience something doesn’t make it true in the framework of just OUR OWN belief system. The same experiences occur for people of other beliefs quite different from our own.

Yes, I wonder a lot about the perception of this antichrist being some huge beast or snake or whatever!~ I don’t doubt that such a beast probably exists behind the scenes but is that REALLY “the antichrist”?

And finally … I’ve gotta bring E. Michael Jones into this as well!~ Ha, can’t resist. He’s always talking about “the logos” … but never clarifies what he means by that. Does he actually KNOW what he’s talking about … I wonder? Does he -at least- have a clear concept of what he understands the logos to be?

Here again, we get this concept of the logos from the Johanine community -in THE GOSPEL of John- as they attempt to brush-stroke the new Jesus Christ into existence.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:2 The same was in the beginning with God.

The word “WORD” here is translated from the greek word “logos” and that word in turn is derived from the word “logic”.

I’m sure that Jones will have a far more elaborate concept of the logos idea … and possibly quite an honorable and even correct one too … but to me, the word logos simply implies something that makes absolute sense because it’s been squeezed down by the application of logic.

In other words, God’s creation or the gods’ creation exists on a foundation of logic. Without logic, it CAN’T exist.

Therefore, whenever we want to evaluate the merit of something or the truth of something we can DO IT by the application of pure logic. If something doesn’t make logical sense … then it’s not true … period. We don’t need Phd. degrees or trusted sources or authority or experts to TELL us what is fact and what is not … we can do it ourselves with the careful and patient application of logic.

And so if/when we look at the beginning of the Gospel of John and try to analyze what EXACTLY they meant by this Jesus being the fulfillment of logic … it requires quite a “leap” to get there! Can we actually jump that far?

Well, my own take on it is that the IDEA of a saviour being there to forgive us of our sins and taking all of our sins on himself etc. … teaches us the concept of laying down our own eccentric desires … in order to serve the interests of the world around us and thereby teaches us the value of our human connectedness with each other. In other words, it teaches the value of an “agape” love. And THAT makes logical sense. It makes more sense than teaching that we’re all the product of evolution … that we’re all just animals and that it’s simply a case of raw competition and the fittest will survive.

I think our own human experience teaches us that when we have love … we are fulfilled. When we have only competition and greed, we can “gain the whole world” in monetary values … but we’ll never be fulfilled. It’s far more valuable to have a soul and to be creative and loving than it is to simply horde stuff to ourselves.

And this “sense” is a logos or logic of life. It’s kind of hard to get such a logos from atheism and evolution I think.

At the same time, I wish that Christianity wouldn’t insist on teaching that everything written in the Bible is actually “God’s word” … because it certainly isn’t! It was all written by humans! The only thing that God ever wrote was on some stone tablets … which stupid Moses threw on the ground and broke.

The logos is (possibly) the application of metaphor in order to more deeply understand the meaning of life. Christianity isn’t fact; it’s mostly fiction. Yet, it seems to serve a good purpose a lot of the time. If we could somehow teach it AS a metaphor instead of fact that we MUST believe or go to hell … I think it could do quite a bit of good.