Dear Readers,
The only way to avoid duplicate content is to post on one site only, so I will be posting the rest of my series on Yeshua/Jesus where I have posted my articles since 2009:
right here.

Let’s keep in touch but, for now, above all else, keep your Selves safe from the Inside/out
Kind thoughts from me,
CC

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While on the topic of hygiene, it is worth adding that the washing of hands, netilat yadayim, before or after specific activities such as praying, eating and bodily evacuation was another ritualized cleansing. And this ritual washing points to another of the anomalies found in Matthew’s pages.

Yeshua, a Jewish rabbi, at a time of cultural orthodox observance, would NEVER have broken bread with a group of Gentiles – not even with one – if he could have brought himself to befriend one. It would have been an insult to his God to do so. Among Jews, all outsiders known for their lack of personal hygiene were known as the Unwashed. Besides, a man as religiously principled as Yeshua would not have eaten unleavened bread in the days preceding Passover.

In Acts 11:2 Peter was reprimanded for having done so himself 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers* criticized him, 3 saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’
By the same token anyone familiar with the rigors of the Judaic protocol in vigor circa 34 AD cannot imagine, not for a moment, that Yeshua could have declared, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” Luke 22:10
It is commonly accepted that drinking blood is at the very least freakish, if not totally disgusting. For the Jews, the repulsion of blood is visceral, which is why from antiquity to this day, only Kosher meat, meat that has been drained of its blood while still on the carcass, can be eaten by practising Jews.

Yeshua, who had espoused many aspects of the Iyisim beliefs was against the sacrifice of animals. He might have been a vegetarian, but even if he did eat meat, it could ONLY ever have been meat slaughtered the Kosher way – meat that had been totally drained of its blood, seconds after death.

Adding to that, on the eve of Passover, during the Seder, ritual feast, it is customary to read the Hagadah, a text that contains the story of the exodus from Egypt and the ten plagues God unleashed to convince the Pharaoh that it was in his own people’s best interest to let ‘His children go’.

The first plague is remembered as the Plague of Blood. The Lord, it is said, struck the waters of the Nile and the river became one of blood. The fish died and the people were no longer able to drink its water. Presumably, the water was also no longer suitable for either the beasts to drink or for irrigation – a disaster of true biblical proportion.
The Seder prayer ritual does request that each participant drink, at various key intervals four very small glasses of sweet wine. Each glass symbolizes one of God’s promised deliverance: “I will bring out,” “I will deliver,” “I will redeem,” and “I will take.”

So, there is no doubt that Yeshua drank wine during his last supper, but the iconic lines written by Luke could only have been spoken by one who had once been a pagan and still thought as one – not by a Jew.
In spite of all improbabilities and incongruities, what is certain is that, through the events Matthew mashed-up on his papyrus, Yeshua found himself reinvented as Jesus, teacher of goyim, a term from the Tanach that amalgamated all non-Jewish nationals.

With a modicum of real-time empathy for the real man, it is easy to imagine what a devastating turn of events this would have been for Yeshua whose only spiritual aspiration, based on his interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was to convince kin and peers that he might be a bone fide contender for the role of messiah of their Jewish God and his people. And what would he make of the plethora of Sacred Heart images of himself that adorn Christian churches and homes?

What would he make of the throngs of people who in millions of churches around the world worship his body carved out of wood, marble or painted cement, he whose religion forbade the worship of idols?

Here again, it seems that the pagan beliefs of the early Christians were casting rituals of their old faith on to their newly found divine savior.
In short, it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to anticipate that Yeshua, the real man, would have been totally incensed and repulsed by the grotesque misrepresentation, both of his cultural heritage and his creed, as well as by the posthumous theft of his identity.
==
Dear Reader: the rest of this series will be posted on http://www.articlesbase.com/authors/cc-saint-clair/144167.
See you there
C.C.

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All differences set aside, all three sects governing all the important aspects of Jewish religious and secular living had at least one activity in common, that of the Mikveh, the daily ritual of cleansing immersion in a flowing body of water, living water, such as rivers and streams, or any rain catchment area that has garnered such attention the remix of events that is Matthew. Mikveh baths have been found as far out as Masada.

As every Jew in those days, each of the Temple priests followed one of the six hundred and thirteen commandments written in the Torah, the important mitzvah intended to cleanse the body by immersion in Mikveh water. Thus, they had to immerse themselves before serving in the Temple. Archaeological digs of villas, such as the one named the Burnt House that can be experienced behind glass through an underground museum in the Jewish Quarters of Jerusalem have revealed them to contain many rooms for different purposes – even a separate room for the Mikveh.

For the water to retain its spiritual properties of purity, it could not be ‘drawn’, brought in or installed on the sites and the canalisation needed to distribute water to these bath rooms, was made possible by the Hasmonean viaduct, unearthed in 1985. It is estimated that its construction preceded the reign of King Herod.

While the priests purified themselves in private surrounds, the rest of the population made do with communal Mikvehs and, as has already been discussed, in streams and rivers. This is the point where this narrative returns the one the afore-mentioned In Matthew’s gospel, the moment when Yohanan hailed Yeshua enjoining him to come in flowing waters of the Jordan. How ironic that it should be such an innocuous moment of a mundane daily Judaic ritual that has been recast and enshrined in the gospel as the Baptism of Jesus!

In that particular scene, Yohanan is the central character cast as John the Baptist, a man with a penchant for the cilice (the scratchy goat-hair shirt of the penitent worn as undergarment) and a fondness for honey and locusts, the short-horned grasshoppers that are still culinary treats in various modern-day exotic cuisine.

As occurs so many times throughout the pages of the gospels, an ancestral Jewish rite is claimed by the writers of Christianity and passed off as an established Christian rite, notwithstanding the reality that back in the days of Yeshua and Yohana, Christianity did not exist, not even in anyone’s thoughts, least of all in Yeshua’s.

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Some fourteen years turbulent years later, after the undeterred priests were still throwing Saul of Tarsus (Paulus/St Paul) out of the Temple for attempting to teach the theories he had borrowed from Jacob’s knesiyat ha-nimolim, he went into exile in Syria and Jordan. There, to non-Jews, he was finally free to teach a new belief system, a much simplified version of the commandments topped by the worship of Yeshua resurrected adding, as he went, the epithet Son of God.

Mark and Matthew wrote their gospels a few years after that, only to have them altered by a number of anonymous brush strokes on parchments. By the 4th century, Christianity had spread far and wide and ushered in the conversion of the first Roman emperor to Christianity, Constantine The great.

All of the events from the birth of Yeshua to his arrest constitute an unfortunate but rather mundane chain of events involving only a cast of Jewish characters – as would have been the case for any other Jew who expressed his religious opinions too freely and too loudly – loudly enough to annoy the Zadokim and the Perushim and flashily enough to make the local Roman soldiers very tetchy as they observed the wild-fire hysteria crystalized on the man who had ridden into town from the eastern gate on a white donkey. They watched as hordes of Jews reached towards this man, pleading, ‘Rabbi, hosha na. Teacher, save us!’

It was on the day of Succoth, a day when pilgrims had arrived from far and wide from all corners of Israel and abroad to perform their religious duties at the Temple – the moment popularized in Christian liturgy as Palm Sunday.

The New Testament makes many references to Jesus arguing with the Temple Priests about points of interpretation of the Torah and the prophecies. Like the Perushim, but unlike the Temple priests, Yeshua believed in the prophetized arrival of a messiah and one can easily imagine the oratory debates between them and Yeshua, with him challenging the manner in which they ran the Temple. He challenged their complacency, that of the ones in cushy jobs known to abuse the power of their position. He challenged them in their beliefs that complicated rituals, praying and imploring God for good fortune and forgiveness, offering the life of an animal as a sign of good-will were all their common God asked of his People.

It is quite imaginable that there would have been political factions and alliances made and unmade within the Perushim, the Zadokim and merchants. They would not have liked much his main argument which was that it was not enough to follow rituals with scrupulous care and do external mitzvah while neglecting to tame cravings and greed; while neglecting to care for one another. When push came to shove, perhaps because Yeshua had a strong temper himself, he became the odd man out.
After all, freedom of expression was allowed then as now, even to mere teachers but, then as now, only up to a point. As Yeshua upturned merchants’ stalls set up in the Temple court by priestly permission, as he quarrelled with the men in charge both of the religion and the politics of the religion, he made himself some enemies.

‘And Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. Quoting from the Torah, he shouted, ‘It is written: “My house shall be called a house of prayer” before adding in his own words, ‘but you make it a den of robbers.’(Matthew 21:12).

The third sect of note in the time of Yeshua was that of the Isiyim [Essenes] currently thought to be the originators of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Initially, they lived in high numbers in most towns but took to the desert as protest against the way the Zadokim were tending to the spiritual health of the people. Ideologically, Yeshua would have aligned himself with this group in this respect, He would also have espoused their views on animal sacrifice. They believed that meat, any meat, not just pig meat, was impure, regardless of the rigors of the kosher treatment of the animals before and after death.

These Isiyim enjoyed an ascetic, communal lifestyle which would have appealed to Yeshua’s orthodoxy more than the lifestyle of the rich and powerful Zadokim and Perushim.
Somewhat different in hair and skin coloring from other Jews, the Isyim considered themselves a group apart. In this respect, they allowed anyone to become one of them after a period of probation and they accepted in their midst children from other social groups. Though their community was mixed, many of these men and women were celibate.

These men and women were spiritually enlightened. They knew about telepathy. They knew how to access higher energies and, in secret, they toiled for the triumph of the Spiritual light over the darkness of the human mind. However, though their belief system revolved around an apocalyptic event that would bring about a new Kingdom – it was not necessarily linked to the arrival of a messiah, the topic closest to Yehsua’s heart.

It is believed that around Jesus’ twelfth year, his parents, Yosef and Maryam took him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There, it is said, he discussed the Laws of the Torah with a group of Temple priests and that they were duly amazed by the wisdom of one so young. It is thought that, at some stage, Yeshua and his parents may have gone to Egypt.

After a gap of years, Jesus showed up again but in Galilee, preaching about the Kingdom of God. By then, because Yeshua’s spin on the Torah and the Books of the Prophets resembled the doctrine of the Isiyim, it is believed that he might have spent some years in their midst, as a disciple. And it is believed that he kept very close ties with them while in Jerusalem. It is believed that they assisted him, as only they could, in the hours of his crucifixion.

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When Matthew is able to distance himself from Jesus-the Saint, he occasionally injects a degree of realism in his gospel. Jesus, he wrote, warned his disciples: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5)

It is essential to understand that Christian Jesus simply did not exist. There was no worship of Yeshua while he was alive. What there was the tenuous resonance in the ragtag band of his Jewish disciples of his enhanced Hebraic teachings. We know there was no worship, as such because these simple men abandoned him in the crucial moment that preceded his arrest. When the disciples sensed danger for Yeshua, they would have known that the same danger faced them.

Between the possibility of being sentenced by stoning by the Jewish tribunal, the Sanhedrin, or being tied to a crossbar by Roman soldiers, their lack of intrinsic faith in the one they had called their Teacher saw them pretend they didn’t know him.

For them, it was all rather simple: a Messiah, a great leader of men – in their kingdom or in the Kingdom of God – would have known how to extricate himself from the humiliation and the pain of a crucifixion. Or, as our current teen culture might see it, Only losers get nailed.

Luke 22:54: Then they seized him and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house. Peter followed at a distance; and when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. Then a maid, seeing him as he sat in the light and gazing at him, said, “This man also was with him”. But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I do not know him”. And a little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them”.
But Peter said, “Man, I am not”. And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, “Certainly this man also was with him; for he is Galilean”. But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what areyou saying.”

Having said that, Peter, himself a Galilean, would have known that before any Jew could be arrested by Roman soldiers, a minimum of two witnesses had to identify the alleged perpetrator. If Yudah (Judas) acting his part was one, then, perhaps, Peter, in the absence of a supportive mob, preferred to give Yeshua a fighting chance by simply turning his back on him.

The earliest form of Yeshua-spiritual entity began with belief he had resurrected. What would eventually become of the ministry of Saul (Paulus/St Paul) was actually triggered by Yacob (Jacob), one of Yeshua’s brothers, years after the crucifixion.

Indeed, soon after the death of Yeshua, Yacob created a knesiya, a place of gathering where he and, presumably some of the disciples, as well as others who believed news of the ‘resurrection’ could meet. This meeting place, knesiyat ha-nimolim, would later be renamed the Church of the Circumcised, though one must realize that the word church, based on the German word kirche, was not used in the years that immediately followed Jesus’ death.

As the name suggests, Yacob’s new sect did not take in any non-Jew adherents for the same reasons that Yeshua kept himself separate from the pagan Gentiles, following the Mitzvah commandment mentioned above.
Under Yacob’s guidance, this group of Orthodox Jews added the worship of Yeshua, the resurrected Messiah, to the scriptures of their Jewish faith. They became the first Messianic Jews, popularized today under the banner of Jews for Jesus.

All of that makes perfect sense inasmuch as we accept that Yeshua did exist. It makes sense in so far as we believe that this man is the only prototype for a historical Jesus, the one on which Christianity has been founded along with the pagan-inspired trilogy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which technically holds Christianity one hair’s breath away from true monotheism.

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Italy’s debt crisis escalates.
Its unsustainable borrowing rates have sent the global market in a spin-out.
France, the solid one, is now strained to the limit.
The writing is on the wall.
After 2012 years of viral marketing against the odds, Vatican City NOW has the option, the financial option, to do finally do something real and tangible for its flock.
It can sell some of its billion $ worth of high-end investments and properties.
It can open its coffers and humble itself to serve the immediate needs of its European flock in three predominantly Catholic countries, including Spain – three of many worldwide who have been faithful against over-whelming odds, for over 2000 years.

THAT is what redeeming one’s self could begin to be about, be that in the name of Jesus … or in the name of amending karma.

***** Uh … not because of the billions of $ but because of the *emotional* sacrifice that would require of the Vatican Collective because … they actually CARE.

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The priests operated according to a shift system called Mishmeret Cohanim or the Priestly Shift. There were twenty-four shifts divided among all the Cohamin families.
Each shift lasted one week. When a priest’s shift came up, strong in his belief that he had been called to do God’s duty, he moved to Jerusalem to take his turn as servant of the Temple, sharing Temple duties with all others who had been selected for each twenty-four weekly shifts.

It is important to invest some time to understanding the shifts system as it is that system that allowed Yeshua, at least while he was in Jerusalem, a great supply of temple priests with whom to debate the points of the Torah on which he focused his ministry, as well as which points in the Books of the Prophets touched on the matter of the coming of Messiah, a descendant from the House of King David.
Interestingly, whether Yeshua was the son of Yosef or the son of another man, he knew he could not claim such ancestral lineage.

In a quirky clash of purpose, though Christian clerics were intent on establishing a connection to King David through ‘a’ father to posit Yeshua as the Messiah prophetized in the Old Testament of the Jews, they were equally attached to the idea of Yeshua being the product of a virgin birth.

“Each of these 24 groups was further divided into 6 clans, or family branches. Every day of the week was presided over by one family group, and on the Sabbath the week’s entire priestly shift worked together.” [1]

It was assumed that each priest was infused with desire to serve his God during his shift and that they would have rivalled against each other, vying for the ‘holiest’ of responsibilities, if it hadn’t been for a very elaborate systems of draws that, presumably according to divine decree, fated each priest with a specific function to perform, thus sparing them any unholy stratagems among themselves.

Unfortunately for headstrong Yeshua, these temple Priests were reputedly a quarrelsome lot who did not believe in the resurrection of anyone. Other points of dispute were the interpretations of words, lines and sections from the Torah and Prophets. Quarrelling and ‘knit-picking’ over scriptures is an all-consuming activity among clerics that has not yet gone out of fashion.

In the name of Jesus, Matthew wrote a wonderful commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, an order lifted directly from the Torah which warns in Leviticus 19:17-18:18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.’

But there is the additional mitzvah command ‘To love all human beings who are of the covenant.’ (Lev. 19:18) which might explain why, though Yeshua’s controversial teaching of the Torah was about the importance of caring for one’s neighbor as for a kin, he felt no spiritual obligation to care about the Romans, the pagan occupiers of his country, let alone to discuss the finer points of Judaism with them, which was all he that preoccupied him. Yeshua didn’t have much time for the local Samaritans either, though they and the Jews had a common root in Abraham.

Politically speaking, Yeshua was a separatist, not very different from the Orthodox Jews who, today, live in the Mea Sharim ghetto, a suburb of Jerusalem.
Religious mythology aside, a worthwhile question to pose is If Jesus was the credibly kind, compassionate man enhanced by divine energy, why did he attract so many enemies? Why was he made to die a violent death and why was he abandoned by all except a couple of women weeping within sight of his cross?
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1. http://www.templeinstitute.org/day_in_life/24_shifts.htm

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Already in the time of Yeshua, the Torah had already been translated into Aramaic and in Greek Septuagint, the form of ancient Greek used in the translations of biblical texts and thus, by then, the Torah was no longer the ‘secret book of the Jews’.

It is generally accepted that Matthew’s gospel, as well as some of the subsequent ones were originally written in Hebrew because of the numerous references made to the Torah and the Books of the Prophets, but in regards to who was Matthew-the-man, he may simply have been like a modern-day obsessive collector of all sound bytes attributed to his hero – in this case, Yeshua, the already-crucified teacher.

Having said that, in regards to the authorship of this gospel, the jury is still undecided as to whether the various sections of manuscripts were written by the one anonymous ‘Matthew’ or whether they were written collaboratively over a period of time by equally anonymous persons.

The most important shrine that has linked the Jewish people to their god, from centuries before Yeshua through the various diasporas and to this day, is the Temple which stood in various states of repair and war-torn disrepair on Temple Mount from 957 BC to 70 AD.

Jewish King Herod the Great is remembered as The Builder because of the innovative architecture he commissioned throughout the land. It is in the temple known, post renovation, as the second Temple, Herod’s temple, that Yeshua had many loud quarrels, both with priests and temple-goers, over a number of his grievances.
Under Roman rule, the Jews had retained their autonomy in regards to matters of religion.
Religion [and politicised religion] were everything in these ancient times and the Jewish community in Yeshua’s lifetime was led by three main sects:

The perushim (known as the Pharisees in the New Testament) held the reins of local political leadership. They rejected what aspects of Greek philosophy had fate acting as the controlling agent of human destiny. Instead, they expounded free will and that, as such, our daily deeds affected our destiny, here, now, and in the afterlife. Rewards and punishments in the next world were part and parcel of their belief system but with a resurrection after the death of the body. They also believed in the eventual arrival of a messiah, a special being, but one of flesh and bone. According to their belief, the long awaited Messiah would be a political leader who would free the People of Israel from foreign rule and who would lead them according to the Law of God. The Perushim led a modest lifestyle and their doctrines are the ones followed today by Orthodox Jews.

The Zadokim (Zadokites/Sadducees in the New Testament) were wealthy, powerful. Many were arrogant. and many abused the power they had over ‘commoners’. Their area of control spread over all aspects of the religion including Temple life. Their belief system was aligned with the Greek philosophy of the times and thus, they did not believe in resurrection. They directed everything from the daily rites to daily blessings. They arbitrated in matters of interpretation of the Torah and the Books of the Prophets. They were essential to the sacrifices of animals according to the strict and humane rules of Kosher slaughtering and they organized the religious festivals and the management of pilgrims.

It is from the Zadokim group that came most of the temple priests. By ancient decree most came from the Kohanim lineage and that was certainly true of the High Priest. They were extremely zealous. Unlike resident monks, these priests often lived in other towns away from Jerusalem. It is also from their ranks that judges were chosen for the Sanhedrin (the court system) and, by the time of the second Temple, the Sanhedrin was legislating on all matters of religious and political life – a coming together of power that was later not to play out in Yeshua’s favor.

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Yeshua’s life was cut short after only a three-year ministry.

The Hebrew name for God is Yehova, respectfully abstracted in the double Yod character יי.
According to the ancient Jewish custom going back to Abraham, Yeshua’s name which also begins with Yod ישוע created a direct link from God to him through the sound of this character.

Abraham (né Avraham), one of the three Fathers of the Jewish People, named his only son Yitzhak. יצחק, meaning ‘He who will laugh a lot’ when his wife, Sarai, laughed gleefully herself upon hearing angels announce she would be blessed with a first-born.

At already 75 years of age such news, in these times, was indeed something to rejoice about particularly, perhaps, when the soon-to-be-father had already celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday. The belief of this link to God through the Yod is still current in regards to all other biblical names such as Yakov, Yosef, Yudit, and Yudah; hence Yahuda, Judea, the land of God. Yod is also the holy link-letter in Yehoshafat, Yehoahaz (יהואחז), names belonging to various kings of Judea.

The first Christian gospel is generally attributed to Matthew, though it is believed that Mark’s had been written some ten years earlier therefore forty years after Yeshua’s death.
Matthew’s account begins while Yeshua was having one of the daily ritual baths in accordance with the ancestral Jewish rule of Mikveh which requires a daily immersion in a flowing body of water to cleanse the body.

On that fateful day, glimpsing Yeshua on the bank of the Jordan, Yohanan ha-matbil hailed him and invited him to bathe alongside him. Seeing as Yohanan and Yeshua were cousins on Maryam’s side, it was hardly newsworthy. Be that as it may, by the end of the 1st century, Matthew wrote that at that precise moment, Yohanan had sensed there was something quite unique about his cousin.

Yeshua, himself, had been entertaining the notion that he was a prophet akin to the ancient prophets whose prophecies he had been studying, interpreting, actively debating and arguing about with the Temple Priests. As time went on, Yeshua’s belief became more profound: the priests had to urge their people to add elements of love and compassion to their dealings with others. A rigid belief in ritualized religion was no longer enough. The priests had to lead by example.

From the writings of Mark, Yeshua was renamed Jesus and Maryam/myram, his mother, was reborn as Mary – a Gentile.

In Matthew, Yohanan, Maryam’s nephew, himself of Jewish descent, as were all the people with whom Yeshua lived, ate and spoke to on a daily basis, were re-cast under the Christian moniker. Yohanan was thus recast as John the Baptist, and that positioned him as a Gentile, a non-Jew.

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What historical facts and scholarly knowledge I have come to accept regarding Yeshua, the Jewish teacher intent on sowing far and large the spiritual wisdom of the Torah and the Books of the Prophets and Jesus, the Christian holy icon, have come to me via Moriya, my teacher of Spirituality.

Moriya, herself, is an enthusiastic follower of Professor David Flusser who died in 2000. “This man,” she explained, “is the greatest scholar on Jesus, Paulus and on all that has become Christianity.” A quick Google search will certainly position Professor Flusser as an eminent, if not the most eminent, scholar of all that concerns the nebulous era when Christianity struck root from its Jewish stem.

Thanks to Moriya’s erudite knowledge of sacred texts, interpretive tomes and her infinite patience with our months-long flurries of Q & A email [questions from me/answers from her supplemented by my own research that triggered more Q’s and therefore more clarifying A’s] I was set on my way. I began measuring the distance between Yeshua, the ‘Torah-bashing’ young man who ardently defended his belief that merely praying, acting on each of the 613 commandments and offering God the sacrifice of an animal when one’s conscious prodded too much, were not enough to accede the Grace of God – and his avatar, Gospel-driven Jesus.

It is estimated that Yeshua, or Yehoshua, was born around 4 BC, in the last years of King Herod’s reign and that he died around 30–35 AD – the exact years remaining unconfirmed. Some four centuries later, the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, adopted Christianity around the age of forty. He was the first Roman Emperor to convert. Did he do that out of faith or did his already converted mother, Helena, prod him to do so for his own salvation? Or did he convert to forge new political alliances? That remains a moot point, but he most likely was a lapsing Christian, too attached to the paganism of his ancestors to truly turn his back on it.

Influenced by the beliefs that had ruled his mind until then, Constantine decreed Yeshua the new Sun god. He fixed Yeshua’s birth on the shortest day of the yearly cycle, the 25th of December, said to be the birth day of the original Sun god, thus Sunday became the holy day of Christianity.

If the gospel writers have painted an accurate image of Yeshua’s interactive skills, he was no doubt a charismatic, intelligent teacher of the Torah. There is little doubt that he was an inspired healer, well familiar with the aura, the astral field, and a master in the secret lore of herbal medicine – none greatly unusual skills in bygone eras when in temples throughout Ancient Egypt and much further afield in Tibet, gifted young adepts were trained at the highest levels in the sciences of healing, astrology, astral travelling and ministration of the soul. Master Seers were as essential to the decisions of a Pharaoh or a Dalai Lama as were their chief officials.

In Ancient Israel, back in the 9th century BC, biblical prophets, Elijah and Elisha, had already been noted for their ability to revive ones who had stopped breathing and to perform miracles similar to that of Yeshua’s feeding of 5,000 with just five loaves and the two fish. Though it said that Yeshua did not like the comparison some made between him and Elijah, perhaps because Elijah killed some of his enemies whilst Yeshua merely threw himself around shouting at them, a copy-catting of miraculous aptitude seems evident.

I Kings 17 recounts such an event wen Elijah, sent to Zarepath on a mission from God, asked an old woman to fetch him water and a piece of bread.
12 “As surely as the LORD your God lives,” she replied, “I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug.”

Elijah reiterates his wish, explains that God said that what miserly quantities of flour and oil were currently at the bottom of her jars would remain untouched, then the disbelieving woman on her way.
15 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. 16 For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah.
Sometime later the woman’s son became ill and eventually he stopped breathing.

22 The LORD heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. 24 Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD from your mouth is the truth.”

II Kings 2:19 gives us the miracle of Healing of the Water.

City folks informed Elijah that the spring water was so foul that it was not even good for watering the land.
Elijah asked someone to bring him a new bowl in which he put salt. He threw the salt into the spring.
21 “This is what the LORD says: ‘I have healed this water. Never again will it cause death or make the land unproductive.’” 22 And the water has remained pure to this day, according to the word Elisha had spoken.

All but the most ardent of miracle believers will accept that the early prophets, the Isyim and Yeshua who had lived with them for many years, and others from various world cultures, did not truly perform ‘miracles’. Instead, it is more likely to think that a very advanced knowledge of healing, lost to us, combined with expert skills at power-hypnosis, also lost to us, altered more than the mindset of the participants but their auric energy.

Modern-day faith healings spread across all religion. Shamanism and organized indigenous religions such as voodoo do deliver very real outcomes for the believers.
With minimal training, run-of-the-mill suburban folks can be ‘trained’ to walk on ambers. True fire-walkers walk on hot coals. Not only are these people totally awake and free of pain, but their skin remains blister-free. It is not surprising to hear that an African tribe has been living on a diet of poisonous scorpions for innumerable years.

Setting aside the power of the mind in regards to superstitions, amulets and potions as well as faith healings, theoretically, seeing as we are souls in disguise, it should not be surprising to think that, once we can access true higher energies after having jettisoned unfortunate aspects of the ego-persona, or when these energies are accessed on our behalf by selfless, pure channelers, our body can become impervious to many ills that would otherwise undo or kill us. Energy over matter.

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