Onlline Sermons

We have posted a lot of sermons from our Universal Life Church ministers. Some are Christian and some are not. You are welcome to use them or just enjoy them as you like.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Four Gospels

Four Gospels
‘Jesus and Yehoshua’
By Carter Matherly

The man known today as Jesus was not always as popular as he is today. We will take a brief look into the life of this man, his teachings, and uncover some misconceptions that Paul has propagated. Jesus only held his ministries for two years and the miracles attributed to him were valid, however not entirely word for word as the bible depicts.

The first thing that we should investigate is the name of Jesus. Most people today are convinced that this was his actual name as one might be called Bob or Sherry. This is a simple misconception. Jesus is actually a Jewish title. The person who carries this title is a savior or king of the Jews. Here there is no divine implication as the Jewish religion teaches that their savior will be mortal and nowhere is it stated that the savior will be an embodiment of God. The name of the man we know as Jesus is Yehoshua ben Joseph. This was the name given to him by his parents. He obtained the title of Jesus through his followers as he was a king of Jews, just as the hundreds of other Jesus’ through history have been.

There are other misconceptions that modern believers suffer from. Through the use of titles to represent persons we understand that Jesus is really Yehoshua. We should take the time to analyze the man that was spared instead of Yehoshua. This man was known as Barabus. Barabus was the murderous robber that the Jews supposedly chose to live and let Jesus die. The misconceptions that run through this fable are deep and unfortunately strong. We will take our time in dissecting this scenario as it will lead to a greater understanding of this whole affair.

Firstly, the men: Jesus and Barabus. We have already established Jesus’ name as Yehoshua. The commonly accepted name Jesus is nothing more than a title like president or professor, so why not Barabus? After working with this name we find it is actually two words tied together, Bar and Abus. Translating these names gives us ‘Son of’ ‘The Father’. Father is capitalized because Abus refers to the heavenly father, God.

Why would a murder be named ‘Son of The Father’? It’s true that our Barabus was a murder. However this is in the same sense that a general is a murderer. Now we know that Barabus was no regular murder. His name was James, James the Just to be exact. This was Yehoshua’s brother.

To understand how both brothers came to such a predicament we need to research their roles in the Cannite Qumran community. This Jewish community was founded by Moses when he led the Jews out of Egypt. It was founded on three basic principals. The king, the priest, and God. This was represented by twin pillars connected by an archway representing heaven; the key stone in the archway was named ‘shalom’ meaning God. Yehoshua was always the leader and thus he occupied the Kingly role while his brother was the priestly one. James only assumed this role after the decapitation of John the Baptist.

Yehoshua did not recognize his brother as the priestly pillar of this community and thus claimed that he was all of them after John the Baptist’s death. This is the origin of the greatest misconception of Yehoshua’s earthly state. When he clamed to be all of them he only intended the kingly and priestly. However, as we will learn later, Paul got this statement all backwards in his teachings. Yehoshua never clamed to be shalom or God.

Parts of Yehoshua’s teachings were a return to the basic Ten Commandments that Moses brought to his people. Yehoshua said that the other some 450 holy laws were an invention of man and a mockery of God’s intent. This proclamation, along with his ongoing insisting that he was not only the king but the priest of the community led to eventual unrest among the people and the roman leadership who oversaw the community.

On the holiest night of the year Yehoshua stormed into the Holiest of Holies to make his devotion. Only the high priest was allowed to enter here and this privilege was offered only once a year. It was this act that eventually led to Yehoshua’s arrest.

Interestingly enough, charges were brought against James for leading a raid through another city in God’s name. The Romans now had the two leaders of the Qumran community in their hands for execution. Pontius Pilot knew that executing both of them would create civil war. So he did something that had never been done and would never be done again. He offered the crowd to save one of the men. This was a tough decision, save the priest or the king. The crowd chose their priest, James. Of course, Yehoshua was crucified as this was their form of the gas chamber or electric chair. A King or any military leader is a very useful tool in death, the martyr dying for the cause.

Yehoshua died on the cross only two years after being baptized by John the Baptist. His brother James lived for another twenty years before his death. The Christian movement didn’t occur for fifty years after Yehoshua’s death. A man by the name of Paul, obtained a scroll of Qumran that spoke of the workings of the Jesus Yehoshua. It can be easily seen how the name Jesus became a staple when reading the scrolls. It looked like this was his actual name rather than a title, much like Barabus!

Paul is an interesting character. The Romans referred to him as ‘Paul, the spouter of lies’. Christianity’s nickname Paul-theism also comes from this infamous namesake. Paul preached what was written in the scrolls he found. Sadly what was written was in dialect and slang familiar to the Qumran community. The effect was like taking a news paper from England and reading it in California. Things would be mistaken in their meanings. In England a cigarette is referred to as a ‘:censor:’ I think this analogy accurately illustrates my point.

A prime example of this is the act of turning water to wine. This was a slang term for turning nothing into something. In actuality, Yehoshua baptized everyone at that wedding party. The un-baptized were water and after they were baptized they had become wine. This is only one example of the many false teachings of Paul.

The man we know today as Jesus was actually named Yehoshua and had a brother named James or as the bible referred to him, Barabus. Yehoshua did many things that were considered great enough to be written down in a time when printing presses and computers did not exist. These scrolls were later obtained and mistranslated by Paul. A man so revered by the Romans that they called him ‘Paul the spouter of lies’. Through his work Paul laid the foundations for Paul-theism or commonly referred to as Christianity.



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