Jesus meaning

Meaning

Salvation, Yah Saves

Etymology

From the noun ישועה (yeshua), salvation, or from (1) יה (yah), the name of the Lord, and (2) the verb ישע (yasha'), to save.

Related names

• Via יה (yah): See the 'browse by form' menu for a long list of yah-names.

• Via ישע (yasha'): Abishua, Bar-Jesus, Bath-shua, Chemosh, Elisha, Elishah, Elishua, Hosanna, Hosea, Hoshaiah, Isaiah, Ishi, Jason, Jeshua, Joshua, Malchi-shua, Mesha, Shuah

There are five separate individuals named Jesus in the Bible, which is not such a wonder since Jesus is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Joshua.

The most famous Jesus, of course, is Jesus the Nazarene, also known as Jesus Christ or the Messiah; the semi-biological son of Mary, son-by-law of Joseph and monogenes Son of God. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, lived as an infant in Egypt, moved to Nazareth and worked as a τεκτων (tekton), technician, assembler, until he was thirty years old. In the early days of his ministry he moved to Capernaum, and at the end of it he was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, tried by Pontius Pilate and executed at Golgotha. Three days later he resurrected and forty days after that he ascended to heaven.

Other men named Jesus in the New Testament are:

• An ancestor of Jesus in the Lucan genealogy (Luke 3:29), and only according to some translations. In Greek this name is spelled Ιωση (Jose), which only the King James and Young translations properly transliterate. The Darby translation speaks of Joses. The New International Version and New American Standard translations have Joshua. And the American Standard Version has Jesus.
• Joshua (Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8).
• A fellow worker of Paul named Jesus Justus (Colossians 4:11).
• A Jewish magician who Paul and Barnabas meet on Cyprus, named Bar-Jesus (a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic for Son Of Joshua).

The name Jesus was obviously quite common in New Testament times. The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus mentions at least twenty different people named Jesus in his works, one of these being Jesus son of Damneus, who became high priest when the previous high priest was deposed for executing James the Just, the brother of Jesus of Nazareth (Ant.20.9). Another Jesus whom Josephus wrote about was Jesus son of Ananias, who in 62 AD began walking about Jerusalem, loudly foretelling its destruction by the Romans in 70 AD .

Altogether, the name Jesus occurs 972 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

The name Jesus is the Greek transliteration of either the noun ישועה (yeshua), meaning salvation, or the name יהושע (Joshua) or its shortened form (ישוע) Jeshua. The latter two consists of two elements. The first part is the appellative יה (Yah) = יהו (Yahu) = יו (Yu), which in turn are abbreviated forms of the Tetragrammaton; the name of the Lord: YHWH.

The second element of the name Joshua, and the noun ישועה (yeshua), come from the verb ישע (yasha'), meaning to save or deliver:

The name Jesus is an English transliteration of a Greek transliteration of a Hebrew term that may both mean Salvation or Yah Will Save. Jesus may also simply be the English version of the Greek version of the Hebrew name Joshua, which would hence be the name by which Jesus was known by his contemporaries. Note that when we reverse the two segments of the name Joshua (יהושע), we get the name Isaiah (ישעיה). This is a known phenomenon in Hebrew: the name Joel, for instance (יואל) is the reverse of Elijah (אליה).

The story of Jesus (as told in the Gospels) is like the Mona Lisa: it's obviously a portrait but anyone who thinks that a portrait is all it is, clearly has more screws loose than a hardware store. In fact, the Gospel is so much more than a portrait that its biographical element is minute, even negligible and ultimately irrelevant. The historicity of the Bible is irrelevant, because the story of the Bible is not about history but about something within which history unfolds. And that something itself never changes: it facilitates all change and all growth (Luke 2:40, 2:52) but it itself never changes (Hebrews 13:8).

People like to think that the universe started at a point in time, which is silly because time is a function of the universe, so that instead: time began at a point in the universe, and the universe is greater than time. Entirely likewise, if the Bible were historical, then it would be bound by time and time would be greater than it. It isn't. The Bible is greater than time because it speaks of patterns that form the foundation of reality and of which time is a mere consequence.

Science speaks hopefully of an as-of-yet "missing" Law of Functional Information, which is not only more fundamental than time itself, it also suggests very strongly that "purpose" is the main motivator in the universe, even so much so that the very laws of nature assess all things in the universe, and score them according to their functionality, and either keep them or decompile them according to whether they "work" or not. The question this immediately generates is: what is the universe for? Well, glad you ask.

We don't know what tomorrow might bring because, starting with the fixed qualities of today, the universe allows a small set of different potential tomorrows, and there's no telling which one might actually come about. Next week is even so fuzzy that we can't even say anything for sure about next week's weather. Whatever we know of today, we know very little about next week. Next year is even fuzzier. Next century might be utterly unrecognizable to us today. Entirely likewise, if we had no records of yesterday, then a small set of different yesterdays could have brought about our present today, and which one actually did bring forth our present is not all that relevant. Likewise, last week may have varied in all sorts of ways, and a broad spectrum of qualities could have brought about our present. Likewise last year. Likewise last century. Ergo: it matters very little what "actually happened" 2000 years ago, what actually was said and who actually was where. If the gospels had been historical, they would have been utterly irrelevant by now.

Instead, like the Hebrew Bible of which the New Testament is a so-called "innovation," the gospels are not anecdotal and historical (and irrelevant by now) but algorithmical and lawful: they are true not because they speak of thing that "really happened" but because they speak of the patterns that run through reality at all times, that are eternal and cannot change.

The four versions of the Gospel of Jesus Christ have long been recognized as some of the most formidable and brilliant pieces of literature ever produced in the history of mankind. Like the Hebrew Scriptures, the gospels don't discuss a capped slit of history but the grand sweep of perpetual law. They are not anecdotal but algorithmical. Jesus is not merely in the past but equally in the present and the future. Whatever he may have been in the flesh back then, the Literary Jesus, the Jesus in the story (the only actually real Jesus), is the human embodiment of the eternal Logos, if you are a Greek, and if you are a Hebrew: the fulfillment of the blessed Torah (the perfect law of liberty: see James 1:25, 2 Corinthians 3:17, Galatians 5:1; also see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law).

People like to think that the story of Jesus is about a philosophy of neighborly love, a kind of popular humanism that endeavors everybody to simply be nice to each other, whilst declaring allegiance to some pagan creed, clasping amulets and symbols and repeating spells to invoke the deity to work his magic (that he didn't do on his own; he needs to be told). This is utter nonsense. The story of Jesus is not about becoming a better you, whilst telling the deity how you want it. The story of Jesus is about switching operating systems — kind of like switching from Windows to Linux, but then within your brain: switching the operating system of your consciousness. It's about completely deleting what you got, reformatting your core, and uploading a whole other operating system; not a better version of the one you had but a whole new species of operating system, a whole new set of protocols and parameters, an entire new way of doing everything.

The story of Jesus is about upgrading the software of your mind to an entirely different sort of looking at the world, and oneself, and God, and other people.

The story of Jesus is about getting a whole new heart (Ezekiel 36:26, Matthew 12:35), a whole new spirit (Psalm 51:10, Ezekiel 18:31), and a whole new mind (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23-24). It is impossible for anyone who still runs the old software to begin to imagine what the world looks like through upgraded eyes, that run on the new software. The New Testament is aimed at pagan people who run the old pagan code, and so it is written to run on the old pagan code. What happens when someone clicks the button that says "upgrade now" cannot be explained in old-software terms, but the myth that the whole upload is done is a flash and the reboot takes no time at all is an old-software lie. The upload takes years. Installing the new software may take a lifetime. The reboot almost invariably results in a whopping psychosis. It literally requires the old software to be decommissioned, decompiled and deleted. It's literally mind-blowing, and not in a pleasant way. It's literally a death of self: the death of someone who will never live again and won't ever be remembered.

If you "converted to Jesus" one Sunday morning, and it was all done in a flash of bright light and you felt never happier and loved and all that — then congratulations with your new found feelings, and enjoy them while they last, because ... you didn't convert to Christ. You've had sugar. You've been duped. You've been conscripted by evil people to serve in their armies and fight against foreign hordes in defense of "our way of life". It's all political and has nothing to do with God or the Bible or the People of the Promise.

A true conversion to Christ is deeply traumatic and humbling. Your rebirth doesn't make you a happy and confident grown-up, but a helpless squirming little babe. If you didn't have a community to feed and protect you, you wouldn't last a night. And for the first few years, you're not doing anything to secure your own survival, safety or even growth. So give thanks to and for the grown-ups.

The key to a new life in Christ is not some method, some magic spell or some ritual. The key is in Bible study — not the doctrinal or academic kind where piles of dead commentaries stump out whatever tries to grow, but the growing kind, the small kind, the living kind where one grows slowly into the direction of a calling, living voice that rolls like a breeze over the dunes of the ages and through the Bible's pages as through a door ajar (John 10:9). The key is in Bible study, but not the angry, argumentative kind but the slow-moving love-making kind, when words become kisses and drift like wisps of pure soul from one mind to the other: the kind that stills the waters of one's subconscious and allows one's soul to rise like a droplet in a mist of multitudes that reach for the Creator and meet him in inexpressible communion (Luke 24:45, 1 Thessalonians 4:17).

Ask any gorilla about humans and the gorilla will surely attest that the human is a great ape just like the gorilla. But immediately, the gorilla will guffaw and declare that there is nothing about the human that would make the human in any possibly perceivable or conceivable way superior to the gorilla. The gorilla is in no way equipped to assess why he is in a cage and the humans sit outside it looking in. In fact, the gorilla sits in his cage thinking he got the best spot in the house, with food being delivered by his human servants and more of those silly runts staring at his greatness from a respectful distance.

Entirely likewise: ask any English (or German or Greek) speaker about Hebrew and they will surely attest that Hebrew is a language just like English (or German or Greek), albeit a bit of a runt, equipped predominantly to express the concerns of primitive desert dwellers with cloven hooves and fraying tassels. But said simply and plainly: the gorilla has no idea how things really are, and there is no way to explain this to the gorilla. But perhaps the smartest and most mindful of gorillas can grasp that what mathematics is to the physical universe, so Hebrew is to consciousness. The working principles of Hebrew are identical to that of the human mind, or rather more precise: to the working principles of God's mind. Said somewhat simpler: the only way for the humans on planet earth to coalesce into a single unified world-mind — like a mental internet: all human minds connected in free conversation by merit of a single common protocol — is to adopt the working principles of the Hebrew language. The gorilla won't agree, but that's fine.

A child born blind will never comprehend colorful art, and a child born deaf will never comprehend symphonic music. A person who speaks no human language cannot begin to imagine what might happen to one's view on the world when one does. A person who speaks only one language cannot begin to imagine what thinking in another language is all about, when completely different etymological associations bring about a whole other kind of realism, a whole new speculative depth and even different dreams and another sense of humor. Someone who's never seen mathematical notation cannot begin to imagine how such notation liberates the ease with which one can handle large data and detect patterns. Likewise, someone who is not familiar with Hebrew cannot begin to imagine what happens when one has taken a few years to learn it.

The brilliance, depth and majesty of the Hebrew language cannot possibly be conveyed in gorilla terms, but both gorillas and enlightened human eat bananas, and since the reader is obviously an enlightened human, here's a banana:

The Hebrew Scriptures are not linear but comprise a giant fractal in which structures repeat at different levels of complexity (Psalm 78:2, Exodus 25:40, Hebrews 10:1, Matthew 6:10) and each word contains all other words (John 21:25, Ephesians 1:10). The words in an English text are like bricks in a wall. The words in a Hebrew texts are like neurons in a brain. No kidding. The Hebrew text comes with a mind that hovers over the words, and communicates with the reader on some superhuman level and allows the human to reach out and onto that spirit and grow toward it and toward anybody else who is animate by that same spirit (compare Genesis 1:2 to Psalm 42:7).

And for that, there's no magic spell or ritual, no formula, no possible sacrifice to bring. Instead, it comes from years of conversation, and in order to converse, one first has to learn the language in which to communicate — meaning that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to teach it Hebrew and familiarize it with the stories of the Bible from the get-go (Matthew 19:14). It also means that all religions are fake, and that any exercise that does not teach or preserve Hebrew or stress any of the many Hebrew principles (because Hebrew is much more than mere words), is fake, inert and ultimately deadly (1 Kings 18:29).

Being a "follower of Jesus" has nothing to do with doctrine, nothing with subscribing to creeds or statements of faith or even with theology and knowing all the right answers. As Paul says: in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female ..." (Galatians 3:28, see 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Colossians 3:11). Being a follower of Jesus has nothing to do with any sort of religion, with its fixed certainties and graven imaginations, and everything with a wide-open marketplace of knowledge and ideas, and its ongoing conversation that is forever guaranteed by the perfect language of freedom (and results in technology that works, and works the same always). Following Jesus means rejecting one's dependency on the language of one's youth and the tribe of one's origin, and following him into Hebrew, the language of the entire universe, that is demonstrated by the Bible and which makes perfect and without blemish one's communion with one's human fellows and so doing with the Creator (Matthew 22:37-40).

Having one's mind run on Hebrew is like having a constant fountain of inspiration (John 7:38), a well from which flows a whole new sort of realism (Colossians 2:3): an automatic understanding of the world (1 Corinthians 2:10, John 4:25, 14:26, 2 Timothy 2:7) that lets one make decisions that are always slightly better than those of the next guy. When one's mind runs on Hebrew, one is much more prone to find ways to unite with one's neighbor: better communication, better empathy, better laws to govern one's community, better science, better literary art, better business (with the understanding that "better business" does not make the businessman richer and his competition poorer, but rather the whole world better, prosperous, liberated, peaceful and joyful: Genesis 12:3, 18:18, 22:18, 26:4, Psalm 82:8, Daniel 7:14, Ephesians 3:15, Revelation 11:15).

So no, the purpose of the Bible is not to promote some doctrine or creed (that aims to compress the Bible in a few bumper sticker slogans: something the Bible itself was apparently unable to do) but rather to teach the language of creation (i.e. a human language that closely mimics the laws of nature), the one that made the old world and will make the new one too: the language that leads the way for all languages of the earth and will ultimately unite them in a single well-managed cooperative.

If you, dear reader, had lived 100,000 years ago, you would have had the same brain you have today but you would have been entirely unable to imagine what life would be like if you had a language as complex and widely spoken and fabulously informed as English, and a computer (or phone) that's part of a world-wide network that contains more information than the largest library anywhere on earth. The Hebrew Torah is the analog equivalent of a computer, and all Torah students form a Living Internet of a depth and scope that cannot be imagined by anyone not logged on.

People like to think that God speaks English and understands our prayers when we pray in English. But does he now? Do we understand gorillas when they growl at us? Gorillas don't put words into their vocalizations, only feelings, but we humans understand things through our words, which gorillas don't have. So even if we could imagine the feelings of the gorilla as expressed by the gorilla, we're not gorillas and despite our superior human intelligence and technologies, we cannot imagine what the world is like for the gorilla or what his own growling means to him.

Hebrew is as far removed from English as English is from gorilla-language (Isaiah 55:8-9). English is a savannah, a flat grassland, but Hebrew is a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, like a rainforest or a jungle, not only incomprehensibly deep and complex but also the very lungs of the world at large. Hebrew contains as much information per page as an acre of jungle does life, vastly more than an acre of grassland or a page of English. People native to the savannah will never comprehend the jungle, and many people native to the jungle never venture out but stay safely in their village square. All that is fine, of course, but sometimes a savannah-native learns about the jungle and becomes infatuated by tales of its vast complexities and its oceans of treasures buried just beneath the canopy, and searches out those who have always lived there and listens to their legends and takes them seriously and sets out into the jungle's wilderness and explores it just for the sake of exploration. Many such jungle-exploring savannah-natives die of a wide variety of maladies that they didn't think to prepare for. But some go in with due respect and with a group of natives to guide and help them. And it has happened that by the bravery and resolve of such mixed parties entire ancient cities were exposed and long forgotten peoples were brought back into memory (Isaiah 28:11).

For a closer look at why and how massively English fails, and is well on its way to complete annihilation, see our article on the name Mesopotamia. For now, suffice it to say that unlike English, Hebrew works with easily recognizable word-clusters (clouds, if you will), so that all the individual words of that cluster describe items in the real world that closely relate in essence. A person who thinks natively in English (or Greek) cannot imagine this (and that's fine) but to give an example: in Hebrew, the words for agricultural field, human essence, soul-bearing blood and imitation (from which comes language) are very closely related (they're all members of the דמם, damam, cluster). And this means that the story of Adam's creation, while a mere primitive origin myth in English, in Hebrew yields a brilliant meditation on the principles of humanity and society as it emerged during the agricultural revolution, within but distinctly separate from the animal realm. (The Hebrew phrase for "in the beginning" also means "in any little head" and speaks of consciousness: the universe perceived rather than the universe per se. The God of consciousness is consciousness. His name is I AM).

In antiquity, there were no dictionaries and grammar books, and so the stories demonstrated the language — not only its words and their webs of etymological associations, but also its archetypes, its narrative styles and tropes, its scope and concerns, its working principles, its self-references and pronouns and personifications, even its music and rhymes and rhythms, its tones and moods and colors; all demonstrated by the stories that were told.

In every language basin, specially trained bards made the rounds reciting large swaths of epic poetry, simply to expose everybody to a single unifying language (writing systems could only be forged when the languages had standardized, as every Tolkien fan knows: there were three such systems in Elam and environs, seven in the Semitic realm and nine in Indo-European). So yes, humanity's foundational stories (Homer, Moses, the Vedas, and certainly the Quran also) literally created the human world, by exposing all candid but uncultivated minds to the same complex language and narrative archetypes and tropes to relate to and feed on. The authors of the gospels depicted this principle as the familiar image of the Infant Word wrapped in cloth and deposited in an fodder trough for animals, and matured it into the widely miscomprehended rite of communion: John 6:53-55. As any Hebrew-speaking child knows (but the Pharisees evidently didn't: John 6:52), these things are obviously not about cannibalism but about language learning: the noun בשר (basar), meaning flesh, derives from the verb בשר (basar) meaning to bring good news, even tidings of comfort and joy.

If certain remote villages slanged-up and would in time surely pinch-off from the greater language basin and become incomprehensible and dry up and ultimately go mute like animals, then the bards would come in and simply recite the text, so that the speech of the people would be restored and the slang-mutations driven out (and the abominations, mutations and deviations flushed from the goblin tunnels; the Hebrew word for noun also means bone; hence Ezekiel's valley of dry bones). Language pools below a certain critical mass of speakers simply die, like lambs strayed off into the wilderness. The job of the bards was to bring the lost sheep back to the herd, and to heal their verbal diseases (see Judges 5:10).

But a hugely important part of any story in Hebrew is the very serious part played by the many puns and wordplays, by direct or implied nods to historical characters and winks to preceding events or earlier Scriptures, by the meaning of the names, and by the understanding that anything that happens on earth has its counter-happening in heaven (and even reverberates in some form in the underworld). Those are not superfluous details but rather quite essential, and leaving those elements out is like leaving out all the verbs in English. It's where the breath of the Bible sits, its blood or spirit. Leaving those parts out is like leaving the love out of a marriage or the soul out of a human body.

While the most obvious data and storylines of the Hebrew Scriptures might be translatable into other languages, much of the less immediate data and all of the working principles and etymological networks that sit like mycelium amidst the roots cannot. That means that when folks began to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, they stripped the stories of their humanity (only humans wear clothes: Genesis 3:7, 3:21), their billowing robes and garments with their intricate patterns and meaning, and surrendered the violated naked core to die like a beast by public exposure.

When the Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures were beginning to be produced, the Jewish elite thought it an excellent idea. But soon it was observed that the readers of the Greek version didn't get the point, because the point wasn't incorporated in their version and was literally lost in translation. And so the Greek-readers began to persecute the Hebrew-readers, who did get the point but couldn't explain it just like you can't explain humanity to a gorilla.

By the time the horror of the mistake was discovered (centuries into the modern era), the Hebrew-speakers remembered the vision of Ezekiel, who saw seventy elders of the house of Israel committing vile deeds in the dark, each in front of his own idol (Ezekiel 9:10-12). And so they named this disastrous Greek translation "Septuagint" (after the Latin word for seventy; see our article on εβδομηκοντα, hebdomekonta, seventy), and came up with fitting origin stories like Marvel explaining Spiderman. But those who knew Ezekiel, knew the complaint captured in the name.

If there was any virtue to the Greek translation (or the Latin one that followed, or the German and English ones that followed the Latin one), its virtue was exclusively its ability to lead people back to Hebrew. Whoever reads any translation and is able to see past the plastic nonsense and perceive the waning glow of the original, will drop everything and do whatever it takes to get familiar, intimately familiar, with the working principles of the Hebrew language, and so with the mind of God (1 Corinthians 2:16, see Isaiah 40:12). A translation is certainly better than nothing at all, but no Greek text, not even the New Testament, demonstrates the mind of God. Only Hebrew can do this.

In the first century, though, the Greek translation was still highly regarded and used widely by both Jewish and Greek scholarly elites. Jesus of Nazareth was not pleased with that and showed on several occasions that the Greek translation simply didn't cut it — probably most famously in the synagogue of Capernaum (Luke 4:16-30), where Jesus was presented with a Greek translation of Isaiah, and hence cited the Septuagint's expanded version of Isaiah's proclamation, to include the promise of recovery of the sight of the blind (possibly after Psalm 146:7-8). Antiquity's proverbial Blind Man was Homer, so yes, this is about the Greek language and the blind society its foundational texts are heir to (hence Paul heard Jesus but never saw him properly, and only as a light that struck him blind). The Jewish elders, slowly picking up the fact that Jesus was effectively equating them to the merry men of Sodom (Genesis 19:11, also see Nahum 1:5-6 and of course Matthew 11:23), reacted in rage and decided to throw Jesus off a cliff, which was a typical Greco-Roman thing to do (see Taygetus and the Tarpeian Rock, for instance; in Hebrew stories, criminals would get stones thrown at them, rather than be thrown off one). And so doing they came to embody none other than Sisyphus: the Greek tyrant whom the gods had condemned to drive a huge boulder up a hill, only to lose control near the top and watch it roll back down again time after time.

Another clear example of Jesus demonstrating the failure of the Septuagint occurs in Matthew 22:44-45, where Jesus demonstrates the absurdity of translating both the hallowed Name יהוה (yhwh) or YHWH, and the noun אדן ('adon), mister or lord, with the same one-size-fit-all word κυριον (kurion), effectively equating God's royalty with that of any earthly monarch or governmental authority (Psalm 110:1). And this is precisely the polar opposite of what the Septuagint did with the word אלהים ('elohim), one Hebrew word that entirely eludes the comprehension of Greek, and in Greek becomes either God or gods or human rulers, according to the good humor of the translators. We'll have a look at this word אלהים ('elohim) further below, but for now let's just say that Jesus is as Jesus does (John 5:19).

In case the reader is still a bit foggy about what we're saying here, let's just say it loud and clear. Instead of talking about the deity as something far out there on a snow-capped mountain or in the heavens high above, the Hebrew language demonstrates the deity by being complete and whole and solid like a Dyson Sphere without cracks or leakage. This is why the Body of Christ speaks and thinks in Hebrew, not Greek or English. The Body of Christ consists of people who have the mind of Christ in common, and that mind speaks Hebrew. This is why anybody who is serious about Christ studies Hebrew (in our modern world, anybody with a cell phone can study Hebrew entirely for free). People who are not serious about Christ don't study Hebrew.

The Body of Christ comprises anybody who is in Christ and who partakes in the anointing (1 John 2:20). People who are not in Christ are under Christ. The Greek for "under Christ" is the familiar word Christian — we show this at length in our article on the name Christian: the "-ian" suffix (or in Greek: -ιανος, -ianos) means "under the authority of". Hence the word Ασιοσ (Asios) described a native Asian, but an Ασιανος (Asianos), an Asiatic, was a foreigner living in Asia, under the supervision of the actual Asians. This suffix was also used to indicate under which star sign one was born: the term σκορπιανος (skorpianos), denoted someone born under Scorpio; the word λεοντιανος (leontianos), someone born under Leo, and παρθενιανος (parthenianos), someone born under Virgo (after παρθενος, parthenos, virgin).

A Christian is someone who is under Christ, not in Christ, someone who knows of the anointing but has no part in it. The first Christians said they followed Christ but actually didn't and continued to stubbornly speak Greek, then Latin, then German and English, drifting ever further away from the knowledge of God, not knowing God but only knowing of God if that is even possible (it isn't: one either knows God or one knows idolatry, which can only imagine a local God who exists within Existence; we'll discuss this further below).

The first "in-Christs", the actual followers of Jesus, were invariably referred to as People of the Way, evidently to emphasize their distinction from the Christians, those under-Christ but not in-Christ. The actual "in-Christs", who were actually serious about Christ, actually returned to the Hebrew language and did whatever it took to preserve this language and its sacred Scriptures (from some of them came the tradition today known as Judaism, which is by no means a perfect organization of perfectly pleasant people: even the physical Jesus has stomach acid and bowel movements.).

Once more, loud and clear: the friends, disciples and brethren of Jesus are Hebrew speaking, Torah studying folk who reject all labels but that of love (Mark 14:28; compare Song of Solomon 2:4 to Romans 13:8). The enemies and murderers of Jesus became the Greek and Latin speaking Chistian Church of Emperor Constantine: hence the name Roman Catholicism. For centuries those people have accused the People of the Way of having rejected (even murdered) Christ, while in fact the reverse is true, and the latter should not believe the former. Nobody should believe the former. The former confuse the reign of Christ with the reign of some human honcho. The People of the Way are those who reject tyranny of any kind and only embrace the freedom that exists in a kingdom of which God is the King and Torah is the constitution.

Roman Christianity has nothing to do with the Bible or the Gospel, and everything with statecraft and Roman Imperial Theology, which is pagan. The sole virtuous purpose of the Roman Church is that is maintains the broad outer court of the temple, and the sole purpose of that outer court was to guide people from the utterly lawless outer darkness (where humans are beasts without words, without technology, without manners, without rules or any sense of what a rule is, let alone a whole law), through a winding trajectory of learning, onto the inner courts of the priests who serve God alone. So no, the Gospels are not Christian, they are "in-Christ". Though Greek-speaking, the Gospels are designed to show the folly of Greek and the majestic splendor of the Hebrew upon which they are so obviously founded.

Unfortunately for everybody, the kings of men discovered that running the outer court is rather lucrative, and barricaded the gates to the inner court and plastered them over so that no one could find them and everybody was forced to stay on the outer court and partake in the endless rat race.

If a Christian church is not teaching its people Hebrew, then it teaches pagan delights, which are without exception fetters of bondage. The Bible is all about information technology (i.e. language, writing, science, narrative), which is global, organic and boundless. A Christian church, however, is part of the state's machinery: an institute of law enforcement. And churches are much cheaper than police stations, which is why for centuries they were so lavishly funded by kings and emperors.

Today we have sex and drugs and the evening news as main instruments of popular bondage, which is why the churches are massively abandoned. The main difference between modern propaganda and the church is that the church, in all her depravity, always kept the hinges of a tiny door, way in the back, well-oiled: a door upon the study of Semitic languages, and many church-goers found that door and entered it and left the outer court behind for a life within the mind of God. Now that the churches are being abandoned, that little door is going to close, and whoever is in stays in and whoever is out stays out.

The pagan world is the animal world, and will be fine. The Body of Christ is the Baby that will be born: the Temple that will forever govern the living world. The Roman Church, or the outer court, is the placenta: very necessary for a while but only until the birth.

The Body of Christ is a real and measurable entity, very much alive in our world today. It's a stateless and landless and decentralized republic that runs on freedom and facilitates science, global trade and any kind of story-telling in any language known to man. The Body of Christianity is precisely the opposite of the Body of Christ, namely a centralized tyranny that functions on violence and the threat of violence (that's the function of the crucifix: reminding people of the death penalty for wanting freedom and sovereignty), peddles in bondage and harvests the enslaved for everything they're worth.

Like Jesus and James the Just, Judaism and Islam are Abrahamic brothers, but Christianity is not Abrahamic or even Semitic but Japhetic — that is: Christianity as a singular culture; many individuals within the Christian culture understand and obey short Abrahamic commands despite their verbal handicap (compare Genesis 9:27 to Q.18.22). Many others born into Christianity realize in time that they were always native to Shem rather than to Japheth (like puppies and babies growing up together: at first the puppies dominate but when the babies begin to stand up, the puppies become submissive and the babies set out on their path to becoming human).

Christian Orthodoxy first and later Protestantism attempted to restore the decentralized nature of Christ, but failed to eradicate their Greco-Roman idols (and creeds and dogmas). Rationalism and Science managed to do away with the idols, and became a true monotheism, but in faith only, as Rationality was unable to demonstrate the Unity it believed in, let alone restore and animate it into a single universal wisdom. Only Hebrew can do that.

Not everybody who speaks Hebrew actually comprehends its depths or its divine unity, or uses Hebrew all the time to continuously and deliberately commune with God in some glorious way. Jesus washes feet too. And not everybody who speaks Hebrew refrains from murdering, or keeps the Sabbath; these are little more than Koko the Talking Gorilla (see Q.2.65 and Psalm 49:20, 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10). But anyone who comes to understand that God is One, does so because of the presence of Hebrew in the world — and this includes Islam, because Muhammad received the Quran from Gabriel, whose name is Hebrew. And also note that without Jethro of Midian there would not have been a receiving of the Law at Sinai, and without Islam, there would not have been a European Renaissance. Without these two magnificent witnesses of the One God, Europe would neither have universities, nor public courts, nor central banks, nor popular governments.

It also includes Science, which explains why half of the Nobel prizes go to people of Jewish extraction and the other half to people who learned from people of Jewish extraction. And if that doesn't impress the reader, realize that the text you are reading now is written in the Latin alphabet, which is an adaptation of the Greek one, which is an adaptation of the Hebrew one (which was largely created by the Phoenicians and perfected with vowel-notation by the Israelites around the time of king David; hence the temple of YHWH built as a joint venture of kings Solomon and Hiram). No other language produced the alphabet because no other language is natively endowed with such analytic precision and depth of complexity. The intelligence of Hebrew sits within the language itself, independent from the intelligence of any speaker who tells some story. The Hebrew language itself is vastly more intelligent than any other language, which is why the Hebrew language basin could produce the alphabet. And this is also why all other languages adopted the alphabet and made its bards literate, so as to save their legacies from demise and oblivion (Psalm 16:10). Hebrew is the Good Shepherd. Greek is the sheepdog. Latin the pig dog. And the rest is cattle.

The story of Jesus is designed to function as the point of intersection of multiple axes of progression — it is also self-similar to the story of the mutual domestication (δαμαζω, damazo) of Homo sapiens and dog (κυων, kuon): the first being the proverbial nerd of the great ape family, and the latter the proverbial nerd of the wolf family, both in their own world "men of sorrows" but together the duo that guided the whole of animal kind onto this paradisical modern world of ours. The difference between Judaism and Islam is that Islam never made friends with the canine Greeks and remained dogless, albeit as much Homo sapiens as Judaism, which became the shepherd (ποιμην, poimen) of the Greco-Latin language basin from which came the world's governments (including the Christian churches) that governed the herds comprising all other languages. Islam never cooperated with dogs and for very long remained hunter-gatherer, proverbially on the move (compare the names Nod and Arabia, but carefully note that the popular understanding of the flood of Noah is flat wrong, and that the final generation of Cain provided the everlasting qualities of the tabernacle service: tents, music and bronze utensils). A good dog obeys his shepherd but no dog will ever understand his shepherd or the world he is part of. Hebrew and Arabic, however, are so very similar that if a hunter-gatherer would desire to take up husbandry, they could learn it quickly. Otherwise, agriculture requires oxen and donkeys, but dogs can surely be done without.

Without the Hebrew alphabet, there would have been no Greek philosophy, statecraft or science, no Roman Empire, no Christianity and no Islam. There would have been no science. There would have been no freedom.

Not everybody who confesses that God is One actually understands why that is so. But if the Torah creates reality-as-known-by-consciousness, and Hebrew demonstrates the Torah, then Judaism is the box in which the Torah is kept. This box is part wood and part gold and these two don't mix and are nothing alike. The box can't be all gold (no one could have lifted it) or all wood (it would have quickly fallen apart). The Torah is one, but the box has parts: a cover that comes off, with Cherubim whose wings touch atop it. And the box sits within a much larger complex, but this is not a religious complex (in the common sense of the word) but rather a technological complex. Its manufacturers are technicians (see Exodus 31:1-11), and note that the words "technology", "textile" and "text" al derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root "teks-" meaning to weave. This is not a coincidence. As noted above, the earthly profession of Jesus and Joseph is in Greek called τεκτων (tekton), meaning "assembler". This word comes from the same PIE root meaning to weave.

Someone (Thomas Nagel, actually) once asked what it's like to be a bat, and concluded that only a bat knows what it is like to be a bat. That's why a bat is a bat: a bat is something that knows what it is like to be a bat.

The same goes for God. Only God knows what it is like to be God. We humans don't. For us humans, God appears literally like an unimaginable singularity without parts — and if Existence is the grand working-together network of all things that exists (Romans 8:28), and all things that exist, do exist because they emerge from Existence, then we cannot even say that God exists! God does not exist because God does not emerge from Existence. If God existed, he would depend on Existence, and Existence would be greater than God. Instead, Existence depends on God, and emerges from God. And God is One.

Of course, this is only a word-trick, but an important one as it demonstrates that English cannot consider God's existence; only Semitic languages can. This is because a language like English reckons things after their static appearance and their category, whereas Semitic languages reckon behaviors, and things after their behaviors. When we say in English: "the dog is in the street", we mean to say that the thing called dog is located in the realm called street, regardless of what it is doing there. In Hebrew, however, the verb "to be" describes a thing's defining behavior, whatever that might be. So in Hebrew, "the dog is in the street" means that the dog is engaged in the defining behavior of a dog (and happens to be doing that in the street): the dog is doing the dog-thing, the thing that only the dog knows how to do. When in English we say "God is" or "God exists" we mean that God has a quality in common with all other things that "are" or "exist" and is thus, in fact, one of them. That is fundamentally false.

When in English we say "God exists" we claim that God is local and exists within Existence along everything else that exists. This is a pagan model, and it doesn't really matter how many gods we imagine to exist locally, one or five or seven hundred: local gods are always part of a polytheistic model. In English, God does not exist, because God is doing the God-thing long before Existence emerges from God doing the God-thing.

Imagine a painting, a painting of some road with houses on it, whose lines of perspective all converge upon a focal point on the horizon. Now imagine a painting with the focal point outside the painting. There you go. If the painting is your model of reality, and the focal point of your reality sits outside your scope while all lines of perspective obviously point at it, then you know of God (Romans 1:20). Not all paintings are the same. Not all paintings have the focal point outside it. There have been many people in the past whose focal point sat within their reality. Not all of them understood how perspective works, and many didn't comprehend the pervasive importance of the focal point, but some did. These were people who could talk with God the way one talks to a friend (Exodus 33:11).

All this doesn't mean that God is a singularity (the English verb "to be" does not apply to God), it just means that He appears as one to us, either outside or else on the very edge of what can be perceived or imagined, when everything that exists is recognized as dynamic part of a single all-encompassing whole: not merely some theoretical Theory of Everything but a conscious comprehension of all the relative qualities of every little thing (Luke 12:7, Psalm 103:14) and every little breath (Matthew 6:26) and every little thought (Psalm 139:2) in the entire universe. How God might "unfold" in His own realm, is entirely beyond our speculative abilities, like talking about latitude greater than ninety, or time shorter than the Planck-length, or densities beyond that of a singularity. God is where a whole other kind of reality commences, which is entirely none of our business and beyond anything we can imagine.

We know that God is One and not Two or Five Hundred because creation is One as well, and the Oneness of Creation is not part of creation but the fundamental reality within which creation exists, from which it emerges and that keeps the whole thing going forever. Oneness is greater than anything that exists within Existence because it came before anything that exists within Existence, and governs and determines everything within Existence. This is why everything that goes up must come down, why energy is preserved, why gravity cancels out the strongelectroweak force, why baryon number is preserved, why electrical charge is always balanced. The nature of God is One (see Romans 1:20, and also Matthew 12:25, John 17:21-23, Ephesians 4:1-6), and humanity can partake in that nature (2 Peter 1:4, Hebrews 12:10) so as to embody the Logos (if you're Greek) and fulfill the Torah (if you're Semitic), with the sole purpose of pointing toward the One God who alone is God and the Father of all, above us all and within us all (Zephaniah 3:17, Joel 2:27, Luke 17:21, Revelation 21:22).

God, who is One, produces the Torah, which produces creation, which produces man, who produces Hebrew that contains the Torah that contains the mind of God. And somewhere in there, there sits an event horizon that separates creation from Creator, but only the mind that understands the Creator understands where creation ends. Only a person who does not know God, seeks God, and seeks him in personal enlightenment and higher states of consciousness and mantras and symbols and self-centered nonsense like that. A person who knows God (as unknowable singularity), finds God in the embrace and free conversation with fellow humans, so long as this conversation occurs in a perfect language. This is why God is love, and humans seek to establish among each other wholeness, virtue, comfort, sympathy, legal allegiance and a place like a womb to organically grow into whatever God imagines.

As noted above, narrative stories in the Bible are part of a vast fractal pattern, so that each story explains every other story, and all stories are part of a single super-story, whose outline is given in the Creation Week. The story of Jesus is obviously a fourth-day story, with the Torah being the Great Light (compare Genesis 1:16 to Isaiah 9:2), and every single human mind that contains the Torah and runs on its software a single star (see Genesis 15:5, Daniel 12:3, Nehemiah 4:21, Matthew 12:2).

In the Greek story, the literary character called Jesus (the only real Jesus there is) is called the Son of God. This is not disputed. But the sole purpose of that epithet is to inform the reader what real entity in the Hebrew Bible this Greek literary character called Jesus refers to: which entity in Hebrew becomes Jesus in Greek. Nobody in the original audience of the gospels would have made a mistake about this: the Son of God is whatever embodies the Word of God (Genesis 15:1), which is the Torah, which is that what the Hebrew language demonstrates (1 Chronicles 17:13, 22:10; see Psalm 2:7, also see Isaiah 43:6).

When the House of Israel was still in Egypt, the whole of Israel developed Hebrew and the whole of Israel was the Son of God: "Thus says the Lord, 'Israel is My son, My firstborn'" (Exodus 4:22). The prophet Hosea cites this and connect it directly to the Exodus (Hosea 11:1) and Matthew inserts this line from Hosea (Matthew 2:15) to make it absolutely perfectly clear to everybody that the literary Jesus of his gospel reiterates Joshua among the People of Israel on their way out of Egypt (hence too the obvious link between Jesus and Pesah).

The catch here is that not the whole House of Israel embodied the Torah — just like not all great apes became humans, not all flat-footed animals became great apes and not all mammals became flat-footed — and the epithet "Son of God" applied only to the working core, scraped clean of its barnacles, freed of its dead weight and cleared of its garbage. Like a statue chiseled from a block of marble, the House of Israel was clipped on all sides, to ever more expose the working core: that within the House that actually embodied the Torah.

As noted above, the Bible is about consciousness: the universe perceived rather than the universe per se. And as we explain in greater detail in our article on the name Thessalonica, the Word could only assume human form when "humanity had developed beyond a certain level of social and intellectual complexity". Said otherwise, if anybody living 100,000 years ago had somehow conceived of Relativity Theory, they would have taken their insights to the grave with them because nobody would have thought of preserving them. For any kind of insight to truly take root, humanity at large must be ready to receive it.

In the Bible, the name Adam describes the most rudimentary definition of consciousness of any living creature alive on earth at any time — so that whatever goes for Adam goes for all of us (Eve is the "mother of all life", what we moderns call the biosphere). In Noah, humankind definitely separates from animal kind (hence "they knew not until the flood came"; Matthew 24:39), which not merely speaks of budding "sapiens" or intelligence but much rather (in Shem) language: giving names to things and creating a duplicate of the world within the unified collective mind of everybody who agrees on those names.

In Peleg, mankind's language breaches into two separate methodologies, namely accumulation (Tower of Babel) versus efficiency (Abraham). This implies that the language of the Tower builders functions simply on the premise of slapping any arbitrary label upon whatever object has to be named (thing one, thing two, ..., thing five hundred, ..., thing one thousand), whereas Abraham begins to focus on the organization of things named, syntax and etymology: the relationships of things rather than their uniqueness (things 1: thing 1a, 1b; things 2: thing 2a, 2b, 2c). Since in Abraham's system, only things 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b and 2c correspond to visible things, the words for "things 1" and "things 2" begin to denote "invisible realms": imagination and mythology enters man's mind, as man begins to see beyond the visible. This is where the Word of God first engages man (Genesis 15:1).

From Abraham's way comes the observation that vastly more data can be retained when a few rules are upheld, which in turn leads to Moses, in whose generation the Torah is received: the set of rules that will ultimately allow mankind's consciousness to contain the entire universe, and hence break out of it and go beyond. By the time of the Exodus, the peoples of the world have developed collective identities: the mythologies and legendariums shared like words of a language among human individuals form a single living animal. Those spiritual animals — those collective realities whose "bodies" consist of "cells" that are the human individuals that cling to those stories — are the ones targeted in the Canaan campaign: all the slaughter of Canaanite peoples first and Moabites and Ammonites and Philistines later, are of course not about physical genocide (what a silly thing to think: the Law forbids רצח, rasah: Exodus 20:13), but about eliminating people's foundational texts and therewith their collective identities.

In David's time, the alphabet is completed and the entire world embraces it as it would a global king. David's son would build the Temple at the heart of an empire of dazzling proportions — and we have known for a while now that this empire, though very real, was not a physical empire just like the slaughter of the Canaanites was not a physical slaughter. Of this son of David, the one who would build the Temple, God himself says: "I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me" (2 Samuel 7:14).

It's the Temple-building part that is the key. The entire rest of the House of Israel, or even the world at large, only exists to serve that most intimate Temple-building faculty.

Directly after the Exodus, certain native Israelites began to fall away and the rest needed leadership. Jesus of Nazareth embodies that which made the House of Israel God's Son and Firstborn, with the understanding that the term "firstborn" does not refer to the order in which on was born (or even one's physical birth all together), but rather declared whichever son was the "first" among those born, or rather the "chief of the sons" (and since one's sons are the stones of one's house, the "firstborn" was the same as the "head stone": see Psalm 118:22). And this quality was transferable (as elaborately demonstrated by Esau: Genesis 25:27-34).

Since Jesus is self-similar to Joshua, and Joshua was not a Jew but an Ephraimite, and Ephraim was a son of Joseph (and an Egyptian mother), the father of Jesus was Joseph, whose strength, like his famous namesake, was his ability to explain dreams (Matthew records no fewer than five dream sequences between Mary's conception and the move to the Galilee: Matthew 1:20, 2:12, 2:13, 2:19 and 2:22). The whole Pauline half of the New Testament is explained by Joshua's good friend Caleb, who, although representing Judah as one of the twelve spies, actually was a Kenizzite, an aboriginal Canaanite, whose tribe had been adopted into Judah (as hinted at in Exodus 12:38 and Romans 11:24).

The shibboleth episode makes it abundantly clear that not only the creation of Adam, the Exodus and the building of the Temple but also the period of the Judges is about language formation and really nothing else. By the end of the First Temple period and despite their pervasive lisp, or perhaps because of it, the tribe of Ephraim had attained the epithet "Firstborn of God" (Jeremiah 31:9). In the midst of the exile though, only Judah retained Hebrew and kept the Torah and only Judah remained the Son of God (Ezekiel 21:10). Then, when Judah massively turned to the Greek Septuagint, only those who retained Hebrew, and preserved every jot and tittle of the Torah, remained the Son of God. Those people (native Jews and adoptees like Caleb) who stuck to the Hebrew Torah, are embodied by the Gospels as Jesus of Nazareth.

And if this is confusing, consider English, which is one single language but is spoken by many speakers, who all derive their individual consciousness and sense of reality from that one single language. So is English one, and all speakers come to drink from its one fountain, or is it fractured into a cloud of dust and dispersed over all those separate heads? It's obvious a single oneness and not a cloud of dust, because the cloud of dust would quickly dissipate, while English remains because it is one, and its oneness is guaranteed by the standards maintained by the speakers. It really doesn't matter how many people speak English, because English is always one, or else it's no longer a language. Likewise Jesus of Nazareth: he embodies the Hebrew that conveys the Torah that demonstrates God, and is necessarily One, despite (or even because of) the many people in whose mind this strictly unified language exists.

The confusion continues in the meaning of the Hebrew word that often (but not always) is translated as "son". The Hebrew language names things after behavior, not after substance or category (or sexual reproduction), so no, a son is certainly not something that is of the same "substance" as any parent, but something that does what the parent does, irrespective of the level of complexity this is done on. If the parent is One and the parent's signifying behavior is to maintain unity, then whatever unifies and is unified is the son. So no, Jesus is certainly not the "Son of God" the way Apollo is the son of Zeus: disjoined and autonomous and perfectly allowed by the laws of nature to rise against Zeus and come up with other ideas. This unfortunate confusion is entirely due to the meaning of the word "son" in Greek. Just like in English we can only truthfully say that God does not exist, so in Greek we can only say that God has no son. When Gabriel spoke through Muhammad, both knew that their audience was blinded by Greek thought, and so emphasized in every chapter of the Quran that God has no son. This is entirely correct. God has no son.

The Hebrew word for son, namely, is בן (ben), while the verb בין (bin), means to discern or create space between things. From this word for son derives the word for daughter, namely בת (bat), while the word for house or temple is בית (bayit). The verb בנה (bana), means to build. That means that the familiar image of "living stones" being built into a "living temple" (1 Peter 2:1-7) may be a fantastic metaphor in English, but in Hebrew it's perfectly native realism: these relationships are baked into the language itself, and were true long before anybody's story even started. The word for stone is אבן ('eben). The word for father is אב ('ab).

In Hebrew, an arrow is called a "son of the bow" (Job 41:28) or "son of the quiver" (Lamentations 3:13), and a spark is called "son of the flame" (Job 5:7). A single herd animal a son of the herd" (Genesis 18:7). A plant that only lives one night is a "son of night" (Jonah 4:10), and a fruitful vineyard is a "son of fatness" (Isaiah 5:1). A single prophet is called a "son of the prophets" (2 Kings 2:3), a single mighty-man a "son of the mighty-men" (1 Samuel 14:52), and a single bad guy a "son of wickedness" (2 Samuel 3:34). When an arrow does something else than sit on a bow, it is no longer a son of the bow. When a prophets stops being a prophet, they are no longer a son of the prophets. In Greek, a son can rise against his father. In Hebrew he cannot. And when he does, he cannot live (2 Samuel 18:15).

The Hebrew word for "God" as introduced in Genesis 1:1, namely אלהים ('elohim), is also used to mean "gods" (Exodus 20:3) or "[human] rulers" (Exodus 21:6), which demonstrates that this word describes any centralizing authority or governance, any societal guiding or order-making in chaos, and certainly not the "genus" God or any specific person or being, or the — this is so utterly absurd — "substance" of God in the sense in which Paul speaks of the kinds of flesh of men, animals, fish or birds (1 Corinthians 15:39). If God could be thought of as having substance, his substance is that of words, since words take up no space or time and have no mass or speed of locality, and hence exist outside of spacetime. God is pure mind, and the working essence of our word אלהים ('elohim) may be compared to that of the word "messenger", which describes anything at all that conveys any sort of message in any which way, and certainly does not speak of the qualities or personhood or "substance" of the entity that carries the message. In Hebrew, it's the doing that counts, not whoever is doing it.

Our English word "god" simply means: whatever your life is centered on, and whatever you revere as most central in your life. For many of us, that's sex and drugs and the evening news. For many others it's their belly — and the belly is the seat of one's emotions, meaning that people "whose god is their belly" (Philippians 3:19, see Quran 25:43) are entirely governed by their feelings, rather than their own reason or the collective judgement of Torah studying people (1 Corinthians 6:2). So yes, there are many gods and many lords (1 Corinthians 8:5). But there is only one Elyon, and when we acknowledge Elyon, then all other gods simply stop being gods.

Our word אלהים ('elohim) simply describes the presence of any kind of force or power that organizes or orders any kind of chaotic or unruly realm or substance, entirely regardless of whether this force is purely physical or animated and intelligent or even divine or not. These organizing forces often occur embedded, like an emperor who rules kings who rule people who shepherd herds (Psalm 82:1), but the greatest of these is of course the One who rules all: Elyon or Highest. Hence:

"... I said, "You are gods (אלהים, 'elohim), and all of you are sons (בנים, benim) of Elyon. Nevertheless you will die like men" (Psalm 82:6).

Although Logos and Torah are divine and originate perfectly within the deity, long before there is anything but God (John 1:1), the Torah in any way perceived by man or expressed within humanity becomes entirely human and not God. God is not local and has no location in space or time. Anything that has location in space or time is not God, and whatever is not God and still worshipped as God, is an idol — its worshippers violate the First Commandment (Exodus 20:3, see Deuteronomy 4:39, 1 Kings 8:60, Isaiah 45:7, Joel 2:27, Mark 12:32, 1 Corinthians 8:4), which is the sin against the Holy Spirit and cannot be forgiven, simply because the worshippers themselves have abandoned the only One who can forgive sins.

Someone who looks at a frosted or matte glass lamp cannot see the lightbulb inside and only sees the lit outer frosted glass. A bug inside the outer frosted glass surely sees the inner lightbulb, but is still separated from the glowing spiral by the glass of the bulb. Only the spiral knows what it is like to be the spiral. The bug scurries about the inside of the frosted glass and knows the lightbulb. Someone beneath the lamp only sees the light coming through the frosted glass.

To people living in darkness, the sun shining through a distant window looks identical to the window, and the two cannot be told apart from afar. People who know only darkness are not equipped with the faculties to tell the difference between light and an agent of light. This is why people who don't know the nature of God may be forgiven to believe that Jesus is God. In the words of the prophet Zechariah: "... the house of David will be like God, like the angel of YHWH ..." (Zechariah 12:8). To the Hebrews, the Law was given by God. To the gentiles, the Law was given by angels, namely those Hebrew speaking teachers of the Law (Acts 7:53, Galatians 3:19; compare Judges 13:3 to 13:6, also see Genesis 33:10 and compare Genesis 32:24 to Hosea 12:3-4; also see Daniel 10:5-17).

Once more, for clarity: a dog cannot tell the difference between a peasant and a king, because the difference between the two is a matter of statecraft and there is nothing about statecraft that can be smelled, tasted, touched, heard or perceived in any way available to the dog. That's not the dog's fault, and no human being in his right mind would beat a dog for not bowing down to the king. Likewise, to people who don't know God, there is no way to tell the difference between God and the people who are "like God, like the angel of YHWH". That's not those first people's fault, and no godly person would blame them. Instead, a godly person will train dogs to become "good dogs" and will tell fellow humans that they are not God or gods but only fellow workers (Revelation 22:9).

The Messiah of the House of Israel comes with the Hebrew language — on the clouds of all those individual minds that speak Hebrew — which is why a Hebrew-speaking Jew may seem like God to a gentile. That's not the gentile's fault. It's up to the Hebrew-speakers, though (and this is a central mission) to explain to the gentiles why they may appear like God but are not God. It's up to the Hebrews to explain that the quality that makes them seem like God can be easily learned by anybody who is intelligent enough to learn any language. This is why the Hebrews have always been everywhere and have taught the world the alphabet and injected as many Hebrew words and principles into the gentiles' fallen languages as these languages could absorb (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of the Greek language).

The story of evolution by accident is ludicrous, and only maintained by people who have no idea how the universe works. In the real world, everything falls apart and returns to dust. Order is achieved by a principle that boldly contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, and is greater than it because it "existed" long before it did. This principle, by lack of a better term, is the world's "Creative Principle". It's as real as entropy, but works the other way: it unifies things and creates order in chaos. Entropy and the Creative Principle largely cancel each other out, but the Creative Principle is slightly dominant over entropy, which is where evolution comes from. (The word evolution means "unrolling" and describes the unrolling of a Torah scroll).

Progress in the world has always been achieved from a small group of "front-runners" (collectively and at any level called Immanuel), whose collective was a solid union without seems or gaps to whoever looked on from the outside: whose difference from the hapless audience was precisely the same as difference between one helium atom and four hydrogen atoms, or the first real multi-cellular creatures in the eyes of any colony of single-cellular creatures, or the first language-speakers in the eyes (ears) of pre-language humans (or animals, for that matter), or the Internet compared to an IBM mainframe. These super-unified collectives consisted of many members, but no onlooker could see where one member ended and the next one began because the members were unified into a single "him" in ways that vastly exceeded the perception of whoever looked upon "him" from the outside. This is why the Torah states:

"In the beginning אלהים ('elohim) created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and note that the verb to create, namely ברא (bara'), is closely related to the word for covenant, ברית (berit), implying that the creative principle is a legal matter, based on law, based on reason, based on language. Noun ברית (borit) denotes a kind of soap (verb ברר, barar, means to clean or purify). Noun בר (bor) means cleanness or pureness. Verb באר (ba'ar) means to write or engrave. Noun באר (be'er) means well or fountain. And of course, the familiar Aramaic noun בר (bar) means son. This is all common knowledge to any Hebrew speaking child, and there's no way that anyone who doesn't know Hebrew is going to understand any of this.

In Greek, the Gospel zooms in on this majestic creative principle that only Hebrew speakers can understand, and personifies it and meditates on its divine nature:

"I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:20-24).