FRESH LOOKS AT THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIANITY Dietz Ziechmann February 24, 2026

The Original New Testament: A Radical Translation and Reinterpretation edited and translated from the Greek by Hugh J. Schonfield.
Originally published in the U.K. by Waterstones & Co., Ltd., 1985.
Republished by Harper & Row (SF), Element, etc.
A revision of his earlier work The Authentic New Testament (1955).
The Real Messiah: The Throne of St. Mark and the True Origins of Christianity by Stephan Huller. London: Watkins, distributed in the USA by Sterling, 2009.
The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book by Julie Galambush. San Francisco/NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God! By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. London: Harper Collins, 1999; USA: Harmony Books, 2000.
The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the Identities of Jesus and Paul. By Lena Einhorn. Translated from the Swedish by Rodney Bradbury. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2007.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality by Matthew Fox. Augmented edition: NY: Tarcher/Putnam, 2000 (1st Edition: 1983).
(The) Complete Jewish Bible: An English Version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and B rith Hadashah (New Testament). Edited by David H. Stern. Clarksville, MD and Jerusalem, Israel: Jewish New Testament Publications, 1998.
Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. By Harold Bloom. NY: Riverhead Books, 2005.
Introducing Jesus. By Anthony O Hear. Illustrated by Judy Groves. NY: Totem Books, 1994. (Originally published by Icon Books, Cambridge, Eng.)

What can I say? As a grade-schooler in Shaker Heights, Ohio I grew up watching Hollywood films and Sunday morning television film dramas depicting what purported to be the life of Jesus (alternatively Joshua, Latin: Iesous, Greek: Iesous, Aramaic: Yeshua, Hebrew: Yeshu, etc.). We grew up unaffiliated in my isolated immediate family, so I soon developed a certain detachment toward religious myth and rituals. We always had an evergreen tree in December (a Tannenbaum, as my father preferred to call it using the German, or alternatively a Weihnachtsbaum ( Dedication Nights Tree , Dedications Nights being the German designation for the Christmas holidays, ironically mirroring the name for the more or less synchronous Jewish holiday Hanukah ( Dedication ). We also celebrated Easter, the ancient pagan holiday ostensibly morphed into a Christian observance, the spring fertility festival with Easter eggs and chocolates in our own secular way. (This is not as unusual as it might seem; Gershom Scholem, the Kabbalist author, noted that his observant Jewish household in Germany always had a Christmas tree. You know the Germans; they re just as syncretistic as the Jews.)

Christmas always seemed like such a wondrous, if fantastic holiday. A Jewish male child would grow up and usher in world peace by his amazing peaceful presence. If would have seemed equally wondrous if he had been a Chinese child, or any other kind of child.

But then, around four months later would come the confluence of Passover and Easter. The adult Jesus would not even achieve peace with the Jerusalem Temple hierarchy or stop Rome from being an oppressor state, much less bring peace through the world. Instead, he would willing got off to his cruel death as a lamb to the slaughter, predestined narrators would say, hardly an example to emulate. (Perpetua did you not understand that!) At Passover and during the High Holidays, children from synagogue-connected families would be absent; at Easter, Christmas, and Sundays, children from church-connected families would go off to their local house of worship. We would be at home, left without illusions, able to partake of myths at a distance, but without the joys of congregation. The children in the larger community existed in separate, and too often fractious communities, mirroring the divisions and conflicts of the world at large.

I could empathize in many ways with the figure of Jesus the Christ in those film dramas: he is precocious as a child, has a sacred high duty to perform in an esoteric manner, but must be careful, circumspect in what he ways and has to endure punishment though we are told he has done nothing immoral. I grew up in what my father had constructed as the Institute for Central European Research. Though it had soon ceased to publish research, books continued to come from leading academic publishing houses. While other boys got to go out and play ball , etc., I got lessons in the minutiae of history, genealogy, court etiquette, etc. My father, who failed to get a State Department appointment as a diplomat, seemed fantastically to want to make sure that if America ever established a monarchy, I d be ready. My paternal great grandmother, descended from local ancient Roman colonists, had been a maid at the Royal Court of Bavaria and held court twice (Christmas and Easter) a year in her home, calling each member of her wider family to account for themselves. I repeatedly got told to discipline my parents, to lead them away from their wasteful habits. This is not easy material for a secondary-schooler to digest, especially considering the requirements of diplomacy. My instructions from my parents were never to contradict neither my maternal great-grandmother nor my great-uncle, the family of the family business, not matter how offensive might be.

My hidden ambition and seemingly destined role sometime in my adult years had to be to be a messiah, to bring a general, inclusive peace where only ignorance, mutual suspicion, and hostility existed But how could that be?! This self-perception exists decades before Holy Blood, Holy Grail or its fictional derivative The Da Vinci Code, focusing upon a fraction of my collateral ancestors appeared. So you see why I have such a keen interest in the cited literature.

Stephan Huller s The Real Messiah seems very koanic, as if written by a Zen master. In part it seems to drift off into pure fantasy. Were there really only one Judean ruler under the Romans named Marcus (in English, Mark) not two in succession. Was Marcus Iulius Agrippa the real messiah of the Christian bible, not the executed Yeshua? Was Marcus Agrippa the real St. Mark of the Bible. These claims seem fantastic, but they may be true. Marcus Agrippa became king of Judea, and thus maschiach (messiah, anointed ) by virtue of his office. In Huller s book, Jesus serves as the herald (in Hebrew, Karoz) to the Messiah, not messiah himself. Of course, Jesus never undergoes an anointment ceremony, as would have occurred had he become king or high priest, which the Bible of the Christians never depicts as literally happening. Do we, therefore, take him as having been a purely mystical anointed one? Can we have more than one messiah at a time? If nothing else Huller s book underlines the horrendous factional and bloody conflicts (dynastic, ethnic, and cultic) cutting the people of Canaan (to use a neutral and inclusive term) apart in those times. Huller thus gives us very valuable and rare insights into the origins of the anti-Jerusalem feelings current at the time and persisting for at least two millennia. Huller is a direct descendant of the 18th century messianic aspirant Jacob Frank, who sought to reconcile Judaism and Christianity. Huller believes that Mark constituted a Super Gospel , which was bowdlerized and adulterated by unauthentic additions. As a nine-year-old, according to Huller, Marcus Iulius Agrippa, a captive of his kinsman Herod witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus, when his own life was at risk but survived. David Schwartz notes the 2,000 year-old Jewish tradition knows only one King Agrippa. Huller, p. 19. (Schwartz is a scholar published in Jerusalem and Tubingen, Germany.) In Church accounts there are two Marcus Agrippas, one born around xx, reportedly died xx, the other born xx and died xx. These purported facts are important to Huller s story, but not necessarily crucial. It is possible to have had a boy messiah, and then an adult one. The adult Marcus Agrippa was a Jewish vassal king to the Romans, a mediator and peacemaker who had to swallow much oppression of his people in order to preserve some semblance of peace in order to avoid a total devastation of the land along the model of destruction allegedly committed against Carthage by the Romans. It is not an example to endear him to Zionist zealots, though it finds some resonance in rabbinic writings. Indeed, Marcus Agrippa is recognized s a messiah in the Talmud, though without a great enthusiasm, and not as the Great Messiah of desperate expectations in that source. A problem Heller seemingly faces is that so many records were intentionally or otherwise destroyed and suppressed, including those suppressed to this day. One thing is certain, he highlights some of the deep resentments and divisions among the Hebrews of Canaan at that time, the semi-Hellenistic Sadducees in charge of Temple rituals, the Peru shim ( Separatists , Pharisees in English), junior partner in the Temple management who were in the long slow process of supplementing and eventually replacing Temple sacrifices with prayer, meditation, and study in the synagogue, the Galileans, the Shomri ( Guardians . Samaritans in English, displaced by the descendents of the hierarchs who returned to establish themselves as the Jerusalem hierarchy) Galileans, Edomites (from the eastern-most province, with claims to be the original Torah formulators, purportedly sons of Esau, disparaged as marginal Jews by the Jerusalem hierarchy, despite the emplacement of the Herodian dynasty, Zealots and Sicarii ( Daggermen ), who assassinated Roman personnel and targeted collaborators, and the majority without strong factional affiliations. Was there only one messiah? One feels like asking, was there only messiah? Messiah, messiah, on the wall, who s the fairest, or messiah-est, of them all?

Hugh Schonfield s book is in many ways the most conventional book of the lot. A Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, he does restructure the border of the components of the book and provide very useful explanatory and reference footnotes, which make his construction of the foundation book of Christianity much easier to read than the King James version and other editions. The author labeled himself a Hebrew Christian and was dedicated towards achieving Christian-Jewish and world peace, work carried on by his wife and their foundation. He wrote a whole rack of books on the subject of Christianity. The writings of what became canonized repeatedly and differently as The New Testament (a term coined by Roman Bishop of Lyons Irenaeus, and misleading if taken to mean eye-witnesses accounts, testimony) were written as separate books without the familiar separations including chapter and verse so convenient to modern readers. The Original New Testament follows what Schonfield perceives with some justification to be as close an approximation of the ordering as and intentions of its composers as is possible and as follows a sort of internal logic. His references in footnotes back to the Hebrew Bible are especially helpful in establishing context.

Freke and Gandy s study draws numerous parallels in art and conception between Christian art, symbols and mythic theology and that of the pagans (rurals). What became canonized as Christianity draws heavily from the mystery religions of Egypt and the Near East: a Son-God is born in humble circumstances (in a cave in Dionysian and early Christian constructions) at the time of the Winter Equinox, around December 25 and is executed (crucified on a tree or a wooden cross in both the Dionysian and early Christian traditions) at the start of spring at the time of the Easter time, when fertility rites celebrate the Goddess offerings with eggs, the symbol of mammalian birth. (Freke and Gandy outline in bullet form on nearly two pages, pp. 60 and 61, the sets of inescapably and extraordinarily close parallels.) In the mystery religions the death of the savior is meant to be a vicarious experience, to enable the completed initiate to be born again . The framers of such stories drew upon a tradition expressed in Greek of the m thos, (plural m thoi), myth, literally story , a category of literature including fiction and poetry, a culturally significant story of how things came to be The Oxford Companion to the English Language, edited by Tom McArthur (OUP, 1992). In classical Greece, m thos was contrasted with logos; both [words] derive from verbs that translate as speak , but where m thos subsumed poetry, emotion, and mythic though, logos subsumed prose reason, and analytical thought. (OCEL, pp. 675-6) The writings of the ostensible proponents of Iesous should be read largely in that context. The term logos from logik t khne, the craft of speech , which also came to mean a logical principle pervading and governing the universe OCEL, p. 624), and is used in this sense, if somewhat irrationally, in the scripture of John (Yohanan). The Jesus Mysteries received The Daily Telegraph Book of the Year award for 1999 and has a string niche audience in the USA, but has not entered major media consciousness in this country.
   
Lena Einhorn, an M. D. and P. D., a Swedish documentary filmmaker produced a series of three documentaries in her native language which unfortunately apparently haven t been translated into English that analyze the Exodus from Egypt and the origins of the Israelites. She benefited from a book by written by Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for a Historical Jesus (London, 1906/10), but otherwise doesn t seem to have benefited by any of the vast sea of secondary and interpretive sources and ancillary ancient texts cited by Freke and Gandy in TJM. She also benefited from a work by John Dominic Crossan, the Jesuit member of the Jesus Seminar, who wrote a biography, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). Freke and Gandy did not use that source, but used Schweitzer in a small way. Einhorn, shifting through the wreckage of Biblical incongruencies, attempts a tentative hypothesis that Iesous was Paul (Shmuel), the legendary St. Paul. She notes at least one of the geographic errors relating to Canaan in the Gospel of Mark (Schonfield notes several in the New Testament), concluding that this portion of the text could not have been written by someone native to the area. Geographical errors are not surprising. Schonfield writes that None of the Synoptic Gospels was composed in the Holy Land. The considered view of the present author is that Mark was composed in Italy, Matthew in Egypt, Luke in Greece, and John in Asia Minor. (TONT, p. xvii)

Matthew Fox, a Christian priest (first a Dominican, now an Episcopalian) struck a radical note of protest by replacing Augustine s negative construct of Original Sin with a much more positive and useful focus of an Original and enduring Blessing. Fox dubs his way of thinking a religious detox . He speaks of a Cosmic Christ, more than of a historical, time-bound, finite Christ. He writes in terms of the dynamics of faith, of the creative powers of the individual in collaboration with the divine, of an optimism based upon a transcendent view of existence. He draws strength from numerous quotations from within and outside Christianity to bolster his case. In one of his later books (One River. Many Wells) he identified the mystical as being the creative and renewing element in religion.
This is the book which caused Cardinal Ratzinger (then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the renamed Office of the Inquisition, now Pope Benedict) to get Fox expelled from the Dominicans.

O Hear s work is a magnificent, very concise survey inclusive of virtually the whole sweep of Christian concepts, philosophies, dogmas ( opinions ), and applications, from ancient to modern times structured around Judy Groves s pithy graphic representations. O Hear even provides some of mythical antecedents of the Greek (Hellenic) world, though not as extensively as Freke and Gandy do for the whole Near East and Mediterranean. His assertion that the Epistles of Paul, anteceded the Gospels, a view accepted by some recent scholars, is contradicted by Schonfield and Huller.
Dietz Ziechmann, Musician Towers, March 2010.

 SOME MORE LOOKS AT THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE SPLITTING OF THE ABRAHAMIC LEGACY.

Paul Was Not A Christian [sic transit: Trinitarian?]: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle by Pamela Eisenbaum. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009.
Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History by Ron Miller and Laura [J.] Bernstein. Woodstock, VT: Skypath Books, 2006. (No index)
The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold Story of Jewish History by Jonathan Kirsch.
God Against the Gods:The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism by Jonathan Kirsch. NY: Penguine Compass, 2004
Secret Origins of the Bible by Tim Callaghan. Altadena, CA: Millennium Press, 2002.

When reading these works it is useful to keep in mind the definitions of m thos and logos given in the Oxford Companion to English Language, to have empathy for the authors of ancient scripture and to avoid falling into the frightened trap of scriptural literalists, who read every construction of religious texts as sacrosanct, no matter how irrelevant, factually impossible or contradictory. One should abide by constructions of good morality, no matter the source, but to resist evil, no matter how tempting, familiar, or pleasing the source. In this regard one should follow the precept of Bernard Haldane, follow tradition unless it conflicts with principle, in which case follow principle. One can easily apply the annunciation of principle by Hillel the Great, when asked to explain the guiding principles of the Torah while the non-Jewish questioner was standing on one foot: Do not do whatever is hateful to you to your neighbor. All the rest is commentary, Go study. This is the Jewish version of the Golden Rule, adopted in slightly different forms by most of the world s cultures. One is reminded of the observation of Bertrand Russell, The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Of course, Hillel s formulation is worth stating and repeating often. It unfortunately missed inclusion in the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible (the Tanack) and is also unfortunately not quoted in the New Testament. Apply this principle to sections of the written Torah, or to the Tanack in its entirety, and one realizes that there is obviously treif (food that should not be consumed for religious reasons) in the Torah, as it has unfortunately been handed down to succeeding generations, the most obvious example being what are alleged to be orders from God to engage in conquest by genocide, a pseudo-historical conquest dismissed on archeological historical grounds by Israeli archeologists and historians. (Is preservation of these passages in ritualized literature by traditional Jews not something that should be considered a potent source of Judeophobia, a tradition that begs for long overdue revision by Jews? Neale Donald Walsch gained a wide readership in the USA and elsewhere by stating unambiguously in his Conversations with God that whatever is immoral or un-holistic does not spring from God.)

The Hebrew Bible, scholarship has established, is a palimpsest, or drawn over artwork, though most of the laity and non-scholars in the field are unaware of this fact. (See Kirsch, above both books, and Callaghan above, Rabbi Dr. Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths and The Hebrew Goddess, and numerous other works by a variety of authors.) The Bible s earlier versions were polytheistic, honoring many gods; gradually it become henotheistic advocating the worship of only one God (monolatry) and eventually, during the period of the Babylonian Captivity, claiming the existence of only one God (monotheism). The move towards Trinitarianism espoused by the Nicene Creed of the 4th century CE identifying a God-the Father, God-the-Son (Jesus), and an undefined God-the Holy Spirit existing in the mystery of a single God (thought by some to be a feminine Goddess, counterpart of the Kabbalist Shekinah) moved back in the opposite direction, a move opposed by Gnostic ( Knowing ) and Arian Christians and the subject of a bloody centuries-long struggle within Christianity. The Three-in-One Godhead takes the concept beyond even that of the single Godhead consisting of Ya (or YHVH) and his consort Asherah, which can be interpreted as Yang and Yin, the male and female essences of the universe. Yeshu has an independent existence from his divine father, even bemoaning his abandonment on the cross of his crucifixion.

Miller and Bernstein start off by defining what is a messiah (roughly equivalent to holding the mandate of heaven in Chinese terminology), thinking in terms of the anticipated Maschiach ha apart ha yamim, the messiah (unusually undefined) of the End of Days or the Eschaton, to use the Greek term, meaning end of an age ( literally of century ), in both cases meaning the end of an old age of division, war, hostility, and impoverishment and the beginning of a new age of peace, comity, friendliness, and prosperity. The term maschiach literally means anointed of course, and was applied in biblical usage to any person charged with a Divine office (e.g. kings, priests, prophets) The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion (1965). The concept of the redemptive messiah in Biblical literature indicated desperation over numerous historical developments and shifted over time with particular emphasis upon a David king. Jews certainly feel justified in rejecting Yeshu as the end-time messiah, predicted or wished for in a composite definition derived from various specific segments of Tanack literature. Yeshu certainly did not meet the criteria of a messiah liberating the Jews from the Romans, as seen by the broad mass of Jewish people. The followers of the crucified leader likewise felt very disappointed as the hoped for end time did not materialize after a period of decades (and later centuries). So rather than conceding defeat, Yeshuites re-defined the concept of messiahship into (purely) metaphysical terms.
So, many Yeshuites and conventional Jews both look forward to a future leader leading people into a new age, an Anointed Age of wide-spread peace and harmony. For contemporary Christian theologian Rosemary Ruether, Jesus was proleptically the Messiah, a foretaste of the Eschaton, rather as Shabbat is said to be foretaste of the olam ha ba, the world to be .

Yeshua, according to the surviving texts, emphasized inclusiveness and conciliation as the keys to shalom, a complete and healing peace. Miller and Bernstein see a harmony between this view and that of the Daoists and Buddhists. (Freke and Gandy note the actual presence of a few Buddhists at the time in Alexandria, where Huller believes much, if not most of the New Testament was written. Sufism is also said to have been in existence at the time.) Inclusiveness is the key to understanding Yeshu. He championed the Samaritans, the Galileans, and the underclass in the society of his time and region.
What is the back story of that?

At the time of Babylonian Captivity, Judean and Israelite society was divided into three hereditary classes, the Kohanim ( priest-ministers and government ministers), Levities (assistant priests given the drudge work of the Temple and the task of being its guards), and the rest of the Israelites, a division preserved even into contemporary times among the Orthodox . The Assyrian conquest took away most of the Kohanim and Levities and supposedly swept away all the Twelve Tribes, located in the north, leaving only a fragment of Judeans and destroying the Jerusalem Temple. Those left in Judea constituted the lower class. From among them arose the Samaritans ( Guardians ), who preserved what they could of Temple ritual in the absence of the exiled Kohanim and Levites. In the period of the Captivity, the Kohanim, shocked by the Israelites military defeat, redacted the Bible, inspired to revamp it as a set of monotheist texts to give their people greater social, moral, political, and military cohesion. The exiled elite did not do too badly in Babylon, their leader, the Nasi in exile (the Exilarch) eventually even had his own palace. When Cyrus the Great of Persia permitted the descendents to go ( return ) to Jerusalem and even contributed to their rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple, they ousted the Samaritans, denouncing them as rudely and indiscriminately on the pretext of having intermarried and violating the purity of the Jewish race (see The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, Jerusalem, 1965, Kirsch, The Woman Who Laughed for a summary of the abruptness and inconsistency of this charge, and Patai, Myth of the Jewish Race for a glimpse of the enduring confusion this departure from the existing universalist norm has caused over the centuries). The Samaritans were not even allowed to help in the physical rebuilding of the Temple and were kept away from its precincts. Eventually they formed their own Aramaic translation of the Torah, the own Temple on Mount Gerizim and their own small-scale equivalent of the Talmud. Huller emphasizes the intensity of feeling Miriam ( Mary )-Salome, her son Marcus Iulius Agrippa, and Yeshua had for their cause. The bitterness expressed in the New Testament towards Jerusalem and its hierarchy can to be attributed more than anything else to this enduring classism, which is clearly not understood by the overwhelming majority of casual readers or even scholars, and is often understandably identified consciously or subconsciously by Judeophobes as racism, given a special edge when identified with conquest theology and a Judaic God of the Universe (a concept ironically inspired and developed during the Captivity). Only in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries have some small real efforts been made to heal this Samaritan-mainline Jewish rift. Rabbi Yonathan (Jonathan)bar Nappaha, the leading Palestinian Jewish Amoraim ( Interpreter ), of the Mishna espoused the view that Anyone who does not practice idolatry can be considered a Jew ; unfortunately, this conciliatory view was not been sufficiently heeded, either by his contemporaries nor later to prevent some of the disasters which occurred. Re-envisioning Yeshua as God or as a sub-god of God seems to have been a way of trumping the alleged prophet Ezra. I cannot think of any other reason for this development: the Temple was already attracting Greek intellectuals (Sebatoi, Reverers embracing monotheism or monism, who were even allowed to worship in the Forecourt of the Temple.)

Miller and Bernstein question the value of the Virgin Birth tradition of Yeshua, which has devalued sex as a normal practice within much of Christianity, leading to frigidity even within marriage, priestly abuse of young boys, and denial of a more holistic approach to life. Nevertheless, they acknowledge both angels and miraculous births are familiar occurrences in the Hebrew scriptures.

Of the utmost importance in the Miller-Bernstein study are not so much the problematic historian challenges they raise, important as they are, especially in terms of the emotions generated, but their analysis of the operating principles supposedly espoused by Yeshua. His emphasis is on peaceful engagement, on loving enemies to reconcile them, on truth, on nonviolence towards the militarily-strong Roman occupation authority. Stephan Huller contends that with Marcus Iulius Agrippa as Tetrarch of Judea, subordinate to Roman Governor Titus, largely the nonviolent approach outlined by Yeshua, especially perhaps when Marcus s sister-wife Berenice accompanied Titus to Rome as his influential mistress when he became Emperor; not exactly fitting the criteria of the Eschaton or in accord with Yeshua s prim sexual morality. Marcus still had to contend with the militant zealots and sicarii (dagger men). Yeshua s prediction of the meek [Miller would prefer gentle ] did not inherit the earth during Marcus s time, though the model of gentleness would be taken up, if only by default, by the rabbinic class, following the failure of the warriors in the Jewish War revolt against Rome.

One last piece of story baggage to dispose off: the auto-curse attributed to the Jewish mob calling for Jesus crucifixion in preference to Bar-abbas s. Let his [Yeshu s] blood be on us and on our children (Matt. 27:25) taken by many to be the Jewish people in perpetuity. Bernstein and Miller take this comment to be retrojected into the story, as they do the uncharacteristically undiplomatic assault by Yeshua on the money-changers tables in the forecourt of the Temple.

 But the historical and pseudo-historical baggage of the Abrahamic religions is much less important than the operative principles, which people try to employ in living their lives.

Let s take a few examples. Chapter 10 deals with the subject Opposing Evil Without Emulating It and other chapters deal with equally or even greater problematic subjects. Turn the other check is said to be a statement of insistence of equality, instead of the obsequious it seems to be. New Testament phraseology tends to be more confusing than even the contradictions of the Old Testament , yet the stakes are higher as the Trinitarian construction places a higher status on Yeshua as a god placed above all the prophets, belief in whom must be absolute to avoid the eternal hell-fire as the price of disbelief indicated by St. John (Yonathan).
For an amazing and useful array of Jewish quotes, including Yeshu s go to A Treasury of Jewish Quotations edited by Salo Barron.

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From: dietzziechmann679@gmail.com
To: Shlomoh Sherman
Tue, February 24, 2026 at 8:19 PM

The Candida Moss book "God's Ghostwriters " appeals to me (backed up by the Sheehan book) speaks to me like none other. It allows me to question Trinitarianism like nothing else. For years I felt oppressed by my nonconformity to the community I lived in. I dare not share the Jewish element in our family's past even with Jewish acquaintances with whom I had friendly relations. Big media was part of the problem.

Moss says the Romans didn't oppress Christians, but did oppress Jews. But Trinitarians came to oppress those who didn't have their belief. Now they have a more tolerant view. I didn't have the Jewish community as a support group back then, and was afraid of nonconformity there also. Glad to have passed that hurdle also. All for now.

Thoughts on the Nature of Scripture, Metaphysics, and integrity

Dietz Ziechmann
From: dietzziechmann679@gmail.com
To: Rabbi Roger C. Klein
Rev. Randy Partain
Tuesday, February 24, 2026 at 7:34 PM

These thoughts have been triggered by week's torah study.

Who Is Dietz Ziechmann