History of the Christian Religion

 

There are many questions and many holes in the story of Christianity. For instance, why does Christianity justify violence? There's a great problem for many of us when you ask basic questions about the agreed-upon story. My inbox is full from week to week of messages from people who grew up in church, grew up in Sunday school, and who got thrown out of Sunday school for asking obvious questions, like how does God do such awful, violent, wicked things?

We know they're wicked because we know the teaching of Jesus. We know they're wicked because we've got a basic conscience. How can we be higher than the morality of this god character? Children have their own ways of asking those questions, which are obvious questions, and then they get thrown out because the Sunday School teacher or the Bible Study leader can't answer their simple honest curiosities.

And I'm not talking about this happening to people 100 years ago. I'm talking about people my age and younger who've been thrown out of groups not because they're being disruptive, but because they're asking obvious questions, to which there are obvious answers, but people don't want to give the obvious answers.

You and I have grown up with a book called the Bible with two hard covers on it, and in between them, you've got the Old Testament and the New Testament glued together. And the moment that book was created, the message it sends out is that there's continuity between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. And you make the assumption that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is all about God, and the New Testament is all about God, and it must be the same God.

This is God's book, isn't it? That's sort of the starting point for many of us who have grown up with the Christian faith. But as soon as you start reading the gospels and listening to the teaching of Jesus, it raises a huge question, because if Jesus is a Yahwist, worships the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, Yahweh, then why isn't he a proponent of Yahweh's laws? Why does the religion that came from the teachings of Jesus not include the laws of Yahweh? And why does Jesus not mention Yahweh even once through all the Gospels?

Now, some would say, well, that's because the Gospels are written in Greek, and so you're going to get a Greek translation, you're going to see the word 'corios', which means sir or Lord, instead of the the name Yahweh. That's probably why it doesn't mention him. Except that answer doesn't quite pass muster, because there are key words that the gospel writers have left in Aramaic because they were so important to Jesus' teaching and ministry, and they were so strongly associated with his teaching and ministry.

Jesus would have spoken in Aramaic, the spoken form of Hebrew; he would have taught in Aramaic. Here are these four Aramaic phrases he used that give the character of what Jesus was all about... “Amen, Amen... I'm about to tell you something important”. The next one was “may deaf ears be opened”, then “arise, awaken little one”, and then “Abba”, a way to relate to the source of the universe, to discover an intimate connection with the source of the universe, and know the source of the universe as a father.

You put them together, and you've actually got the character of a lot of early Christian teaching around Jesus: Amen, amen. I'm going to tell you something important. Defi is open. Talitha Kawan, little one, Abba, arise, wake up, and now you can relate to the source of the cosmos. You could say that this really is the nub of all the Gnostic literature, the heart of their message. But nowhere do you find the name Yahweh.

And there are other moments where Jesus seems to be pitched against Yahweh, instead of representing a continuation. One example of that would be in the Gospel of John, chapter eight, where Jesus is addressing the Jewish leaders, and he refers to their father. He says, your father the devil. Your father was a liar. Your father was a murderer. He's a false father. He's the father of lies. Well, who could he possibly be speaking about if he wasn't speaking about Yahweh in that moment?

This is a terrible shock to a lot of Christian believers, because they never heard it preached that way. But if you go back and look in that chapter - John 8 - you'll see he's pitching himself against the false father of the Jewish leaders. Who is he talking about? And how is it that Jesus doesn't talk about Yahweh? Instead, he talks about the Father, the one in the heavens, to distinguish his father from all others, the heavenly Father, who he addresses as 'Pater', which means father, and Abba, which means sir or daddy. And Jesus says no one has ever seen the Father.

How can he say that if Yahweh is the father, because Moses spoke to Yahweh face to face, and Yahweh was physically seen many times in the old stories. Yet Jesus says no one has ever seen the Father. And he says, both to his big audiences and to his twelve disciples “what I'm bringing you is something completely new”.

Philip says, “Show us the Father”, so it shows they don't know what he's talking about. He's bringing something new. There's another amazing moment where Jesus puts a lot of distance between himself and the Yahweh stories and the Yahweh character when he says, “Which of you fathers, if your children were thirsty and asked for drink or hungry and ask for food, would give them a stone, or would give them a snake?” And you or I would listen to that and think, oh, what a strange, perverse, random scenario he's come up with there. Except the Jewish hearers in the beginning would say, “Oh, hold on. Yahweh gave his people a stone when they were thirsty. Yahweh sent snakes when his people were hungry.” And here's Jesus saying, What kind of father would do that?

All the gospel writers in the canonical gospels are eager to show that Jesus is a successor to and replacement of Moses, the prophet of Yahweh, yet they show him as bringing laws that delete and replace the laws of Yahweh. That's really the big picture. It's a picture of discontinuity.

Jesus really did intend to set people free from the laws of Yahweh, and was bringing something very different. The Gospel writers understood it. There's the moment of Transfiguration, where we've even got a dramatic handover of the baton, where those of his ancestors who had to do business with Yahweh - Moses and Elijah - handing the baton over to Jesus, and a voice from the heavens, the father in the heavens, speaks and says, “This is my son. Listen to him.” And so in that moment, we've gone from the old to the new, and the new is something completely new. So it's very clear by the time you're in the book of Acts, in Acts 15, and the Jerusalem Council is happening, the early church has worked it out that Christianity is not yahwehism.

There's clear blue water between what Jesus was all about and all the old stories and laws of Yahweh. It's very hard to get that discontinuity into our minds when we've been taught a story of continuity for so long. But the only way the story of continuity works is if you ignore all the nastiness and violence of the Yahweh character that is totally incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. That's the clue for most people that some things are seriously awry.

Is God in the Old and New Testament the same?

I'm not a real big fan of the Old Testament. You know fire and brimstone, you know a punishment kind of God. In the New Testament, the God that Jesus speaks of is extremely different, like night and day. It's like if you're writing a story or a novel, the character of Yahweh changes so dramatically between the first part and the second part... like if Darth Vader was Darth Vader in the first part of the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he's a dancer who loves to paint and is very kind to people, using the Force. That's essentially the dichotomy we have with Yahweh.

It is the moral behavior of the Yahweh character that gives us a problem, because it doesn't square with all the qualities of divinity listed in the New Testament, with all the qualities we're supposed to aspire to according to the teachings of Jesus. When the church has answered these questions in the past, it's essentially been by telling people to ignore their own conscience, that if God does it, it must be all right, and if you worship God, then you better come to terms with who God is and stay on his right side.

The problem with these answers, where we have to shut down our conscience, is simply that if you worship a God who's violent, you have to justify violence, and once you've justified violence, then you might use violence in God's name, and we've had 2000 years of history showing that's certainly the case. If you worship a God who's a xenophobe, you'll have to justify xenophobia and start thinking in xenophobic terms. These are my people. These are not my people. That's the way Yahweh thought. If you worship a God who is a misogynist, you have to justify misogyny, And Yahweh was a misogynist. He hated adult women. He found the whole idea of menstruation disgusting and horrible, and women while menstruating weren't even part of the community.

But if he's the creator, how can you have a problem with that? And it's one of those little clues that you're dealing with a very eccentric being who should not be worshiped and should not be excused. But as soon as we get into the track of justifying his misogyny, his violence, and his xenophobia, you can draw a straight line between that and so many injustices and abuses done in the name of God... because we're prosecuting God's will.

So it's very important that we stop making mistakes of this order, because they lead to disastrous results.

The thing I always found fascinating about the Yahweh character is that he seems really insecure. He seems very egotistical. It seems like there's a lot of these, things that you attach to him because of the way he acts. “You must worship me. You must do this.”

Jesus never said anything like that. Jesus was all about the powers within you, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. “You can do what I can do, and even more.” This is a 180 degree difference, isn't it? Because Jesus said I did not come to be served, whereas Yahweh says, “If you don't serve me...”

The Crusades were all about killing those that didn't believe in Jesus, which is certainly not in keeping with his teachings. So how did the teachings get so transmuted to the point where Christians fought in the name of Jesus. “I will kill you in the name of Christianity.” It makes no sense.

It only makes sense when seen as an adoption of the Old Testament with Yahweh as God. Somehow this got mixed in with Jesus' teachings... because it's all found in one book.

So, the essential question is: Did Jesus’ message get hijacked?

The answer is most certainly yes. Judaism evolved from a canon of paleo contact, a memory of contact with all kinds of beings, to monotheism. And this change was done mainly to empower the monarchy in Jerusalem and the high priesthood in Jerusalem.

So all the other priesthoods serving all the other entities that were remembered - Asherah, Milcom, Jimash and other Jewish priesthoods that serviced installations commemorating these beings were shut down. Sometimes they were slaughtered. Their temples were adopted or gotten rid of, their altars broken down. King Hezekiah, high priest Hilkiah, Royal scribe Shafan, Senior priest Ezra, boy King Josiah - these were the key figures in getting rid of the memory of these other entities, of defacing the carvings showing the many Elohim of the past, so that people would forget who they were, what they looked like, and coming up with a list of books that would be the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So this change happened so that from being a group of tribes who remember ancient helpers, now we've got a religion of monotheism, one God, one king, one high priest and high priestly family, one temple in Jerusalem, all tithes coming to that one temple - a huge centralization of economic power. One high priest telling you what's what, what to believe. He's the news agency. He tells you what's news, what's fake news. So it's a great centralization of power, and by choosing the violent God to be the one and only God, it empowers the crown to enact violence in the name of that God.

If you've got a violent God, then the king can go to war and threaten the violence of their god against other people. So it was empowering in that way.

Christianity had a similar thing happen to it at the time of Constantine. Emporer Constantine wanted, essentially, to hijack the emerging religious movement called Christianity, which was very popular among many of his soldiers, and he wanted all those who were worshiping this new God Jesus to think that in order to worship Jesus, they had to obey him, the emperor, and be good citizens.

Constantine wanted all the believers in the empire to believe that God was endorsing the power of the state. The state could enact violence against its own people to maintain order, and could go to war with other territories to get more lands and possessions.

And the way he did this was to ask a certain bishop to rewrite world history, and in particular, to rewrite his own story. He wanted a biography of himself written by this bishop, Eusebius. And the reason he picked this bishop was that he had read something he'd written before, which had described the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a way that he really liked. And what he liked about it was really some passing comment that God must have favored Constantine since Constantine won, and so he makes friends with Eusebius, includes him in his royal circle. And after a while, he says, 'I want you to write a new history, and I want you to beef up that God must have been on Constantine's side section, because I really liked how you did that.'

So in the new book, The New Story of the Milvian Bridge says that before that battle, a sign appeared in the sky, a cross which everybody saw, and the words written in the sky were in hoc seniors signo Vince, which means conquering this sign. So it's a show that Jesus was supporting Constantine as emperor and is endorsing the violence of his army and his military campaigns.

So now it's Jesus and the Emperor, sort of hand in hand, battling for the expansion of Constantine's empire. So it happens in literary form, and then we start seeing it in the art where Jesus is being depicted looking rather like an Italian foot soldier in Imperial armor. In fact, he's wearing the uniform of a foot soldier of the Imperial Army, which now means he's somewhat junior to the Emperor, supporting all of the Empire's military feats.

This is the beginning of the story of colonization and enslavements done in the name of Jesus. Constantine is the great pioneer of that and he brings the cross in as the central symbol of Christianity, and he puts it on all his military flags. And now the soldiers start wearing things with the cross on it, but it's a form of cross that fuses the idea of military power with divine power. And so there's the story of the Divine Right of Kings and people equating the violent expansion of the empire with exporting Christianity.

So the confusion has been very deliberately created by rulers who wanted to hijack religion and use it to put a divine imprimatur on anything and everything they want to do, even if it's grotesque and violent.

So not much has changed since that time. The world's rulers still use religion to get what they want and manipulate the Pope and the public. It's insane.

There were multiple gods in early Hebrew teachings, originally, We have the vestiges of that worldview still in the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures. So if you go to the Ten Commandments, Yahweh begins by saying, I don't want you working for any other elohim. I don't want you to bow down to them, and you're not even allowed to depict them. And of course, we're not supposed to ask, sorry, don't depict who, what other elohim are we talking about? Are we just talking about images and statues, or are we talking about other beings?

And as you read the Elohim stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, it turns out he's talking about other beings. And Yahweh has a very competitive relationship with these other beings.

In Joshua 24, Joshua is a successor to Moses and says to the people “You need to decide who you're going to serve. Will you serve the Elohim that you served in Mesopotamia? Will you serve the Elohim of Egypt, or will you serve Yahweh?” So we've got this plurality of beings to choose from, but you're only supposed to work for Yahweh.

Some scholars say, strictly speaking, Judaism wasn't polytheism. It did believe in many gods, whatever they were, but you must only worship one, and we call that henotheism. But within henotheism is an acknowledgement of other beings.

We have a vision in 1 Kings 22 by the prophet Micaiah, who describes this council of beings, this council of Elohim, who are all stakeholders apparently in Project Earth, and they're in some kind of uneasy truce among themselves as to managing the project.

Moving forward, you've got wars among the Elohim, where they send their humans to war against each other. So there's no question that there are plural Elohim in the texts, which is why it's a plural form. Word, plural verbs, plural behaviors. They have conversations, they have conflicts, they go to war. But then, as I say, we get to the eighth to sixth century, BCE and the scribes want the story to change so that we think of these old gods, these other gods, as if they were just totems and statues and images. And there's only one real God, and that's Yahweh.

But there are still stories left behind that show these beings are sort of going toe to toe against each other, and many of the stories of wars are incomprehensible until you frame them that way. You can frame them by going to Psalm 82 or Deuteronomy 32 which describes a moment post invasion. So we're invaded by a group called the seva Hashem IIM, which means the airborne armies or the sky fleet.

So just picture that for a moment. What are we looking at there? And then they arrive, they start governing things as the Ba Adat and El Elyon, the senior among these Elohim, then carves out the lands, giving this land to this Elohim, this land to this Elohim. This land to this Elohim. Yahweh seems to be a junior member of that council because he gets short shrift. He gets a people group with no land. So El Elyon has created this artificial scarcity, so that now conflict and warfare has been built into the system as they compete for resources.

So the first thing Yahweh does is rescue his people group from another Elohim land. He has to go into Egypt of Ach and retrieve his people group and then go to war with other elohim so his people group can have some land. And so this is the great outrage and injustice that's built into the story as Yahweh's people look for some kind of homeland, and it doesn't matter who the people group is.

If you've got a people group with no citizenship and no land, whether we're talking about the Middle East today or if we're talking about the Rohingya people, it creates appalling problems, and it's those appalling problems we see playing out in the Hebrew Scriptures, none of which makes sense if there are no other elohim.

But we're told from the beginning there are many, but that's the story that had to be changed in the great reform, so that now we think of the other gods as idols, so that now we think of serving the other elohim as if it were idolatry or backsliding. But before those editorial changes, it was just the world, many lands, many Elohim, and it's the same worldview that you can find in the ancient story of cultures all around the world.

Many of these stories have been borrowed from earlier sources. So we've got Elohim stories in the Bible that are retellings of Anunnaki and anuna stories from ancient Mesopotamia. We didn't know this until the 1830s when we discovered the translation key to all the cuneiform tablets those ancient cultures had left behind. And then we started recognizing that this looks like where the flood story came from. This looks like where the story of the fall came from. This is where the story of Asherah came from.

And so those stories go back 6-7000 years to the emergence of Sumer, which is a fascinating topic all itself, because Suma seems to appear from out of nowhere. We've not had civilization before. And all of a sudden, not only do we have modern agriculture, we've got civil engineering, we've got city building, we've got written language, money systems, legal systems, and they told stories which were older than their own culture. They told stories that went back 200,000 years and more, if we include texts like the Kings List.

And those stories talk about cataclysms, talk about interference in the development of Homo sapiens; talk about times when we were enslaved as the working class to invaders from off planet. That's all in the stories of the Anunnaki, and they're all echoed in the Bible. But then I think it goes back even further, because when you look at the stories of beginnings in the book of Genesis, by the time you get to chapter 12, you've read five stories that strongly suggest planetary level cataclysms. So that could be one Cataclysm remembered five times over, and the stories have been brought together, but there are hints that there are a number of cataclysms and resets being described, which takes the memory in those stories further back than anything we know about Homo sapiens.

So we could have stories that are millions of years old, that have been told to us by others who knew about them, or by visitors or observers who knew about them. So there's a lot of mystery as to where the stories begin, whose stories they originally were, and where exactly the story of humanity begins.

from Paul Wallis interview by Alex Ferrari at nextlevelsoul.com on April 18, 2025