Judaism

• beliefs › prophets proclaimed God the Father of Israel

2:6.4The con­cept of God as a king-judge, al­though it fos­tered a high moral stan­dard and cre­ated a law-re­spect­ing peo­ple as a group, left the in­di­vid­ual be­liever in a sad po­si­tion of in­se­cu­rity re­spect­ing his sta­tus in time and in eter­nity. The later He­brew proph­ets pro­claimed God to be a Fa­ther to Is­rael; Je­sus re­vealed God as the Fa­ther of each hu­man be­ing. The en­tire mor­tal con­cept of God is tran­scen­dently il­lu­mi­nated by the life of Je­sus. Self­less­ness is in­her­ent in pa­ren­tal love. God loves not like a fa­ther, but as a fa­ther. He is the Par­a­dise Fa­ther of ev­ery uni­verse per­son­al­ity.

• failed to associate goodness of God with science and art

2:7.9The great mis­take of the He­brew re­li­gion was its fail­ure to as­so­ciate the good­ness of God with the fac­tual truths of sci­ence and the ap­peal­ing beauty of art. As civ­i­liza­tion pro­gressed, and since re­li­gion con­tin­ued to pur­sue the same un­wise course of overem­pha­siz­ing the good­ness of God to the rel­a­tive ex­clu­sion of truth and ne­glect of beauty, there de­vel­oped an in­creas­ing ten­dency for cer­tain types of men to turn away from the ab­stract and dis­so­ci­ated con­cept of iso­lated good­ness. The over­stressed and iso­lated moral­ity of mod­ern re­li­gion, which fails to hold the de­vo­tion and loy­alty of many twen­ti­eth-cen­tury men, would re­ha­bil­i­tate it­self if, in ad­di­tion to its moral man­dates, it would give equal con­sid­er­a­tion to the truths of sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy, and spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, and to the beau­ties of the phys­i­cal cre­ation, the charm of in­tel­lec­tual art, and the grandeur of gen­uine char­ac­ter achieve­ment.

• beliefs › without shedding blood no remission of sin

4:5.5The He­brews be­lieved that “with­out the shed­ding of blood there could be no re­mis­sion of sin.” They had not found de­liv­er­ance from the old and pa­gan idea that the Gods could not be ap­peased ex­cept by the sight of blood, though Moses did make a dis­tinct ad­vance when he for­bade hu­man sac­ri­fices and sub­sti­tuted there­for, in the prim­i­tive minds of his child­like Bed­ouin fol­low­ers, the cer­e­mo­nial sac­ri­fice of an­i­mals.

• promised salvation from difficulties

5:4.5All re­li­gions teach the wor­ship of De­ity and some doc­trine of hu­man sal­va­tion. The Bud­dhist re­li­gion promises sal­va­tion from suf­fer­ing, un­end­ing peace; the Jew­ish re­li­gion promises sal­va­tion from dif­fi­cul­ties, pros­per­ity pred­i­cated on righ­teous­ness; the Greek re­li­gion prom­ised sal­va­tion from dishar­mony, ug­li­ness, by the re­al­iza­tion of beauty; Chris­tian­ity promises sal­va­tion from sin, sanc­tity; Mo­hammedanism pro­vides de­liv­er­ance from the rig­or­ous moral stan­dards of Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity. The re­li­gion of Je­sus is sal­va­tion from self, de­liv­er­ance from the evils of crea­ture iso­la­tion in time and in eter­nity.

• beliefs › religion based on goodness

5:4.6The He­brews based their re­li­gion on good­ness; the Greeks on beauty; both re­li­gions sought truth. Je­sus re­vealed a God of love, and love is all-em­brac­ing of truth, beauty, and good­ness.

• beliefs › teaching centered on knowing God

5:4.8The Greek re­li­gion had a watch­word “Know your­self”; the He­brews cen­tered their teach­ing on “Know your God”; the Chris­tians preach a gospel aimed at a “knowl­edge of the Lord Je­sus Christ”; Je­sus pro­claimed the good news of “know­ing God, and your­self as a son of God.” These dif­fer­ing con­cepts of the pur­pose of re­li­gion de­ter­mine the in­di­vid­ual’s at­ti­tude in var­i­ous life sit­u­a­tions and fore­shadow the depth of wor­ship and the na­ture of his per­sonal habits of prayer. The spir­i­tual sta­tus of any re­li­gion may be de­ter­mined by the na­ture of its prayers.

• beliefs › Jews merged celestial rulers into composite Deity

43:3.4Down through the ages there has been great con­fu­sion on Uran­tia re­gard­ing the var­i­ous uni­verse rulers. Many later teach­ers con­fused their vague and in­def­i­nite tribal de­i­ties with the Most High Fa­thers. Still later, the He­brews merged all of these ce­les­tial rulers into a com­pos­ite De­ity. One teacher un­der­stood that the Most Highs were not the Su­preme Rulers, for he said, “He who dwells in the se­cret place of the Most High shall abide un­der the shadow of the Al­mighty.” In the Uran­tia rec­ords it is very dif­fi­cult at times to know ex­actly who is re­ferred to by the term “Most High.” But Daniel fully un­der­stood these mat­ters. He said, “The Most High rules in the king­dom of men and gives it to whom­so­ever he will.”

• rituals › Andonic animal sacrifice preserved in

63:6.4Very early the An­donic peo­ples formed the habit of re­frain­ing from eat­ing the flesh of the an­i­mal of tribal ven­er­a­tion. Pres­ently, in or­der more suit­ably to im­press the minds of their youths, they evolved a cer­e­mony of rev­er­ence which was car­ried out about the body of one of these ven­er­ated an­i­mals; and still later on, this prim­i­tive per­for­mance de­vel­oped into the more elab­o­rate sac­ri­fi­cial cer­e­monies of their de­scen­dants. And this is the ori­gin of sac­ri­fices as a part of wor­ship. This idea was elab­o­rated by Moses in the He­brew rit­ual and was pre­served, in prin­ci­ple, by the Apos­tle Paul as the doc­trine of atone­ment for sin by “the shed­ding of blood.”

• beliefs › health teachings of Caligastia 100 persisted in garbled form to days of Moses

66:5.19Many of the early teach­ings of Lut’s guard­i­ans of health per­sisted among the tribes of earth on down to the days of Moses, even though they be­came much gar­bled and were greatly changed.

• beliefs › creation account

74:8.7The Old Tes­ta­ment ac­count of cre­ation dates from long af­ter the time of Moses; he never taught the He­brews such a dis­torted story. But he did pre­sent a sim­ple and con­densed nar­ra­tive of cre­ation to the Is­raelites, hop­ing thereby to aug­ment his ap­peal to wor­ship the Cre­ator, the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, whom he called the Lord God of Is­rael.

74:8.8In his early teach­ings, Moses very wisely did not at­tempt to go back of Adam’s time, and since Moses was the su­preme teacher of the He­brews, the sto­ries of Adam be­came in­ti­mately as­so­ci­ated with those of cre­ation. That the ear­lier tra­di­tions rec­og­nized pre-Adamic civ­i­liza­tion is clearly shown by the fact that later ed­i­tors, in­tend­ing to erad­i­cate all ref­er­ence to hu­man af­fairs be­fore Adam’s time, ne­glected to re­move the tell­tale ref­er­ence to Cain’s em­i­gra­tion to the “land of Nod,” where he took him­self a wife.

74:8.9The He­brews had no writ­ten lan­guage in gen­eral us­age for a long time af­ter they reached Pales­tine. They learned the use of an al­pha­bet from the neigh­bor­ing Phil­is­tines, who were po­lit­i­cal refugees from the higher civ­i­liza­tion of Crete. The He­brews did lit­tle writ­ing un­til about 900 B.C., and hav­ing no writ­ten lan­guage un­til such a late date, they had sev­eral dif­fer­ent sto­ries of cre­ation in cir­cu­la­tion, but af­ter the Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity they in­clined more to­ward ac­cept­ing a mod­i­fied Mes­o­po­ta­mian ver­sion.

74:8.10Jew­ish tra­di­tion be­came crys­tal­lized about Moses, and be­cause he en­deav­ored to trace the lin­eage of Abra­ham back to Adam, the Jews as­sumed that Adam was the first of all man­kind. Yah­weh was the cre­ator, and since Adam was sup­posed to be the first man, he must have made the world just prior to mak­ing Adam. And then the tra­di­tion of Adam’s six days got wo­ven into the story, with the re­sult that al­most a thou­sand years af­ter Moses’ so­journ on earth the tra­di­tion of cre­ation in six days was writ­ten out and sub­se­quently cred­ited to him.

74:8.11When the Jew­ish priests re­turned to Je­ru­sa­lem, they had al­ready com­pleted the writ­ing of their nar­ra­tive of the be­gin­ning of things. Soon they made claims that this recital was a re­cently dis­cov­ered story of cre­ation writ­ten by Moses. But the con­tem­po­rary He­brews of around 500 B.C. did not con­sider these writ­ings to be di­vine rev­e­la­tions; they looked upon them much as later peo­ples re­gard mytho­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives.

• beliefs › consorting with deceased brother’s widow

83:5.4The Jew­ish cus­tom re­quir­ing that a man con­sort with his de­ceased brother’s widow for the pur­pose of “rais­ing up seed for his brother,” was the cus­tom of more than half the an­cient world. This was a relic of the time when mar­riage was a fam­ily af­fair rather than an in­di­vid­ual as­so­ci­a­tion.

• fetish hut elevated by Moses to harbor law of God

88:2.3The hearth—fire­place—be­came more or less of a fe­tish, a sa­cred spot. The shrines and tem­ples were at first fe­tish places be­cause the dead were buried there. The fe­tish hut of the He­brews was el­e­vated by Moses to that place where it har­bored a super­fe­tish, the then ex­is­tent con­cept of the law of God. But the Is­raelites never gave up the pe­cu­liar Ca­naan­ite be­lief in the stone al­tar: “And this stone which I have set up as a pil­lar shall be God’s house.” They truly be­lieved that the spirit of their God dwelt in such stone al­tars, which were in re­al­ity fe­tishes.

• feasts › Passover › smearing blood on doorposts was outgrowth of child sacrifice

89:7.2An out­growth of the pass­ing child sac­ri­fice was the cus­tom of smear­ing blood on the house door­posts for the pro­tec­tion of the first-born. This was of­ten done in con­nec­tion with one of the sa­cred feasts of the year, and this cer­e­mony once ob­tained over most of the world from Mex­ico to Egypt.

• feasts › Passover › Hebrew ritual

89:9.2In con­nec­tion with the Mother of God cult, in Mex­ico and else­where, a sacra­ment of cakes and wine was even­tu­ally uti­lized in lieu of the flesh and blood of the older hu­man sac­ri­fices. The He­brews long prac­ticed this rit­ual as a part of their Pass­over cer­e­monies, and it was from this cer­e­mo­nial that the later Chris­tian ver­sion of the sacra­ment took its ori­gin.

89:9.3The an­cient so­cial broth­er­hoods were based on the rite of blood drink­ing; the early Jew­ish fra­ter­nity was a sac­ri­fi­cial blood af­fair. Paul started out to build a new Chris­tian cult on “the blood of the ev­er­last­ing covenant.” And while he may have un­nec­es­sar­ily en­cum­bered Chris­tian­ity with teach­ings about blood and sac­ri­fice, he did once and for all make an end of the doc­trines of re­demp­tion through hu­man or an­i­mal sac­ri­fices. His the­o­logic com­pro­mises in­di­cate that even rev­e­la­tion must sub­mit to the grad­u­ated con­trol of evo­lu­tion. Ac­cord­ing to Paul, Christ be­came the last and all-suf­fi­cient hu­man sac­ri­fice; the di­vine Judge is now fully and for­ever sat­is­fied.

• feasts › Passover › sacrament must consist of most primitive viand

92:2.2Re­li­gion clings to the mores; that which was is an­cient and sup­pos­edly sa­cred. For this rea­son and no other, stone im­ple­ments per­sisted long into the age of bronze and iron. This state­ment is of rec­ord: “And if you will make me an al­tar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone, for, if you use your tools in mak­ing it, you have pol­luted it.” Even to­day, the Hin­dus kin­dle their al­tar fires by us­ing a prim­i­tive fire drill. In the course of evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion, nov­elty has al­ways been re­garded as sac­ri­lege. The sacra­ment must con­sist, not of new and man­u­fac­tured food, but of the most prim­i­tive of viands: “The flesh roasted with fire and un­leav­ened bread served with bit­ter herbs.” All types of so­cial us­age and even le­gal pro­ce­dures cling to the old forms.

• advanced religion of ancient times
• great international, interracial faith

92:6.42. The He­brew re­li­gion.

• advanced religion of ancient times

92:6.14The most ad­vanced re­li­gions of an­cient times were Hin­duism and Ju­daism, and each re­spec­tively has greatly in­flu­enced the course of re­li­gious de­vel­op­ment in Ori­ent and Oc­ci­dent. Both Hin­dus and He­brews be­lieved that their re­li­gions were in­spired and re­vealed, and they be­lieved all oth­ers to be deca­dent forms of the one true faith.

• great international, interracial faith

92:6.16The great in­ter­na­tional, in­ter­ra­cial faiths are the He­braic, Bud­dhist, Chris­tian, and Is­lamic. Bud­dhism stretches from Cey­lon and Burma through Ti­bet and China to Japan. It has shown an adapt­abil­ity to the mores of many peo­ples that has been equaled only by Chris­tian­ity.

• evolutionary link between religions of evolution and revelation

92:6.17The He­brew re­li­gion en­com­passes the philo­sophic tran­si­tion from poly­the­ism to mono­the­ism; it is an evo­lu­tion­ary link be­tween the re­li­gions of evo­lu­tion and the re­li­gions of rev­e­la­tion. The He­brews were the only west­ern peo­ple to fol­low their early evo­lu­tion­ary gods straight through to the God of rev­e­la­tion. But this truth never be­came widely ac­cepted un­til the days of Isa­iah, who once again taught the blended idea of a racial de­ity com­bined with a Uni­ver­sal Cre­ator: “O Lord of Hosts, God of Is­rael, you are God, even you alone; you have made heaven and earth.” At one time the hope of the sur­vival of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion lay in the sub­lime He­braic con­cepts of good­ness and the ad­vanced Hel­lenic con­cepts of beauty.

• influence on Judaism by › Amenemope

95:4.4Amen­emope func­tioned to con­serve the ethics of evo­lu­tion and the morals of rev­e­la­tion and in his writ­ings passed them on both to the He­brews and to the Greeks. He was not the great­est of the re­li­gious teach­ers of this age, but he was the most in­flu­en­tial in that he col­ored the sub­se­quent thought of two vi­tal links in the growth of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion—the He­brews, among whom evolved the acme of Oc­ci­den­tal re­li­gious faith, and the Greeks, who de­vel­oped pure philo­sophic thought to its great­est Eu­ro­pean heights.

• influence on Judaism by › Ikhnaton

95:5.7Ikh­na­ton was wise enough to main­tain the out­ward wor­ship of Aton, the sun-god, while he led his as­so­ciates in the dis­guised wor­ship of the One God, cre­ator of Aton and su­preme Fa­ther of all. This young teacher-king was a pro­lific writer, be­ing au­thor of the ex­po­si­tion en­ti­tled “The One God,” a book of thirty-one chap­ters, which the priests, when re­turned to power, ut­terly de­stroyed. Ikh­na­ton also wrote one hun­dred and thirty-seven hymns, twelve of which are now pre­served in the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Psalms, cred­ited to He­brew au­thor­ship.

95:5.8The su­preme word of Ikh­na­ton’s re­li­gion in daily life was “righ­teous­ness,” and he rapidly ex­panded the con­cept of right do­ing to em­brace in­ter­na­tional as well as na­tional ethics. This was a gen­er­a­tion of amaz­ing per­sonal piety and was char­ac­ter­ized by a gen­uine as­pi­ra­tion among the more in­tel­li­gent men and women to find God and to know him. In those days so­cial po­si­tion or wealth gave no Egyp­tian any ad­van­tage in the eyes of the law. The fam­ily life of Egypt did much to pre­serve and aug­ment moral cul­ture and was the in­spi­ra­tion of the later su­perb fam­ily life of the Jews in Pales­tine.

• influence on Judaism by › Ikhnaton

95:5.14Al­though the ef­fort of this Egyp­tian ruler to im­pose the wor­ship of one God upon his peo­ple ap­peared to fail, it should be re­corded that the reper­cus­sions of his work per­sisted for cen­turies both in Pales­tine and Greece, and that Egypt thus be­came the agent for trans­mit­ting the com­bined evo­lu­tion­ary cul­ture of the Nile and the rev­e­la­tory re­li­gion of the Eu­phrates to all of the sub­se­quent peo­ples of the Oc­ci­dent.

95:5.15The glory of this great era of moral de­vel­op­ment and spir­i­tual growth in the Nile val­ley was rapidly pass­ing at about the time the na­tional life of the He­brews was be­gin­ning, and con­se­quent upon their so­journ in Egypt these Bed­ou­ins car­ried away much of these teach­ings and per­pet­u­ated many of Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trines in their racial re­li­gion.

• influence on Judaism by › Zoroastrianism

95:6.7Even the re­li­gion which suc­ceeded Zoroas­tri­an­ism in Per­sia was markedly in­flu­enced by it. When the Ira­nian priests sought to over­throw the teach­ings of Zoroaster, they res­ur­rected the an­cient wor­ship of Mithra. And Mith­ra­ism spread through­out the Lev­ant and Med­i­ter­ra­nean re­gions, be­ing for some time a con­tem­po­rary of both Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity. The teach­ings of Zoroaster thus came suc­ces­sively to im­press three great re­li­gions: Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity and, through them, Mo­hammedanism.

• influence on Judaism by
• predicated on Melchizedek’s covenant with Abraham

96:0.3The Salem re­li­gion per­sisted among the Ken­ites in Pales­tine as their creed, and this re­li­gion as it was later adopted by the He­brews was in­flu­enced, first, by Egyp­tian moral teach­ings; later, by Baby­lo­nian the­o­logic thought; and lastly, by Ira­nian con­cep­tions of good and evil. Fac­tu­ally the He­brew re­li­gion is pred­i­cated upon the covenant be­tween Abra­ham and Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, evo­lu­tion­ally it is the out­growth of many unique sit­u­a­tional cir­cum­stances, but cul­tur­ally it has bor­rowed freely from the re­li­gion, moral­ity, and phi­los­o­phy of the en­tire Lev­ant. It is through the He­brew re­li­gion that much of the moral­ity and re­li­gious thought of Egypt, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Iran was trans­mit­ted to the Oc­ci­den­tal peo­ples.

• various Deity titles defined

96:1.2The prog­ress of the He­brews from poly­the­ism through heno­the­ism to mono­the­ism was not an un­bro­ken and con­tin­u­ous con­cep­tual de­vel­op­ment. They ex­pe­ri­enced many ret­ro­gres­sions in the evo­lu­tion of their De­ity con­cepts, while dur­ing any one epoch there ex­isted vary­ing ideas of God among dif­fer­ent groups of Semite be­liev­ers. From time to time nu­mer­ous terms were ap­plied to their con­cepts of God, and in or­der to pre­vent con­fu­sion these var­i­ous De­ity ti­tles will be de­fined as they per­tain to the evo­lu­tion of Jew­ish the­ol­ogy:

96:1.31. Yah­weh was the god of the south­ern Pales­tinian tribes, who as­so­ci­ated this con­cept of de­ity with Mount Ho­reb, the Sinai vol­cano. Yah­weh was merely one of the hun­dreds and thou­sands of na­ture gods which held the at­ten­tion and claimed the wor­ship of the Semitic tribes and peo­ples.

96:1.42. El Elyon. For cen­turies af­ter Mel­chiz­e­dek’s so­journ at Salem his doc­trine of De­ity per­sisted in var­i­ous ver­sions but was gen­er­ally con­noted by the term El Elyon, the Most High God of heaven. Many Semites, in­clud­ing the im­me­di­ate de­scen­dants of Abra­ham, at var­i­ous times wor­shiped both Yah­weh and El Elyon.

96:1.53. El Shad­dai. It is dif­fi­cult to ex­plain what El Shad­dai stood for. This idea of God was a com­pos­ite de­rived from the teach­ings of Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom mod­i­fied by Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trine of Aton and fur­ther in­flu­enced by Mel­chiz­e­dek’s teach­ings em­bod­ied in the con­cept of El Elyon. But as the con­cept of El Shad­dai per­me­ated the He­brew mind, it be­came thor­oughly col­ored with the Yah­weh be­liefs of the desert.

96:1.6One of the dom­i­nant ideas of the re­li­gion of this era was the Egyp­tian con­cept of di­vine Prov­i­dence, the teach­ing that ma­te­rial pros­per­ity was a re­ward for serv­ing El Shad­dai.

96:1.74. El. Amid all this con­fu­sion of ter­mi­nol­ogy and hazi­ness of con­cept, many de­vout be­liev­ers sin­cerely en­deav­ored to wor­ship all of these evolv­ing ideas of di­vin­ity, and there grew up the prac­tice of re­fer­ring to this com­pos­ite De­ity as El. And this term in­cluded still other of the Bed­ouin na­ture gods.

• beliefs › trinitarian Elohim part of theology after Babylon

96:1.85. Elo­him. In Kish and Ur there long per­sisted Sume­rian-Chaldean groups who taught a three-in-one God con­cept founded on the tra­di­tions of the days of Adam and Mel­chiz­e­dek. This doc­trine was car­ried to Egypt, where this Trin­ity was wor­shiped un­der the name of Elo­him, or in the sin­gu­lar as Eloah. The philo­sophic cir­cles of Egypt and later Alexan­drian teach­ers of He­braic ex­trac­tion taught this unity of plu­ral­is­tic Gods, and many of Moses’ ad­vis­ers at the time of the ex­o­dus be­lieved in this Trin­ity. But the con­cept of the trini­tar­ian Elo­him never be­came a real part of He­brew the­ol­ogy un­til af­ter they had come un­der the po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence of the Baby­lo­ni­ans.

96:1.96. Sundry names. The Semites dis­liked to speak the name of their De­ity, and they there­fore re­sorted to nu­mer­ous ap­pel­la­tions from time to time, such as: The Spirit of God, The Lord, The An­gel of the Lord, The Al­mighty, The Holy One, The Most High, Adonai, The An­cient of Days, The Lord God of Is­rael, The Cre­ator of Heaven and Earth, Kyrios, Jah, The Lord of Hosts, and The Fa­ther in Heaven.

96:1.10Je­ho­vah is a term which in re­cent times has been em­ployed to des­ig­nate the com­pleted con­cept of Yah­weh which fi­nally evolved in the long He­brew ex­pe­ri­ence. But the name Je­ho­vah did not come into use un­til fif­teen hun­dred years af­ter the times of Je­sus.

• Micah attacked sacrificial system

97:5.6Ever the bur­den of Micah’s mes­sage was: “Shall I come be­fore God with burnt of­fer­ings? Will the Lord be pleased with a thou­sand rams or with ten thou­sand rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my trans­gres­sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown me, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord re­quire of you but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?” And it was a great age; these were in­deed stir­ring times when mor­tal man heard, and some even be­lieved, such eman­ci­pat­ing mes­sages more than two and a half mil­len­ni­ums ago. And but for the stub­born re­sis­tance of the priests, these teach­ers would have over­thrown the whole bloody cer­e­mo­nial of the He­brew rit­ual of wor­ship.

• influence on Judaism by › Egypt

97:8.2In or­der to un­der­stand how the dev­as­tat­ing pres­sure and the in­es­cap­able co­er­cion of sec­u­lar his­tory so ter­ror­ized the cap­tive and alien-ruled Jews that they at­tempted the com­plete rewrit­ing and re­cast­ing of their his­tory, we should briefly sur­vey the rec­ord of their per­plex­ing na­tional ex­pe­ri­ence. It must be re­mem­bered that the Jews failed to evolve an ad­e­quate non­the­o­logic phi­los­o­phy of life. They strug­gled with their orig­i­nal and Egyp­tian con­cept of di­vine re­wards for righ­teous­ness cou­pled with dire pun­ish­ments for sin. The drama of Job was some­thing of a protest against this er­ro­neous phi­los­o­phy. The frank pes­simism of Ec­cle­si­astes was a worldly wise re­ac­tion to these overop­ti­mistic be­liefs in Prov­i­dence.

• influence on Judaism by › Babylonian captivity

97:9.27In Baby­lon the Jews ar­rived at the con­clu­sion that they could not ex­ist as a small group in Pales­tine, hav­ing their own pe­cu­liar so­cial and eco­nomic cus­toms, and that, if their ide­olo­gies were to pre­vail, they must con­vert the gen­tiles. Thus orig­i­nated their new con­cept of des­tiny—the idea that the Jews must be­come the cho­sen ser­vants of Yah­weh. The Jew­ish re­li­gion of the Old Tes­ta­ment re­ally evolved in Baby­lon dur­ing the cap­tiv­ity.

97:10.1Their lead­ers had taught the Is­raelites that they were a cho­sen peo­ple, not for spe­cial in­dul­gence and monopoly of di­vine fa­vor, but for the spe­cial ser­vice of car­ry­ing the truth of the one God over all to ev­ery na­tion. And they had prom­ised the Jews that, if they would ful­fill this des­tiny, they would be­come the spir­i­tual lead­ers of all peo­ples, and that the com­ing Mes­siah would reign over them and all the world as the Prince of Peace.

97:10.2When the Jews had been freed by the Per­sians, they re­turned to Pales­tine only to fall into bond­age to their own priest-rid­den code of laws, sac­ri­fices, and rit­u­als. And as the He­brew clans re­jected the won­der­ful story of God pre­sented in the farewell ora­tion of Moses for the rit­u­als of sac­ri­fice and pen­ance, so did these rem­nants of the He­brew na­tion re­ject the mag­nif­i­cent con­cept of the sec­ond Isa­iah for the rules, reg­u­la­tions, and rit­u­als of their grow­ing priest­hood.

97:10.3Na­tional ego­tism, false faith in a mis­con­ceived prom­ised Mes­siah, and the in­creas­ing bond­age and tyranny of the priest­hood for­ever si­lenced the voices of the spir­i­tual lead­ers (ex­cept­ing Daniel, Eze­kiel, Hag­gai, and Malachi); and from that day to the time of John the Bap­tist all Is­rael ex­pe­ri­enced an in­creas­ing spir­i­tual ret­ro­gres­sion. But the Jews never lost the con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther; even to the twen­ti­eth cen­tury af­ter Christ they have con­tin­ued to fol­low this De­ity con­cep­tion.

97:10.4From Moses to John the Bap­tist there ex­tended an un­bro­ken line of faith­ful teach­ers who passed the mono­the­is­tic torch of light from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other while they un­ceas­ingly re­buked un­scrupu­lous rulers, de­nounced com­mer­cial­iz­ing priests, and ever ex­horted the peo­ple to ad­here to the wor­ship of the su­preme Yah­weh, the Lord God of Is­rael.

• deficient in philosophy and aesthetics, but conserved moral values

97:10.5As a na­tion the Jews even­tu­ally lost their po­lit­i­cal iden­tity, but the He­brew re­li­gion of sin­cere be­lief in the one and uni­ver­sal God con­tin­ues to live in the hearts of the scat­tered ex­iles. And this re­li­gion sur­vives be­cause it has ef­fec­tively func­tioned to con­serve the high­est val­ues of its fol­low­ers. The Jew­ish re­li­gion did pre­serve the ide­als of a peo­ple, but it failed to fos­ter prog­ress and en­cour­age philo­sophic cre­ative dis­cov­ery in the realms of truth. The Jew­ish re­li­gion had many faults—it was de­fi­cient in phi­los­o­phy and al­most de­void of aes­thetic qual­i­ties—but it did con­serve moral val­ues; there­fore it per­sisted. The su­preme Yah­weh, as com­pared with other con­cepts of De­ity, was clear-cut, vivid, per­sonal, and moral.

• influence of Judaism on › Christianity
• influence of Judaism on › Islam

97:10.6The Jews loved jus­tice, wis­dom, truth, and righ­teous­ness as have few peo­ples, but they con­tributed least of all peo­ples to the in­tel­lec­tual com­pre­hen­sion and to the spir­i­tual un­der­stand­ing of these di­vine qual­i­ties. Though He­brew the­ol­ogy re­fused to ex­pand, it played an im­por­tant part in the de­vel­op­ment of two other world re­li­gions, Chris­tian­ity and Mo­hammedanism.

• persisted because of institutions

97:10.7The Jew­ish re­li­gion per­sisted also be­cause of its in­sti­tu­tions. It is dif­fi­cult for re­li­gion to sur­vive as the pri­vate prac­tice of iso­lated in­di­vid­u­als. This has ever been the er­ror of the re­li­gious lead­ers: See­ing the evils of in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized re­li­gion, they seek to de­stroy the tech­nique of group func­tion­ing. In place of de­stroy­ing all rit­ual, they would do bet­ter to re­form it. In this re­spect Eze­kiel was wiser than his con­tem­po­raries; though he joined with them in in­sist­ing on per­sonal moral re­spon­si­bil­ity, he also set about to es­tab­lish the faith­ful ob­ser­vance of a su­pe­rior and pu­ri­fied rit­ual.

97:10.8And thus the suc­ces­sive teach­ers of Is­rael ac­com­plished the great­est feat in the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion ever to be ef­fected on Uran­tia: the grad­ual but con­tin­u­ous trans­for­ma­tion of the bar­baric con­cept of the sav­age de­mon Yah­weh, the jeal­ous and cruel spirit god of the ful­mi­nat­ing Sinai vol­cano, to the later ex­alted and su­per­nal con­cept of the su­preme Yah­weh, cre­ator of all things and the lov­ing and mer­ci­ful Fa­ther of all man­kind. And this He­braic con­cept of God was the high­est hu­man vi­su­al­iza­tion of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther up to that time when it was fur­ther en­larged and so ex­qui­sitely am­pli­fied by the per­sonal teach­ings and life ex­am­ple of his Son, Mi­chael of Neb­a­don.

97:10.9[Pre­sented by a Mel­chiz­e­dek of Neb­a­don.]

• beliefs › religious dogma so crystallized as to jeopardize further growth

98:2.9In Pales­tine, re­li­gious dogma be­came so crys­tal­lized as to jeop­ar­dize fur­ther growth; in Greece, hu­man thought be­came so ab­stract that the con­cept of God re­solved it­self into a misty va­por of pan­the­is­tic spec­u­la­tion not at all un­like the im­per­sonal In­fin­ity of the Brah­man philoso­phers.

• influence of Judaism on › Christianity

98:7.52. The He­braic sys­tem of moral­ity, ethics, the­ol­ogy, and be­lief in both Prov­i­dence and the su­preme Yah­weh.

• influence on Judaism by › Zoroastrianism

98:7.63. The Zoroas­trian con­cep­tion of the strug­gle be­tween cos­mic good and evil, which had al­ready left its im­print on both Ju­daism and Mith­ra­ism. Through pro­longed con­tact at­ten­dant upon the strug­gles be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Chris­tian­ity, the doc­trines of the Ira­nian prophet be­came a po­tent fac­tor in de­ter­min­ing the the­o­logic and philo­sophic cast and struc­ture of the dog­mas, tenets, and cos­mol­ogy of the Hel­le­nized and La­tinized ver­sions of the teach­ings of Je­sus.

• monotheistic zeal eclipsed teachings of Trinity

104:1.8The He­brews knew about the Trin­ity from the Ken­ite tra­di­tions of the days of Mel­chiz­e­dek, but their mono­the­is­tic zeal for the one God, Yah­weh, so ec­lipsed all such teach­ings that by the time of Je­sus’ ap­pear­ance the Elo­him doc­trine had been prac­ti­cally erad­i­cated from Jew­ish the­ol­ogy. The He­brew mind could not rec­on­cile the trini­tar­ian con­cept with the mono­the­is­tic be­lief in the One Lord, the God of Is­rael.

• rapidly expanding in times of Jesus

121:1.63. The rapidly spread­ing in­flu­ence of Jew­ish re­li­gious and moral teach­ings.

• tolerated fringe of gentile believers

121:2.5Each Jew­ish syn­a­gogue tol­er­ated a fringe of gen­tile be­liev­ers, “de­vout” or “God-fear­ing” men, and it was among this fringe of pros­e­lytes that Paul made the bulk of his early con­verts to Chris­tian­ity. Even the tem­ple at Je­ru­sa­lem pos­sessed its or­nate court of the gen­tiles. There was very close con­nec­tion be­tween the cul­ture, com­merce, and wor­ship of Je­ru­sa­lem and An­ti­och. In An­ti­och Paul’s dis­ci­ples were first called “Chris­tians.”

• secret of survival was centralization of worship at Jerusalem

121:2.6The cen­tral­iza­tion of the Jew­ish tem­ple wor­ship at Je­ru­sa­lem con­sti­tuted alike the se­cret of the sur­vival of their mono­the­ism and the prom­ise of the nur­ture and send­ing forth to the world of a new and en­larged con­cept of that one God of all na­tions and Fa­ther of all mor­tals. The tem­ple ser­vice at Je­ru­sa­lem rep­re­sented the sur­vival of a re­li­gious cul­tural con­cept in the face of the down­fall of a suc­ces­sion of gen­tile na­tional over­lords and racial per­se­cu­tors.

• eastern/western differences › Levant adopted western viewpoint

121:6.1By the close of the first cen­tury be­fore Christ the re­li­gious thought of Je­ru­sa­lem had been tremen­dously in­flu­enced and some­what mod­i­fied by Greek cul­tural teach­ings and even by Greek phi­los­o­phy. In the long con­test be­tween the views of the East­ern and West­ern schools of He­brew thought, Je­ru­sa­lem and the rest of the Oc­ci­dent and the Lev­ant in gen­eral adopted the West­ern Jew­ish or mod­i­fied Hel­lenis­tic view­point.

• renaissance dates from Greek translation of Scriptures

121:6.2In the days of Je­sus three lan­guages pre­vailed in Pales­tine: The com­mon peo­ple spoke some di­alect of Ara­maic; the priests and rab­bis spoke He­brew; the ed­u­cated classes and the bet­ter strata of Jews in gen­eral spoke Greek. The early trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek at Alexan­dria was re­spon­si­ble in no small mea­sure for the sub­se­quent pre­dom­i­nance of the Greek wing of Jew­ish cul­ture and the­ol­ogy. And the writ­ings of the Chris­tian teach­ers were soon to ap­pear in the same lan­guage. The re­nais­sance of Ju­daism dates from the Greek trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures. This was a vi­tal in­flu­ence which later de­ter­mined the drift of Paul’s Chris­tian cult to­ward the West in­stead of to­ward the East.

• influence on Judaism by › Philo
• influence on Judaism by › Platonism and Stoicism

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

121:6.4Philo was a great teacher; not since Moses had there lived a man who ex­erted such a pro­found in­flu­ence on the eth­i­cal and re­li­gious thought of the Oc­ci­den­tal world. In the mat­ter of the com­bi­na­tion of the bet­ter el­e­ments in con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sys­tems of eth­i­cal and re­li­gious teach­ings, there have been seven out­stand­ing hu­man teach­ers: Sethard, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Bud­dha, Philo, and Paul.

121:6.5Many, but not all, of Philo’s in­con­sis­ten­cies re­sult­ing from an ef­fort to com­bine Greek mys­ti­cal phi­los­o­phy and Ro­man Stoic doc­trines with the le­gal­is­tic the­ol­ogy of the He­brews, Paul rec­og­nized and wisely elim­i­nated from his pre-Chris­tian ba­sic the­ol­ogy. Philo led the way for Paul more fully to re­store the con­cept of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, which had long been dor­mant in Jew­ish the­ol­ogy. In only one mat­ter did Paul fail to keep pace with Philo or to tran­scend the teach­ings of this wealthy and ed­u­cated Jew of Alexan­dria, and that was the doc­trine of the atone­ment; Philo taught de­liv­er­ance from the doc­trine of for­give­ness only by the shed­ding of blood. He also pos­si­bly glimpsed the re­al­ity and pres­ence of the Thought Ad­justers more clearly than did Paul. But Paul’s the­ory of orig­i­nal sin, the doc­trines of hered­i­tary guilt and in­nate evil and re­demp­tion there­from, was par­tially Mith­raic in ori­gin, hav­ing lit­tle in com­mon with He­brew the­ol­ogy, Philo’s phi­los­o­phy, or Je­sus’ teach­ings. Some phases of Paul’s teach­ings re­gard­ing orig­i­nal sin and the atone­ment were orig­i­nal with him­self.

121:6.6The Gospel of John, the last of the nar­ra­tives of Je­sus’ earth life, was ad­dressed to the West­ern peo­ples and pre­sents its story much in the light of the view­point of the later Alexan­drian Chris­tians, who were also dis­ci­ples of the teach­ings of Philo.

121:6.7At about the time of Christ a strange re­ver­sion of feel­ing to­ward the Jews oc­curred in Alexan­dria, and from this for­mer Jew­ish stronghold there went forth a vir­u­lent wave of per­se­cu­tion, ex­tend­ing even to Rome, from which many thou­sands were ban­ished. But such a cam­paign of mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion was short-lived; very soon the im­pe­rial gov­ern­ment fully re­stored the cur­tailed lib­er­ties of the Jews through­out the em­pire.

• saved by intervention of Babylonian teachers

121:6.8Through­out the whole wide world, no mat­ter where the Jews found them­selves dis­persed by com­merce or op­pres­sion, all with one ac­cord kept their hearts cen­tered on the holy tem­ple at Je­ru­sa­lem. Jew­ish the­ol­ogy did sur­vive as it was in­ter­preted and prac­ticed at Je­ru­sa­lem, not­with­stand­ing that it was sev­eral times saved from obliv­ion by the timely in­ter­ven­tion of cer­tain Baby­lo­nian teach­ers.

• eastern/western differences

121:6.9As many as two and one-half mil­lion of these dis­persed Jews used to come to Je­ru­sa­lem for the cel­e­bra­tion of their na­tional re­li­gious fes­ti­vals. And no mat­ter what the the­o­logic or philo­sophic dif­fer­ences of the East­ern (Baby­lo­nian) and the West­ern (Hel­lenic) Jews, they were all agreed on Je­ru­sa­lem as the cen­ter of their wor­ship and in ever look­ing for­ward to the com­ing of the Mes­siah.

• oral law › minute regulations invaded every domain of life
• oral law › viewed as ordained by Abraham; more sacred than Scripture

121:7.3The scribes, the Phar­isees, and the priest­hood held the Jews in a ter­ri­ble bond­age of rit­u­al­ism and le­gal­ism, a bond­age far more real than that of the Ro­man po­lit­i­cal rule. The Jews of Je­sus’ time were not only held in sub­ju­ga­tion to the law but were equally bound by the slav­ish de­mands of the tra­di­tions, which in­volved and in­vaded ev­ery do­main of per­sonal and so­cial life. These minute reg­u­la­tions of con­duct pur­sued and dom­i­nated ev­ery loyal Jew, and it is not strange that they promptly re­jected one of their num­ber who pre­sumed to ig­nore their sa­cred tra­di­tions, and who dared to flout their long-hon­ored reg­u­la­tions of so­cial con­duct. They could hardly re­gard with fa­vor the teach­ings of one who did not hes­i­tate to clash with dog­mas which they re­garded as hav­ing been or­dained by Fa­ther Abra­ham him­self. Moses had given them their law and they would not com­pro­mise.

121:7.4By the time of the first cen­tury af­ter Christ the spo­ken in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the law by the rec­og­nized teach­ers, the scribes, had be­come a higher au­thor­ity than the writ­ten law it­self. And all this made it eas­ier for cer­tain re­li­gious lead­ers of the Jews to ar­ray the peo­ple against the ac­cep­tance of a new gospel.

• beliefs › religion of good works, slavery to law

121:7.5These cir­cum­stances ren­dered it im­pos­si­ble for the Jews to ful­fill their di­vine des­tiny as mes­sen­gers of the new gospel of re­li­gious free­dom and spir­i­tual lib­erty. They could not break the fet­ters of tra­di­tion. Jeremiah had told of the “law to be writ­ten in men’s hearts,” Eze­kiel had spo­ken of a “new spirit to live in man’s soul,” and the Psalmist had prayed that God would “cre­ate a clean heart within and re­new a right spirit.” But when the Jew­ish re­li­gion of good works and slav­ery to law fell vic­tim to the stag­na­tion of tra­di­tion­al­is­tic in­er­tia, the mo­tion of re­li­gious evo­lu­tion passed west­ward to the Eu­ro­pean peo­ples.

• eastern/western differences › Joseph father of Jesus held to eastern
• eastern/western differences › Mary mother of Jesus leaned toward western

122:5.11Joseph held vig­or­ously to the East­ern, or Baby­lo­nian, views of the Jew­ish re­li­gion; Mary leaned strongly to­ward the more lib­eral and broader West­ern, or Hel­lenis­tic, in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the law and the proph­ets.

• beliefs › redemption of first-born sons
• rituals › purification after childbirth

122:9.1Moses had taught the Jews that ev­ery first-born son be­longed to the Lord, and that, in lieu of his sac­ri­fice as was the cus­tom among the hea­then na­tions, such a son might live pro­vided his par­ents would re­deem him by the pay­ment of five shekels to any au­tho­rized priest. There was also a Mo­saic or­di­nance which di­rected that a mother, af­ter the pass­ing of a cer­tain pe­riod of time, should pre­sent her­self (or have some­one make the proper sac­ri­fice for her) at the tem­ple for pu­rifi­ca­tion. It was cus­tom­ary to per­form both of these cer­e­monies at the same time. Ac­cord­ingly, Joseph and Mary went up to the tem­ple at Je­ru­sa­lem in per­son to pre­sent Je­sus to the priests and ef­fect his re­demp­tion and also to make the proper sac­ri­fice to in­sure Mary’s cer­e­mo­nial pu­rifi­ca­tion from the al­leged un­clean­ness of child­birth.

• rituals › purification after childbirth

122:10.2Joseph was afraid to seek work, and their small sav­ings were rapidly dis­ap­pear­ing. Even at the time of the pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies at the tem­ple, Joseph deemed him­self suf­fi­ciently poor to war­rant his of­fer­ing for Mary two young pi­geons as Moses had di­rected for the pu­rifi­ca­tion of moth­ers among the poor.

• educational program in Galilee

123:2.5There were few homes in the gen­tile world of those days that could give a child a bet­ter in­tel­lec­tual, moral, and re­li­gious train­ing than the Jew­ish homes of Gal­i­lee. These Jews had a sys­tem­atic pro­gram for rear­ing and ed­u­cat­ing their chil­dren. They di­vided a child’s life into seven stages:

123:2.61. The new­born child, the first to the eighth day.

123:2.72. The suck­ling child.

123:2.83. The weaned child.

123:2.94. The pe­riod of de­pen­dence on the mother, last­ing up to the end of the fifth year.

123:2.105. The be­gin­ning in­de­pen­dence of the child and, with sons, the fa­ther as­sum­ing re­spon­si­bil­ity for their ed­u­ca­tion.

123:2.116. The ado­les­cent youths and maid­ens.

123:2.127. The young men and the young women.

123:2.13It was the cus­tom of the Galilean Jews for the mother to bear the re­spon­si­bil­ity for a child’s train­ing un­til the fifth birth­day, and then, if the child were a boy, to hold the fa­ther re­spon­si­ble for the lad’s ed­u­ca­tion from that time on. This year, there­fore, Je­sus en­tered upon the fifth stage of a Galilean Jew­ish child’s ca­reer, and ac­cord­ingly on Au­gust 21, 2 B.C., Mary for­mally turned him over to Joseph for fur­ther in­struc­tion.

• feasts
• feasts › atonement
• feasts › Passover › celebrated in Jerusalem when possible
• feasts › Pentecost
• feasts › Purim › feast of Esther and Israel’s deliverance
• feasts › tabernacles › annual holiday of all Palestine; established by Moses
• feasts › tabernacles › feast of harvest ingathering

123:3.5Hav­ing met John, who came from near Je­ru­sa­lem, Je­sus be­gan to evince an un­usual in­ter­est in the his­tory of Is­rael and to in­quire in great de­tail as to the mean­ing of the Sab­bath rites, the syn­a­gogue ser­mons, and the re­cur­ring feasts of com­mem­o­ra­tion. His fa­ther ex­plained to him the mean­ing of all these sea­sons. The first was the mid­win­ter fes­tive il­lu­mi­na­tion, last­ing eight days, start­ing out with one can­dle the first night and adding one each suc­ces­sive night; this com­mem­o­rated the ded­i­ca­tion of the tem­ple af­ter the restora­tion of the Mo­saic ser­vices by Ju­das Mac­cabee. Next came the early spring­time cel­e­bra­tion of Purim, the feast of Es­ther and Is­rael’s de­liv­er­ance through her. Then fol­lowed the solemn Pass­over, which the adults cel­e­brated in Je­ru­sa­lem when­ever pos­si­ble, while at home the chil­dren would re­mem­ber that no leav­ened bread was to be eaten for the whole week. Later came the feast of the first-fruits, the har­vest in­gath­er­ing; and last, the most solemn of all, the feast of the new year, the day of atone­ment. While some of these cel­e­bra­tions and ob­ser­vances were dif­fi­cult for Je­sus’ young mind to un­der­stand, he pon­dered them se­ri­ously and then en­tered fully into the joy of the feast of taber­na­cles, the an­nual va­ca­tion sea­son of the whole Jew­ish peo­ple, the time when they camped out in leafy booths and gave them­selves up to mirth and plea­sure.

123:5.1Je­sus was now seven years old, the age when Jew­ish chil­dren were sup­posed to be­gin their for­mal ed­u­ca­tion in the syn­a­gogue schools. Ac­cord­ingly, in Au­gust of this year he en­tered upon his event­ful school life at Naz­a­reth. Al­ready this lad was a flu­ent reader, writer, and speaker of two lan­guages, Ara­maic and Greek. He was now to ac­quaint him­self with the task of learn­ing to read, write, and speak the He­brew lan­guage. And he was truly ea­ger for the new school life which was ahead of him.

• feasts › Passover › celebrated in Jerusalem when possible

123:5.2For three years—un­til he was ten—he at­tended the el­e­men­tary school of the Naz­a­reth syn­a­gogue. For these three years he stud­ied the rudi­ments of the Book of the Law as it was re­corded in the He­brew tongue. For the fol­low­ing three years he stud­ied in the ad­vanced school and com­mit­ted to mem­ory, by the method of re­peat­ing aloud, the deeper teach­ings of the sa­cred law. He grad­u­ated from this school of the syn­a­gogue dur­ing his thir­teenth year and was turned over to his par­ents by the syn­a­gogue rulers as an ed­u­cated “son of the com­mand­ment”—hence­forth a re­spon­si­ble cit­i­zen of the com­mon­wealth of Is­rael, all of which en­tailed his at­ten­dance at the Passovers in Je­ru­sa­lem; ac­cord­ingly, he at­tended his first Pass­over that year in com­pany with his fa­ther and mother.

123:5.3At Naz­a­reth the pupils sat on the floor in a semi­cir­cle, while their teacher, the chazan, an of­fi­cer of the syn­a­gogue, sat fac­ing them. Be­gin­ning with the Book of Leviti­cus, they passed on to the study of the other books of the law, fol­lowed by the study of the Proph­ets and the Psalms. The Naz­a­reth syn­a­gogue pos­sessed a com­plete copy of the Scrip­tures in He­brew. Noth­ing but the Scrip­tures was stud­ied prior to the twelfth year. In the sum­mer months the hours for school were greatly short­ened.

123:5.4Je­sus early be­came a mas­ter of He­brew, and as a young man, when no vis­i­tor of promi­nence hap­pened to be so­journ­ing in Naz­a­reth, he would of­ten be asked to read the He­brew scrip­tures to the faith­ful as­sem­bled in the syn­a­gogue at the reg­u­lar Sab­bath ser­vices.

123:5.5These syn­a­gogue schools, of course, had no text­books. In teach­ing, the chazan would ut­ter a state­ment while the pupils would in uni­son re­peat it af­ter him. When hav­ing ac­cess to the writ­ten books of the law, the stu­dent learned his les­son by read­ing aloud and by con­stant rep­e­ti­tion.

123:5.6Next, in ad­di­tion to his more for­mal school­ing, Je­sus be­gan to make con­tact with hu­man na­ture from the four quar­ters of the earth as men from many lands passed in and out of his fa­ther’s re­pair shop. When he grew older, he min­gled freely with the car­a­vans as they tar­ried near the spring for rest and nour­ish­ment. Be­ing a flu­ent speaker of Greek, he had lit­tle trou­ble in con­vers­ing with the ma­jor­ity of the car­a­van trav­el­ers and con­duc­tors.

123:5.7Naz­a­reth was a car­a­van way sta­tion and cross­roads of travel and largely gen­tile in pop­u­la­tion; at the same time it was widely known as a cen­ter of lib­eral in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Jew­ish tra­di­tional law. In Gal­i­lee the Jews min­gled more freely with the gen­tiles than was their prac­tice in Judea. And of all the cities of Gal­i­lee, the Jews of Naz­a­reth were most lib­eral in their in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the so­cial re­stric­tions based on the fears of con­tam­i­na­tion as a re­sult of con­tact with the gen­tiles. And these con­di­tions gave rise to the com­mon say­ing in Je­ru­sa­lem, “Can any good thing come out of Naz­a­reth?”

123:5.8Je­sus re­ceived his moral train­ing and spir­i­tual cul­ture chiefly in his own home. He se­cured much of his in­tel­lec­tual and the­o­log­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion from the chazan. But his real ed­u­ca­tion—that equip­ment of mind and heart for the ac­tual test of grap­pling with the dif­fi­cult prob­lems of life—he ob­tained by min­gling with his fel­low men. It was this close as­so­ci­a­tion with his fel­low men, young and old, Jew and gen­tile, that af­forded him the op­por­tu­nity to know the hu­man race. Je­sus was highly ed­u­cated in that he thor­oughly un­der­stood men and de­vot­edly loved them.

123:5.9Through­out his years at the syn­a­gogue he was a bril­liant stu­dent, pos­sess­ing a great ad­van­tage since he was con­ver­sant with three lan­guages. The Naz­a­reth chazan, on the oc­ca­sion of Je­sus’ fin­ish­ing the course in his school, re­marked to Joseph that he feared he “had learned more from Je­sus’ search­ing ques­tions” than he had “been able to teach the lad.”

123:5.10Through­out his course of study Je­sus learned much and de­rived great in­spi­ra­tion from the reg­u­lar Sab­bath ser­mons in the syn­a­gogue. It was cus­tom­ary to ask dis­tin­guished vis­i­tors, stop­ping over the Sab­bath in Naz­a­reth, to ad­dress the syn­a­gogue. As Je­sus grew up, he heard many great thinkers of the en­tire Jew­ish world ex­pound their views, and many also who were hardly or­tho­dox Jews since the syn­a­gogue of Naz­a­reth was an ad­vanced and lib­eral cen­ter of He­brew thought and cul­ture.

123:5.11When en­ter­ing school at seven years (at this time the Jews had just in­au­gu­rated a com­pul­sory ed­u­ca­tion law), it was cus­tom­ary for the pupils to choose their “birth­day text,” a sort of golden rule to guide them through­out their stud­ies, one upon which they of­ten ex­pa­ti­ated at their grad­u­a­tion when thir­teen years old. The text which Je­sus chose was from the Prophet Isa­iah: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the meek, to bind up the bro­ken­hearted, to pro­claim lib­erty to the cap­tives, and to set the spir­i­tual pris­on­ers free.”

123:5.12Naz­a­reth was one of the twenty-four priest cen­ters of the He­brew na­tion. But the Galilean priest­hood was more lib­eral in the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the tra­di­tional laws than were the Judean scribes and rab­bis. And at Naz­a­reth they were also more lib­eral re­gard­ing the ob­ser­vance of the Sab­bath. It was there­fore the cus­tom for Joseph to take Je­sus out for walks on Sab­bath af­ter­noons, one of their fa­vorite jaunts be­ing to climb the high hill near their home, from which they could ob­tain a panoramic view of all Gal­i­lee. To the north­west, on clear days, they could see the long ridge of Mount Carmel run­ning down to the sea; and many times Je­sus heard his fa­ther re­late the story of Eli­jah, one of the first of that long line of He­brew proph­ets, who re­proved Ahab and ex­posed the priests of Baal. To the north Mount Her­mon raised its snowy peak in ma­jes­tic splen­dor and mo­nop­o­lized the sky­line, al­most 3,000 feet of the up­per slopes glis­ten­ing white with per­pet­ual snow. Far to the east they could dis­cern the Jor­dan val­ley and, far be­yond, the rocky hills of Moab. Also to the south and the east, when the sun shone upon their mar­ble walls, they could see the Greco-Ro­man cities of the De­capo­lis, with their am­phithe­aters and pre­ten­tious tem­ples. And when they lin­gered to­ward the go­ing down of the sun, to the west they could make out the sail­ing ves­sels on the dis­tant Med­i­ter­ra­nean.

123:5.13From four di­rec­tions Je­sus could ob­serve the car­a­van trains as they wended their way in and out of Naz­a­reth, and to the south he could over­look the broad and fer­tile plain coun­try of Es­draelon, stretch­ing off to­ward Mount Gil­boa and Samaria.

123:5.14When they did not climb the heights to view the dis­tant land­scape, they strolled through the coun­try­side and stud­ied na­ture in her var­i­ous moods in ac­cor­dance with the sea­sons. Je­sus’ ear­li­est train­ing, aside from that of the home hearth, had to do with a rev­er­ent and sym­pa­thetic con­tact with na­ture.

123:5.15Be­fore he was eight years of age, he was known to all the moth­ers and young women of Naz­a­reth, who had met him and talked with him at the spring, which was not far from his home, and which was one of the so­cial cen­ters of con­tact and gos­sip for the en­tire town. This year Je­sus learned to milk the fam­ily cow and care for the other an­i­mals. Dur­ing this and the fol­low­ing year he also learned to make cheese and to weave. When he was ten years of age, he was an ex­pert loom op­er­a­tor. It was about this time that Je­sus and the neigh­bor boy Ja­cob be­came great friends of the pot­ter who worked near the flow­ing spring; and as they watched Nathan’s deft fin­gers mold the clay on the pot­ter’s wheel, many times both of them de­ter­mined to be pot­ters when they grew up. Nathan was very fond of the lads and of­ten gave them clay to play with, seek­ing to stim­u­late their cre­ative imag­i­na­tions by sug­gest­ing com­pet­i­tive ef­forts in mod­el­ing var­i­ous ob­jects and an­i­mals.

• oral law › Jesus in constant collision with

124:1.13Je­sus con­tin­ued to grow phys­i­cally, in­tel­lec­tu­ally, so­cially, and spir­i­tu­ally. His trips away from home did much to give him a bet­ter and more gen­er­ous un­der­stand­ing of his own fam­ily, and by this time even his par­ents were be­gin­ning to learn from him as well as to teach him. Je­sus was an orig­i­nal thinker and a skill­ful teacher, even in his youth. He was in con­stant col­li­sion with the so-called “oral law,” but he al­ways sought to adapt him­self to the prac­tices of his fam­ily. He got along fairly well with the chil­dren of his age, but he of­ten grew dis­cour­aged with their slow-act­ing minds. Be­fore he was ten years old, he had be­come the leader of a group of seven lads who formed them­selves into a so­ci­ety for pro­mot­ing the ac­quire­ments of man­hood—phys­i­cal, in­tel­lec­tual, and re­li­gious. Among these boys Je­sus suc­ceeded in in­tro­duc­ing many new games and var­i­ous im­proved meth­ods of phys­i­cal recre­ation.

124:6.1Je­sus, hav­ing now reached the thresh­old of young man­hood and hav­ing been for­mally grad­u­ated from the syn­a­gogue schools, was qual­i­fied to pro­ceed to Je­ru­sa­lem with his par­ents to par­tic­i­pate with them in the cel­e­bra­tion of his first Pass­over. The Pass­over feast of this year fell on Sat­ur­day, April 9, A.D. 7. A con­sid­er­able com­pany (103) made ready to de­part from Naz­a­reth early Mon­day morn­ing, April 4, for Je­ru­sa­lem. They jour­neyed south to­ward Samaria, but on reach­ing Jezreel, they turned east, go­ing around Mount Gil­boa into the Jor­dan val­ley in or­der to avoid pass­ing through Samaria. Joseph and his fam­ily would have en­joyed go­ing down through Samaria by way of Ja­cob’s well and Bethel, but since the Jews dis­liked to deal with the Samar­i­tans, they de­cided to go with their neigh­bors by way of the Jor­dan val­ley.

124:6.2The much-dreaded Archelaus had been de­posed, and they had lit­tle to fear in tak­ing Je­sus to Je­ru­sa­lem. Twelve years had passed since the first Herod had sought to de­stroy the babe of Beth­le­hem, and no one would now think of as­so­ci­at­ing that af­fair with this ob­scure lad of Naz­a­reth.

124:6.3Be­fore reach­ing the Jezreel junc­tion, and as they jour­neyed on, very soon, on the left, they passed the an­cient vil­lage of Shunem, and Je­sus heard again about the most beau­ti­ful maiden of all Is­rael who once lived there and also about the won­der­ful works El­isha per­formed there. In pass­ing by Jezreel, Je­sus’ par­ents re­counted the do­ings of Ahab and Jezebel and the ex­ploits of Jehu. In pass­ing around Mount Gil­boa, they talked much about Saul, who took his life on the slopes of this moun­tain, King David, and the as­so­ci­a­tions of this his­toric spot.

124:6.4As they rounded the base of Gil­boa, the pil­grims could see the Greek city of Scythopo­lis on the right. They gazed upon the mar­ble struc­tures from a dis­tance but went not near the gen­tile city lest they so de­file them­selves that they could not par­tic­i­pate in the forth­com­ing solemn and sa­cred cer­e­monies of the Pass­over at Je­ru­sa­lem. Mary could not un­der­stand why nei­ther Joseph nor Je­sus would speak of Scythopo­lis. She did not know about their con­tro­versy of the pre­vi­ous year as they had never re­vealed this episode to her.

124:6.5The road now led im­me­di­ately down into the trop­i­cal Jor­dan val­ley, and soon Je­sus was to have ex­posed to his won­der­ing gaze the crooked and ever-wind­ing Jor­dan with its glis­ten­ing and rip­pling wa­ters as it flowed down to­ward the Dead Sea. They laid aside their outer gar­ments as they jour­neyed south in this trop­i­cal val­ley, en­joy­ing the lux­u­ri­ous fields of grain and the beau­ti­ful ole­an­ders laden with their pink blos­soms, while mas­sive snow-capped Mount Her­mon stood far to the north, in majesty look­ing down on the his­toric val­ley. A lit­tle over three hours’ travel from op­po­site Scythopo­lis they came upon a bub­bling spring, and here they camped for the night, out un­der the star­lit heav­ens.

124:6.6On their sec­ond day’s jour­ney they passed by where the Jab­bok, from the east, flows into the Jor­dan, and look­ing east up this river val­ley, they re­counted the days of Gideon, when the Mid­i­an­ites poured into this re­gion to over­run the land. To­ward the end of the sec­ond day’s jour­ney they camped near the base of the high­est moun­tain over­look­ing the Jor­dan val­ley, Mount Sartaba, whose sum­mit was oc­cu­pied by the Alexan­drian fortress where Herod had im­pris­oned one of his wives and buried his two stran­gled sons.

124:6.7The third day they passed by two vil­lages which had been re­cently built by Herod and noted their su­pe­rior ar­chi­tec­ture and their beau­ti­ful palm gar­dens. By night­fall they reached Jeri­cho, where they re­mained un­til the mor­row. That evening Joseph, Mary, and Je­sus walked a mile and a half to the site of the an­cient Jeri­cho, where Joshua, for whom Je­sus was named, had per­formed his renowned ex­ploits, ac­cord­ing to Jew­ish tra­di­tion.

124:6.8By the fourth and last day’s jour­ney the road was a con­tin­u­ous pro­ces­sion of pil­grims. They now be­gan to climb the hills lead­ing up to Je­ru­sa­lem. As they neared the top, they could look across the Jor­dan to the moun­tains be­yond and south over the slug­gish wa­ters of the Dead Sea. About half­way up to Je­ru­sa­lem, Je­sus gained his first view of the Mount of Olives (the re­gion to be so much a part of his sub­se­quent life), and Joseph pointed out to him that the Holy City lay just be­yond this ridge, and the lad’s heart beat fast with joy­ous an­tic­i­pa­tion of soon be­hold­ing the city and house of his heav­enly Fa­ther.

124:6.9On the east­ern slopes of Oli­vet they paused for rest in the bor­ders of a lit­tle vil­lage called Beth­any. The hos­pitable vil­lagers poured forth to min­is­ter to the pil­grims, and it hap­pened that Joseph and his fam­ily had stopped near the house of one Si­mon, who had three chil­dren about the same age as Je­sus—Mary, Martha, and Laz­a­rus. They in­vited the Naz­a­reth fam­ily in for re­fresh­ment, and a life­long friend­ship sprang up be­tween the two fam­i­lies. Many times af­ter­ward, in his event­ful life, Je­sus stopped in this home.

124:6.10They pressed on, soon stand­ing on the brink of Oli­vet, and Je­sus saw for the first time (in his mem­ory) the Holy City, the pre­ten­tious palaces, and the in­spir­ing tem­ple of his Fa­ther. At no time in his life did Je­sus ever ex­pe­ri­ence such a purely hu­man thrill as that which at this time so com­pletely en­thralled him as he stood there on this April af­ter­noon on the Mount of Olives, drink­ing in his first view of Je­ru­sa­lem. And in af­ter years, on this same spot he stood and wept over the city which was about to re­ject an­other prophet, the last and the great­est of her heav­enly teach­ers.

124:6.11But they hur­ried on to Je­ru­sa­lem. It was now Thurs­day af­ter­noon. On reach­ing the city, they jour­neyed past the tem­ple, and never had Je­sus be­held such throngs of hu­man be­ings. He med­i­tated deeply on how these Jews had as­sem­bled here from the ut­ter­most parts of the known world.

124:6.12Soon they reached the place pre­ar­ranged for their ac­com­mo­da­tion dur­ing the Pass­over week, the large home of a well-to-do rel­a­tive of Mary’s, one who knew some­thing of the early his­tory of both John and Je­sus, through Zach­a­rias. The fol­low­ing day, the day of prepa­ra­tion, they made ready for the ap­pro­pri­ate cel­e­bra­tion of the Pass­over Sab­bath.

124:6.13While all Je­ru­sa­lem was astir in prepa­ra­tion for the Pass­over, Joseph found time to take his son around to visit the academy where it had been ar­ranged for him to re­sume his ed­u­ca­tion two years later, as soon as he reached the re­quired age of fif­teen. Joseph was truly puz­zled when he ob­served how lit­tle in­ter­est Je­sus evinced in all these care­fully laid plans.

124:6.14Je­sus was pro­foundly im­pressed by the tem­ple and all the as­so­ci­ated ser­vices and other ac­tiv­i­ties. For the first time since he was four years old, he was too much pre­oc­cu­pied with his own med­i­ta­tions to ask many ques­tions. He did, how­ever, ask his fa­ther sev­eral em­bar­rass­ing ques­tions (as he had on pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sions) as to why the heav­enly Fa­ther re­quired the slaugh­ter of so many in­no­cent and help­less an­i­mals. And his fa­ther well knew from the ex­pres­sion on the lad’s face that his an­swers and at­tempts at ex­pla­na­tion were un­sat­is­fac­tory to his deep-think­ing and keen-rea­son­ing son.

124:6.15On the day be­fore the Pass­over Sab­bath, flood tides of spir­i­tual il­lu­mi­na­tion swept through the mor­tal mind of Je­sus and filled his hu­man heart to over­flow­ing with af­fec­tion­ate pity for the spir­i­tu­ally blind and morally ig­no­rant mul­ti­tudes as­sem­bled for the cel­e­bra­tion of the an­cient Pass­over com­mem­o­ra­tion. This was one of the most ex­traor­di­nary days that the Son of God spent in the flesh; and dur­ing the night, for the first time in his earth ca­reer, there ap­peared to him an as­signed mes­sen­ger from Sal­ving­ton, com­mis­sioned by Im­manuel, who said: “The hour has come. It is time that you be­gan to be about your Fa­ther’s busi­ness.”

124:6.16And so, even ere the heavy re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of the Naz­a­reth fam­ily de­scended upon his youth­ful shoul­ders, there now ar­rived the ce­les­tial mes­sen­ger to re­mind this lad, not quite thir­teen years of age, that the hour had come to be­gin the re­sump­tion of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of a uni­verse. This was the first act of a long suc­ces­sion of events which fi­nally cul­mi­nated in the com­ple­tion of the Son’s be­stowal on Uran­tia and the re­plac­ing of “the gov­ern­ment of a uni­verse on his hu­man-di­vine shoul­ders.”

124:6.17As time passed, the mys­tery of the in­car­na­tion be­came, to all of us, more and more un­fath­omable. We could hardly com­pre­hend that this lad of Naz­a­reth was the cre­ator of all Neb­a­don. Nei­ther do we nowa­days un­der­stand how the spirit of this same Cre­ator Son and the spirit of his Par­a­dise Fa­ther are as­so­ci­ated with the souls of man­kind. With the pass­ing of time, we could see that his hu­man mind was in­creas­ingly dis­cern­ing that, while he lived his life in the flesh, in spirit on his shoul­ders rested the re­spon­si­bil­ity of a uni­verse.

124:6.18Thus ends the ca­reer of the Naz­a­reth lad, and be­gins the nar­ra­tive of that ado­les­cent youth—the in­creas­ingly self-con­scious di­vine hu­man—who now be­gins the con­tem­pla­tion of his world ca­reer as he strives to in­te­grate his ex­pand­ing life pur­pose with the de­sires of his par­ents and his obli­ga­tions to his fam­ily and the so­ci­ety of his day and age.

• feasts › Passover › women seldom attended

125:0.2Women sel­dom went to the Pass­over feast at Je­ru­sa­lem; they were not re­quired to be pres­ent. Je­sus, how­ever, vir­tu­ally re­fused to go un­less his mother would ac­com­pany them. And when his mother de­cided to go, many other Naz­a­reth women were led to make the jour­ney, so that the Pass­over com­pany con­tained the largest num­ber of women, in pro­por­tion to men, ever to go up to the Pass­over from Naz­a­reth. Ever and anon, on the way to Je­ru­sa­lem, they chanted the one hun­dred and thir­ti­eth Psalm.

• feasts
• feasts › dedication
• feasts › Passover › Moses established; institution antedated
• feasts › Pentecost
• feasts › Pentecost › 7 weeks after Passover; established by Moses
• feasts › Purim › feast of Esther and Israel’s deliverance
• feasts › tabernacles › annual holiday of all Palestine; established by Moses
• only Jerusalemites permitted to witness daily sacrifices

125:1.5Joseph saw how his son had sick­ened at the sight of the tem­ple rites and wisely led him around to view the “Gate Beau­ti­ful,” the artis­tic gate made of Corinthian bronze. But Je­sus had had enough for his first visit at the tem­ple. They re­turned to the up­per court for Mary and walked about in the open air and away from the crowds for an hour, view­ing the As­monean palace, the stately home of Herod, and the tower of the Ro­man guards. Dur­ing this stroll Joseph ex­plained to Je­sus that only the in­hab­i­tants of Je­ru­sa­lem were per­mit­ted to wit­ness the daily sac­ri­fices in the tem­ple, and that the dwellers in Gal­i­lee came up only three times a year to par­tic­i­pate in the tem­ple wor­ship: at the Pass­over, at the feast of Pen­te­cost (seven weeks af­ter Pass­over), and at the feast of taber­na­cles in Oc­to­ber. These feasts were es­tab­lished by Moses. They then dis­cussed the two later es­tab­lished feasts of the ded­i­ca­tion and of Purim. Af­ter­ward they went to their lodg­ings and made ready for the cel­e­bra­tion of the Pass­over.

• feasts › Passover › Jesus › determined to establish a bloodless Passover

125:2.3Even at this early date, though he said noth­ing about such mat­ters to his par­ents, Je­sus had be­gun to turn over in his mind the pro­pri­ety of cel­e­brat­ing the Pass­over with­out the slaugh­tered lamb. He felt as­sured in his own mind that the Fa­ther in heaven was not pleased with this spec­ta­cle of sac­ri­fi­cial of­fer­ings, and as the years passed, he be­came in­creas­ingly de­ter­mined some­day to es­tab­lish the cel­e­bra­tion of a blood­less Pass­over.

• rituals › inconsistent and absurd; Jesus thought ceremonies pathetic

125:2.4Je­sus slept very lit­tle that night. His rest was greatly dis­turbed by re­volt­ing dreams of slaugh­ter and suf­fer­ing. His mind was dis­traught and his heart torn by the in­con­sis­ten­cies and ab­sur­di­ties of the the­ol­ogy of the whole Jew­ish cer­e­mo­nial sys­tem. His par­ents like­wise slept lit­tle. They were greatly dis­con­certed by the events of the day just ended. They were com­pletely up­set in their own hearts by the lad’s, to them, strange and de­ter­mined at­ti­tude. Mary be­came ner­vously ag­i­tated dur­ing the fore part of the night, but Joseph re­mained calm, though he was equally puz­zled. Both of them feared to talk frankly with the lad about these prob­lems, though Je­sus would gladly have talked with his par­ents if they had dared to en­cour­age him.

• feasts › Passover › Jesus › determined to establish a bloodless Passover
• feasts › Passover › lambs sacrificed at
• oral law › Jesus resented those misrepresentative of Father

127:6.6On this visit oc­curred one of those pe­ri­odic out­breaks of re­bel­lion against tra­di­tion—the ex­pres­sion of re­sent­ment for those cer­e­mo­nial prac­tices which Je­sus deemed mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tive of his Fa­ther in heaven. Not know­ing Je­sus was com­ing, Laz­a­rus had ar­ranged to cel­e­brate the Pass­over with friends in an ad­join­ing vil­lage down the Jeri­cho road. Je­sus now pro­posed that they cel­e­brate the feast where they were, at Laz­a­rus’s house. “But,” said Laz­a­rus, “we have no paschal lamb.” And then Je­sus en­tered upon a pro­longed and con­vinc­ing dis­ser­ta­tion to the ef­fect that the Fa­ther in heaven was not truly con­cerned with such child­like and mean­ing­less rit­u­als. Af­ter solemn and fer­vent prayer they rose, and Je­sus said: “Let the child­like and dark­ened minds of my peo­ple serve their God as Moses di­rected; it is bet­ter that they do, but let us who have seen the light of life no longer ap­proach our Fa­ther by the dark­ness of death. Let us be free in the knowl­edge of the truth of our Fa­ther’s eter­nal love.”

127:6.7That evening about twi­light these four sat down and par­took of the first Pass­over feast ever to be cel­e­brated by de­vout Jews with­out the paschal lamb. The un­leav­ened bread and the wine had been made ready for this Pass­over, and these em­blems, which Je­sus termed “the bread of life” and “the wa­ter of life,” he served to his com­pan­ions, and they ate in solemn con­for­mity with the teach­ings just im­parted. It was his cus­tom to en­gage in this sacra­men­tal rit­ual when­ever he paid sub­se­quent vis­its to Beth­any. When he re­turned home, he told all this to his mother. She was shocked at first but came grad­u­ally to see his view­point; nev­er­the­less, she was greatly re­lieved when Je­sus as­sured her that he did not in­tend to in­tro­duce this new idea of the Pass­over in their fam­ily. At home with the chil­dren he con­tin­ued, year by year, to eat the Pass­over “ac­cord­ing to the law of Moses.”

• clearer recognition of Father than any religion

130:3.4By the fourth hour af­ter land­ing they were set­tled near the east­ern end of the long and broad av­enue, one hun­dred feet wide and five miles long, which stretched on out to the west­ern lim­its of this city of one mil­lion peo­ple. Af­ter the first sur­vey of the city’s chief at­trac­tions—uni­ver­sity (mu­seum), li­brary, the royal mau­soleum of Alexan­der, the palace, tem­ple of Nep­tune, the­ater, and gym­na­sium—Gonod ad­dressed him­self to busi­ness while Je­sus and Ga­nid went to the li­brary, the great­est in the world. Here were as­sem­bled nearly a mil­lion manuscripts from all the civ­i­lized world: Greece, Rome, Pales­tine, Parthia, In­dia, China, and even Japan. In this li­brary Ga­nid saw the largest col­lec­tion of In­dian lit­er­a­ture in all the world; and they spent some time here each day through­out their stay in Alexan­dria. Je­sus told Ga­nid about the trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek at this place. And they dis­cussed again and again all the re­li­gions of the world, Je­sus en­deav­or­ing to point out to this young mind the truth in each, al­ways adding: “But Yah­weh is the God de­vel­oped from the rev­e­la­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek and the covenant of Abra­ham. The Jews were the off­spring of Abra­ham and sub­se­quently oc­cu­pied the very land wherein Mel­chiz­e­dek had lived and taught, and from which he sent teach­ers to all the world; and their re­li­gion even­tu­ally por­trayed a clearer rec­og­ni­tion of the Lord God of Is­rael as the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther in heaven than any other world re­li­gion.”

• influence on Judaism by › Philo

130:3.9Among the many men with whom Gonod trans­acted busi­ness was a cer­tain Jew­ish banker, Alexan­der, whose brother, Philo, was a fa­mous re­li­gious philoso­pher of that time. Philo was en­gaged in the laud­able but ex­ceed­ingly dif­fi­cult task of har­mo­niz­ing Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy. Ga­nid and Je­sus talked much about Philo’s teach­ings and ex­pected to at­tend some of his lec­tures, but through­out their stay at Alexan­dria this fa­mous Hel­lenis­tic Jew lay sick abed.

131:2.1The Ken­ites of Pales­tine sal­vaged much of the teach­ing of Mel­chiz­e­dek, and from these rec­ords, as pre­served and mod­i­fied by the Jews, Je­sus and Ga­nid made the fol­low­ing se­lec­tion:

131:2.2“In the be­gin­ning God cre­ated the heav­ens and the earth and all things therein. And, be­hold, all he cre­ated was very good. The Lord, he is God; there is none be­side him in heaven above or upon the earth be­neath. There­fore shall you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. The earth shall be full of the knowl­edge of the Lord as the wa­ters cover the sea. The heav­ens de­clare the glory of God, and the fir­ma­ment shows his hand­i­work. Day af­ter day ut­ters speech; night af­ter night shows knowl­edge. There is no speech or lan­guage where their voice is not heard. The Lord’s work is great, and in wis­dom has he made all things; the great­ness of the Lord is un­search­able. He knows the num­ber of the stars; he calls them all by their names.

131:2.3“The power of the Lord is great and his un­der­stand­ing in­fi­nite. Says the Lord: ‘As the heav­ens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.’ God re­veals the deep and se­cret things be­cause the light dwells with him. The Lord is mer­ci­ful and gra­cious; he is long-suf­fer­ing and abun­dant in good­ness and truth. The Lord is good and up­right; the meek will he guide in judg­ment. Taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who trusts God. God is our refuge and strength, a very pres­ent help in trou­ble.

131:2.4“The mercy of the Lord is from ev­er­last­ing to ev­er­last­ing upon those who fear him and his righ­teous­ness even to our chil­dren’s chil­dren. The Lord is gra­cious and full of com­pas­sion. The Lord is good to all, and his ten­der mer­cies are over all his cre­ation; he heals the bro­ken­hearted and binds up their wounds. Whither shall I go from God’s spirit? whither shall I flee from the di­vine pres­ence? Thus says the High and Lofty One who in­hab­its eter­nity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place; also with him who is of a con­trite heart and a hum­ble spirit!’ None can hide him­self from our God, for he fills heaven and earth. Let the heav­ens be glad and let the earth re­joice. Let all na­tions say: The Lord reigns! Give thanks to God, for his mercy en­dures for­ever.

131:2.5“The heav­ens de­clare God’s righ­teous­ness, and all the peo­ple have seen his glory. It is God who has made us, and not we our­selves; we are his peo­ple, the sheep of his pas­ture. His mercy is ev­er­last­ing, and his truth en­dures to all gen­er­a­tions. Our God is gov­er­nor among the na­tions. Let the earth be filled with his glory! O that men would praise the Lord for his good­ness and for his won­der­ful gifts to the chil­dren of men!

131:2.6“God has made man a lit­tle less than di­vine and has crowned him with love and mercy. The Lord knows the way of the righ­teous, but the way of the un­godly shall per­ish. The fear of the Lord is the be­gin­ning of wis­dom; the knowl­edge of the Su­preme is un­der­stand­ing. Says the Al­mighty God: ‘Walk be­fore me and be per­fect.’ For­get not that pride goes be­fore de­struc­tion and a haughty spirit be­fore a fall. He who rules his own spirit is might­ier than he who takes a city. Says the Lord God, the Holy One: ‘In re­turn­ing to your spir­i­tual rest shall you be saved; in quiet­ness and con­fi­dence shall be your strength.’ They who wait upon the Lord shall re­new their strength; they shall mount up with wings like ea­gles. They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not be faint. The Lord shall give you rest from your fear. Says the Lord: ‘Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dis­mayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; yes, I will up­hold you with the right hand of my righ­teous­ness.’

131:2.7“God is our Fa­ther; the Lord is our re­deemer. God has cre­ated the uni­ver­sal hosts, and he pre­serves them all. His righ­teous­ness is like the moun­tains and his judg­ment like the great deep. He causes us to drink of the river of his plea­sures, and in his light we shall see light. It is good to give thanks to the Lord and to sing praises to the Most High; to show forth lov­ing-kind­ness in the morn­ing and the di­vine faith­ful­ness ev­ery night. God’s king­dom is an ev­er­last­ing king­dom, and his do­min­ion en­dures through­out all gen­er­a­tions. The Lord is my shep­herd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pas­tures; he leads me be­side still wa­ters. He re­stores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righ­teous­ness. Yes, even though I walk through the val­ley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for God is with me. Surely good­ness and mercy shall fol­low me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for­ever.

131:2.8“Yah­weh is the God of my sal­va­tion; there­fore in the di­vine name will I put my trust. I will trust in the Lord with all my heart; I will lean not upon my own un­der­stand­ing. In all my ways I will ac­knowl­edge him, and he shall di­rect my paths. The Lord is faith­ful; he keeps his word with those who serve him; the just shall live by his faith. If you do not well, it is be­cause sin lies at the door; men reap the evil they plough and the sin they sow. Fret not your­self be­cause of evil­do­ers. If you re­gard in­iq­uity in your heart, the Lord will not hear you; if you sin against God, you also wrong your own soul. God will bring ev­ery man’s work to judg­ment with ev­ery se­cret thing, whether it be good or evil. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

131:2.9“The Lord is near all who call upon him in sin­cer­ity and in truth. Weep­ing may en­dure for a night, but joy comes in the morn­ing. A merry heart does good like a med­i­cine. No good thing will God with­hold from those who walk up­rightly. Fear God and keep his com­mand­ments, for this is the whole duty of man. Thus says the Lord who cre­ated the heav­ens and who formed the earth: ‘There is no God be­side me, a just God and a sav­ior. Look to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. If you seek me, you shall find me if you search for me with all your heart.’ The meek shall in­herit the earth and shall de­light them­selves in the abun­dance of peace. Who­ever sows in­iq­uity shall reap calamity; they who sow the wind shall reap the whirl­wind.

131:2.10“‘Come now, let us rea­son to­gether,’ says the Lord, ‘Though your sins be as scar­let, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crim­son, they shall be as wool.’ But there is no peace for the wicked; it is your own sins which have with­held the good things from you. God is the health of my coun­te­nance and the joy of my soul. The eter­nal God is my strength; he is our dwell­ing place, and un­der­neath are the ev­er­last­ing arms. The Lord is near to those who are bro­ken­hearted; he saves all who have a child­like spirit. Many are the af­flic­tions of the righ­teous man, but the Lord de­liv­ers him out of them all. Com­mit your way to the Lord—trust him—and he will bring it to pass. He who dwells in the se­cret place of the Most High shall abide un­der the shadow of the Al­mighty.

131:2.11“Love your neigh­bor as your­self; bear a grudge against no man. What­so­ever you hate do to no man. Love your brother, for the Lord has said: ‘I will love my chil­dren freely.’ The path of the just is as a shin­ing light which shines more and more un­til the per­fect day. They who are wise shall shine as the bright­ness of the fir­ma­ment and they who turn many to righ­teous­ness as the stars for­ever and ever. Let the wicked for­sake his evil way and the un­righ­teous man his re­bel­lious thoughts. Says the Lord: ‘Let them re­turn to me, and I will have mercy on them; I will abun­dantly par­don.’

131:2.12“Says God, the cre­ator of heaven and earth: ‘Great peace have they who love my law. My com­mand­ments are: You shall love me with all your heart; you shall have no gods be­fore me; you shall not take my name in vain; re­mem­ber the Sab­bath day to keep it holy; honor your fa­ther and mother; you shall not kill; you shall not com­mit adul­tery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false wit­ness; you shall not covet.’

131:2.13“And to all who love the Lord su­premely and their neigh­bors like them­selves, the God of heaven says: ‘I will ran­som you from the grave; I will re­deem you from death. I will be mer­ci­ful to your chil­dren, as well as just. Have I not said of my crea­tures on earth, you are the sons of the liv­ing God? And have I not loved you with an ev­er­last­ing love? Have I not called you to be­come like me and to dwell for­ever with me in Par­a­dise?’”

• feasts
• feasts › atonement › Jesus thought ceremonies pathetic
• rituals › inconsistent and absurd; Jesus thought ceremonies pathetic

134:9.3Both of them were pres­ent at the solemn ser­vices of the day of atone­ment. John was much im­pressed by the cer­e­monies of this day of all days in the Jew­ish re­li­gious rit­ual, but Je­sus re­mained a thought­ful and silent spec­ta­tor. To the Son of Man this per­for­mance was piti­ful and pa­thetic. He viewed it all as mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the char­ac­ter and at­tri­butes of his Fa­ther in heaven. He looked upon the do­ings of this day as a trav­esty upon the facts of di­vine jus­tice and the truths of in­fi­nite mercy. He burned to give vent to the dec­la­ra­tion of the real truth about his Fa­ther’s lov­ing char­ac­ter and mer­ci­ful con­duct in the uni­verse, but his faith­ful Mon­i­tor ad­mon­ished him that his hour had not yet come. But that night, at Beth­any, Je­sus did drop nu­mer­ous re­marks which greatly dis­turbed John; and John never fully un­der­stood the real sig­nif­i­cance of what Je­sus said in their hear­ing that evening.

• feasts › tabernacles › annual holiday of all Palestine; established by Moses

134:9.4Je­sus planned to re­main through­out the week of the feast of taber­na­cles with John. This feast was the an­nual hol­i­day of all Pales­tine; it was the Jew­ish va­ca­tion time. Al­though Je­sus did not par­tic­i­pate in the mer­ri­ment of the oc­ca­sion, it was ev­i­dent that he de­rived plea­sure and ex­pe­ri­enced sat­is­fac­tion as he be­held the light­hearted and joy­ous aban­don of the young and the old.

• beliefs › apocalyptists taught Jews’ sufferings were penalties for nation’s sins

135:5.2About one hun­dred years be­fore the days of Je­sus and John a new school of re­li­gious teach­ers arose in Pales­tine, the apoc­a­lyp­tists. These new teach­ers evolved a sys­tem of be­lief that ac­counted for the suf­fer­ings and hu­mil­i­a­tion of the Jews on the ground that they were pay­ing the penalty for the na­tion’s sins. They fell back onto the well-known rea­sons as­signed to ex­plain the Baby­lo­nian and other cap­tiv­i­ties of for­mer times. But, so taught the apoc­a­lyp­tists, Is­rael should take heart; the days of their af­flic­tion were al­most over; the dis­ci­pline of God’s cho­sen peo­ple was about fin­ished; God’s pa­tience with the gen­tile for­eign­ers was about ex­hausted. The end of Ro­man rule was syn­ony­mous with the end of the age and, in a cer­tain sense, with the end of the world. These new teach­ers leaned heav­ily on the pre­dic­tions of Daniel, and they con­sis­tently taught that cre­ation was about to pass into its fi­nal stage; the king­doms of this world were about to be­come the king­dom of God. To the Jew­ish mind of that day this was the mean­ing of that phrase—the king­dom of heaven—which runs through­out the teach­ings of both John and Je­sus. To the Jews of Pales­tine the phrase “king­dom of heaven” had but one mean­ing: an ab­so­lutely righ­teous state in which God (the Mes­siah) would rule the na­tions of earth in per­fec­tion of power just as he ruled in heaven—“Your will be done on earth as in heaven.”

• feasts › Passover › commandment not to leave sacrifice until morning

142:3.18“8. The sac­ri­fice of the feast of the Pass­over shall not be left un­til morn­ing.

• influence on Judaism by › Philo

146:1.3Many of the bet­ter of the Baby­lo­nian and Per­sian ideas of light and dark­ness, good and evil, time and eter­nity, were later in­cor­po­rated in the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity, and their in­clu­sion ren­dered the Chris­tian teach­ings more im­me­di­ately ac­cept­able to the peo­ples of the Near East. In like man­ner, the in­clu­sion of many of Plato’s the­o­ries of the ideal spirit or in­vis­i­ble pat­terns of all things vis­i­ble and ma­te­rial, as later adapted by Philo to the He­brew the­ol­ogy, made Paul’s Chris­tian teach­ings more easy of ac­cep­tance by the west­ern Greeks.

• beliefs › uncertain regarding life after death

146:3.8And all who heard these blessed words were greatly cheered. The Jew­ish teach­ings had been con­fused and un­cer­tain re­gard­ing the sur­vival of the righ­teous, and it was re­fresh­ing and in­spir­ing for Je­sus’ fol­low­ers to hear these very def­i­nite and pos­i­tive words of as­sur­ance about the eter­nal sur­vival of all true be­liev­ers.

• feasts › Passover › Jesus › determined to establish a bloodless Passover

147:2.3At Beth­any they qui­etly cel­e­brated the Pass­over. And this was the first time that Je­sus and all of the twelve par­took of the blood­less Pass­over feast. The apos­tles of John did not eat the Pass­over with Je­sus and his apos­tles; they cel­e­brated the feast with Ab­ner and many of the early be­liev­ers in John’s preach­ing. This was the sec­ond Pass­over Je­sus had ob­served with his apos­tles in Je­ru­sa­lem.

• Jesus’ antagonism with J. always positive

147:6.6Je­sus’ an­tag­o­nism to the Jew­ish tra­di­tions and slav­ish cer­e­mo­ni­als was al­ways pos­i­tive. It con­sisted in what he did and in what he af­firmed. The Mas­ter spent lit­tle time in neg­a­tive de­nun­ci­a­tions. He taught that those who know God can en­joy the lib­erty of liv­ing with­out de­ceiv­ing them­selves by the li­censes of sin­ning. Said Je­sus to the apos­tles: “Men, if you are en­light­ened by the truth and re­ally know what you are do­ing, you are blessed; but if you know not the di­vine way, you are un­for­tu­nate and al­ready break­ers of the law.”

• promised salvation from difficulties

148:6.5“But the coun­sel of his sec­ond friend, Bil­dad, was even more de­press­ing, not­with­stand­ing its sound­ness from the stand­point of the then ac­cepted the­ol­ogy. Said Bil­dad: ‘God can­not be un­just. Your chil­dren must have been sin­ners since they per­ished; you must be in er­ror, else you would not be so af­flicted. And if you are re­ally righ­teous, God will cer­tainly de­liver you from your af­flic­tions. You should learn from the his­tory of God’s deal­ings with man that the Al­mighty de­stroys only the wicked.’

150:8.1This Sab­bath was a beau­ti­ful day, and all Naz­a­reth, friends and foes, turned out to hear this for­mer cit­i­zen of their town dis­course in the syn­a­gogue. Many of the apos­tolic ret­inue had to re­main with­out the syn­a­gogue; there was not room for all who had come to hear him. As a young man Je­sus had of­ten spo­ken in this place of wor­ship, and this morn­ing, when the ruler of the syn­a­gogue handed him the roll of sa­cred writ­ings from which to read the Scrip­ture les­son, none pres­ent seemed to re­call that this was the very man­u­script which he had pre­sented to this syn­a­gogue.

150:8.2The ser­vices on this day were con­ducted just as when Je­sus had at­tended them as a boy. He as­cended the speak­ing plat­form with the ruler of the syn­a­gogue, and the ser­vice was be­gun by the recital of two prayers: “Blessed is the Lord, King of the world, who forms the light and cre­ates the dark­ness, who makes peace and cre­ates ev­ery­thing; who, in mercy, gives light to the earth and to those who dwell upon it and in good­ness, day by day and ev­ery day, re­news the works of cre­ation. Blessed is the Lord our God for the glory of his hand­i­works and for the light-giv­ing lights which he has made for his praise. Se­lah. Blessed is the Lord our God, who has formed the lights.”

150:8.3Af­ter a mo­ment’s pause they again prayed: “With great love has the Lord our God loved us, and with much over­flow­ing pity has he pitied us, our Fa­ther and our King, for the sake of our fa­thers who trusted in him. You taught them the statutes of life; have mercy upon us and teach us. En­lighten our eyes in the law; cause our hearts to cleave to your com­mand­ments; unite our hearts to love and fear your name, and we shall not be put to shame, world with­out end. For you are a God who pre­pares sal­va­tion, and us have you cho­sen from among all na­tions and tongues, and in truth have you brought us near your great name—se­lah—that we may lov­ingly praise your unity. Blessed is the Lord, who in love chose his peo­ple Is­rael.”

• rituals › Shema was creed of faith

150:8.4The con­gre­ga­tion then re­cited the Shema, the Jew­ish creed of faith. This rit­ual con­sisted in re­peat­ing nu­mer­ous pas­sages from the law and in­di­cated that the wor­shipers took upon them­selves the yoke of the king­dom of heaven, also the yoke of the com­mand­ments as ap­plied to the day and the night.

150:8.5And then fol­lowed the third prayer: “True it is that you are Yah­weh, our God and the God of our fa­thers; our King and the King of our fa­thers; our Sav­ior and the Sav­ior of our fa­thers; our Cre­ator and the rock of our sal­va­tion; our help and our de­liv­erer. Your name is from ev­er­last­ing, and there is no God be­side you. A new song did they that were de­liv­ered sing to your name by the seashore; to­gether did all praise and own you King and say, Yah­weh shall reign, world with­out end. Blessed is the Lord who saves Is­rael.”

150:8.6The ruler of the syn­a­gogue then took his place be­fore the ark, or chest, con­tain­ing the sa­cred writ­ings and be­gan the recita­tion of the nine­teen prayer eu­lo­gies, or bene­dic­tions. But on this oc­ca­sion it was de­sir­able to shorten the ser­vice in or­der that the dis­tin­guished guest might have more time for his dis­course; ac­cord­ingly, only the first and last of the bene­dic­tions were re­cited. The first was: “Blessed is the Lord our God, and the God of our fa­thers, the God of Abra­ham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Ja­cob; the great, the mighty, and the ter­ri­ble God, who shows mercy and kind­ness, who cre­ates all things, who re­mem­bers the gra­cious promises to the fa­thers and brings a sav­ior to their chil­dren’s chil­dren for his own name’s sake, in love. O King, helper, sav­ior, and shield! Blessed are you, O Yah­weh, the shield of Abra­ham.”

150:8.7Then fol­lowed the last bene­dic­tion: “O be­stow on your peo­ple Is­rael great peace for­ever, for you are King and the Lord of all peace. And it is good in your eyes to bless Is­rael at all times and at ev­ery hour with peace. Blessed are you, Yah­weh, who blesses his peo­ple Is­rael with peace.” The con­gre­ga­tion looked not at the ruler as he re­cited the bene­dic­tions. Fol­low­ing the bene­dic­tions he of­fered an in­for­mal prayer suit­able for the oc­ca­sion, and when this was con­cluded, all the con­gre­ga­tion joined in say­ing amen.

150:8.8Then the chazan went over to the ark and brought out a roll, which he pre­sented to Je­sus that he might read the Scrip­ture les­son. It was cus­tom­ary to call upon seven per­sons to read not less than three verses of the law, but this prac­tice was waived on this oc­ca­sion that the vis­i­tor might read the les­son of his own se­lec­tion. Je­sus, tak­ing the roll, stood up and be­gan to read from Deuteron­omy: “For this com­mand­ment which I give you this day is not hid­den from you, nei­ther is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it down to us that we may hear and do it? Nei­ther is it be­yond the sea, that you should say, who will go over the sea for us to bring the com­mand­ment to us that we may hear and do it? No, the word of life is very near to you, even in your pres­ence and in your heart, that you may know and obey it.”

150:8.9And when he had ceased read­ing from the law, he turned to Isa­iah and be­gan to read: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me be­cause he has anointed me to preach good tid­ings to the poor. He has sent me to pro­claim re­lease to the cap­tives and the re­cov­er­ing of sight to the blind, to set at lib­erty those who are bruised and to pro­claim the ac­cept­able year of the Lord.”

150:8.10Je­sus closed the book and, af­ter hand­ing it back to the ruler of the syn­a­gogue, sat down and be­gan to dis­course to the peo­ple. He be­gan by say­ing: “To­day are these Scrip­tures ful­filled.” And then Je­sus spoke for al­most fif­teen min­utes on “The Sons and Daugh­ters of God.” Many of the peo­ple were pleased with the dis­course, and they mar­veled at his gra­cious­ness and wis­dom.

150:8.11It was cus­tom­ary in the syn­a­gogue, af­ter the con­clu­sion of the for­mal ser­vice, for the speaker to re­main so that those who might be in­ter­ested could ask him ques­tions. Ac­cord­ingly, on this Sab­bath morn­ing Je­sus stepped down into the crowd which pressed for­ward to ask ques­tions. In this group were many tur­bu­lent in­di­vid­u­als whose minds were bent on mis­chief, while about the fringe of this crowd there cir­cu­lated those de­based men who had been hired to make trou­ble for Je­sus. Many of the dis­ci­ples and evan­ge­lists who had re­mained with­out now pressed into the syn­a­gogue and were not slow to rec­og­nize that trou­ble was brew­ing. They sought to lead the Mas­ter away, but he would not go with them.

• oral law › Sanhedrists deserted commandments of God while holding to oral law

153:3.3Then one of the Je­ru­sa­lem spies who had been ob­serv­ing Je­sus and his apos­tles, said: “We no­tice that nei­ther you nor your apos­tles wash your hands prop­erly be­fore you eat bread. You must well know that such a prac­tice as eat­ing with de­filed and un­washed hands is a trans­gres­sion of the law of the el­ders. Nei­ther do you prop­erly wash your drink­ing cups and eat­ing ves­sels. Why is it that you show such dis­re­spect for the tra­di­tions of the fa­thers and the laws of our el­ders?” And when Je­sus heard him speak, he an­swered: “Why is it that you transgress the com­mand­ments of God by the laws of your tra­di­tion? The com­mand­ment says, ‘Honor your fa­ther and your mother,’ and di­rects that you share with them your sub­stance if nec­es­sary; but you en­act a law of tra­di­tion which per­mits un­du­ti­ful chil­dren to say that the money where­with the par­ents might have been as­sisted has been ‘given to God.’ The law of the el­ders thus re­lieves such crafty chil­dren of their re­spon­si­bil­ity, not­with­stand­ing that the chil­dren sub­se­quently use all such monies for their own com­fort. Why is it that you in this way make void the com­mand­ment by your own tra­di­tion? Well did Isa­iah proph­esy of you hyp­ocrites, say­ing: ‘This peo­ple hon­ors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they wor­ship me, teach­ing as their doc­trines the pre­cepts of men.’

153:3.4“You can see how it is that you desert the com­mand­ment while you hold fast to the tra­di­tion of men. Al­to­gether will­ing are you to re­ject the word of God while you main­tain your own tra­di­tions. And in many other ways do you dare to set up your own teach­ings above the law and the proph­ets.”

• beliefs › eating with unwashed hands punishable by excommunication
• oral law › viewed as ordained by Abraham; more sacred than Scripture

153:3.6The Phar­i­saic com­mis­sion­ers of the Je­ru­sa­lem San­hedrin were now al­most con­vinced that Je­sus must be ap­pre­hended on a charge of blas­phemy or on one of flout­ing the sa­cred law of the Jews; where­fore their ef­forts to in­volve him in the dis­cus­sion of, and pos­si­ble at­tack upon, some of the tra­di­tions of the el­ders, or so-called oral laws of the na­tion. No mat­ter how scarce wa­ter might be, these tra­di­tion­ally en­slaved Jews would never fail to go through with the re­quired cer­e­mo­nial wash­ing of the hands be­fore ev­ery meal. It was their be­lief that “it is bet­ter to die than to transgress the com­mand­ments of the el­ders.” The spies asked this ques­tion be­cause it had been re­ported that Je­sus had said, “Sal­va­tion is a mat­ter of clean hearts rather than of clean hands.” But such be­liefs, when they once be­come a part of one’s re­li­gion, are hard to get away from. Even many years af­ter this day the Apos­tle Pe­ter was still held in the bond­age of fear to many of these tra­di­tions about things clean and un­clean, only be­ing fi­nally de­liv­ered by ex­pe­ri­enc­ing an ex­traor­di­nary and vivid dream. All of this can the bet­ter be un­der­stood when it is re­called that these Jews looked upon eat­ing with un­washed hands in the same light as com­merce with a har­lot, and both were equally pun­ish­able by ex­com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

153:3.7Thus did the Mas­ter elect to dis­cuss and ex­pose the folly of the whole rab­binic sys­tem of rules and reg­u­la­tions which was rep­re­sented by the oral law—the tra­di­tions of the el­ders, all of which were re­garded as more sa­cred and more bind­ing upon the Jews than even the teach­ings of the Scrip­tures. And Je­sus spoke out with less re­serve be­cause he knew the hour had come when he could do noth­ing more to pre­vent an open rup­ture of re­la­tions with these re­li­gious lead­ers.

• deficient in science

155:1.4“In all that you do, be­come not one-sided and over­spe­cial­ized. The Phar­isees who seek our de­struc­tion ver­ily think they are do­ing God’s ser­vice. They have be­come so nar­rowed by tra­di­tion that they are blinded by prej­u­dice and hard­ened by fear. Con­sider the Greeks, who have a sci­ence with­out re­li­gion, while the Jews have a re­li­gion with­out sci­ence. And when men be­come thus mis­led into ac­cept­ing a nar­row and con­fused dis­in­te­gra­tion of truth, their only hope of sal­va­tion is to be­come truth-co-or­di­nated—con­verted.

• oral law › misinterpreted sacred writings

159:4.6“The thing most de­plorable is not merely this er­ro­neous idea of the ab­so­lute per­fec­tion of the Scrip­ture rec­ord and the in­fal­li­bil­ity of its teach­ings, but rather the con­fus­ing mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of these sa­cred writ­ings by the tra­di­tion-en­slaved scribes and Phar­isees at Je­ru­sa­lem. And now will they em­ploy both the doc­trine of the in­spi­ra­tion of the Scrip­tures and their mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions thereof in their de­ter­mined ef­fort to with­stand these newer teach­ings of the gospel of the king­dom. Na­than­iel, never for­get, the Fa­ther does not limit the rev­e­la­tion of truth to any one gen­er­a­tion or to any one peo­ple. Many earnest seek­ers af­ter the truth have been, and will con­tinue to be, con­fused and dis­heart­ened by these doc­trines of the per­fec­tion of the Scrip­tures.

• feasts › tabernacles › feast of harvest ingathering

162:4.1The pres­ence of peo­ple from all of the known world, from Spain to In­dia, made the feast of taber­na­cles an ideal oc­ca­sion for Je­sus for the first time pub­licly to pro­claim his full gospel in Je­ru­sa­lem. At this feast the peo­ple lived much in the open air, in leafy booths. It was the feast of the har­vest in­gath­er­ing, and com­ing, as it did, in the cool of the au­tumn months, it was more gen­er­ally at­tended by the Jews of the world than was the Pass­over at the end of the win­ter or Pen­te­cost at the be­gin­ning of sum­mer. The apos­tles at last be­held their Mas­ter mak­ing the bold an­nounce­ment of his mis­sion on earth be­fore all the world, as it were.

162:4.2This was the feast of feasts, since any sac­ri­fice not made at the other fes­ti­vals could be made at this time. This was the oc­ca­sion of the re­cep­tion of the tem­ple of­fer­ings; it was a com­bi­na­tion of va­ca­tion plea­sures with the solemn rites of re­li­gious wor­ship. Here was a time of racial re­joic­ing, min­gled with sac­ri­fices, Levit­i­cal chants, and the solemn blasts of the sil­very trum­pets of the priests. At night the im­pres­sive spec­ta­cle of the tem­ple and its pil­grim throngs was bril­liantly il­lu­mi­nated by the great can­de­labras which burned brightly in the court of the women as well as by the glare of scores of torches stand­ing about the tem­ple courts. The en­tire city was gaily dec­o­rated ex­cept the Ro­man cas­tle of An­to­nia, which looked down in grim con­trast upon this fes­tive and wor­ship­ful scene. And how the Jews did hate this ever-pres­ent re­minder of the Ro­man yoke!

162:4.3Sev­enty bul­locks were sac­ri­ficed dur­ing the feast, the sym­bol of the sev­enty na­tions of hea­then­dom. The cer­e­mony of the out­pour­ing of the wa­ter sym­bol­ized the out­pour­ing of the di­vine spirit. This cer­e­mony of the wa­ter fol­lowed the sun­rise pro­ces­sion of the priests and Levites. The wor­shipers passed down the steps lead­ing from the court of Is­rael to the court of the women while suc­ces­sive blasts were blown upon the sil­very trum­pets. And then the faith­ful marched on to­ward the Beau­ti­ful Gate, which opened upon the court of the gen­tiles. Here they turned about to face west­ward, to re­peat their chants, and to con­tinue their march for the sym­bolic wa­ter.

162:4.4On the last day of the feast al­most four hun­dred and fifty priests with a cor­re­spond­ing num­ber of Levites of­fi­ci­ated. At day­break the pil­grims as­sem­bled from all parts of the city, each car­ry­ing in the right hand a sheaf of myr­tle, wil­low, and palm branches, while in the left hand each one car­ried a branch of the par­a­dise ap­ple—the cit­ron, or the “for­bid­den fruit.” These pil­grims di­vided into three groups for this early morn­ing cer­e­mony. One band re­mained at the tem­ple to at­tend the morn­ing sac­ri­fices; an­other group marched down be­low Je­ru­sa­lem to near Maza to cut the wil­low branches for the adorn­ment of the sac­ri­fi­cial al­tar, while the third group formed a pro­ces­sion to march from the tem­ple be­hind the wa­ter priest, who, to the sound of the sil­very trum­pets, bore the golden pitcher which was to con­tain the sym­bolic wa­ter, out through Ophel to near Siloam, where was lo­cated the foun­tain gate. Af­ter the golden pitcher had been filled at the pool of Siloam, the pro­ces­sion marched back to the tem­ple, en­ter­ing by way of the wa­ter gate and go­ing di­rectly to the court of the priests, where the priest bear­ing the wa­ter pitcher was joined by the priest bear­ing the wine for the drink of­fer­ing. These two priests then re­paired to the sil­ver fun­nels lead­ing to the base of the al­tar and poured the con­tents of the pitch­ers therein. The ex­e­cu­tion of this rite of pour­ing the wine and the wa­ter was the sig­nal for the as­sem­bled pil­grims to be­gin the chant­ing of the Psalms from 113 to 118 in­clu­sive, in al­ter­na­tion with the Levites. And as they re­peated these lines, they would wave their sheaves at the al­tar. Then fol­lowed the sac­ri­fices for the day, as­so­ci­ated with the re­peat­ing of the Psalm for the day, the Psalm for the last day of the feast be­ing the eighty-sec­ond, be­gin­ning with the fifth verse.

• beliefs › blindness caused by sin

164:3.3The rab­bis taught that all such cases of blind­ness from birth were caused by sin. Not only were chil­dren con­ceived and born in sin, but a child could be born blind as a pun­ish­ment for some spe­cific sin com­mit­ted by its fa­ther. They even taught that a child it­self might sin be­fore it was born into the world. They also taught that such de­fects could be caused by some sin or other in­dul­gence of the mother while car­ry­ing the child.

• Levites officiated in Jerusalem temple

164:4.2But they did not call Je­sus be­fore them; they feared to. In­stead, they sent forth­with for Josiah. Af­ter some pre­lim­i­nary ques­tion­ing, the spokesman for the San­hedrin (about fifty mem­bers be­ing pres­ent) di­rected Josiah to tell them what had hap­pened to him. Since his heal­ing that morn­ing Josiah had learned from Thomas, Na­than­iel, and oth­ers that the Phar­isees were an­gry about his heal­ing on the Sab­bath, and that they were likely to make trou­ble for all con­cerned; but Josiah did not yet per­ceive that Je­sus was he who was called the De­liv­erer. So, when the Phar­isees ques­tioned him, he said: “This man came along, put clay upon my eyes, told me to go wash in Siloam, and I do now see.”

164:4.3One of the older Phar­isees, af­ter mak­ing a lengthy speech, said: “This man can­not be from God be­cause you can see that he does not ob­serve the Sab­bath. He vi­o­lates the law, first, in mak­ing the clay, then, in send­ing this beg­gar to wash in Siloam on the Sab­bath day. Such a man can­not be a teacher sent from God.”

164:4.4Then one of the younger men who se­cretly be­lieved in Je­sus, said: “If this man is not sent by God, how can he do these things? We know that one who is a com­mon sin­ner can­not per­form such mir­a­cles. We all know this beg­gar and that he was born blind; now he sees. Will you still say that this prophet does all these won­ders by the power of the prince of dev­ils?” And for ev­ery Phar­isee who dared to ac­cuse and de­nounce Je­sus one would arise to ask en­tan­gling and em­bar­rass­ing ques­tions, so that a se­ri­ous di­vi­sion arose among them. The pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer saw whither they were drift­ing, and in or­der to al­lay the dis­cus­sion, he pre­pared fur­ther to ques­tion the man him­self. Turn­ing to Josiah, he said: “What do you have to say about this man, this Je­sus, whom you claim opened your eyes?” And Josiah an­swered, “I think he is a prophet.”

• eastern/western differences

166:5.4It was the ap­par­ent mis­for­tune of Ab­ner to be at vari­ance with all of the lead­ers of the early Chris­tian church. He fell out with Pe­ter and James (Je­sus’ brother) over ques­tions of ad­min­is­tra­tion and the ju­ris­dic­tion of the Je­ru­sa­lem church; he parted com­pany with Paul over dif­fer­ences of phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy. Ab­ner was more Baby­lo­nian than Hel­lenic in his phi­los­o­phy, and he stub­bornly re­sisted all at­tempts of Paul to re­make the teach­ings of Je­sus so as to pre­sent less that was ob­jec­tion­able, first to the Jews, then to the Greco-Ro­man be­liev­ers in the mys­ter­ies.

• feasts › Passover › temple head tax payable at

173:1.3But traf­fic in sac­ri­fi­cial an­i­mals and sundry mer­chan­dise was not the only way in which the courts of the tem­ple were pro­faned. At this time there was fos­tered an ex­ten­sive sys­tem of bank­ing and com­mer­cial ex­change which was car­ried on right within the tem­ple precincts. And this all came about in the fol­low­ing man­ner: Dur­ing the As­monean dy­nasty the Jews coined their own sil­ver money, and it had be­come the prac­tice to re­quire the tem­ple dues of one-half shekel and all other tem­ple fees to be paid with this Jew­ish coin. This reg­u­la­tion ne­ces­si­tated that money-chang­ers be li­censed to ex­change the many sorts of cur­rency in cir­cu­la­tion through­out Pales­tine and other prov­inces of the Ro­man Em­pire for this or­tho­dox shekel of Jew­ish coin­ing. The tem­ple head tax, payable by all ex­cept women, slaves, and mi­nors, was one-half shekel, a coin about the size of a ten-cent piece but twice as thick. By the times of Je­sus the priests had also been ex­empted from the pay­ment of tem­ple dues. Ac­cord­ingly, from the 15^th to the 25^th of the month pre­ced­ing the Pass­over, ac­cred­ited money-chang­ers erected their booths in the prin­ci­pal cities of Pales­tine for the pur­pose of pro­vid­ing the Jew­ish peo­ple with proper money to meet the tem­ple dues af­ter they had reached Je­ru­sa­lem. Af­ter this ten-day pe­riod these money-chang­ers moved on to Je­ru­sa­lem and pro­ceeded to set up their ex­change ta­bles in the courts of the tem­ple. They were per­mit­ted to charge the equiv­a­lent of from three to four cents com­mis­sion for the ex­change of a coin val­ued at about ten cents, and in case a coin of larger value was of­fered for ex­change, they were al­lowed to col­lect dou­ble. Like­wise did these tem­ple bankers profit from the ex­change of all money in­tended for the pur­chase of sac­ri­fi­cial an­i­mals and for the pay­ment of vows and the mak­ing of of­fer­ings.

• beliefs › authority was watchword

173:2.3It was al­to­gether proper that the tem­ple rulers and the of­fi­cers of the Jew­ish San­hedrin should ask this ques­tion of any­one who pre­sumed to teach and per­form in the ex­traor­di­nary man­ner which had been char­ac­ter­is­tic of Je­sus, es­pe­cially as con­cerned his re­cent con­duct in clear­ing the tem­ple of all com­merce. These traders and money-chang­ers all op­er­ated by di­rect li­cense from the high­est rulers, and a per­cent­age of their gains was sup­posed to go di­rectly into the tem­ple trea­sury. Do not for­get that au­thor­ity was the watch­word of all Jewry. The proph­ets were al­ways stir­ring up trou­ble be­cause they so boldly pre­sumed to teach with­out au­thor­ity, with­out hav­ing been duly in­structed in the rab­binic academies and sub­se­quently reg­u­larly or­dained by the San­hedrin. Lack of this au­thor­ity in pre­ten­tious pub­lic teach­ing was looked upon as in­di­cat­ing ei­ther ig­no­rant pre­sump­tion or open re­bel­lion. At this time only the San­hedrin could or­dain an el­der or teacher, and such a cer­e­mony had to take place in the pres­ence of at least three per­sons who had pre­vi­ously been so or­dained. Such an or­di­na­tion con­ferred the ti­tle of “rabbi” upon the teacher and also qual­i­fied him to act as a judge, “bind­ing and loos­ing such mat­ters as might be brought to him for ad­ju­di­ca­tion.”

• feasts › Passover › no secular work done or gentile buildings entered on preparation day for

179:0.1Dur­ing the af­ter­noon of this Thurs­day, when Philip re­minded the Mas­ter about the ap­proach­ing Pass­over and in­quired con­cern­ing his plans for its cel­e­bra­tion, he had in mind the Pass­over sup­per which was due to be eaten on the evening of the next day, Fri­day. It was the cus­tom to be­gin the prepa­ra­tions for the cel­e­bra­tion of the Pass­over not later than noon of the pre­ced­ing day. And since the Jews reck­oned the day as be­gin­ning at sun­set, this meant that Sat­ur­day’s Pass­over sup­per would be eaten on Fri­day night, some­time be­fore the mid­night hour.

• feasts › Passover › Jesus › determined to establish a bloodless Passover
• Jesus did not participate in any sacrificial service

179:0.3The apos­tles knew that Je­sus had cel­e­brated other Passovers with­out the lamb; they knew that he did not per­son­ally par­tic­i­pate in any sac­ri­fi­cial ser­vice of the Jew­ish sys­tem. He had many times par­taken of the paschal lamb as a guest, but al­ways, when he was the host, no lamb was served. It would not have been a great sur­prise to the apos­tles to have seen the lamb omit­ted even on Pass­over night, and since this sup­per was given one day ear­lier, they thought noth­ing of its ab­sence.

• feasts › Passover › Moses established; institution antedated

179:1.6They are gath­ered to­gether to cel­e­brate, at least in spirit, an in­sti­tu­tion which an­te­dated even Moses and re­ferred to the times when their fa­thers were slaves in Egypt. This sup­per is their last ren­dezvous with Je­sus, and even in such a solemn set­ting, un­der the lead­er­ship of Ju­das the apos­tles are led once more to give way to their old predilec­tion for honor, pref­er­ence, and per­sonal ex­al­ta­tion.

• feasts › Passover › customs

179:3.1Af­ter drink­ing the first cup of the Pass­over, it was the Jew­ish cus­tom for the host to arise from the ta­ble and wash his hands. Later on in the meal and af­ter the sec­ond cup, all of the guests like­wise rose up and washed their hands. Since the apos­tles knew that their Mas­ter never ob­served these rites of cer­e­mo­nial hand wash­ing, they were very cu­ri­ous to know what he in­tended to do when, af­ter they had par­taken of this first cup, he arose from the ta­ble and silently made his way over to near the door, where the wa­ter pitch­ers, basins, and tow­els had been placed. And their cu­rios­ity grew into as­ton­ish­ment as they saw the Mas­ter re­move his outer gar­ment, gird him­self with a towel, and be­gin to pour wa­ter into one of the foot basins. Imag­ine the amaze­ment of these twelve men, who had so re­cently re­fused to wash one an­other’s feet, and who had en­gaged in such un­seemly dis­putes about po­si­tions of honor at the ta­ble, when they saw him make his way around the un­oc­cu­pied end of the ta­ble to the low­est seat of the feast, where Si­mon Pe­ter re­clined, and, kneel­ing down in the at­ti­tude of a ser­vant, make ready to wash Si­mon’s feet. As the Mas­ter knelt, all twelve arose as one man to their feet; even the traitorous Ju­das so far for­got his in­famy for a mo­ment as to arise with his fel­low apos­tles in this ex­pres­sion of sur­prise, re­spect, and ut­ter amaze­ment.

• feasts › Passover › customs

179:3.10When Je­sus had fin­ished speak­ing, the Al­pheus twins brought on the bread and wine, with the bit­ter herbs and the paste of dried fruits, for the next course of the Last Sup­per.

• feasts › Passover › customs

179:5.1As they brought Je­sus the third cup of wine, the “cup of bless­ing,” he arose from the couch and, tak­ing the cup in his hands, blessed it, say­ing: “Take this cup, all of you, and drink of it. This shall be the cup of my re­mem­brance. This is the cup of the bless­ing of a new dis­pen­sa­tion of grace and truth. This shall be to you the em­blem of the be­stowal and min­istry of the di­vine Spirit of Truth. And I will not again drink this cup with you un­til I drink in new form with you in the Fa­ther’s eter­nal king­dom.”

• feasts › Passover › commemorated Jews’ emergence from racial slavery

179:5.2The apos­tles all sensed that some­thing out of the or­di­nary was tran­spir­ing as they drank of this cup of bless­ing in pro­found rev­er­ence and per­fect si­lence. The old Pass­over com­mem­o­rated the emer­gence of their fa­thers from a state of racial slav­ery into in­di­vid­ual free­dom; now the Mas­ter was in­sti­tut­ing a new re­mem­brance sup­per as a sym­bol of the new dis­pen­sa­tion wherein the en­slaved in­di­vid­ual emerges from the bond­age of cer­e­mo­ni­al­ism and self­ish­ness into the spir­i­tual joy of the broth­er­hood and fel­low­ship of the lib­er­ated faith sons of the liv­ing God.

• feasts › Passover › no secular work done or gentile buildings entered on preparation day for

182:2.9None of the apos­tles ex­pected any­thing out of the or­di­nary to hap­pen that night since it was al­ready so late. They sought sleep that they might rise up early in the morn­ing and be pre­pared for the worst. They thought that the chief priests would seek to ap­pre­hend their Mas­ter early in the morn­ing as no sec­u­lar work was ever done af­ter noon on the prepa­ra­tion day for the Pass­over. Only David Zeb­e­dee and John Mark un­der­stood that the en­e­mies of Je­sus were com­ing with Ju­das that very night.

• feasts › Passover › no secular work done or gentile buildings entered on preparation day for

184:3.17An­nas de­sired that the trial pro­ceed fur­ther, and that charges of a def­i­nite na­ture re­gard­ing Je­sus’ re­la­tion to the Ro­man law and Ro­man in­sti­tu­tions be for­mu­lated for sub­se­quent pre­sen­ta­tion to Pi­late. The coun­cilors were anx­ious to carry these mat­ters to a speedy ter­mi­na­tion, not only be­cause it was the prepa­ra­tion day for the Pass­over and no sec­u­lar work should be done af­ter noon, but also be­cause they feared Pi­late might any time re­turn to the Ro­man cap­i­tal of Judea, Cae­sarea, since he was in Je­ru­sa­lem only for the Pass­over cel­e­bra­tion.

• feasts › Passover › no secular work done or gentile buildings entered on preparation day for

185:0.3Though Pi­late con­ducted much of Je­sus’ ex­am­i­na­tion within the prae­to­rium halls, the pub­lic trial was held out­side on the steps lead­ing up to the main en­trance. This was a con­ces­sion to the Jews, who re­fused to en­ter any gen­tile build­ing where leaven might be used on this day of prepa­ra­tion for the Pass­over. Such con­duct would not only ren­der them cer­e­mo­ni­ally un­clean and thereby de­bar them from par­tak­ing of the af­ter­noon feast of thanks­giv­ing but would also ne­ces­si­tate their sub­jec­tion to pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies af­ter sun­down, be­fore they would be el­i­gi­ble to par­take of the Pass­over sup­per.

• feasts › Passover › pardon by Roman governor at

185:5.2Just as the Jews were about to en­gage in shout­ing their protests against the re­lease of Je­sus, a vast crowd came march­ing up to the prae­to­rium for the pur­pose of ask­ing Pi­late for the re­lease of a pris­oner in honor of the Pass­over feast. For some time it had been the cus­tom of the Ro­man gov­er­nors to al­low the pop­u­lace to choose some im­pris­oned or con­demned man for par­don at the time of the Pass­over. And now that this crowd had come be­fore him to ask for the re­lease of a pris­oner, and since Je­sus had so re­cently been in great fa­vor with the mul­ti­tudes, it oc­curred to Pi­late that he might pos­si­bly ex­tri­cate him­self from his predica­ment by propos­ing to this group that, since Je­sus was now a pris­oner be­fore his judg­ment seat, he re­lease to them this man of Gal­i­lee as the to­ken of Pass­over good will.

• feasts › Passover › lambs sacrificed at

186:5.1There is no di­rect re­la­tion be­tween the death of Je­sus and the Jew­ish Pass­over. True, the Mas­ter did lay down his life in the flesh on this day, the day of the prepa­ra­tion for the Jew­ish Pass­over, and at about the time of the sac­ri­fic­ing of the Pass­over lambs in the tem­ple. But this co­in­ci­den­tal oc­cur­rence does not in any man­ner in­di­cate that the death of the Son of Man on earth has any con­nec­tion with the Jew­ish sac­ri­fi­cial sys­tem. Je­sus was a Jew, but as the Son of Man he was a mor­tal of the realms. The events al­ready nar­rated and lead­ing up to this hour of the Mas­ter’s im­pend­ing cru­ci­fix­ion are suf­fi­cient to in­di­cate that his death at about this time was a purely nat­u­ral and man-man­aged af­fair.

186:5.2It was man and not God who planned and ex­e­cuted the death of Je­sus on the cross. True, the Fa­ther re­fused to in­ter­fere with the march of hu­man events on Uran­tia, but the Fa­ther in Par­a­dise did not de­cree, de­mand, or re­quire the death of his Son as it was car­ried out on earth. It is a fact that in some man­ner, sooner or later, Je­sus would have had to di­vest him­self of his mor­tal body, his in­car­na­tion in the flesh, but he could have ex­e­cuted such a task in count­less ways with­out dy­ing on a cross be­tween two thieves. All of this was man’s do­ing, not God’s.

186:5.3At the time of the Mas­ter’s bap­tism he had al­ready com­pleted the tech­nique of the re­quired ex­pe­ri­ence on earth and in the flesh which was nec­es­sary for the com­ple­tion of his sev­enth and last uni­verse be­stowal. At this very time Je­sus’ duty on earth was done. All the life he lived there­after, and even the man­ner of his death, was a purely per­sonal min­istry on his part for the wel­fare and up­lift­ing of his mor­tal crea­tures on this world and on other worlds.

186:5.4The gospel of the good news that mor­tal man may, by faith, be­come spirit-con­scious that he is a son of God, is not de­pen­dent on the death of Je­sus. True, in­deed, all this gospel of the king­dom has been tremen­dously il­lu­mi­nated by the Mas­ter’s death, but even more so by his life.

186:5.5All that the Son of Man said or did on earth greatly em­bel­lished the doc­trines of son­ship with God and of the broth­er­hood of men, but these es­sen­tial re­la­tion­ships of God and men are in­her­ent in the uni­verse facts of God’s love for his crea­tures and the in­nate mercy of the di­vine Sons. These touch­ing and di­vinely beau­ti­ful re­la­tions be­tween man and his Maker, on this world and on all oth­ers through­out the uni­verse of uni­verses, have ex­isted from eter­nity; and they are not in any sense de­pen­dent on these pe­ri­odic be­stowal en­act­ments of the Cre­ator Sons of God, who thus as­sume the na­ture and like­ness of their cre­ated in­tel­li­gences as a part of the price which they must pay for the fi­nal ac­quire­ment of un­lim­ited sov­er­eignty over their re­spec­tive lo­cal uni­verses.

186:5.6The Fa­ther in heaven loved mor­tal man on earth just as much be­fore the life and death of Je­sus on Uran­tia as he did af­ter this tran­scen­dent ex­hi­bi­tion of the co­part­ner­ship of man and God. This mighty trans­ac­tion of the in­car­na­tion of the God of Neb­a­don as a man on Uran­tia could not aug­ment the at­tri­butes of the eter­nal, in­fi­nite, and uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, but it did en­rich and en­lighten all other ad­min­is­tra­tors and crea­tures of the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. While the Fa­ther in heaven loves us no more be­cause of this be­stowal of Mi­chael, all other ce­les­tial in­tel­li­gences do. And this is be­cause Je­sus not only made a rev­e­la­tion of God to man, but he also like­wise made a new rev­e­la­tion of man to the Gods and to the ce­les­tial in­tel­li­gences of the uni­verse of uni­verses.

186:5.7Je­sus is not about to die as a sac­ri­fice for sin. He is not go­ing to atone for the in­born moral guilt of the hu­man race. Man­kind has no such racial guilt be­fore God. Guilt is purely a mat­ter of per­sonal sin and know­ing, de­lib­er­ate re­bel­lion against the will of the Fa­ther and the ad­min­is­tra­tion of his Sons.

186:5.8Sin and re­bel­lion have noth­ing to do with the fun­da­men­tal be­stowal plan of the Par­a­dise Sons of God, al­beit it does ap­pear to us that the sal­vage plan is a pro­vi­sional fea­ture of the be­stowal plan.

186:5.9The sal­va­tion of God for the mor­tals of Uran­tia would have been just as ef­fec­tive and unerringly cer­tain if Je­sus had not been put to death by the cruel hands of ig­no­rant mor­tals. If the Mas­ter had been fa­vor­ably re­ceived by the mor­tals of earth and had de­parted from Uran­tia by the vol­un­tary re­lin­quish­ment of his life in the flesh, the fact of the love of God and the mercy of the Son—the fact of son­ship with God—would have in no wise been af­fected. You mor­tals are the sons of God, and only one thing is re­quired to make such a truth fac­tual in your per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence, and that is your spirit-born faith.

• feasts › Passover › pardon by Roman governor at

187:0.2The two thieves cru­ci­fied with Je­sus were as­so­ciates of Barab­bas and would later have been put to death with their leader if he had not been re­leased as the Pass­over par­don of Pi­late. Je­sus was thus cru­ci­fied in the place of Barab­bas.

• feasts › Passover › Jews did not want Jesus’ body exposed on

187:5.7Be­cause this was the prepa­ra­tion day for both the Pass­over and the Sab­bath, the Jews did not want these bod­ies to be ex­posed on Gol­go­tha. There­fore they went be­fore Pi­late ask­ing that the legs of these three men be bro­ken, that they be dis­patched, so that they could be taken down from their crosses and cast into the crim­i­nal burial pits be­fore sun­down. When Pi­late heard this re­quest, he forth­with sent three sol­diers to break the legs and dis­patch Je­sus and the two brig­ands.

• feasts › Passover › 1-1/2 million attended

188:3.1Through­out this Sab­bath day the dis­ci­ples and the apos­tles re­mained in hid­ing, while all Je­ru­sa­lem dis­cussed the death of Je­sus on the cross. There were al­most one and one-half mil­lion Jews pres­ent in Je­ru­sa­lem at this time, hail­ing from all parts of the Ro­man Em­pire and from Mes­o­po­ta­mia. This was the be­gin­ning of the Pass­over week, and all these pil­grims would be in the city to learn of the res­ur­rec­tion of Je­sus and to carry the re­port back to their homes.

• feasts › Pentecost › festival of baptism

194:1.5Pen­te­cost was the great fes­ti­val of bap­tism, the time for fel­low­ship­ping the pros­e­lytes of the gate, those gen­tiles who de­sired to serve Yah­weh. It was, there­fore, the more easy for large num­bers of both the Jews and be­liev­ing gen­tiles to sub­mit to bap­tism on this day. In do­ing this, they were in no way dis­con­nect­ing them­selves from the Jew­ish faith. Even for some time af­ter this the be­liev­ers in Je­sus were a sect within Ju­daism. All of them, in­clud­ing the apos­tles, were still loyal to the es­sen­tial re­quire­ments of the Jew­ish cer­e­mo­nial sys­tem.

• apostles at first imposed J. upon converts

194:3.9The man­i­fes­ta­tions as­so­ci­ated with the be­stowal of the “new teacher,” and the re­cep­tion of the apos­tles’ preach­ing by the men of var­i­ous races and na­tions gath­ered to­gether at Je­ru­sa­lem, in­di­cate the uni­ver­sal­ity of the re­li­gion of Je­sus. The gospel of the king­dom was to be iden­ti­fied with no par­tic­u­lar race, cul­ture, or lan­guage. This day of Pen­te­cost wit­nessed the great ef­fort of the spirit to lib­er­ate the re­li­gion of Je­sus from its in­her­ited Jew­ish fet­ters. Even af­ter this dem­on­stra­tion of pour­ing out the spirit upon all flesh, the apos­tles at first en­deav­ored to im­pose the re­quire­ments of Ju­daism upon their con­verts. Even Paul had trou­ble with his Je­ru­sa­lem breth­ren be­cause he re­fused to sub­ject the gen­tiles to these Jew­ish prac­tices. No re­vealed re­li­gion can spread to all the world when it makes the se­ri­ous mis­take of be­com­ing per­me­ated with some na­tional cul­ture or as­so­ci­ated with es­tab­lished racial, so­cial, or eco­nomic prac­tices.

• religion of moral sublimity

196:3.19The He­brews had a re­li­gion of moral sub­lim­ity; the Greeks evolved a re­li­gion of beauty; Paul and his con­fer­ees founded a re­li­gion of faith, hope, and char­ity. Je­sus re­vealed and ex­em­pli­fied a re­li­gion of love: se­cu­rity in the Fa­ther’s love, with joy and sat­is­fac­tion con­se­quent upon shar­ing this love in the ser­vice of the hu­man broth­er­hood.