ANCIENT POLITICS & TODAY
Understanding of the development of this mentality is the basis for the next step, “Love your enemy” – Jesus.
Those, whose letters and writings were taken to be included in the New Testament were deeply steeped in dualism; therefore, no one can make a dogma from their writings. For this reason you either choose John 16:13 where the Holy Spirit leads, guides and reveals; or you choose Jude 1:6 and brood in mystery.
Does anyone know that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:6)?
The battle is over theological barriers, blocks that prevent you from knowing God in the power of truth and its liberation.
New Testament, written completely in Greek, was made of the dualistic mentality, which was first brought back from Babylon. From Ezra and Nehemiah we have the second temple period lasting for about 618 years until the ministry of Jesus. The Hellenistic period enslaved the monotheistic Jewish mind to Greek mythological mind. Most Jews were lost in Hellenism.
Knowing the development of dualism you will also understand Christianity and will be able to reform your beliefs. All that is written is good and holy, but how you understand it makes a big difference. You can either understand it all by filtering all that is written through the prism of the well-established Christian theology or as the Holy Spirit gives you the understanding; independently.
BRIEF HISTORY
In 332 BC Alexander the Great captured Gaza. Later, under the supervision of Jewish high priest, deceptively, Alexander the Great sacrifices to the Jewish God. The Hellenistic period then started. Synagogues were desecrated; pigs’ blood was poured on the Holy Hill in Jerusalem. The predominant language was Greek.
A Jewish priest from Modiin, Mattathias (Hasmonean), sparked the revolt against the Seleucid Empire by refusing to worship the Greek gods. Mattathias killed a Hellenistic Jew who stepped forward to offer a sacrifice to an idol in Mattathias' place. He and his five sons fled to the wilderness of Judah.
After Mattathias' death in 166 BC, his son Judah Maccabee led an army of Jewish dissidents to victory over the *Seleucid dynasty in guerrilla warfare, which at first was directed against many Hellenized Jews. (*The Seleucid Empire was a major center of Hellenistic culture that maintained the preeminence of Greek customs where a Greek political elite dominated.) The Maccabees destroyed pagan altars in the villages, circumcised boys and forced Jews into outlawry (*act of putting a person beyond the protection of the law and legal jurisdiction).
Under the Hasmonean Dynasty, Judah became comparable in extent and power to the ancient Davidic dominion. However, internal political and religious discord ran high especially between the appointed by Hasmoneans Pharisees, who interpreted the written law by adding a wealth of *oral law, and the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly class who called for strict adherence to the written law.
*Example: [Mark 7:913] He was also saying to them, “You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. [10] For Moses said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER’; and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH’; [11] but you say, ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever I have that would help you is Corban (that is to say, given to God),’ [12] you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother; [13] thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.”
ROMAN INFLUENCE
Eighty years of independent Jewish sovereignty had come to an end. The period of Roman dominion had begun.
Julius Caesar restored certain territories to Judea and appointed he Hasmonean King, son of Alexander Yannai, Hyrcanus II ethnarch (Greek for “ruler of the nations”).
Thirty-seven years before the birth of Christ Roman Senate confirmed Herod as king of Judah who reigned until 4 BC. In 6 BC Rome annexed the province of Syria and Judea, which they renamed Palestina (Palestine, from Philistia). Independent Judah was now under the Roman rule. However, Rome granted the Jews religious autonomy and some judicial and legislative rights through the Sanhedrin.
The Great Sanhedrin, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, supervised smaller local Sanhedrins and was the final authority on many important religious, political, and legal issues, such as declaring war, trying a high priest, and supervising certain rituals.
Example: [Luke 11 52] “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.”
Jesus declared these words in this fashion because the religious iron grip on people’s beliefs was extremely dominant. And that was due to the Hellenization of Jews, which robbed them not only of their Jewish identity, but above all, of monotheism. Babylon and Persia greatly impaired the monotheistic thought and Greece made it much worse.
From Zoroaster the Jews borrowed ideas of split Universe between light and darkness and two gods, YHVH the ruler of light and Satan His subordinate angel as the Prince of Darkness. The Gnostics went further and gave us the god of this world. The split Gnostic idea maintained: anything physical is evil and anything spiritual is holy. Many have gone as far as denying *physical birth of Christ.
*Example: [2 John 1:7] For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.
The Greeks gave us the devil (Diabolos).
*Example: [Luke 4:6] And the devil said to Him, “I will give You all this domain and its glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish.”
All these ideas landed in all the popular writings from the Book of Enoch, the Watchers, Jubilee, and also later on the Book of 2Peter, Jude and Revelations, etc., books that influenced all people; including the apostles. Popular folklore was fashionable and anything religious was written in the fashionable Greek. Rome used Latin a rather secular language; to this very day used in medical science.
Starting with the period after Christ, the Book of Acts, the mythological mindset was gradually narrowed down to a dualistic mindset, which means God vs. Satan or the (Greek) devil. This dualistic mindset has been with us for more than 2600 years. Tons of books have been written and millions of sermons preached in the God vs. the devil mindset.
This dualistic iron grip—the Pharisees wielded over the de-Hellenized Jews and proselytes of Palestine—remains to this very day. Starting with Vatican, Europe and the Americas. Any departure from this popular hallucinogenic seems impossible. As a result none can see what’s behind that high wall and no one knows God the way He really is.
*The angel of the LORD (Numb. 22) who confronted Balaam came to the son of Beor as Satan, or adversary, yet it was an angel of the LORD and not some disobedient cosmic being.
After the “discovery” came Greek mythology and further impairment of the Jewish monotheistic thought. All this sensationalized religion. Spiritual wars... one of God's angels plotted… got kicked out from heaven... etc.
The Essenes developed their dualistic ideas, which they passed on to the Christian monks. Essenes were the actual founders of the monastic lifestyle, which then was spread throughout the Christian Empire after Constantine (who died in 337); and then was well established thereafter.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The great adversary (Satan) to the early Christians was the Roman and Jewish systems. The Jewish system passed away in 70 AD, and once, under Constantine, the empire converted to Christianity Roman opposition and visible persecution of Christians ceased. The lack of visible adversaries perhaps encouraged mainstream Christianity to conclude that the adversary (Satan) was therefore invisible and cosmic. It was against this background that Augustine came onto the scene.
*Manichaean teachings deal with two creations, the one good, from God and the other evil, from an antagonistic power, namely Satan and the bad angels who seek to destroy the work of God. Man’s spirit is from God and therefore good, his body from Satan and therefore evil. There is a constant struggle between these two opposite forces.
IN CLOSING
The followers of Zoroaster or Mani concocted aforesaid Gnostic ideas that only confused. But to a certain extent other ideas were not better. All Gnostic writings were excluded from the New Testament's canon and today's Protestant Christian Bible (formulated by the council of Nicaea) is rather poor. There could have been many more books, which the Catholic Bible contains, but judging from the spiritual quality of those excluded books what we have is best. Even the Nag Hammadi Library containing many Gnostic texts, discovered in 1945 at Giza in Egypt, do not measure up to the present day canon of the Bible. Gospels of Thomas or Philip are Gnostic containing very little spiritual and truthful inspiration. The Nicaea Counsel was not yet familiar with these texts for if they were perhaps our 66 books of the Bible would be at least 70 or 77 and would exclude the Book of Revelations.
But do we need more books? Hardly. We are more than confused, we are indoctrinated and lack common sense. But worse is the superstitious fear of letting go of dualism.
So many long to know Him in Truth, but the Truth eludes them due to this awful impairment of mind.
Dr. Joseph Luxum
Author of “WAR IN A BOTTLE”
If Jews discovered something they knew nothing about before and then they dropped it; then why did they 'discovered', played with and then dropped it? - The answer is clear. They borrowed from pagans something foreign; considered it and then returned to the ONE GOD belief; and therefore kept the straight line to God. Everything else then falls in place, for Yeshua (Jesus) opened that straight line to the Father. Today we deal with God the Father as He really is. So Romans 11:25 is being fulfilled and closing in on humanity.
ReplyDeleteBe dependent on the Spirit of God and not on the letter of the law or the letter of scripture, which: a Jew reads it this way, and a Christian that way. The letter of Scripture also kills, but kills what? - The Spirit of Life. Dogma has not saved you, but the resurrected and living Christ did.