Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

[Azad]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

we Armenians can relish in the fact that even before Christianity, we were somewhat close to 'Christian' principles and had some sort of faith.

That is where we should be headed. Armenian Christianity has to be gradually revised to be customized to our survival. Just like our Alphabet prolonged our identity, religion will have the same effect.

[Armenian]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

So, I don't understand why do Christians have to embrace it as part of the Holy book? Why so much insistance on this book in our Church? How has it become part of Christian faith? I see no relevance between the two.

Lucin jan, as I explained above, it's essentially because of the Church Council of Nicaea held in 325 AD. At the time the Emperor Constantine attempted to unify his pagan, Christian and J-e-wish populations under one religion. Let's not forget, at the time in question religion was a serious/powerful institution, much like what democracy, socialism or communism is today. Thus, controlling a given population's religion meant controlling the population. As a result of the geopolitical climate within the eastern Roman Empire at the time we got the brand of belief systems we today know as Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and all their off-shoots. Many do not even know that during the early years of the Christian Church there was a major movement called the Marcionites that rejected J-ewish sacred books completely, considering them to be the work of a demon. Nonetheless, as I said due to geopolitical factors, a particular formula was passed down to us.

Yes, when you read a bit Avesta, one can clearly see some similarities between Christ and Zoroaster and also their parallel teachings. So, we Armenians can relish in the fact that even before Christianity, we were somewhat close to 'Christian' principles and had some sort of faith.

New and Old Testaments have been a part of our heritage for close to two thousand years now. Although I personally reject the Old Testament and embrace other sacred texts as sacred such as the Avesta, I can't blame the average Armenian, the average Christian today, for not understanding. The masses will not understand complex theosophies, they only need to be told children's stories. That is part of the reason why I believe the Gospel of Thomas was rejected, for it did not tell simple easy to understand stories about ethics. For the masses, religion must be black and white, gray areas will lose the faithful. Nevertheless, the current from of Christianity that we have today has been a part our national identity for nearly two thousand years. As a result, you simply can't tamper with it or change it without running the risk of destroying or altering our current Armenian identity and heritage.

Having said that, objective and open-minded people who study Christian and Zoroastrian theology and ethics soon realize that Christ had fundamentally more in common with Zoroaster and Buddha than with a mythical being called Moses. And our Christian Triune God has more in common with our ancestral God "Aramazd" than with the tribal god named Yahweh. Moreover, we Armenians are the aboriginal natives of the Garden of Eden, where God first created mankind and civilization. Our homeland is also where God repopulated the world after the great flood. Thus, taking the above into consideration, our nation had been ready for the coming of our God/Christ for thousands of years before his birth. Perhaps we, the natives of the Armenian Highlands, are the true chosen people. Our sacred land was first chosen by our almighty creator God as the epicenter of mankind and human civilization. The theologies and ethics associated with Christianity was not a foreign theological and/or philosophical concept for us Armenian at the time. Christianity was the natural evolution of our ancient faith system filtered through Palestine.

On the other hand, the very being of Christ, everything about him, was such a foreign concept for traditionalist J-ews to digest that he was immediately rejected and murdered. Despite of all the attempts by the apostles to connect Christ to the J-ewish tradition, the J-ewish nation did not recognize Christ as their promised Messiah. Christ's teachings and the theological nature associated with him were foreign to the J-ews. Yet, even before Christ's resurrection, his divine message was accepted by us Armenians, as attested by the King Abgar legend. Thus, it is no wonder that when God visited mankind within Palestine two thousand years ago, the first people to pay their respects were the Zoroastrian Magi from the east - as Herod "the King of the J-ews" was busy trying to murder all the newly born male infants at the time. It is no wonder that we Armenian were the first nation on earth to embrace Christianity as a state religion.

All the elements I have outlines are clearly there for all to see. However, two thousand years of indoctrination has blinded people. As far as I'm concerned, Mariam (Mari) the Mother of God is none other than our ancient Mother of God, Anahid. Our Savior Christ is none other than our ancient Savior, Mithra. And our Triune God is none other than our ancient all powerful creator deity, Aramazd. The facade of our faith has changed dramatically, the core however, remains the same.

[Azad]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

Perhaps we, the natives of the Armenian Highlands, are the true chosen people.

You are correct and it is not a "perhaps". Christianity is a universal love of God and oneself. For the Christian Armenians we are the "chosen people" so are the Serbs the "chosen people" in the eyes of the Serbian people .... the only way to isolated the fake racist glorification of desert rats. It is time to take back Christian history from the ones that shifted it South and place it back where it belongs.

[Armenian]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

Unfortunately, there are many atheist scholars and historians today that attempt to undermine Christianity and disprove God's existence through their work. Such is the case with the following authors. Their primely intention is to reveal that Christ did not exists as an actual being but was merely an ideology, an abstract belief. I want to introduce you to their work because regardless of their unholy intentions, namely to disprove the existence of Christ, their research is valuable nonetheless and its elements should be assessed.

Armenian

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The Jesus Mysteries Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God?

ByTimothy Freke and Peter Gandy

The traditional history of Christianity is hopelessly inadequate to the facts. From our research into ancient spirituality it has become obvious that we must fundamentally revise our understanding of Christian origins in the most shocking of ways. Our conclusion, supported by a considerable body of evidence in our book, The Jesus Mysteries, is that Christianity was not a new revelation. It was a continuation of Paganism by another name. The gospel story of Jesus is not the biography of an historical Messiah. It is a xxxish reworking of ancient Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman Osiris-Dionysus, which had been popular for centuries throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

The stories told about Osiris-Dionysus will no doubt sound familiar. He is the Son of God who is born to a virgin on the 25th of December before three shepherds. He is a prophet who offers his followers the chance to be born again through the rites of baptism. He is a wonderworker who raises the dead and miraculously turns water into wine at a marriage ceremony. He is God incarnate who dies at Easter, sometimes through crucifixion, but who resurrects on the third day. He is a savior who offers his followers redemption through partaking in a meal of bread and wine, symbolic of his body and blood. The Jesus story is a synthesis of the xxxish myth of the Messiah Joshua (in Greek Jesus) with these Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman.

It is hard for us today to imagine the Jesus story being consciously created, but this is because we have misunderstood ancient spirituality. Myths were not seen as untruths as they are now. They were understood as allegories of spiritual initiation, which encoded profound mystical teachings. Reworking old myths to create new ones was a standard practice in the ancient world.

The conquests of Alexander the Great had turned the Mediterranean world into one culture with a common language. This created an age of eclecticism, much like our own, in which different spiritual traditions met and synthesized. xxxish mystics of this period, such as Philo Judeas, were obsessed with synthesizing xxxish and Pagan mythology. In light of all this, it is actually no surprise that some group of xxxish mystics should synthesize the great mythic hero of the xxxs, Joshua the Messiah, with the great mythic hero of the Pagans, Osiris-Dionysus. At the time, both Pagans and Christians were well aware that the Jesus story was a myth. The early Christians, known as Gnostics, understood the Jesus story as allegory, not history, and even called Jesus by the names of the Pagan Godman. The Gnostics were brutally eradicated by the Roman Church in the 4th and 5th centuries, and since then we have believed the official propaganda that these Christians were dangerous heretics who had gone Pagan.

Actually the evidence suggests the opposite is closer to the truth. The Gnostics were the original Christians, just as they themselves claimed. They had synthesized xxxish and Pagan mythology to produce the Jesus story and many other extraordinary Christian myths largely unknown today. The Roman Church was a later deviation, which misunderstood the Jesus story as history. It was, as the Gnostics said at the time, an imitation Church teaching a superficial Christianity designed for the masses. Roman Christianity, and all its subsequent offshoots, is based on the idea that if you believe in the existence of an historical Jesus you will go to heaven when you die. For the Gnostics, however, Jesus is an everyman figure in an initiation allegory. They taught that if you yourself go through the process of initiation symbolized by the Jesus myth, you would die to your old self and resurrect in a new way. The Greek word we translate as resurrect also means awaken.

For the Gnostics, Christianity was about dying -- the idea of giving up your mortal body and awakening to your immortal essence as the Christ within x- the One Consciousness of the Universe. This mystical enlightenment was not something that happened after death, but could happen here and now. The historical figure of Jesus has been so central to Western culture that it is hard to question his existence. As soon as we hear his name we can see him in our mind's eye, in his flowing white robes, with long hair and a beard. Yet this picture of Jesus was not created until the 8th century. Early portrayals of Jesus show him clean-shaven with short hair and wearing a Roman tunic. St Paul says that long hair disgraces a man, so presumably his image of Jesus was not the same as ours.

The fact is that everything we think we know about Jesus, like this romantic picture of the bearded savior, is a creation of the human imagination. Actually there is barely a shred of evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus and this dissolves on closer inspection. Paul, the earliest Christian source, shows no knowledge of an historical man, only a mystical Christ. The gospels have been thoroughly discredited as eyewitness reports. Other bits of traditional evidence, such as references to Jesus by the xxxish historian Josephus, have been shown to be later forgeries. If solid evidence had existed, there would have been no need to have created such fabrications.

A little over a century ago most people believed the story of Adam and Eve to be history. To most thinking people today its is obviously a myth. We predict that within a generation a similar revolution will have taken place in our understanding of the gospels. People will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and be amazed that a culture with the technology to travel to the moon could see the fabulous story of Jesus as anything other than a myth. However, we do not want to dismiss the Jesus story as nonsense. For us it is truly the greatest story ever told, because it has been thousands of years in the making. It is a perennial tale that has fascinated the human soul since the dawn of time.

Whilst our ideas clearly rewrite history, we do not see ourselves as undermining Christianity. On the contrary we are suggesting that Christianity is in fact richer than we previously imagined. According to the original Gnostic Christians, the Jesus story is a perennial myth with the power to impart the mystical experience of Gnosis, which can transform each one of us into a Christ, not merely a history of events that happened to someone else two thousand years ago.

Source: http://www.bibleinterp.com/commentary/gandy_011701.htm

[Armenian]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

Rejection of the Old Testament by Christians is nothing new, it actually existed from the very beginning of Christianity. As I have outlined above, the particular brand of Christinaity that we have today comes to us as a result of geopolitical factors prevalent within Byzantium during the fourth century AD. During the early years of Christianity there many many schools of thought regarding Christ and his teachings. However, after the Council of Nicaea approved the particular line of Christianity familiar to us all the other groups were branded heretical and were slowly persecuted out of existence. Nevertheless, as one can only destroy the body and not the soul, the beliefs and concepts of the destroyed heretical churches survive to this day.

Armenian

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The Marcionites 2nd Century Christians

Bart Ehrman in "Lost Christianities" provides a detailed description of the history of many early Christian groups.

Marcionites were the followers of Marcion. If these types of Christians had become the dominant type, they would have canonized a different set of New Testament texts to those that the Pauline Christians did. As the Pauline Christians proved themselves the more aggressive, violent and powerful, the Marcionites were eradicated by them. Mainstream Pauline Christianity has a problem with The Bible. The Old Testament is completely different to the New Testament. The God of the Old Testament is murderous, demanding, jealous, vocal, interfering and debates with it's people. The God of the New Testament, however, appears largely removed, is highly spiritual, peaceful and reasoned. Hundreds of Christian books have debated what the causes are of this difference.

Christian Marcionites resolved the difference thusly: They believed in 2 Gods. The God of the Old Testament was actually a different God to the (better) God of the New Testament. "As we have seen, Paul claimed that a person is made right with God by faith in Christ, not by doing the works of the Law. This distinction became fundamental to Marcion, and he made it absolute. The gospel is the good news of deliverance; it involves love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption and life. The Law, however, is the bad news that makes the gospel necessary in the first place; it involves harsh commandments, guilt, judgement, enmity, punishment, and death. [...]

How could the same God be responsible for both? Or put in other terms: How could the wrathful, vengeful God of the xxxs be the loving, merciful God of Jesus? Marcion maintained that these attributes could not belong to one God. [...] The God of the Old Testament [...] was not evil, but he was rigorously just. He had laws and inflicted penalties on those who did not keep them. But this necessarily made him a wrathful God, since no one kept all of his laws perfectly. Everyone had to pay the price for their transgressions, and the penalty for transgression was death. [...]" This situation, with the God of the Old Testament being involved with the world and laying down laws, would change when the other God, who had so far not been involved, took pity on mankind and decided to try to save us.

The Salvation Given by Jesus

"The God of Jesus came into this world in order to save people from the vengeful God of the xxxs. [...] He paid the penalty for other people's sins, to save them from the just wrath of the Old Testament God."

Early Christians had many opinions on the nature of Christ. Marcion's was that Christ was an appearance of a Human, in order to trick the Old Testament God. Only another God could obey the OT laws perfectly, and only a person who followed them perfectly and then sacrificed himself could end the rule of the Old God. So the God of Jesus, the NT God, appeared on Earth pretending to be a Human. The Good News was spread that Jesus had indeed come and made himself the perfect sacrifice. The power of the OT God was reduced, and now began the age of pisces, the NT God. Paul wrote that Jesus did indeed only come 'in the likeness of flesh' (Rom.8:3), and by having faith in Jesus you escaped the wrath of the OT God. Jesus said that a tree is known by its fruit (see Luke 6:43-44):

"Good trees do not produce rotten fruit, and rotten trees do not produce good fruit". Marcion realized that this applies to the OT: The Old Testament God, who says that he "creates evil" (OT Amos. 3:6), cannot have produced the New Testament. To say otherwise is to ignore the words of Jesus and Paul. In Pauline Christianity, the reasons for the crucifixion of Jesus are a little vague and confusing. If the Old Testament God was the same as the New, and it wanted to save more people, then it could merely have chosen to do so. There was no need for an 'ultimate sacrifice'. Being the supreme God, it could save whoever it wants, whether or not Jesus came to Earth and died on the cross. Marcionite Christianity did not have this problem; there was a clear reason why Jesus died: To trick the OT God out of it's power.

Marcionite Influence

Marcionism was wide and successful, for hundreds of years some places knew only of Marcionite Christianity. Pauline Christianity, although aggressive and with its resources and power, could not seem to oppress it. It did not have the logical problems of saying that the harsh God of the Old Testament had somehow 'changed', and it didn't have the problems of what to do with all the Old Testament laws and regulations: Other Christians such as the Ebionites still obeyed all these laws. Marcionism portrayed Jesus as a good God come to save humanity, and as such, was a powerful and influential Christian movement.

"Marcion put together a canon of Scripture, that is, a collection of books that he considered to be sacred authorities. Marcion, in fact, is widely thought to have been the first Christian to have done so [...], long before the New Testament that we know was established."

Ehrman notes that some scholars think that Marcion's example was copied by the continually growing Pauline Christians. Aside from copying Marcionism, Pauline Christians continually attacked it, devoting resources and money to do so.

The Near Demise of Marcionism

At one point, the early Christian writings that were collected by Marcion, along with his own writings, were all destroyed. A domineering early Catholic Church, the Pauline Christians, committed themselves to a long-term campaign against these early Christians. Tertullian produced five volumes attacking Marcionism and distributed them throughout the Roman Empire. The honest intellectual and rational approach of Marcion to the Old Testament and the saving grace of Jesus were lost, burnt and oppressed by the more violent and aggressive Pauline Christians. It is ironic that in the name of 'good works', Pauline Christians murdered and toruted those who believed differently to themselves... if it is true, as Jesus says and as Marcion pointed out, that good trees do not produce rotten fruit, then have we ended up with a rotten tree grown from a rotten fruit, instead of the real Christianity as espoused by Jesus?

If it is Christian duty to 'turn the other cheek', 'resist not evil', 'love your enemies' and 'love your neighbours as yourself', then it is clear that the Pauline Christians, who eliminated Marcionism and got to choose the books of the Bible, were not the true Christians.

Source: http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/marcionites.html

[axel]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

One of the books of Yeznik Koghbatsi's refutation of the sects is devoted to the Marcionite heresy.
___________________________________

BOOK IV

Refutation of the Heretic Marcion

The relationship between Man and God was profoundly changed by the revelation of God among mankind in the person of Jesus Christ. God as revealed in the Old Testament was a stern, jealous creator, a vengeful God of Justice, a God of Laws and Commandments, whereas God as revealed in the New Testament was a loving, forgiving, self-sacrificing God. In the second century, Marcion, the son of the bishop of Pontus in Asia Minor, seized upon this dichotomy to propound a new doctrine of faith. Relying on the teachings of St. Paul, he set out to draw a clean line between Christian doctrine and its Judaic heritage. His writings have not survived, but we know of his doctrine through the writings of his opponents: Tertullian, Epiphanius and, as we shall see, Yeznik Koghbatsi.

Marcion was deeply impressed by how differently God is depicted in the two Testaments. He carried this difference to the extreme conclusion that in fact there is not one God, but two: the one, known before the coming of Christ, created the universe and was revealed in the Laws and through the prophets of the Old Testament; the other, the unknown true God, who sent His Son to redeem man, was revealed only in the New Testament. In addition, Marcion absorbed some of the ideas current in Greek philosophical thought and Gnosticism concerning the evil nature of matter. On the basis of these beliefs he framed a doctrine which reconciled, to his mind, the differences between God as revealed in the two Testaments and accounted for human life as experienced and understood by philosophers and mystics in his time. [p.58]

For ease of reference, the God of the Old Testament shall be called Lord of the Laws and Creation or simply, Lord of Creation or Lord of the Laws. The God of the New Testament shall be called the Other God, the Unknown God, or the God of Love.

MARCION'S VIEWS AS RELATED BY YEZNIK (4.1)

As is well known, Marcion strayed by introducing another God into his doctrine. He opposed this God both to Matter and to the Lord of Creation, who was revealed in the Old Testament and who created the universe and set out the laws. He believed, therefore, that there were three primary forces: 1) Matter, 2) the Other, Unknown God, who was revealed in the New Testament, and 3) the Lord of Creation. Each of these three primary forces dwelt in separate realms: the Other God in the First heaven, the Lord of Creation in the Second heaven, and Matter on earth. Through the sexual union of Matter and Lord of Creation, the world and the creatures came into being. Each of the. parents, Mother-Matter and Father-Lord of Creation, established a realm: Matter with her children on Earth and the Lord with his creations in heaven.

When the Lord of the Laws and Creation saw how beautiful the world was, he decided to create man. He descended to Earth and asked matter to give him clay out of which to shape man in their image. Then he breathed the spirit of life into the first man, Adam, whose name means clay. When he finished creating Adam and his spouse, he placed them in paradise where they would dwell for eternity in obedience to their creator, living in bliss as the children of Matter and the Lord of Creation.

When the Lord of Creation, who was master of the world, saw how noble Adam was, he plotted to steal him from Matter. He took Adam aside and told him that he was the one and only God and that Adam would die if he recognized any god but Him. Thus threatened, Adam began to withdraw from Matter.

Matter, noticing that Adam no longer obeyed her commands and had withdrawn from her, surmised that the Lord of [p.59] Creation had a hand in Adam's change of behavior. In retaliation, Matter created a multitude of gods and idols to confuse Adam so that he would not know which was the true God. Henceforth, neither Adam nor his descendants could find God. Confused, they worshipped the false gods and Matter. The Lord of Creation grew angry with man. One by one, beginning with Adam, because he ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree, the Lord of Creation cast the souls of the dead into Hell for a period of twenty-nine centuries.

They say that the Unknown God, the God of Love, who was in the first heaven, was hurt by seeing so many souls suffering at the hands of the two imposters: Matter and the Lord of Creation. Therefore, the Unknown God sent His Son to work miracles and cure the blind and foresaw that men would be jealous and crucify him. He also knew that once crucified and buried as mortal, His Son would descend into Hell and empty it by freeing the souls which had been cast there by the Lord of the Laws and Creation.

And indeed, after the Son was crucified, he descended into Hell and freed the captive souls and took them to heaven with His Father, the God of Love. Thereupon, the Lord of Creation grew angry and darkened the skies and dressed the world in black.

The second time Jesus descended in the form of God, he opened a case against the Lord of Creation for having put him to death. When the Lord of Creation saw the Godliness of Jesus, he knew that there was a God higher than himself. Jesus leveled his charges against the Lord of Creation and demanded that the Laws which the Lord of Creation had written be the judge in their case.

When he placed the Laws between them, Jesus asked, "Did you not write, 'And who ever kills, shall die and who ever spills the blood of the righteous, his blood shall be spilled.'?" After the Lord of Creation acknowledged that he had written them, Jesus demanded that he surrender himself to be punished by death. Then Jesus added, "I have been more just than you to your [p.60] creations," and he began to list the kindnesses he had done them. Seeing that he had been condemned by his own laws for killing Jesus, the Lord of Creation pleaded that he had killed Jesus unknowingly and offered in retribution to give Jesus all those who believe in him to take where he pleased. After Jesus left the Lord of Creation, he appeared to Paul. He revealed to his apostle the compensation, and thereafter, Paul preached that Jesus "redeemed us for a price." This, then, is the basis of Marcion's doctrine as we have come to know it.

...

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/scanned/yeznik_refutation.htm

________________________

PS for Lucin: the immaculate conception is a nineteethn century catholic dogma which asserts the virgin Mary was born without the stain of the original sin. It is not held as truth by orthodox christians.

[axel]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

A lot of the material above appears quite unorthodox to me.

[Armenian]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

A lot of the material above appears quite unorthodox to me.

Axel, let's debate the elements, the core beliefs of our faith. But before we do that I ask you to please familiarize yourself with the contents of the posted materials.

[Armenian]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

In Defense of My Spiritual Convictions

John's baptism of Christ in the official presence of the Holy Trinity

I have read the works of the Christian apologists (I used to be one myself, in a sense). In my opinion, relatively speaking, the apologists' works are nothing but verbal gymnastics and theological spin. It's the defense of a particular view or a formulation in theology by special interests. Let's also realize that traditional Christianity as we currently know it, in a sense, became the officially sanctioned religion of the most powerful entity on earth at the time, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). Thus, that particular line of theological reasoning/formula had immense influence over other belief systems that may have existed within the vast territories of the Eastern Roman Empire. Let's also take into serious consideration that many of the so-called heretical movements were only subdued by bloody suppression, sometime lasting generations to eliminate completely. What we have here is a glaring example of how winners have written history. And the winners in this case also managed to destroy most of the literature of the so-called "heretics" of old.

Nevertheless, the fact still remains: core elements found within Christian theology and ritual are non-Judaic in nature and origin. As a matter of fact, one can rightfully claim that some core elements found within J-ewish beliefs and traditions are not Judaic either.

To move forward, one must be able to break the emotional bonds of literally interpreting the works of the church forefathers and/or the apostles and to begin reading between the rhetorical or theosophical lines. As a result, the probable manipulation of Christ's statements or his biography by his J-ewish followers is a very crucial realization one has arrive at here. On the one hand, derived from the Gospels, we have a Trinity represented by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit that closely resembles deities found within the pagan world. Christ's philosophies and ethics resemble that of the pagan world as well. And, Christ's suggested purpose on earth, namely to die for our sins, defeat the Devil and to be the judge of mankind at the end of times, also resembles the tenets found within pagan world. All this, not to mention all the others pagan elements within our faith: the virgin birth, water baptism, the life giving cross, prayers for the dead, miracles of healing, the order of the angelic world, the concepts of heaven and hell, etc...

Yet, on the other hand, we also have a man called Jesus of Nazareth, also according to the Gospels, making statements to the effect that he was indeed the long awaited savior of the J-ews, born from the lineage of the Hebrew King David.

What we have here is a major theological paradox, a serious dilemma within traditional Christianity that would naturally require an army of apologists and "spinners" to reconcile.

In essence, we have two characters in the Gospels - a Godman called Christ and a rabbi called Jesus of Nazareth. Upon closer look, these two characters cannot be made to fit the same mold, and they cannot fit no matter how hard our church theologians try. Attempting to combine these two diametrically opposed concepts - a Godman and the J-ewish Messiah - within Judaism is absurd to say the least. You can have one, or the other, but one can't have both existing in union within Judaism. It's simply not Judaic.

It is obvious to me that Christ's Hellenized J-ewish followers wanted to convert the J-ews from their primitive belief system. And simple logic here would suggest that they may have manipulated certain texts towards that purpose, enter the most influential Gospel character, Paul of Tarsus. However, their attempts simply did not work in the longterm. J-ewish orthodoxy, J-ewish society, naturally did not accept Christ as their Messiah. And look at those people who did accept Christ: Romans, Greeks, Assryians, Armenians, Iranians, Copts, Ethiopians and Hellenized, in other words, assimilated - J-ews.

What I am trying to convey here is that Christianity in particular (and Judaism in general) is not derived from or originated by the Hebrews. Christianity, in essence, is the continuation, albeit through J-ewish eyes, of a faith that existed within Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, the birth place of mankind, centuries prior to Christ's birth. And, as I have already noted above, the nomadic J-ews obtained their faith in Babylon during their captivity there during the sixth century BC at a time when Babylon was the epicenter of world and human civilization.

I have highlighted quite a few core theological tenants within Christianity that are exclusively non-Judaic in nature and origin. Bear in mind that even if only one of the highlighted pagan elements exists within Jesus of Nazareth, his entire Messianic facade crumbles. For one not to see this one must be blind spiritually.

On that note, I would also like to say: The truest essence of our ancient faith system only exists within Christian Orthodoxy today, although I still have a problem with their acceptance of the so-called Old Testament. Nonetheless, of all the existing religions on earth, Christian Orthodox rituals, philosophies, theologies and ethics come the closest to our ancient belief system.

As for myself, culturally I am a Christian Orthodox. I am also a child of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Spiritually, however, I guess one can call me a - heretic. I am a "Christian," in the sense that I am a follower of Christ, but I reject any connection that is said to exits be between my Christ and the J-ewish Messiah, between my Triune God and Yahweh, between Judaic ethnics and Christian ethnics.

The Armenian nation converted to Christianity from Zoroastrianism in 301 AD and became the first Christian state within the world. Armenian history and ethnic identity is closely intertwined with Christianity. Having voluntarily served within the Armenian Apostolic Church, I have noticed that much of our church rituals are directly derived from Zoroastrianism and earlier native beliefs. To me and to most Armenians throughout history, Christ's message and his nature was a very familiar concept and one that found a permanent home within Armenian society. Thus, I have never felt compelled to go into another religion in search of a so-called "truth" and/or belonging. Nevertheless. the main area where I respectfully deviate from my Church is my refusal to spiritually accept the Old Testament as a main source or liturgical prerequisite for my belief in Christ.

My suggestion to all those who reject my spiritual convictions: Please read all the materials posted in this thread. I am going to periodically post more materials in support of my particular line of belief. Read the materials with an open mind and objectivity and most of all meditate on it. I was also once a traditionalists and I also looked upon all "heretics" as demons out to destroy the Judeo-Christian Jesus.

I also want to emphasize here that I am in no way suggesting that our national church has to be tampered with. Regardless of the theological debates that may exist, our Church, as it exists, has been a bulwork of Armenian identity and has gallantly helped in preserving our national heritage. I look at our church as our national treasure. Nevertheless, as I have outlined above, my personal spiritual convictions differ a bit from the official doctrines canonized by mortal men some sixteen hundred years ago.

I do not know if any of what I am stating here makes any sense to the reader or if I answered any questions the reader may have had. This is a very complex topic, one which I am still in the process of learning. And I doubt if I will ever complete the learning process within my lifetime. In all reality, as all mortals, I do not know who or what God is. I don't know where he lives, I don't know his true nature. And I do not know who or what Christ was. I don't know why he was born in Palestine, or what he wants from mankind. I don't know the true answers to any of these question other than what I am told by the J-ewish authors found within the Gospels.

However, I know for certain that there is an all powerful creator God in existence. I know for certain that the world, at least the civilized world, was populated from out of Asia Minor, specifically from our sacred highlands. I know for certain that there is a anti-God known as Satan, a demon who is dark, destructive and hateful. I also realize that mankind is in essence stuck between these two diametrically opposed natures within the universe. I also know for certain that the Godman known as Christ to us existed within many ancient cultures at different time periods. And I suspect that this Godman Christ's last manifestation occurred in Palestine, where he preached good deeds, worked miracles and died for our sins only to rise again from the dead - as he had done within various other ancient societies.

God does exist, has always existed, will always exist. Being that we are mere mortals living in our awfully limited physical realities, we will never fully comprehend our universal creator. We must, nonetheless, as children seek or pursue his life giving divine light. And I believe Christ to be the divine light of the world, only through him we can obtain everlasting life.


Well, enough of my Sunday sermon for now.


Go, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.


Amen


Armenian

[Yedtarts]

Re: Non-Judaic Nature of Christ

In Defense of My Spiritual Convictions

Amen

Amen!