Our gospels were not written by ‘Christians’. If a ‘Christian’ is said to be someone who believes in Yeshua (‘Jesus’) then our gospel writers were not Christians, for they were opposed to everything Yeshua preached and they were deeply offended by everything he did. For this reason, what we have here is not a destroyed pearl, but rather we find in the gospels a buried pearl. A destroyed pearl can never be recovered, and has been lost forever, but a buried pearl can be rediscovered, and because it is buried what is required is some digging.
The most interesting of the gospels, and the best place to recover the buried pearl, is the Gospel of Mark. Mark was a member of the ‘religious right’ and he wrote his gospel to make that scandalous character, Yeshus (‘Jesus’) seem acceptable to the followers of that right wing hawk known as John the Baptist. It is important when studying any document to understand who the author was and what the agenda of the author was and it is also important to understand who the target audience was for a piece of writing, and to discern what the author was hoping to achieve. Who wrote this book? Why did they write it? Who benefits from this work? Who was the intended audience?
Now the Gospel of Mark is an early work, and so it is absent a lot of the cooked up mythology that you find in the later books which renders them pretty much worthless as potential historical sources. Because the Gospel of Mark was composed so close to the time of the events its describes, the author of the Gospel was forced to deal with a host of scandals that had enraged the followers of the religious right, in particular the followers of John the Baptist, a religious right hawk. The way in which the author of Mark’s Gospel deals with these scandals is to follow this formula. First he acknowledges the scandal. Then he makes up some perfectly idiotic sounding excuse for that scandal. Then he moves on to the next scandal and the process is repeated. Therefore, because the author was unable to deny the scandals, for not enough time had passed for the huge scandal of Yeshua (‘Jesus’) to be forgotten, this means that we can uncover the buried pearl by ignoring the piles of dirt shoveled onto that Pearl by the author of the Gospel of Mark. We recover the pearl by ignoring those asinine excuses and just keeping the pure scandal itself, which then allows us to do an historical reconstruction of the real Yeshua, the man and not the myth.
Yeshua was a Jewish Prophet, and like the former Jewish prophets he attacked the Torah laws as being invalid. He went even further in his attacks than the previous generations of prophets dared to go, in that he denied the authenticity of the Sabbath laws, which means that he denied the authenticity of that story of Moses going up the mountain to bring down the Ten Commandments. For this reason the religious right sarcastically quoted to him from the Ten Commandments (‘six days you have to do your work, but not on the Sabbath’). The author of Mark’s gospel is a right wing hawk himself, and not a follower of Yeshua, and so he makes up some asinine excuses for the breaking of the Sabbath (it was an emergency, what if a goat fell down a well, and he also uses the right wing authoritarian argument that Yeshua was ‘Lord of the Sabbath’, and thus was permitted to break the Sabbath himself, but that doesn’t mean that you can). None of the works Yeshua did on the Sabbath were dire emergencies. People could have waited a few hours until Sun Down and it is also worth noting that it is a death penalty offense strictly prohibited in those stone age bible laws to harvest on the Sabbath. Yeshua did not require excuses made for his practice of breaking the Sabbath, for he was doing this to make a point, which was that the laws of the Pharisees were in fact forgeries, just as the Jewish prophet Jeremiah said was the case.
Yeshua did not practice religious mortification. He did not do penance for sins, nor did he fast, nor did he observe lent. Because the author of Mark’s gospel wanted to make his phony version of Yeshua’s story appealing to the religious right, and in particular to the followers of John the Baptist he insists that the reason why Yeshua partied and drank all the time was because ‘it was the wedding of the bride and the bride groom’, and we all know how people carry on at weddings. However, that was then and this is now. Now it is the perpetual and eternal funeral for Yeshua, and so therefore everyone must now observe lent, do penance for their sins, and fast, just like John the Baptist did, or, to put it another way, everyone must become a Roman Catholic, even though, as Mark admits, you could never confuse Yeshua with a Catholic or a Baptist while he was alive, because he partied all the time, usually with those people the religious types considered to be the worst people in town.
On one occasion the religious fanatics caught Yeshua getting his toes sucked by some women who had a reputation for being what we today would call ‘a slut’. Now as we all know when ‘a slut’ is sucking a man’s toes, that is a very sexual act, but Mark, being a right winged hawk, was just as horrified by that toe sucking scandal as were the Baptists and as the Catholics still are to this very day, and so he made up that story about how this dirty slut was going to hell, but in his grace, she was forgiven by the tyrant Lord after she humbled herself in penance and sucked his toe. This story was a real tough one for Mark to come up with some stupid excuse for but he did manage to come up with something and that bit about ‘Jesus showed grace to sluts who sucked his toe’ has now become the official Roman Catholic explanation for that scandal of the toe sucking incident. The truth of the matter would be that Yeshua was caught with a woman who was obviously his sexual partner, which then created an enormous scandal, which then required the religious right to make up another one of those stupid excuses.
By the way, if you mention that toe sucking incident to a Christian, or especially to a Roman Catholic, they will stir up outrage at the thought that the virgin Messiah actually inserted an erect penis into a vagina, and especially when you consider that it was a vagina the religious right had damned at the time as being the vagina of a real slut. In response to this chorus of furious outrage I will reply by saying that we have had a Roman Catholic church for a couple of thousand years, and we have had no god here, since it is very well known by everyone that neither YAHWEH or Yeshua have ever attended Mass, and only Catholics are ever seen doing something like that. Therefore, who gives a fuck what the banished exiles have to say about anything, for when the world first listened to them they were cast into the dungeon where everyone has remained since that time, and for that reason alone it would be a good idea never to listen to such people ever, ever again.
The Gospel of Matthew was composed by a Jewish fundamentalist who was offended by some of the criticism leveled at the sacred laws found in the Bible. According to Mark, Moses brought down the Ten Commandments, and while it is true that Yeshua did what he wanted on the Sabbath and was just notorious for his persistence on this matter, there was a perfectly good excuse each time. According to Mark all those Bible laws were also brought down by Moses, with the exception of the food laws, which were human commandments. Therefore, Mark suggests, while it was true that Isaiah and Jeremiah in particular, condemned those stone age laws as forgeries, they did not mean all of them, since most of them were just fine, and only the food laws and the clean and unclean laws were human commandments added onto those laws by the Pharisees. The rest of those laws were fine, Mark insists, except for the fact that they needed to become more severe, for Moses was to easy on those people and thus did not toughen up those laws enough and therefore allowed people to get away with to much. This is a perverted version of the teaching of Yeshua and also a perversion of the message of the Jewish prophets.
Even the mild criticism of the food laws and the clean unclean laws was to much for a right wing fundamentalist like that Matthew and so therefore he copied Mark’s manuscript (beginning at Matthew chapter six he follows Mark) and step by step he edited out all the parts that would piss off a fundamentalist. He also added that bit about how the bible was infallibly inerrant, and some other fundamentalist came along later and cooked up that story about the virgin birth and added that thing on, for you see, it was against those six hundred or so sacred bible laws for Joseph to be the father of the Jewish Messiah, for Joseph was of Moabite descent, and according to the law, no Moabite could ever be accepted. For that reason sometime in the second century another Jewish fundamentalist cooked up the story of the virgin birth, which we know to be true, for there are extant copies of the Gospel of Matthew still in circulation during the middle of the second century which do not include that cooked up virgin birth story. A literary analysis of the manuscript also indicates that the virgin birth story was alien to the original manuscript.
The point to be made here is that for thousands of years no one ever knew Yeshua. He was a Jewish prophet, which meant that he was a revolutionary, the biggest difference being that he went much further than even the Jewish prophets ever dared to go. He was determined to be ‘the Messiah’ and no one can be ‘a savior’ without going all the way, and if a suffering and oppressed humanity was to ever be rescued and saved from the cruel attacks of senseless religion and its rancid superstitions, someone was going to have to go deep, deep into scandal before it would ever become acceptable to just be a human being again, with a penis or a vagina, without being attacked by fig leaf peddling snakes invading the Garden of Eden.
