ENOUGH! Christianity Intro

THIS IS CHRISTIANITY

NT4-INTRODUCTION

1.
Having never before read the New Testament (NT) thoroughly,
I must say to finally do so has been most interesting and time
well spent. And here is a challenge to all Christian Islamophobes:
I have now read your book with an open mind -
now will you please read mine.

The first 4 books of the NT, which consists of 27 books in total,
are known as the Gospels (=Injeel to Muslims), here referred to
throughout as the NT4, and they describe the ministry of Jesus as
told by 4 different authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but
are generally believed to have been composed by a variety of
writers between roughly 60 and 110 CE, or 30 to 80 years after
the alleged events they describe, but no original "first edition"
manuscripts survive, the oldest individual books are from c 200
CE and the oldest complete NT, the Codex Sinaiticus, dates from
c 350 CE, or more than 300 years after those events.

It is important that Luke to his credit states immediately in the
opening words of his Gospel that he was not an eyewitness to any
of it but tried to put what had already been said and written by
many different people into a coherent narrative.

2.
It has been clear to me for a very long time that all is not what
we are asked to believe as regards Jesus, and therefore
Christianity and Christians, there are definitely some disturbing
aspects present there. When carrying out this study it quickly
became obvious how widespread those aspects are, in fact, rather
than just being a few individual strands they are intrinsic to the
whole fabric of the faith. An unpleasant surprise, even to
someone who never was a Christian and who now is a Muslim.

As a Muslim I respect and revere without exception all the
prophets of the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible and the Muslim
Quran, and it would be SO nice if Jews and Christians did the
same, but as regards the Jesus of the NT4 we are faced with
a stark choice:

EITHER Jesus was a false prophet, as his overall behaviour as
presented before us is incompatible with being a true or proper
one and therefore unthinkable for one,

OR the NT4 gives a false depiction of the man, either because it
was flawed from the beginning, or maybe it has been corrupted
over time, due to countless translations, revisions, additions,
deletions, for all kinds of reasons, so no longer faithfully reflects
what Jesus did and said. This is the general Islamic opinion.

I am inclined to believe the latter, and am always prepared to
give the person Muslims call Isa bin Maryam (=Jesus son of Mary)
the benefit of the doubt.

Interestingly, there are a great number of references to Jesus-Isa
in the Quran and they are universally respectful, although of
course the Quran entirely rejects any divinity for Jesus and sees
him simply as another human prophet in a very long line, from
Azzam (=Adam) over Musa (=Moses) to Isa (=Jesus) and
finishing with Muhammad, and may peace be upon them all.
In contrast, the Quran only specifically mentions Muhammad
(pbuh) a few times.

The comments in this study refer only to the literal text of the
NT4 and do not attempt to guess about the "real" Jesus, a task
which would be as impossible as it would be futile.
So, for the avoidance of doubt: any mention of Jesus here, unless
otherwise stated, therefore means "the Jesus of the NT4".

3.
Sadly, the Jesus presented in the NT4 is not a likeable character
at all and completely the opposite of the image we have been
conditioned to believe: instead of the advertised all-merciful
saviour concerned only with our well-being, we are faced with
an utterly selfish megalomanic psychopath obsessed with being
remembered at any cost. And that is a reasonable and fair-
minded reading of the text. How on earth (pun intended) that
text has been interpreted any other way is a mystery which
Christians must adequately explain, and not only to Muslims.

Jesus consistently chooses to do exactly what is required and
expected to "confirm" prophecies in previous scriptures, which
of course he had studied so knew about, as is obvious from his
sayings. He steadfastly goes out of his way to make even details
of known prophecies "come true", and it is hardly being unkind to
claim that this is the attitude of an impostor seeking lasting fame.
A prophet sent to save the world, or just to point us in the right
direction, would never behave like that.

Some will say: what about all the predictions over which Jesus
had no influence whatsoever yet still mysteriously "came true"
through him, such as his ancestry from the family of David, his
mother being a virgin, his place of birth, the actual manner of his
death, being raised from the dead and on the 3rd day, and so on.
The answer is of course that if anyone has a scrap of real
historical evidence to back any of it up, then we will be happy to
examine and discuss it all, but until that is produced it is in truth
no more than hearsay. Believe it if you wish.

And Jesus is determined to exploit any and every opportunity
to challenge and provoke, ridicule and show disrespect, and
counter-instruct the leading teachers of his day in his own
insensitive know-all manner, in other words: he was the radical
extremist revolutionary of the time, hell-bent on upsetting the
establishment. No wonder it decided to eliminate him - indeed, it
is difficult to see what else it could have done, as he was just a
lone and dangerous individual and not yet the established leader
of a large rival group, so, in his own style of language, root out
the first weed before it takes over the field.
Embarrassing for neo-Crusaders, such a course of action is in
perfect agreement with the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes
formulated by that born-again Christian GW Bush.

The Christians of the world will never accept it but the inevitable
conclusion of a detached and rational study of the NT4 is that the
Prince of Peace is in truth the King of Death, the Lamb of God
turns out to be a man-eating lion which no sensible lamb would
ever choose to lie down with, the Dove of Peace is really a
carrion-seeking vulture, and the oh-so-merciful is indifferent to
the suffering of others, and even delights in inflicting it if possible.
Oh yes, it is all in the NT4 and not hidden in secret codes or
oblique esoteric references or multi-layered flowery language but
right out in the open in the plain text, as this study will clearly
demonstrate.

In short: Christianity is counterfeit goods and has for 2000 years
been knowingly marketed under a false declaration on content
and ingredients.

Is there a worldwide money-back warranty clause here, valid,
like curses in the Bible, to the 10th generation?
Was there no obligation in the days of Jesus to warn customers,
investing and entrusting their spiritual savings in a new venture,
to read the small print, and to point out, if only in the name of
honesty, that "values may go down as well as up"?

All those hopeful millions who are not unreasonably expecting a
decent return and growth, based on the product as advertised,
are likely to be sorely disappointed. Any lawsuits coming up?

Maybe from me! Why? Because the mis-named Prince of Peace
wishes to eradicate me for no other reason than rejecting his
message. Far-fetched hysteria? Not at all, it is all there clearly
stated in the NT4, for anyone to see and comment on, assuming
of course you read it objectively.

Rather than Christians ranting and raving indignantly in defence
and disbelief, or continuing another 2000 years in total denial, we
must ask in utter amazement: how can it be that those plain facts
have not been brought to everybody's attention long ago?
Are they so CROSS-eyed that they cannot read?
Are they so enraptured that they cannot see?

4.
Christianity has a lot to answer for since its beginning, the worst
excesses being the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadores
in the New World - all these unimaginable horrors and holocausts
were indisputably seen to be justified through interpretations of
the Bible, and were committed in the sacred names of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit.

But tragically it did not stop there and it is a reasonable
assumption that mass-murdering monsters like GW Bush, Tony
Blair and their friends, found in the NT all the justification and
"moral" backing they may have felt they needed for their insane
Last Crusade, by the Coalition of the Killing, in the hoax War on
Terror, an assumption supported by GWB himself stating on
public record that God talked to him and told him to invade first
Afghanistan and then Iraq, even describing the whole idiotic
adventure as "a new Crusade", plus his childish "you are either
with us or against us" terminology, the "Axis-of-Evil", "good-
versus-evil", "the defining battle of the new century" etc, just as
he threatened us all with World War III unless we "prevent Iran
from obtaining the knowledge [not the technology, please note]
required to build nuclear weapons", well knowing that such
knowledge is probably available to anyone today on the Internet.
Far from being courageous world leaders with a bold vision for
humanity, such people are evil personified and worthy successors
of Mao, Stalin and Hitler, and in a world with any sense of justice
they would be arrested, convicted on masses of indisputable
evidence, sentenced and locked up for life.

It is a courteous understatement to say that mankind is very
poorly served by such "spirituality" and it should be of great
concern to us all that Christianity in all its forms is still, in terms
of numbers at least, the most widely distributed of all religions
on our planet.
However, the good news, the real Good News, is that Islam is
rapidly catching up and has already overtaken Catholics, so all is
not lost, indeed, the corner has probably already been turned, the
high-water mark of Christianity already behind us - now there is a
comforting thought.

5.
Notwithstanding the fact that according to central dogma of the
Catholic church (Greek: katholikos=universal) ONLY Catholics
are proper Christians, meaning all other denominations are
considered just as misguided and doomed as the adherents of all
other religions, Judaism its precursor included - it is important
here to remember Martin Luther (1483-1546), father of the
Reformation, founder and unofficial prophet of the Protestant
branch of Christianity, and to mention his attitudes towards the
Jews.

From initially being well disposed towards them, but only in the
hope of charming or tempting them into conversion, he gradually
became violently anti-Jewish, NOT to be confused with anti-
Semitic, that is an incorrect, misleading and idiotic expression
which was hijacked by the Jews and the Zionists long ago and is
now invariably used where the proper and logical term would be
anti-Jewish or, more frequently, anti-Zionist or anti-Israel.
Just one example: it is indisputably incorrect and laughable to
call the former grand mufti of al-Quds (=Jerusalem), Mohammad
Amin al-Husayni (1895-1974) anti-Semitic, as all Arabs are
Semitic people too, both in terms of ethnicity and language.
Of course he was stridently anti-Zionist, and rightly so, and was
or became anti-Jewish generally, but he was most certainly NOT
anti-Semitic, yet he is always described as being just that.
Speak clearly please. Back to Martin Luther:

Anyone who has problems with what the Quran says about the
Jews should read Luther's On The Jews And Their Lies (full text
available online). Luther had a special style when writing about
his adversaries: sarcastic and vulgar, vicious and brutal, very
down-to-earth. In this category, On The Jews And Their Lies is
probably his best effort and it should be read by everybody at
least once.

As an aside but related to the problems we face today:
The online version I used had the following sentence displayed
prominently right at the top:
"WARNING: This is a Notorious Anti-Semitic Document!"
- presumably inserted "voluntarily" after some "persuasion" by
the Anti-Defamation League or one of the other Zionist extremist
organisations. For heaven's sake, do not be so hysterical, let
people make up their own minds.
Freedom of expression anyone? Freedom to think?

6.
Just as there is nothing new in the Ten Commandments and the
Law of Moses generally, see THIS IS JUDAISM, so it is with the
Holy Trinity, Christianity's central theoretical dogma, which
remains unexplained and has been described by Christianity's
leading intellectuals variously as an inscrutable mystery or as
being beyond the grasp of human reason.
See also Appendix C1, the Athanasian Creed.

But the concept of joining three deities and regarding them as
one was not invented by Christianity, as the following will show:

In ancient Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria), 1500 or
2000 or more years before Christianity, there were also divine
trinities, one example being Anu (sky), Enlil (earth), Ea (waters)
and together known as The Triad Of The Great Gods.

And further afield, Hinduism has its own trinity tradition, which
is also much older than the Gospel times, consisting of Brahma
(creation), Vishnu (maintenance) and Shiva (destruction), and
often represented as one deity precisely to help visualise the
concept that these 3 processes are in truth 3 aspects of one
and the same reality.

But the most striking example is from ancient Egypt where we
have the direct equivalent of the 3-persons-in-1 of the Christian
Trinity, and quite likely Christianity simply copied it, although it
was done in 2 stages: at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE the Son
was added to the Godhead, so 1 became 2, and at the Council of
Constantinople in 381 CE the Holy Spirit was added, so 2 became
3, arriving at the Holy Trinity which has confused and perplexed
the world ever since.

The Egyptian model is this: an apparently unique wall painting in
the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun (1341–1323 BCE, or about the same
time as Moses) shows three manifestations of him - in the centre
as the living ruling king in the form of Horus, in front of him, but
to our left, as his mummified father in the form of the risen Osiris
(God of the dead), and behind him, but to our right, in the form
of his Ka (soul or spirit), and father and spirit both reach out and
touch the central character, so pictorially linking and unifying all
three by representing father, son and spirit in one person,
precisely as in the Christian version.
Surely too obvious and too perfect a match to be written off as
merely a strange coincidence. (With thanks to Egyptian scholar
Ahmed Osman for this inspired observation).

It is not only entirely plausible but logical and therefore
reasonable to assume that the early church manufactured its own
version of existing trinities in order to make Christianity more
acceptable and marketable to populations who were used to such
religious arrangements, for it must be pointed out that there are
no explicit references to any trinity to be found in the NT4, and all
that could be argued to relate to anything trinity-like is one
miserly verse right at the end of the Gospel of Matthew
(Mt.28:19, last verse but one).

And the OT5 in the very credo of Judaism, the famous Shema
(Hebrew: hear or listen (OT.Deut.6:4)), states that God is ONE,
which, interestingly and significantly, is one area of full
agreement between Jews and Muslims for it is in perfect harmony
with the very foundation of Islam: Tawheed
(=oneness, from: wahed=one), therefore > Qul: huwa Allahu
AHAD (=Say: He is Allah, the ONE (Quran.112:1)).

So of the 3 Abrahamic religions, Christianity is clearly the odd one
out and it has some explaining to do but, after waiting 1600 years
for a coherent answer to the riddle of the Holy Trinity, prospects
are surely bleak.

Now, if the Trinity were so vital and central to our understanding
and salvation, or if indeed it reflected any natural or universal
principle, we would expect that both the Creator himself and ALL
his prophets would have addressed it in numerous places and
explained it in various ways throughout the OT, the NT and the
Quran. But nobody did that and as we just saw, in 2 of the 3 ANY
notion of a composite deity is categorically ruled out.

And if the Trinity were an original and integral or an essential part
of Christianity, it is simply inconceivable that Jesus, who delighted
in using parables to explain his ideas to his followers and the
crowds, would not have devoted a large amount of his time to go
over precisely the concept of the Trinity again and again and, yes,
again. But he did not do that. And in the lonely verse just
referred to (Mt.28:19) all we get is one remark which does not
even specifically describe the mentioned Father, Son and Holy
Spirit as a trinity.

We therefore conclude that the Holy Trinity is an afterthought,
an innovation, a deviation, a marketing spin by the early church.
How embarrassing for Christianity. But that is not our problem.

7.
Muslims generally believe that nowhere does Jesus claim to be
the son of God, even most Quran versions have in their notes and
comments words to that effect. Whilst not wishing to lecture any
of the learned scholars or upset their general readers, the answer
is: my dear Brothers and Sisters, you are wrong, for Jesus claims,
directly or indirectly, to be the son of God not once or twice but at
least 31 times in the Gospels, the first 4 books of the NT, and the
proof is right here in this study, the cases referenced and
commented on in the sequence they occur.
Appendix C2 is a list of those 31 verses but there are surely many
more waiting to be found, particularly in the 4th Gospel, John.

Islamic scholars may comment the way they do due to a lack of
personal study of the NT4, relying instead on accepted "wisdom"
and hearsay, or because they simply cannot accept the idea that
Jesus was/is the son of God, as the Quran explicitly and
repeatedly rejects the whole concept of the Creator having either
a spouse or offspring as not only blasphemous but utterly absurd.

But Islam also claims that the scriptures of the Jews and the
Christians, collectively known by Muslims as Ahl al-Kitab (=People
of the Book), are seriously corrupted, maybe beyond recognition
of the original, so the answer and solution to the Islamic dilemma
is wonderfully simple:
If we can prove that there are serious discrepancies in the OT5
of the Jews and/or in the NT4 of the Christians then we can
reasonably say that, on grounds of logic alone, we must doubt
everything we read in their scriptures.

As the parallel study THIS IS JUDAISM demonstrates, the OT5
we read today is full of inconsistencies, contradictions and sheer
impossibilities, in short, it is indisputably an incoherent and
unreliable text.
This of course has ramifications for the entire OT and for that
matter also for the entire NT, for what is demonstrably the case
with the OT5 may also apply to all the rest, whether immediately
obvious or not.
THIS IS CHRISTIANITY demonstrates that the Jesus presented in
the NT4 is not and cannot be a true prophet, yet Islam and
Muslims universally regard and revere Isa bin Maryam (=Jesus
son of Mary) as one of the major prophets.

Taken together these 2 studies therefore prove that the Islamic
claims that the Ahl al-Kitab (=People of the Book) rely on
corrupted scriptures are not only perfectly reasonable and the
logical conclusion we must draw, those claims are actually true.
That is of course highly embarrassing and most inconvenient for
both Judaism and Christianity, but that is not our problem, we
have every right to point this out, and when unfairly attacked
we have every right to defend ourselves.

8.
One of the most startling discoveries made during the writing of
these 2 studies is this: contrary to common misconceptions,
Christianity is NOT for everyone but for the Jews ONLY, as clearly
stated in the NT4 on a 14 to 1 score of probability, 7 times by
Jesus himself and 4 times by arch-angel Gabriel (=Jibreel to
Muslims), and that would surely be sufficient to determine the
outcome in any legal case. Read on for the evidence.
And, as convincingly demonstrated in THIS IS JUDAISM, although
we knew it already, Judaism is exclusively for the Jews.
Therefore, in stark and obvious contrast to the scriptures of the
other 2 Abrahamic faiths, the Quran transmitted by Muhammad
(pbuh) is the only one of the 3 addressed to all of humanity and
its message is universal.
Al-hamdu-lillah! (=the praise belongs to God).

9.
Practical notes:

OT = Old Testament
OT5 = the 5 Books of Moses examined in THIS IS JUDAISM

NT = New Testament
NT4 = the 4 Gospels examined in this study

In this study all actual quotes, unless otherwise stated, are from
the Easy Read Version (ERV), and I herewith acknowledge my
debt to the organisation who did this modern translation, and
include below an excerpt from the general license agreement,
followed by their standard copyright notice, as requested:

May be quoted for any purpose, up to 1,000 verses, without
written permission. However, the extent of quotation must not
comprise a complete book nor should it amount to more than
50% of the work in which it is quoted. A copyright notice must
appear on the title or copyright page using this pattern:
Taken from the HOLY BIBLE: EASY-TO-READ VERSION™
© 2006 by World Bible Translation Center, Inc.
and used by permission.

An examination will show that this study complies with all of
the above. For the record, 366 verses are quoted.

Actual Bible quotes are in italics and any emphasis is added.
All comments are in plain text.

Although I personally dislike it, for convenience the American
spelling has been left unchanged in all quotes.

For comparison and control of some of the most important
verses, the King James Version (KJV) is also quoted.

Structure:
The study covers all 4 Gospels in one sequential stream, and uses
the first of them, Matthew (Mt.), as the basis.
In a few relevant cases, references are included to other books of
the NT. Any chapter/verse numbers without a book reference
(Mt.-Mk.-Lk.-Jn.) are Mt.
Where a certain incident is described in a significantly different or
more detailed way in one of the other 3 Gospels, those verses are
copied over and inserted into the corresponding place in Matthew,
for increased readability and coherence.
If deemed significant that a given incident from one or more of
the Gospels is not described at all in the others it is likewise
mentioned.

And so to the action >

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