General Introduction
Where theology and religion are concerned, ‘Syncretism’ is when you mix together (or ‘syncretise’) the theologies, beliefs and practices of two or more separate religions. Syncretism, by its very nature, is something that humans do. A syncretised religion is therefore not something from God, but rather something man-made and very human.
When you have an independent spirit, a person who is searching for the truth, many seekers will read widely, and look at numerous different sources in order to discover what feels right to them. This is a noble and fruitful journey to embark upon. However, sometimes people will end up mixing two or more belief-systems with one another, which do not naturally belong together. I would never be so arrogant as to tell people what to read and what not to read, or what to accept or reject as part of their personal faith – Talmidaism is not a tyranny or a cult. What I would exhort you all to do instead is to be discerning, and to use your common sense; anything that genuinely comes from God will always be wise, and accord fully with common decency.
In the quest to jury-rig incongruous beliefs together, sometimes people will claim that the founder of one belief-system said or taught something that a completely different teacher in another religious tradition taught. They end up falsely attributing a set of beliefs to a religious teacher which that teacher did not teach.
One such person you all know is Paul of Tarsus. He took the Yahwist, Jewish philosophy of Yeshua of Nazareth, and mixed it up with the pagan beliefs and philosophies of the Mediterranean ‘Mystery Religions’. Consequently, he distorted Yeshua’s mission and ideals, and took Yeshua’s legacy down a path it was not intended to go – a path of division, intolerance, anti-Semitism, religious wars, persecutions, and dangerous beliefs which even lead some people to love war, apocalypse, and death. Paul’s syncretised religion of Christianity was, as a result, a most sorrowful, mournful tragedy for human history – especially for those who were not Christian.
Other Ancient Syncretised ‘Jesus-religions’
By the time the ancient Congregation of the Way came to its end in the mid-2nd century CE – the community that had previously based its beliefs and mission on the authentic teachings of the Prophet Yeshua – its now leaderless members were being torn this way and that by various tragedies. They were harangued and cursed by rabbinic Jews, mercilessly condemned by Paullist Christians, and derided by Gnostics (who would regularly betray Yeshua’s Jewish Followers to be executed by the Romans). This heavily ostracised Jewish sect eventually succumbed to these numerous societal and political pressures. Some, longing for the fellowship of their fellow Jews, gave in and joined the rabbinic Jewish community, so abandoning the teachings of the prophet Yeshua. Others succumbed to the hardcore missionising of the Paullist Christian Church. Others ended up throwing their lot in with the Gnostics.
Yet others, with the clawing need to belong to a community that taught anything new and unusual, took on pagan teachings and beliefs, or even eastern Asiatic beliefs. This phenomenon – that of mixing the beliefs of several disparate religions, as I explained above – produced a variety of syncretist sects. Syncretist versions of Ebionism are known to have survived right up until the time of Mohammad, when all Ebionites were coerced into becoming Muslims. The reason why certain unfamiliar beliefs entered Islam (beliefs which were otherwise fringe beliefs in mainstream Christianity, such as those taken from Nestorianism), is because they were taken from these syncretist-type Ebionites, who had already mixed the teachings of Yeshua with the teachings of other religions.
Thus the history of any form of Ebionism came to its final end. With the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land, within a couple of generations the Samaritan community was reduced from two hundred thousand to a few hundred, the Jewish community there was reduced to a few thousand, and the Ebionite community was reduced to nothing.
The Awareness in modern Talmidaism of the Dangers of Syncretism
When the community of the Way was reconstituted in the 1980s, our earliest teachers were aware of this phenomenon of Syncretism. Purely by coincidence, we had all read Hugh J. Schonfield’s ‘History of Jewish-Christianity’, which described the tragic results of syncretism. We had all made our individual journeys back to the historical faith of the Way, by removing all the tarnished, worn and toxic layers of alien beliefs, in order to arrive at the authentic, God-given, Jewish teachings of the Prophet Yeshua. Each of us had worked hard to train ourselves to recognise what had genuinely come from Judaism, and what had come from Paullism and other outside religions. For many of us, this monumental effort had come with great personal sacrifice, and much soul-searching prayer.
Hopefully, my sisters and brothers, you can now appreciate that the very thought of our rediscovered faith becoming mixed once more with other, alien and incompatible philosophies – which Yeshua had not and could not possibly have followed – filled us with heartfelt sorrow. We knew how mixing the Way together with the beliefs of other religions had caused the Way in ancient times to weaken, diminish and decline. Surely it would be an absolute, heart-wrenching tragedy if this were to happen again.
Attempting to justify invented beliefs by calling them all ‘Ebionism’
Back then, forty or fifty years ago, people were making up their own belief-systems, and in order to give their teachings a false mantle of historical legitimacy, they each called their inventions, ‘Ebionism’. Anyone who held any unusual belief, while still attributing it to ‘Jesus Christ’, called themselves, ‘Ebionites’. It seemed that any unusual or out-of-place belief could be validated and justified, simply by labelling it as ‘Ebionite’.
At that time, there were several teachers in particular who called themselves ‘Ebionites’, but in reality they were all New Age adherents, teaching regular New Age beliefs, all based on Hinduism and Buddhism. One teacher in particular, who shall remain nameless, insisted that our reconstituted community must accept belief in reincarnation as our central, foundational belief, and flatly refused to accept any less. He had the same kind of inflexible character, and missionising zeal for reincarnation, that Paul of Tarsus had for the salvific death of ‘Christ’ (he just felt like another Paul of Tarsus to us). To be perfectly frank and honest, we could not, in all conscience, accept him as part of our fledgling community (just as the James-community could not accept Paul), so we parted ways. He went off and formed his own reincarnationist cult of Ebionites after that.
The Hypocrisy of condemning Paul, while still doing the same as he did
I do not say what I say with annoyance or even anger, I say it with sorrow and a deflated heart: there are some who condemn what Paul did in his mixing of Yeshua’s Jewish teachings with the beliefs of pagan Mystery religions, and yet they do the exact same thing by mixing Yeshua’s beliefs with the beliefs of other religions. This is hypocrisy at its most basic. They condemn the very thing that they are doing themselves.
I am not advocating intolerance; I’m not insisting that anyone toes any kind of party line – I’m not that kind of teacher. I am advocating Intellectual Honesty.
Discarding all our hard-won Research
There are many researchers both within and outside our movement, who have laboured long and hard, studying many long hours, stretching our patience and sanity by seeking out hard-to-find sources, suppressing our human wills in order to allow God’s own Divine Will to take precedence, and spending years of prayerful pondering, in order to arrive at what Yeshua and James would have genuinely taught. People like us have come to know the original personality and character of the Prophet Yeshua, and feel that we know his historical, prophetic Jewish persona pretty well.
There then come along people seeking to join us, who vehemently insist that Yeshua said, taught and believed things which he could not possibly have taught or believed. I do my best, as a servant of God, to explain why such and such could not have come from Yeshua; I do it all with willing humility before God, because that is what the God I serve requires of me. But I am only human, and when such people insist that, with firm conviction, they know that Yeshua taught such alien un-Jewish beliefs, quite honestly, sometimes it makes me want to cry – it almost feels like grief sometimes.
When someone comes along, wanting to identify as a Talmidi, but then rejects absolutely everything that is authentically ‘Yeshua’, to create a ‘Yeshua’ all their own (just like Paul did in changing everything about Yeshua – who Yeshua was and what he taught), it implies all our hard work was for nothing. Can you imagine what a gut-punch that is? All our collective work, sacrifices and prayers have been for nothing, just as the ministry, prayers and sacrifices of James were for nothing, when it came to Paul’s invented, syncretised religion. Paul wasn’t interested in the life or authentic words of Yeshua; he was only interested in his own teachings – in the pagan ‘Jesus Christ’ he himself had created.
What we believe must have defendable integrity before knowledgeable Historians
I regularly encounter people who mix-and-match the beliefs of several religions, and yet claim that all these beliefs are what Yeshua taught. I derive no joy in saying that they wouldn’t stand a chance in the presence of knowledgeable historians and researchers, who have studied at reputable universities and other institutions.
I myself will openly admit to you that I don’t have the benefit of such an education. I didn’t attend any university, I didn’t graduate from any prestigious seat of learning, I never received any higher academic qualifications, and I have no letters to put after my name. What I have done instead, over the last forty years or so, is study every book and bible commentary I could get hold of (sometimes I would even forego meals in order to be able to afford an important book); I attended free or low-priced lectures, watched videos of distinguished academics on YouTube and other platforms, and gained my knowledge that way. Most of all, I have willingly and freely submitted myself to the wise and compassionate will of Yahveh our God.
Furthermore, it was vitally important for me that I should not pay heed to people simply because they were rebels outside the mainstream, or simply because they were subversive or conspiratorial; I knew that my ministry would not win any respect from anyone for taking on board fringe, eccentric theories just for the sake of doing so. Most of all, I knew that if I taught anything which directly goes against the teachings of God – false things about God and religion which only served to satisfy my own human wants and desires – I would have to stand before God and face judgment.
If we were to base our faith on flights of fancy, on conspiracy theories, on things that have been made up, on things which are historically inaccurate and manifestly untrue, then I can promise you that erudite and learned scholars will be able to take our faith apart and destroy it, in the very same way that unbiassed scholars are able to take apart the invented beliefs of Paul of Tarsus. Anything that has merely been made up will eventually be found out in the fullness of time.
There are very good reasons why we believe and practice what we do, and it’s not because any of us have made things up, or because on a whim we have decided that we happen to like or dislike something. Our ministers and teachers have studied, we have researched historical details and facts, and we have come to conclusions that will stand the test of time, and the critique of scholars.
The things I write about were not blithely made up, nor were they things I included because I myself, as an individual, wanted to have them as part of our faith. You can read up, research and test for yourself anything I write. Everything I write about is the product of a great deal of research, built upon a foundation of many years of prayer-filled questing. I’ve worked out all the kinks, all the pitfalls, all the enigmas, and all the dangerous stumbling blocks. Everything I have found fits together, and it works. Any imperfections that remain come from my own human self, not from Yahveh, who alone is perfect, the God of all knowledge and wisdom.
Making up the words of Yeshua
There is a type of biblical exegesis that is called, ‘Form Criticism’. One aspect of this discipline is peeling away the layers of what writers and editors have added over the centuries, to try and get back to what the original source-material might have said. I myself used this technique to get back to the Jewish teachings of Yeshua. The result is two books in ‘The Exhortations’: ‘The Book of the Preaching’, and, ‘The Book of the Prophet Yeshua’ (or ‘Sefer Yeshua’ for short).
If you solely read the words Yeshua speaks in the Sefer Yeshua, you will gain a true sense of what Yeshua’s speaking- and preaching-style was like. You will gain a sense of his personal idiosyncrasies, and hopefully, you will gain a true sense of his personal character as a human being who was devoted to Yahveh. Someone who is sensitive to the personalities of individual human beings, will be able to discern that one person – and only one person – came up with these teachings, as opposed to the ‘Jesus’ of the gospels, who is a conglomerate of the words of a number of different people. For example, the ‘Jesus’ of the Synoptic gospels (Mt, Mk and Lk) is not the same ‘Jesus’ as that of the gospel of John – they are two, completely different people; they speak differently, and have different personalities.
I’m going to let you into a little secret: The Sefer Yeshua is not my first attempt at recreating a Jewish gospel. In the interval between my leaving Christianity and eventually finding Talmidaism, I did in fact put together another version – one that was designed to fill in the gap in Yeshua’s life, the ‘missing years’ from the age of 12 until the beginning of his ministry. I called it, ‘The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth’. When I committed myself to Talmidaism, I revisited this work, and realised that the ‘Jesus’ within the pages of ‘The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth’ sounded exactly like me! I hadn’t rediscovered the missing years of Yeshua at all; I had merely invented a new Yeshua to fit my own beliefs, which I happened to profess at that particular stage in my life! Needless to say, ‘The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth’ has nothing to do with the Sefer Yeshua; I scrapped it and started again from scratch.
I have not been the only writer to have done this – I recognise all the signs of a fictional book, because I had gone through the process of writing one myself (it isn’t my first rodeo, as you would say in the US).
‘Jesus travelled to India and Tibet’
When I came across ‘The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ’ by Levi H. Dowling, I found a kindred spirit who had done the very same thing as I had done all those years ago – used his acquired knowledge of several religions to invent a fictitious account of the missing years of ‘Jesus Christ’, along with a Jesus who could say things which vindicated his own personal beliefs.
In the 19th century, Dowling, a New Age writer, taught that, during the missing years of Jesus’s youth, he travelled to Persia, India, Tibet, Greece and Egypt, all before returning to his home in the Galilee. In these places he supposedly learned many new things, and this is where his amazing and special knowledge supposedly came from. Towards the end of Dowling’s ministry, he composed ‘The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ’, supposedly by reading the story in ‘the Ether’. He claimed he received it from the Akashic memory of the Universe (a concept which holds that the universe has something like a recording device which records history in its Akashic memory; it was a belief introduced by Madame Blavatsky of the earlier Theosophical Society).
It needs to be pointed out that, if ‘Jesus Christ’ learned all his philosophy from gurus in Asia, this means that none of his message was from God – nothing he taught came from God; it came instead from human gurus. If his message was not from God, then Yeshua was not a prophet of God.
As a linguist, the question also arises: How did he preach to all these various nations around Asia? Did he study and learn all these languages before preaching to these linguistically disparate peoples? Applying the discipline of Form Criticism, you would see that ‘Jesus Christ’ talks like Levi Dowling in this Aquarian gospel, and speaks nothing like the Jesus of the synoptic gospels (or even like the Jesus of John’s gospel). If you look at the words which scholars deem to be authentic in the synoptic gospels, there are no cultural influences or phrases from eastern religions whatsoever – which there should be if Jesus had studied Buddhism and Hinduism.
Some might then say that, well, the gospel writers deliberately wrote out any far-eastern influences. But then, how would they even have been able to recognise far-eastern influences without having studied them themselves? You need to be able to know about an influence in order to spot it in the first place. I very much doubt that any of the gospel writers had ever even heard of Tibet, India or China, let alone be able to tell what teachings came from there!
There are admittedly some good things in this Aquarian Gospel that Talmidis can agree with, but nevertheless, we must always be aware that whatever comes out of the Aquarian Gospel are ultimately the teachings of Levi Dowling, not Yeshua.
So why weren’t the Jewish Followers of Yeshua interested in his early life?
By dissecting the authentic words of Yeshua, you learn that he grew up in the Galilee, spent his youth working as a temporary day-labourer, sometimes working in fields, sometimes as a hired house-servant. His parables reflect his own life, which show no linguistic or cultural influences from the far-east. His teachings are authentically Jewish and Yahwist.
Why didn’t the first Jewish followers want to know about Yeshua’s early life? What I realised when I became a Talmidi – and which has since been proposed by scholars such as Bart Ehrman – is that for the earliest Jewish Followers of Yeshua, his early life just wasn’t relevant, or that remarkable to be worth telling anyone about. People might then say, well, how did he learn all the amazing things he taught? He must have learned them from some other teacher, some guru or some great place of learning! What such people fail to realise, is that if a prophet like Yeshua is given a message to speak by Yahveh, then Yeshua would not have needed to learn his great message from any human teacher. It is enough to know that Yeshua’s message came directly from God, and no knowledge of Yeshua’s ‘missing years’ is necessary or even relevant.
A Jesus for every minute of every day of the year
A multi-faceted Jesus is only possible if the source material – the gospels – is itself multi-faceted, made up of many different, non-Jewish sources.
As a result, you can find a Jesus somewhere or other to fit your own personal beliefs – even a different Jesus for every minute of the day. ‘Jesus Christ’ has deliberately been tailored to fit every theology, every belief-system, and every cultural practice – you can even find a Buddhist Jesus and a Hindu Jesus. People have accomplished this by moulding Yeshua in their own image. Outside of mainstream Christianity, they even put words into his mouth that he, as a Jew, would never have said. Yeshua would not recognise himself in the many Jesus’s that people have created in their own image.
Some people are too eager to accept beliefs because they are downright unconventional, and they like unconventional. Or they hold onto old beliefs (like the end-times) because they like the idea of death and destruction for those who don’t agree with them. Sadly, few people stop to apply critical thinking to the beliefs that grab their attention. If a view or opinion is fashionable, that does not automatically guarantee it is a correct one; the bandwagon that everyone else is jumping on is not always going to a desirable destination; and the broad and wide gate will not always lead us to God.
Summary
I’m not in any way criticising the right of anyone to research and listen to any speaker or teacher they wish, or to read any source they wish. Your personal faith is your own business. What I am trying to say, is that it is intellectually dishonest to claim that Yeshua said things he did not say. It is dishonest to claim that Yeshua taught things – like reincarnation – that he never would have or could have believed in. Yeshua was not a Gnostic, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu.
People create new religions by making Yeshua say things that suit their personal beliefs. People create new ‘Ebionisms’ to validate their own personal, spiritual wants and desires. I did it myself before I found Talmidaism – the Way of YHVH – and I am not so proud that I cannot say that I was wrong, because I was wrong. Ultimately in my journey towards God, what salvaged my quest was that Yahveh’s plans and values, teachings and principles mattered more to me than what I myself wanted to believe. I was willing to say to God, “I don’t know what to believe; please teach me what to believe.“
We can either insist on mixing and matching our theology, like Paul did, and in the generations to come, our man-made religion will likewise become yet another sorrowful tragedy, and a disruptive influence on humanity. Or we can seek something that is as close to the authentic words, philosophy and outlook of Yeshua as possible, and remain loyal to God’s Plan, because one day, in the far distant generations to come, we have the assurance that it will lead to the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom, universal peace, and the establishment of heaven on earth.