October 8, 2016

Printable file

 

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God [Theé], my God [Theé], why have you forsaken me?" (Matt 27:46)

At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God [Ó Theos], my God [ó Theos], why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34)

A Psalm of David (Ps 22:1):

My God [El], my God [El], why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?

the last line is the spiritual portion of the couplet

_________________________

6.

When I was first called to reread prophecy, someone objected to a word I used and said, He knows no Greek. I know English, a little German, and some Greek, but what I also know is that words are “signs” to which meanings must to be assigned in Indo-European languages. In Semitic languages, the meaning of a word must be known before vowels are assigned to the consonant cluster representing the word. Either way, a word is without meaning until a reader assigns a meaning to the signifier. So it really doesn’t matter what meaning has been assigned by others to the signifier; it matters what meaning I assign to the signifier in rereading long read prophecies; for while I don’t want to be, I can be a reading community of one, hardly a community at all.

Again, in order to take meaning from a text, a meaning has to be assigned to most every signifier. The context in which an unfamiliar word here or there is encountered will usually give to the reader [auditor] a recognizable meaning for the word; hence, a reader doesn’t need to know that much about a middle voice, but needs to know the rudiments of salvation. And to this extent, I know that the sign of Jonah functions as a squared thought-couplet in verse. Where Matthew’s Jesus introduces the sign of Jonah in the physical portion of the Gospel (12:39–42), there is both a physical aspect (v. 40) and a spiritual aspect (vv. 41–42). Where Matthew’s Jesus reasserts that no sign will be given other than the sign of Jonah in the spiritual portion of the Gospel (16:2–20), both the physical and the spiritual aspects of the spiritual presentation ignore traditional use of the sign of Jonah—the three days and three nights in the heart of the earth—and address the less tangible attributes of “breath” as in teaching …

When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, "Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." And they began discussing it among themselves, saying, "We brought no bread." But Jesus, aware of this, said, "O you of little faith, why are you discussing among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How is it that you fail to understand that I did not speak about bread? Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (Matt 16:5–12)

Is a teaching like yeast, growing rapidly to permeate the entirety of a lump of dough, causing the entirety of the lump to be puffed up, filled with itself? For a modern example, what about the Sacred Names Heresy that holds that only in a Hebraic enunciation of Jesus’ name is there salvation, this heresy borrows a verse composed in Greek by a Greek novelist and then attempts to back-translate the verse into Hebrew.

The borrowed passage is,

Then Peter, filled with [pneumatos ágion — spirit holy], said to them, "Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by Him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:8–12 emphasis added)

Is there salvation only in the name Jesus Christ? What did Matthew’s Jesus have to say on this matter? And in a long citation we read,

When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on his glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Then He will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?” Then He will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matt 25:31–46)

Anything said by the King about the utterance of His Name? No, not a word. So how important is the utterance of Christ Jesus’ name? Apparently of no importance at all. What has importance is caring for, providing for, addressing the needs of the poorest element in society.

The physical utterance of a physical sound is “physical” and is of this world. It will never be anything other than of this world. And the utterance of Jesus’ name in English, in Greek, or in any other language doesn’t clothe the naked or poorly dressed, doesn’t fill the belly of the hungry, doesn’t warm the person’s who is cold. Doing something for the person is what’s required. Yet the simple-minded Christian who has bitten into the Sacred Names Heresy believes that this Christian has secret knowledge that others do not have and as such will be heaven when those Christians who say “Jesus” instead of a bastardized Hebrew enunciation of Joshua will not be there. This Heresy is no more than a modern form of Gnosticism.

The teachings of the Pharisees and Sadducees were physical, centered on the flesh and on what defiles the flesh. And their teachings were then and the teachings of rabbinical Judaism are even today as insidious as leavening, taking Sabbatarian Christians into ritual and tradition.

But teachings reach students via the breath of the teacher … the physical aspect of the sign of Jonah in the spiritual portion of Matthew’s Gospel pertains to exhaled breath, modulated to form human words that serve to separate Israel from God: the leaven of the Sadducees and Pharisees. Therefore, the spiritual aspect of the sign of Jonah in the spiritual portion of Matthew’s God should also pertain to “breath” and it does: the movement of breath from in-front of the nasal consonant <n> as in John, with the <h> representing aspiration or breath, to behind the nasal consonant as in Jonah, with the <ah> representing aspiration:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter [Petros], and on this rock [petra] I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (Matt 16:13–19)

Jesus knew that Peter was not the son of Jonah, but the son of John [ó uios Íoa^hnnou — John 1:42; plus 21:15–17]. But the misidentification set up the movement of breath from masculine singular case ending on <Petros>, which has the enunciation concluding with exhaled breath through pursed lips, to concluding with inhaled breath through an open mouth in <petra>. So while translators accurately translate into English “you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church,” these translation conceal from English readers the spiritual significance of what Matthew’s Jesus said—and what He said is, On the movement of breathe from outside of you—the front of your face—to inside you (where breath would enter a whale through its blow hole), I will build my assembly.

Is there anything wrong with the English translation as received in most Bibles? No, the translators have done their job. It is the preachers and teachers of Christians who haven’t done their job; who haven’t instructed their parishioners about Hebrew style narrative in either prose or verse. And persons whom I have instructed in Hebraic style verse weren’t taught by God but by another man who puts his pants on one leg at a time. For these persons to say that they were instructed by God is nonsensical.

When I deconstruct a text, I do so because I was taught in the university (UAF) to look for lacunae in texts by professors trained by French linguists and philosophers. Thus, revelation comes by realization: I realized that when Matthew’s Jesus placed two signs together in the spiritual portion of Matthew’s Gospel, the first that of a red sky that has two opposing meanings based on its dusk or dawn context, then the second sign—the sign of Jonah—will also have two opposing meanings based on its context. So when the author of Matthew’s Gospel places in near context, Beware of the leavening of the Sadducees and Pharisees, and, You are Simon Bar-Jonah [son of Jonah], with the difference between the enunciation of <John> and <Jonah> being the movement of nasalization from behind aspiration to in front of aspiration, then Jonah inside the whale being returned to life makes lots of sense. Our inner self is as Jonah was, trapped in a fleshly body and dead until given life by the spirit of God in the spirit of Christ entering into our human spirit. Jesus’ inner self was dead until the spirit [breath] of God in the bodily form of a dove entered into Him, thereby causing Him to be born again; born a second time, not something Nicodemus could understand.

So the sign of Jonah is a specific example of spiritual birth—and translators from Greek to English understand virtually nothing of the Greek text even though they know much more than I do about the language.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine used his “rule of faith” to eliminate textual ambiguity and to read the Trinity into passages where the concept didn’t exist. And to read the sign of Jonah as Jesus building His assembly on the movement of “the breath of significance” from physical breath to spiritual breath (the divine breath of God, pneuma Theou) could be construed as reading into Matthew’s Gospel what isn’t there; for what is there is that for reasons unexplained, Jesus changed Simon son of John’s name to Peter, then misidentifies Peter, calling him, Simon son of Jonah, then says, You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church, which the Roman Church has taken to mean that Peter will be the foundational stone for the assembly Jesus builds …

But didn’t Paul write,

For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (1 Cor 3:4–11 emphasis added)

Peter isn’t mentioned by Paul—and Matthew’s Gospel will probably not be written for another quarter of a century—still if Jesus meant that Peter would be the little stone [petra] upon which He would build His assembly or church, then Paul would seem to need to include Peter in the foundation of the temple (1 Cor 3:16–17) he as a master builder laid. But he mentions Apollos instead, and says that neither he nor Apollos are more than fellow workers [I was called to reread prophecy; so that is what I am, a fellow worker, and this is true]. Peter would be a fellow worker of the first order. But the Roman Church, carrying forth the mystery religion of antiquity, claims to be built on the ministries of Peter and Paul. It is not. Their claim is a fraudulent deed, written on a one-way ticket to Hades. Of course, no Roman Catholic has to remain where they are spiritually; no Catholic has to take that one-way journey. All could repent and begin to believe God. But most will not, and that is sad.

So translation is not a science but an art that is governed by a rule of faith, but not Augustine’s rule of faith. Translation of Scripture should be governed by the sign of Jonah as its rule of faith, meaning that the hierarchal relationship between the large fleshly body of a whale, a “great fish” but also an air-breathing mammal, to the relatively minuscule body of Jonah inside the whale, with Jonah being an air-breathing mammal, represents initially the non-physical spirit of the man [to pneuma tou ánthropou] that resides inside the also non-physical soul [psuche] of the person, but secondarily represents the soul of the person that animates the flesh of the fleshly body [soma] of the person. So every person consists of spirit [pneuma], soul [psuche], and body [soma], what Paul wrote (1 Thess 5:23), with the spirit of the person being “dead” (as in the “dumb” software of 1980s word processors) until the spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou] enters into [penetrates] the spirit of the person and thereby brings to life a new spiritual creature, a son of God, born from above and with life in the heavenly realm.

Paul tells us that flesh and blood will not (and indeed, cannot) inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50); cannot because flesh and blood possess “mass,” the movement of which requires the passage of time [space-time]—and heaven is a timeless supra-dimension in which the known forces remain unfurled.

To earlier generations that didn’t think in terms of known forces and multiple dimensions, the marriage relationship between a man and woman illustrated the sign of Jonah rule of faith; for a man was the head of his wife, his head penetrating his wife to bring to life a new creature—his son (or daughter)—in his wife, with the head of the man in his wife representing a fleshly relationship analogous to Jonah in the whale [which is not to say that wives are whales in relation to their husbands, but in relation to the circumcised head of their husband]. And this is the relationship Paul used when he wrote,

Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Cor 11:1–3 emphasis added)

The tradition maintained is the husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the Head of the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27) and God is the Head of Christ, again as the husband is the head of his wife, which will have the wife being the figurative body of her husband for no man can give birth to his son, but needs the body of his wife to give birth to his son. Hence, for God the Father to give spiritual birth to His sons, He needs Christ Jesus fulfilling the role of His wife—there is no gender in heaven so don’t read more into this analogy than is actually here—and Christ Jesus does through the Body of Christ which is one spiritual body, the Head of which is Christ. Hence, both the Head and the Body of Christ, together, fulfill the role of the woman in human marriage. So the biological head of a woman who has been born of spirit becomes—as with her husband’s head—analogous to Christ Jesus; so that within the Body of Christ there is no inferiority due to gender. The born-of-spirit son of God that dwells inside a female body is a son of God with the same right to deliver the words of Christ Jesus as her biological husband, if also born of spirit, has. And about this Paul wrote,

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. (Gal 3:25–29 emphasis added)

The tradition maintained employs the distinction between male and female genders that goes back to the covenant of circumcision given Abraham, with circumcision causing the natural skin covering of a man’s head to be pared away, thereby causing the man to be naked before God as Adam was naked in the Garden before unbelief overwhelmed Adam. Hence, a woman cannot be circumcised, regardless of how Muslims abuse the term and mutilate their women … the Islamic mutilation of women does not leave women with uncovered heads, as occurs when males are circumcised.

Translators leave undeveloped the covenant of circumcision which had aspiration (breath), the <ah> radical, added to both Abram’s and to Sari’s names.

Paul writes,

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. (Rom 5:12–14 emphasis added)

Sin did not enter the world when Eve ate forbidden fruit; ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Pastoral epistles are not of the Apostle Paul, regardless of any internal claim of Paul being their author; for neither Paul’s gospel nor Paul’s understanding of gender is found in them. So scour from your minds what is written about Paul prohibiting women to teach (1 Tim 2:12). These words come from a false Paul. For the Apostle Paul understood that Adam’s belief of God covered both him and his wife as if this belief of God was garment or robe; for the man was the head of his wife so whatever the wife did, the man’s nakedness before God that was to cause him to walk uprightly and be blameless covered the woman as Christ Jesus’ righteousness (belief of God) covers the Body of Christ. Sin couldn’t have entered this world through the woman—and again, this is apparent in and by the circumcision covenant, which before it was given allowed men to exercise superiority over women. But after it was given, men and women (both having aspiration, the <ah> radical, added to their names) were equal before God, with God displaying no favoritism to males. Hence, the Lord tells Abraham, in the matter of Hagar, to submit to the wishes of Sarah.

The circumcision covenant returned Abram, his son Ishmael, and his future sons to the status Adam had before Adam’s unbelief caused him to eat forbidden fruit, with death thereby entering the world … all of this Paul understood, even if the author of the Pastoral Epistles did not. So again, the integrity of Scripture takes another hit, actually a body blow that should knock the wind out of male chauvinists. Yes, the man is the head of his wife [not the head of someone else’s wife], but he is the head as Christ Jesus is the Head of the Body of Christ, the Christian Church. And when was the last time you saw Christ Jesus intervening in the affairs of the Church to prevent even the introduction of theological error and false scriptures? You haven’t ever seen this, nor has anyone in history. And you need to consider the dilemma of Hosea:

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, "Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord." So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. And the Lord said to him, "Call his name Jezreel, for in just a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. And on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel." (Hos 1:2–5)

And the Lord said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins." So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, "You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you." For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. (Hos 3:1–5)

The children of Israel have indeed dwelt many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. They have sometimes dwelt with the children of Ishmael; they have sometimes warred with the children of Ishmael; but both the children of Israel and the children of Ishmael have spurned the idolatry of greater Christendom even though they are without knowledge of God.

It isn’t in God’s interest to compel the sons of men to worship Him. He cannot snuff out the Adversary’s rebellion if He has to compel good behavior. He has to permit those who will not believe Him to not believe Him. For He could have prevented Adam from eating forbidden fruit—that would have been easy enough for Him to do. So why didn’t He? Because killing an idea is extremely difficult. His sons have to want to believe Him even when they don’t have-to. Only through His sons wanting to be like Him, to believe as He does, to have love for the weak of this world can He erase the premise for the Adversary’s rebellion, that governance from bottom to top works better for everyone than government from top to bottom.

I haven’t yet gotten to the mistranslations with which I started this Teaching, but I have gotten far enough that the person with a small screen has read enough. So I will break this discussion here and pick it up next time from this point by returning to Paul’s discussion of headcoverings.

* * *

"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."

---