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] byunknown 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], 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]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. Heres 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 dont 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.