The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!)

In the teachings attributed to Jesus, it is abundantly clear that he was an apocalyptic teacher who believed that the world would end within the lifetime of the people to whom he was speaking.

The foundation of these teachings was that human beings could be saved by both believing his word and by modeling their lives on the higher moral law of God.

That higher moral law was the foundation of Jewish law. To this end, he believed that pharisaical teaching was an appropriate guide to following this higher moral law.

His criticism of the Pharisees was that they did not live by what they taught.

In line with this higher moral law, Jesus of Nazareth preached an ethics of selfless concern for the welfare of others, rejection of material wealth, and non-retribution, all of which were standard in Jewish ethics.

In his statements, Jesus of Nazareth explicitly rejects government and politics as a legitimate sphere of human action.

The religion that he taught was an intensely individual religion.

Righteousness, which means the performance of right actions, was not a quality of actions but rather a quality of the interior state of the individual. This was not really a break with the Jewish tradition, but it was the core of the way Jesus defined the human relationship with the divine.

There is abundant evidence in the Gospels that Jesus considered his teachings to be for Jews only. This is a curious tradition to maintain in the face of the massive spread of Christianity into the Gentile world, but nowhere does Jesus of Nazareth construct his teachings or the religion he is espousing as anything other than for Jews. In one place explicitly says that his mission is only to the Jews.

Included in the gospels are a number of miraculous events, many of which correspond with shamanic practices of curing the sick and casting out demons.

In the gospels, Jesus is perfectly comfortable with many of the superstitions of the popular Judaism of the time, such as belief in demons. His followers, however, are less comfortable with these stories and present these miracles as arguments for the divinity and special mission of Jesus rather than in the shamanic tradition from which they are derived.

Ultimately, the Jesus who emerges from the gospels is concerned with preparing the Jews for the last event in history, and who actively preaches that human beings can individually enter into a correct relationship with God. They can do this through faith and trust in God and through an active, ethical concern with both the material well-being and the suffering of others.

The Christian religion was at first, obviously, a Jewish religion. It was a movement amongst the population in the immediate area of the land Jesus lived in. Its message aimed directly at a Jewish audience by Jews.

However, with the advent of the Prophet Paul the message changed and was geared towards a Gentile population that was also eager for the “Word.”

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!