Yeshua ben Yosef (or Yeshua bar Yosef) is the original Aramaic name for Jesus the Nazarene. His parents, siblings, disciples, and followers called him by that name. The name "Jesus" is a misspelling and mispronunciation that resulted from the translation of Yeshua's name after his death, first into the Greek Iesous (pronounced "ee-ay-SUS"), and then from the Greek Iesous into the Latin Iesus. No one during Yeshua's life (prior to 30 CE) ever uttered the name, "Jesus." The letter "j" wasn't in the English language until the seventeenth century, so even in English, no one spoke the name "Jesus" until after that time.

 
Content of This Web Site

To understand Yeshua ben Yosef and the simple messages he spoke, we must go back to the time before his death in 30 CE, when Yeshua spoke humbly and lovingly, without the veil of a church that would separate him from the people to whom he wished to give his message. This Web site is devoted to helping humankind understand Yeshua, realize that Christianity is not Yeshua and doesn't own Yeshua, and overcome the damage the church has done in the name of Jesus Christ, the figure that the church created. It is not a Web site affiliated with or claiming allegiance to any religion, including Christianity. It is a spiritual site dedicated to understanding Yeshua and Yeshua's message in an effort to help humankind grow spiritually into the beings and society he knew we could be while in the Earthly plane of eternal life.

 
Who is Jesus Christ?

The name Jesus Christ is used to separate sheep from goats. Responses to the question, "Who was Jesus Christ" vary widely: "He was a Jewish spiritual teacher from the first century," "He was the prophet of the inner life speaking Allah's wisdom," "He was a myth created by first-century Jews," "He is the Son of God," or "He is God." Based on these answers, people divide responders into two broad groups: "She's one of us" or "She's one of them," a sheep or a goat. For the Roman Catholics, the sheep say "He is the God as described by the Roman Catholic Church" while the goats say "He is the God of all Christians" or "He was a great teacher, not a God." For the Muslims, the sheep say "He was the prophet of the inner life, but not a God" while the goats say "He was God incarnate" or "He was a myth." The criteria for dividing people into sheep and goats vary, but the effect is the same—intolerance, misunderstanding, animosity, and separation. The test destroys peace and brotherhood.

And it isn't just the Christians making the judgment. Atheists have their notion of whom the sheep and goats are; Muslims have their differing conceptions; Jews have theirs; and even different Christian groups have different criteria for sheep and goats. The name Jesus Christ, and questions such as "Are you saved," "Do you believe in Jesus," "Are you born again," and "Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" have become today's religious versions of gang symbols and signs. Those who answer correctly are the questioners' homeys. The homeys are people to whom they swear loyalty and with whom they feel solidarity because they articulate the same beliefs and obey the same sets of rules; those who answer differently are demonized, regarded as deluded or disrespectful, cast out from the group, treated inhumanely, and even killed—they are the enemy.

But like the gang symbols and signs, the question, "Do you believe Jesus Christ is God?" results in automatic, visceral responses with no understanding of the question or the answer, and no regard for the people involved, whether homeys or the others. It is a sign of identification with the group; it means "I am one of you," nothing else. The single acceptable answer has displaced understanding other people or understanding the rationales behind the answers. It is a scripted question that requires a scripted response, and thus, it allows no opportunity for dialogue between the real selves of both askers and the responders. Instead of creating a brotherhood of man, it creates discord and separation.

The origins of these religious gang symbols and signs are not understood by most today, either Christians or non-Christians. Few realize how the statements "Jesus has saved humanity" or "Jesus is God" evolved and how they relate to Yeshua ben Yosef, the human being on whom Jesus Christ was based. No dialogue about the questions and answers occurs; the questions and requisite, standardized answers serve only one purpose: to separate sheep from goats.

The essay that follows explains why Yeshua ben Yosef, the spiritual teacher who taught in the hills of the Galilee in the first century, would have been appalled at both the questions and the responses.

 
Yeshua ben Yosef

Because the questions and answers about Jesus Christ have become such powerful, dividing symbols for humankind today, I want to begin with a perspective that I hope will enable the various groups of Christians and the non-Christians to continue to read without making a judgment about whether this is, to them, sheep writing or goat writing. Such a knee-jerk judgment would end consideration of what I'm explaining, just as it ends spiritual relationships when the test is applied.

 
Yeshua ben Yosef was a real person.

We'll begin by dispelling the untenable assertion that Yeshua ben Yosef was a legend or myth, not a real person. Paul has left at least seven verified letters to the churches he founded, and they corroborate much of what is reported in the Acts of the Apostles, another independent source. We know Paul to be a genuine historical figure because of his epistles and acknowledgement of him by the early churches.

Paul's letters show he knew James (in Aramaic, Ja'akov, the brother of Yeshua), Peter (in Aramaic, Cephas), and others from the Jerusalem group who were followers of Yeshua. They engaged in extensive dialogues and met at two councils in Jerusalem. Paul was assured of the fact that the Jerusalem group lived and taught based on the experience of being with Yeshua ben Yosef. Paul lived his life based on his conversion experience and the unquestioned knowledge that James was the brother of the real Yeshua, and Peter and the others were disciples who knew him.

The Jerusalem group were not natives of Jerusalem or Judea; they were from the Galilee, north of Samaria. However, they were so convinced that Yeshua was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah who would deliver the Jewish nation from the Romans and establish the Kingdom of God that they sold their holdings in the Galilee and moved south to Jerusalem, because all Jews knew the Kingdom of God would be established in Jerusalem. As followers of the executed Yeshua, they risked being imprisoned or killed themselves in the wake of Yeshua's execution and the fomenting struggles between Romans and Jews there. Had they made up a legend, they would not have sold their belongings and moved into Jerusalem as a body that would be identified with the apocalyptic vision they had created for Yeshua in the period following his death. If they had fabricated the stories of his teachings and appearances after death, they certainly would not have remained there knowing that nothing good could come of it. They gained nothing from staying in Jerusalem as a body and, in fact, because they left their livelihoods and had no resources to maintain themselves, they later experienced financial difficulties when the return they anticipated didn't happen.

Finally, Peter, James, and Paul all went to their deaths proclaiming that Yeshua ben Yosef was a real man who had been killed by the Romans and appeared to them after his death. They all believed him to be the Jewish Messiah. In light of Paul's letters, the Jerusalem group's sacrifices to move there and sustain their community, the subsequent early conversions, the acceptance of martyrdom as the result of the Apostles' steadfast assertions of their beliefs, and the success with which fledgling Christianity held together in the early days, to suggest that all of this was the result of a fiction created by a group of zealous writers who stood to gain nothing from creating a character named Yeshua ben Yosef is simply untenable. The notion that their subterfuge was so convincing it kept Paul involved and resulted in converts among contemporaries of Yeshua ben Yosef who would have known if a ruse was being perpetrated, is beyond credibility.

Yeshua ben Yosef was a real spiritual teacher who lived in the first century CE, who was executed by the Romans, and whose followers planted the seeds that would become Christianity.

 
Yeshua ben Yosef Was More than an Ordinary Man

If you're reading the heading for this section looking for sheep words or goat words based on your conception of whom the sheep and goats are, I ask you to continue to suspend your judgment until the end of this entire explanation. My explanation is intended to show that understanding Yeshua ben Yosef allows both Christians and non-Christians to feel comfortable with whom he was and his teachings. We understand more today about the afterlife and our own eternal lives than humankind has ever understood. We have the testimonies of people who are residents of the afterlife now that have come from after-death communications, induced after-death communications, near-death experiences, mental medium readings, and direct-voice medium séances. We can now put Yeshua ben Yosef's life and teachings into perspective with what we know about life and the afterlife, and the perspective fits with the meager scraps we have of his teaching.

Yeshua ben Yosef was an old soul who incarnated as many others have to bring knowledge to humankind in its spiritual development. We know that based on his unusual teachings and life, and based on what those in the afterlife now say about him—they do speak of him with great reverence. As such, he was one with the Divine while being thoroughly a man. Using the term "God" to describe him is misleading because of the narrow, primitive notion of "God" that came from a tribal first-century conception; but he was certainly more than an ordinary man. I will expand on that later. Suffice it to say now that Christians will find that whom he was is not incompatible with what they believe about his oneness with God, and non-Christians will find that he was a figure much larger than the confines of a religion and his teaching belongs to no religion—it is teaching for all of humankind regardless of faith or lack of faith. Non-Christians can be inspired by his life and enriched by his teachings just as Christians can be, without having to espouse a belief system not credible to them.

 
Over the Last Two Millennia, Humankind
Grew Intellectually but Not Spiritually

The first-century view of the cosmos was primitive and naive. The dominant Aristotelian view was that the heavenly bodies were unchanging and perfect. That view was shared by other peoples at the time, such as the Jews. God was in the sky, beyond the canopy that was the heavens. There, he reigned from a throne. A little later, Ptolemy described the cosmos as being made of eight concentric crystalline spheres on which the Sun, moon, planets, and other heavenly bodies rested as they moved across the canopy of the heavens. Beyond the canopy was the abode of God, and stars were holes in the canopy through which the light of God shone.

The first-century Jewish and Jewish-Christian God was a big male with an irascible, angry personality; HE was to be feared. God would conceive a son by a human woman and then kill him as a scape goat to take away the sins of the world. In honor of this sacrifice, believers would eat the flesh of the sacrificed son and drink his blood. God was viewed as a tribal chieftain living in the sky, so this man-god could ascend into the sky and sit on a throne at God's right hand. Believers were required to worship and fear this God or be thrown into everlasting torment for their disobedience. There is no exaggeration in this description of the early first-millennium conception of God. It is a simple, direct statement of the belief system that has continued unchanged into the twenty-first century for most Christians.

In the centuries that followed, humankind grew intellectually, but maintained the tribal spiritual beliefs unchanged. In 1610, Galileo challenged the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe as a canopy of crystalline spheres above the stationary Earth, showing that the Sun is the center of the solar system and the planets revolve around it. Humankind had learned something profound about the universe.

In spite of the advancements made in science, the church remained stagnate in its beliefs. Church dogma adopted in 1545 at the Council of Trent tightened the organization of religious institutions, condemned the reforms of Protestantism, dictated that the church's interpretation of the Bible was final and individual interpretations by Christians were heretical, and reaffirmed practices such as the sale of indulgences to move deceased people out of purgatory, pilgrimages, veneration of saints and relics, and veneration of the Virgin Mary.

At the beginning of the next century, Galileo advanced proof of that fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but was required by the church to renounce the opinion. The church insisted that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Intellectually, humankind had advanced in its understanding of the universe; spiritually, it retained the first-century beliefs that were under the control of the church.

Humankind's intellectual advancements continued. In 1619, Kepler established the planetary laws. In 1687, Newton published the Principia Mathematica, which revolutionized humankind's understanding of how the celestial bodies remained in orbit. He explained that the same forces of gravity that dictated the actions of bodies on the Earth were operating on the moon, Sun, planets, and all other bodies in the universe.

During that time, the church viciously persecuted and executed men and women in Europe if their beliefs ran afoul of the church's first-century belief system. Many fled to the new land of America to escape persecution. The dissension resulted in no efforts to reform or to give people freedom of belief. Instead, the church became more firmly entrenched in the face of the Reformation and the growing threats from science and atheism. No pioneer suggested that perhaps Yeshua's lessons about tolerance, love, and peace should become the focus of a new life for the church in the same manner in which Galileo, Kepler, and Newton suggested that the universe was different than that conceived by humankind before. As humankind progressed intellectually to have new understandings of the universe, the church tightened its grip and forced believers to retain the first-century view of spirituality.

In 1900, Max Planck determined that energy traveled in packets, or "quanta," ushering in the era of quantum mechanics. In 1905 and 1915, Einstein published his papers on relativity and gravity, further advancing humankind in its knowledge of the principles governing matter, energy, and forces in the universe.

During the same time, in 1910 in America, Milton and Lyman Steward published The Fundamentals, restating the religious dogma that came from the first century to use as a bulwark for maintaining the primitive nature of humankind's view of God and spirituality. The movement that followed became known as "fundamentalism." After nearly two millennia, the church was still asserting beliefs that were prominent and relevant in the first century when the cosmos was viewed as a canopy, with Earth at its center and a God who was an irascible tribal chieftain in the sky.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble determined that the universe is expanding, and the distant stars we see are actually other galaxies. The universe was grander, larger, and more dynamic than humankind had ever envisioned, and humankind's understanding of it was burgeoning.

At the same time, the fundamentalist churches were becoming known for their intolerance, divisiveness, and anti-intellectualism. They remained adamant that the first-century texts described God and were the standards for spirituality, frozen in time. The church still recites the Nicene Creed from the fourth century CE as its statement of belief. The God of the church is still a male personality who requires obedience or will inflict everlasting punishment on dissenters. The Bishops who attended the Council at Nicea in 325 CE would have felt quite at home in a church service today.

 
Humanity Has Changed Intellectually
and Must Change Spiritually

Over the last two millennia, humanity has enjoyed intellectual sea changes and must now change spiritually to match. We know today that God isn't a big male in the sky, and that the early church borrowed the hell myths from the pagans. We know from very recent research that the mind is not in the body, that people's minds are joined, and that consciousness affects the physical realm. Science tells us that the universe was made uniquely for us, against all odds, and that only an intelligence could have brought it about for us.

Science today is discovering the God that humankind should have evolved to know over the last two millennia. Had spiritually not been held a prisoner in first-century ecclesiastical chains, humankind could have evolved its understanding of God as it developed its understanding of the universe. Today, the development of our knowledge about the Higher Power, the creative impulse that underlies all of creation, would have been written onto the pages of history beside the accounts of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Hubble. We would, today, see science and spirituality as two perspectives on the same Divine mind, understood through humankind's relentless impulse to know and discover.

 
Then Who is Yeshua ben Yosef?

The understanding of the Higher Power that we're now developing is bringing into focus the person of Yeshua ben Yosef. We now know that he was in fact more than a man—he was a celestial being, an old soul, who was one with the Higher Power bringing knowledge to humankind as others have and will, but with an understanding that should have reverberated through the first-century Jewish world. He was executed in the physical realm, and was able to appear to his disciples after death to reassure them about eternal life and the importance of making his teaching and model real in their lives.

The first-century followers of Yeshua ben Yosef interpreted his life and death in the only terms they could—as a people with tribal Gods that lived in the sky beyond the eight concentric crystalline spheres and required sacrifices to atone for sin. Had the church not kept alive for two millennia that primitive interpretation that fit the first century mind, humankind would have developed its understanding of Yeshua ben Yosef, his life, and his teachings, so that over the centuries, our forefathers would have allowed their spiritual understanding to grow as their intellects grew. And today, we might find that for the first time in two millennia, humankind has grown psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually so Yeshua ben Yosef can have the effect on humankind that he was destined to have.

Yeshua's second coming may be in his being understood for the first time.

 
Separating the Sheep from the Goats

We must, today, stop using the name Jesus Christ as an instrument for separating the sheep from the goats. That was a primitive first-century notion that is no longer relevant today. Yeshua ben Yosef's teachings, as they were given prior to 30 CE, are guides for humankind to mature spiritually. They are meant for atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians alike, with no intolerance, judgment, exclusion, or separation. There are no sheep. There are no goats. There are only human beings growing together in spiritual maturity through eternity, enlightened by the life and teaching of a brilliant luminary whose words still live and inspire all who listen to and understand his counsel.