“JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS!” - A RELIGIOUS SLOGAN WITH NO REAL MEANING

I am sure you have noticed how passionate, emotional, and at times outright hysterical some of our pastors and ministers get when with thundering voices they cascade the sacred slogan “Jesus died for your sins!” over the heads of their guilt-ridden yet mesmerized audiences. Very few know, however, that at one time this was a very controversial claim even within the church.

The controversy was never settled but the slogan proved to be such an efficient marketing device that no one within the church wanted to abandon it. As a result, it remains the propaganda line of choice used by Christian priests of all denominations to confuse believers into submitting themselves body and soul to their institution and into giving more of their hard earned savings to the church.

When one takes a moment to figure out the meaning of it, though, he realizes that “Jesus died for your sins” makes actually no sense. More than that, once we become aware of the roots of this bizarre if not absurd slogan, we understand the thinking behind this marketing device, and that Jesus had nothing to do with Christianity or religion in general. At that moment, this centerpiece theme in the Christian doctrine comes forever unraveled, and the same is true of Christianity as a whole.

Excerpts from “A Time to Change – On the Necessary Return to a Rational Understanding of the Nature of Man and the Universe.”

“An important aspect of the effort made by the church to establish and preserve its privileges, the way the “poor in spirit” perceives reality, his fear-induced embracing of the doctrine of divine punishment and divine rewards is conducive to creating dependency to the clergy’s alleged power to obtain forgiveness for his so-called sins.” – A Time of Change

Chapter 11.

We live in a world of action and the purpose of experiencing all kind of things along the road is to find out the truth that will help us become aware of what we are, of the spiritual essence of our being and of reality in general. That spiritual essence is what connects everyone and everything in the universe to the source of everything there is some erroneously call god. Searching for the truth though is a trial and error process. As long as we learn our lessons and we ascend into a higher level of awareness of the spiritual, as long as we do not commit evil deeds, we actually need not feel guilty about sinning. 

Accepting for a moment as fact that he died on the cross, it stands for reason that the physical death of Jesus could not annul the consequences to the so-called sins allegedly committed by humankind. This is another claim made by the church that makes no sense at all, and no theologian was able to rationally explain it. Like most everything else in Christianity, though, this too is an old money making scheme borrowed from other religions.

The church made a few awkward attempts along the time at explaining this melodramatic slogan and, as expected, all of them produced disastrous results. Athanasius of Alexandria, the gray eminence behind the Council of Nicaea, where the church began to build the foundation for its future political power grab, believed the death of Jesus for our sins was an attempt at restoring a heavenly world made according to god’s own plan. Neither he nor anybody else with the church for that matter was able to explain though how could have Jesus’ death resulted into a Heaven-on-Earth kind of world. More than that, the post-Jesus history of humankind shows that once Christianity became a state religion dominating the political arena and setting shop from one end to the other of the Roman Empire, all hell broke loose on our planet while Judaism and later radical Islam do not come across as big promoters of world peace either.

Anselm of Canterbury preached that the death of Jesus Christ “satisfied God’s offended sense of justice over the sins of humanity.” Apparently, this god was never offended by his failure to create a human who would not commit the kind of atrocities and the sleuth of abominable evil things he did in his name. The so-called “satisfaction theory” was turning Jesus, again, into a scapegoat, and exposed also Jehovah, the other Christian god, for being a deity with a big ego, no common sense, and very little respect for human life. Nevertheless, Anselm’s line of thought was later embedded into a theological system put together in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas and made available to the ideologues of the Roman Catholic Church in his Summa Theologiae. Rome would eventually embrace its core ideas as the official doctrine of the church. Even the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, would side with an interpretation of Jesus’ alleged sacrifice based on Anselm’s 11th century theology.

The parable of the death of a body was meant to help man understand that we are not the ephemeral material body, and that the real us is our eternal spiritual essence. In fact, Jesus states that “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” (John 6:63), and that is something they certainly do not preach in churches. Indeed, this description for the true nature of man offered by the one known as Jesus, the fact that what we truly are is the spirit energy and not the body is something the church does not endorse or promote. More than that, Jesus was only repeating what was common knowledge among the sages of the time, and this word of wisdom in the Bible was an idea extracted actually from the teaching of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, one of Jesus’ contemporaries. This Roman stoic philosopher and statesman was also known as the Seneca the Younger (4 BCE – 6 CE). He claimed that, “No man is free who is a slave to the flesh.”

Among others, the fact that Jesus subscribes to this concept proves he did not embrace the claim made by the church that the dead will one day resurrect from the graves. The church founders distorted the meaning of the story about crucifixion, and they falsely presented Jesus dying while crucified as a historical fact. In fact, as we are going to see, the Bible says that a little more than ten years after he allegedly died on the cross for our sins, Jesus was alive, well and debating local Jewish sages and priests.

The bishops of the early church did not exactly care what Jesus was teaching about and they deliberately falsified the historical truth and the message behind this parable. The result of that distortion is the Christian religion we have today. So where did the Christian Church come up with the strange idea that Jesus’ death cleaned the sin slate for us anyway? The answer comes, again, from the text of the Bible. 

You would not be surprised if you were told that even the central theme in the Christian religion was “borrowed” from other religions, would you? There is an old Judaic tradition about the cleansing of the sins of men and the cleansing of the Sanctuary, the innermost chambers of the Tabernacle. At the Temple, it was done by sacrificing a goat, something more than once mentioned in the Old Testament. In Leviticus 16:15, for example, we are explained that, “Aaron must slaughter the first goat as a sin offering for the people…” The sins of the Israelites and the uncleanness of the Sanctuary were somehow transferred unto the poor goat, then the priest would kill the goat and the blood spilled was supposed to give everyone’s conscience a clean bill of health for another year or so. Isn’t religion fun?

In Leviticus 16:21 we are told that on the Day of Atonement the priest would bring a goat to the altar and he would “lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head.” Imagine the priest talking to the goat and telling the poor thing, listen, we did some bad things, and guess what, you are going to die so we could atone. Would you buy that if you were the goat? Probably not, and yet, as we are about to see, human beings of the 21st century associated with the so-called Church of Christ continue to practice the same ritual, except that they replaced the goat with Jesus. Indeed, religion and irrational are inseparable siblings of ignorance.

By replacing the goat with a son-of-god Jesus and making him into the sacrificial lamb that would die for everyone else’s bad behavior, the makers of the Christian religion killed actually three birds with one stone. They were offering the paying customer a more dramatic and thus more marketable story. In the process, they would confuse almost everyone about the real significance of the story of crucifixion, actually a metaphor for spiritual rebirth rooted in Egyptian traditions. Their third and most important accomplishment, however, was that they were once again able to distort a significant element in Jesus’ teachings, one that was supposed to help man access a truthful understanding of his nature and escape the trap of belief.

The old tradition requiring the killing of goats in order for us to conveniently rid ourselves of the burden of our wicked sins was an absurd idea to begin with. The belief that Jesus, the alleged son of god has died for our sins though was an even more irrational idea. Jesus, an enemy of religion, was made into a god that played the role of the scapegoat. With one stroke of the brush, the bishops turned yet another pagan tradition into a Christian one. Most importantly, they were erasing from public consciousness a message that ran contrary to the purpose of their enterprise and their personal ambitions. In addition to that, by luring people into signing up with their more dramatic religion of a sacrificial son of god, they were also eliminating competition.  

Hebrews 9:15, an epistle that contrary to what theologians have claimed it was certainly not written by Paul, provides proof for the fact that a cocktail of not so honest intentions was the motivation behind the church making up the story about Jesus allegedly dying for our sins on the cross. It says that, “… he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.” Dying as a ransom reminds us of the opinion offered by Origen on crucifixion, an opinion rejected though by the church. It looks like whomever the real author of the Hebrews was he took that opinion and nonchalantly made it part of the “word of god.”

The text proves that the ‘dying for our sins’ was an idea borrowed from the old and crazy tradition of killing goats to clear man of his sins, a ransom paid to god, not to Satan, for the purpose of inducing his benevolence, if you believe all that. The goal behind this marketing scheme was to give the poor in spirit a reason to convert to Christianity. Everyone who “believed” was promised a clean slate so he could sin some more,and what else could a true believer ask from his god and his religion.   

Is there something else outside the Bible that tells us Jesus did not die for our sins on the cross? According to the Gnostic text called Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Jesus makes a stunning confession: “I did not die in reality, but in appearance.” This must be shocking news for those who still believe he did die on the cross and then resurrected, the ones who celebrate his fictional death every year with acts of penitence that in some instances are borderline pathological behavior.

According to the same text, Jesus explains that his alleged accusers

in error and blindness....saw me; they punished me. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. I was rejoicing in the height over all....And I was laughing at their ignorance. (Second Treatise of the Great Seth)

Jesus laughs practically at those who would soon establish a new religion in his name, the ones behind the so-called Universal Church and later to be known as the Christian Church. According to what the Gnostic text has him saying, the foundation for their religion was pure and unadulterated falsehood. Christ Jesus did not die for our sins, and obviously, Peter was not the “rock” Jesus built a church and a new religion on, a religion and a church he never intended to create in the first place.

This is the same outrageous act of deception perpetrated by the church in the name of Jesus Paul warned his colleagues into ministry about in one of his letters. John the Elder, the presumed author of the Book of Revelation, pulled no punches as he was exposing this ruse. He portrays the Universal Church as being a greedy, lavishly adorned woman of ill repute seated on seven hills, the seven hills of Rome. According to John of the Book of Revelation, the church was working hand in hand with the beast, the Roman Emperor Domitian who at the time was cruelly persecuting the true Christians, not the Universal Church pretend Christians, and John calls the church the “great whore”:

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. (Book of Revelation, Chapter 17:4-6)

New archeological evidence has confirmed actually the claim made in the Gnostic gospel. As mentioned earlier, the inscription on a tablet found a few decades ago in Jordan, near the Dead Sea tells a story about the death and resurrection after three days of a pre-Jesus time “prince of princes.” (Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection, by Ethan Bronner, The New York Times, July 6, 2008) There is also a third century amulet showing an Osiris/Dionisus god being crucified. This, however, was the traditional symbol for spiritual renewal, for man’s necessary rebirth into a better understanding of reality.

Concurring with the information provided in the Gnostic text, the Dead Sea tablet says that the name of the replacement messiah “who bore the cross on his shoulder” was Simon, which is the name mentioned by Jesus in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. If this is evidence of a historical fact or rather of the existence of a pre-Christian similar tradition about a crucified god, that is a totally different topic of conversation, one you may want to bring up in your Bible study class next Sunday morning. Meanwhile, everything supports the conclusion that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he obviously never resurrected. As a result, it looks like this is too is a holy big lie used by the church for almost 2,000 years now as the bases for its doctrine. Indeed, this death on the cross that never happened is the very reason why we have the tall tale Christianity we have today.      

The Islamic text endorses the Gnostic position on the story about the crucifixion told in the New Testament. As seen, the Quran too states that Jesus was not the one on the cross up on Golgotha. According to the Quran, he was at one point replaced by somebody else while the whole thing was made to look like Jesus was the one being crucified. The Quran states in no confusing terms that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he did not resurrect either. Probably an even greater surprise for those indoctrinated from an early age with the tenets of a Christian religion established on Jesus’ death and resurrection, as we are going to see here later, Paul reminds the early Christians in his letter to the Galatians that Jesus was never physically crucified.

According to sources to be revealed, Jesus’ real name was actually Jmmanuel, or Emmanuel, a name still used today in certain churches. There is also a Talmud of Jmmanuel, a text discovered in 1963 in an old tomb south of the Old City of Jerusalem. It tells a story about Jesus that is in part similar to what we have in Matthew and in many significant aspects different from the one told in churches. The name of Jmmanuel or Emmanuel appears in old hymns dedicated to the son of god, the same son of god we know under the name of Jesus.

The Talmud of Jmmanuel says that, indeed, he was sentenced to be crucified at the insistence of the high priests who realized he was a serious threat to their authority and used mob pressure to influence Pilate. Seeking to produce a powerful impression on the masses, Jesus was actually the one who created the circumstances that left the priests with no other choice than to ask for his death. He was helped with that, not betrayed, by Judas Iscariot, yet his plan seems to have gone awry. He was beaten badly on the way to the crucifixion hill, and suffered broken bones. Then someone else carried the cross to Golgotha, supposedly the one named Simon. Jesus was placed in the tomb alive, and then removed at night. Friends with superior medical skills brought there apparently all the way from India were at the ready during this event and they healed his wounds.

The Bible says that because of broken bones and other wounds he sustained in the preliminary phases of the crucifixion, he fell into a coma. At that moment Joseph of Arimathea, one of his very good friends and a devoted follower tells Pilate that Jesus/Jmmanuel is dead and requests permission to take him down the cross in order to bury him. Clearly suspecting Joseph was not exactly telling the truth, yet out of respect for both Jesus and Joseph, Pilate gives his permission anyway. With Simon’s body wrapped in a cloth, no one among those watching from afar realized Jesus was not the one on the cross. The Bible says that Joseph took Jesus to a tomb he built for himself.

As the same sources claim, though, the tomb had a secret back entrance, and together with a couple of friends, Joseph removed Jesus from the sealed tomb during the night. After healers brought all the way from India as part of the plan helped Jesus/Jmmanuel recover, his brother Thomas, Judas Iscariot (not the same with Juda Iharioth, a real traitor), and his mother Mary left for what today is West Pakistan.

Mary, the mother, died when Jesus was 38 and was buried in today’s Mari, Pakistan. Apparently, there is a small funeral monument in this town built in her memory. The town of Mari happens to be in an area of Pakistan where once thrived a great Hindu civilization. Its ancient people lived in a large structure made of huge and elaborated dwellings of an unusual for that time architecture, something to same extent similar to the big ancient cities established in South America, North America, and Egypt.

Based on the information provided in Mahabharata, some historians have concluded this impressive complex is at least 5,200 years old. If we accept for a moment the chronology offered by traditional Egyptologists as valid, this complex would be older than the Giza pyramids. Based on the information provided in Mahabharata, some have suggested that since this impressive compound was architecturally uncharacteristic for that time, it was built by or with the help of humans possessing advanced knowledge and technology. These individuals came here from other parts of the universe, and Jesus was actually associated with them.

As we are going to see, according to the Bible, at the approximate age of 45 Jesus was alive and teaching. The same sources claim that, at 45, Jesus marries a young and beautiful woman, and that they have several children. He eventually moves to the Kashmir Valley in Srinagar, India, where he continues to teach, and where he lives to be 115 years old. (See also: The Fifth Gospel, By Fida Hassnain and Dahan Levi, and Jesus Lived in India, By Holger Kersten)

A rational logical conclusion, there are lessons to be learned from committing so-called sins, the real purpose of our being here. Aside from fancy calling it substitutionary atonement, though, the church has no well-defined explanations for what “Jesus died for our sins” stands for. On the other hand, for anyone who simply pays attention to the known history of religion and of the human race, this outlandish claim is easily debunked by the very fact that Jesus’ alleged death on the cross did not produce any kind of results.

(Last revised on 04.05.2013)

THE PLEIADES

“Your destiny is in the stars! Don’t you doubt that for a minute.” - Robert Dean

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