Song of God Lecture 1: Acknowledgements & Preface. Regarding Plagiarism.

[Rebbe]

The Song of God

A Fresh Appraisal of the Christian Doctrine of the Ultimate Destiny of Humankind:
IMCF Lectures on God's Universal Salvation

by

Les Aron Gosling, Messianic Rebbe

Copyright © BRI, 1996
Lecture Format © 2016
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Originally Produced as a BRI Study Manual
Lecture One

 (Previously Dedication, Acknowledgements, Prefaces, Questions & Analyses of Prefaces)



"Christendom has done away with Christianity
without being quite aware of it" -- Soren Kierkegaard

Dedication

:

To the memory of my Mother, Sylvia Green,
who insisted I pursue my religious studies and
to the memory of my Father, Amos Gosling,
who taught me above all things to always
be a student and never a scholar.




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements reveal a lot about an author. And therefore I have always made an exercise of wading through such acknowledgements before jaunting into an analysis of the materialisation of a writer's thoughtforms. Often such a venture is extremely laborious. But it is never bleak of personal acquisition. There is always something we can learn, even from a complete stranger. Yet very few people I know, even momentarily hesitate over this section of the book of their choice. My father taught me that the acknowledgements are invariably vital if the book we are about to read is important enough to have picked up in the first place. And I have usually noticed that if the wife or husband of an author happens to be recognised for services rendered, during the unnerving final collation of apprehensive thoughts onto paper, (giving muscular semblance to the skeleton of a book), they are invariably relegated last on the list of others so worthy of mention. Well, I wish to break with such vital tradition forthwith and thank up front my dear wife the Rebbetzin Glenys whose peculiar Irish sense of humour often lifted me out of the gloom of my darkest mental paralysis. Why stop with a mention of her humour? Away with false piety and ego chill! The Rebbetzin has been behind me all the way -- a constant source of encouragement and an intense motivator desirous of seeing the finished work as a complete and successful arrangement of ideas that would once and for all bury the deplorable traditional and time worn dogmas that do not do justice to the Gracious and Salvific face of an Almighty sovereign LORD. Suffice to say there is little doubt in my mind that without the awareness of her ever hovering shadow in the background continually inspiring me this volume would never have seen the light of day.

Secondly, I wish to thank John Buchner, a past friend of many years whose grasp of the English language (which was a little short of awesome) and his German rationalism (which always depressed me) sharpened my spiritual wits. Well do I remember sitting with him over a beer one Sunday morning many decades ago in an RSL Club in suburban Sydney discussing the fact that thoughts have wings. I felt an immediate "fluttering" in my heart when he mentioned that he considered that I was, or had been, a disciple of Alan Watts. "You've obviously read his books thoroughly," he had said. I thank John sincerely, indeed with all my heart, for his comment. I had never heard of Alan Watts, let alone read any of his books. Some days later I almost fell over a pile of paper-backs on the floor of a theosophical bookshop in Sydney City, the Adyar, in fact. On top of the pile was an Alan Watts! Needless to say I immediately purchased it and began reading. It was so absorbing I literally could not put it down, and caught glimpses of text as I sat immobile at red traffic lights as I drove home.

But no acknowledgements would be complete without mentioning other of my mentors as the late historian and educator Dr Ernest L. Martin, Dr Ken Chant, Professor Geddes MacGregor, and Len Magee, the latter so wonderfully human and my last ever pastor who took pains to tell me (many times in fact) that "there is no excuse for a dry-eyed Christian." A closet Universalist, he was as usual correct in his assessment. I should also honour Oscar Wilde, for it was he who first taught me as a child that the hidden secret of life was the suffering entailed in self-emptying.

But no acknowledgements would be complete in a volume of this kind without thoughtful credit being extended to others of my mentors, to name just a few, such as the apostles John and Paul, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Victorinus, and Hilary, and Titus the Bishop of Bostra, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Jerome, and John Cassian, and Walter Lollard, and John Scotus Erigena, and Johann Tauler, and J. van Kuysbroeck, and F. Schleiermacher, and John Murray, as well as Hosea Ballou, and Samuel Cox, and Thomas Whittemore, and F.D. Maurice, and George MacDonald, and A.E. Knoch, and, and, and....

Les Gosling
 Tweed Heads
Australia 1995

A SHORT WORD REGARDING PLAGIARISM

As a young lad I always wanted to think the best of my fellow man, and in particular I treasured the opinions and lofty ideals of those who were considered my friends. I soon discovered the real world left a great deal to be desired. I was also extremely conscious of my own negative limitations and peculiar human tendencies rooted in pessimism. As I began to appraise the world without the beneficial lens of rose-coloured glasses, I became disappointed with human beings and human nature and felt an inner discord toward myself as well. Looking back over the years that have now turned to dust, it is apparent that the Spirit of God -- the Ruach HaKodesh -- had begun leading me at a very early age to look more to God the Father of us all, than to place my trust in mere mortals.

I am sure that each person reading and studying these lectures would identify with that which I have written.

In the late 1970's and into the late 1980's a very fine gentleman who had a rich colourful background in cultic academia (and who was a brilliant historian of some note) actually felt it was his right to take my research concerning certain biblical matters into his own domain and to publish some of these findings as his own unique research and under his name. I still have some of his letters of appreciation to me, and he made a couple of trips to Australia from the USA and during those visits it was my privilege to have had two personal meetings of length with him. I shared my many articles and expositions (including contents of my primitive journal) as a spiritual brother with him. He was so thankful and enthusiastic about my views (well, most of them!) that I let him take them with him to read on his flight back to his home.

I must add however (and with acute disappointment) that he was certainly not generous in giving credit where credit was due. He may simply have overlooked doing so, but nevertheless this saddened me immensely as I both liked and loved this scholar for his genuine personality and his own delicious insights into biblical matters as well as his taste in wine. He apparently apprehended with some satisfaction my theological contributions as well from the results which later appeared in his own publications and under his own name. Be this as it may, this was only the beginning of sorrows in regard my outpouring of literature.

After my personal Damascus Road in 1981 I was able to procure my own answers to the many difficulties which I groped with in relation to the doctrine of universal salvation. To my mind the teaching was not as apparent and obvious as it appeared to writers like A.E. Knoch, and a number of others. I had dark questions -- MANY of them -- and I wanted answers. Well, not "answers" per se, but appropriate soul-satisfying responses from the biblical revelation itself. I wanted a precise clarity from the SPIRIT.

I began to write a series of articles on the subject of universal salvation, more as a covert desire to "test the waters" of my own intellectual apprehension as strictly juxtaposed with the prevalent (and current) ideas circulating about "universal restoration," "universal reconciliation," and "universal atonement." I early understood the Nature of Grace. This was never in question. For, I knew inwardly that a Gracious God could not alienate His own creations made in His own Image for that would amount to an actual denying of HIMSELF -- but just how this salvation was to be achieved seemed completely out of my reach of understanding. My approach was always from the Jewish perspective. Of course, Judaism knew nothing of an eternal Gehenna. As a refining fire it lasted for a period of 12 months (Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbath Folio 33b; Pesikta Rabbati 53.2; Exodus Rabbah 7.4; Eduyoth 2.10: Genesis Rabbah 28.8; Erubin 19a).

Above all else I desired a complete clarification of God's Grace (not as Grace, as such) but IN His Salvific Nature toward others whom He loved. To what extent could I personally trust a loving God to be... a loving God? To what degree could God's unconditional Love be tested and proven to be Unconditional? Disagree though they might, even violently, but churches do teach that God's love and Grace exist only up to a point. Beyond that point lies a Christless Night devoid of God's love.

By the mid 1990's many of these articles appeared on a number of "Messianic," "Sabbatarian" and "Universalist" Discussion Boards, including the popular "Holy Life of Jesus" site which was finally changed to the name "Freedom in Messiah (Ministries)." It was that site in particular which launched my articles and expositions to a larger audience than I had previously entertained.

How stunned was I to see these same copyrighted articles and lectures begin appearing on other neo-Universalist web sites slightly altered, and modified (especially where my then "Torah-oriented Messianism" was emphatic), but in the most part still including my own peculiar "turns of phrase" yet beneath the name of authors I thought were authentic believers. There are "NO teeth" in relation to enforcing copyright laws on the Internet. It is the information highway where "cut and paste" becomes inevitable and uncontrolled. I was devastated.

By 1996, I had collected these original articles, added later lecture insights and notes, and collated them into a "BRI Study Manual" -- again copyrighted -- and entitled The Song of God --  A Fresh Appraisal of the Christian Doctrine of the Ultimate Destiny of Man. A number of these manuals were sold, but then a couple of years later I withdrew all the Study Manuals due to some theological uncertainties which needed to be "better" thought-out, and I began preparing these lectures for a future publishing venture when they could be turned into books.

The original study manual appears here as a series of lectures in a public forum and GRATIS for the first time for the use of our thousands of students. If certain of my teachings appear VERY familiar and you think the bulk of the ideas conveyed in this manual may have originated from other popular sites do not be overly surprised. I have explained why they may be familiar! You might be surprised at the names of those who have wilfully, knowingly, plagiarised my research articles. In my own humble opinion there is not a single original thought, nor a single authoritative theologian, among any of the rabble that pose as "Universalist Christians." I may well sound unkind in such a statement. But God does not particularly enjoy the company of plagiarists either.

"Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who steal my words from one another" (Jeremiah 23.29-30).

This is decidedly not sour grapes on my part. It is a statement of reality born of being "used" and "abused" by people who claim "Jesus" as their Lord and Saviour. Rav Shaul made the observation that there were those in his own day who preached for their own gain, but nevertheless "Mashiach is [being] preached."

Not today, unfortunately. The licentious Saviour popular today in Christendom -- the "lawless one" -- who came to do away with his father's old laws replacing them with something he called "love" bears no resemblance to the Creative Intelligence and Unconditional Love who "became flesh and dwelt among us, full of GRACE and TRUTH."

The Sabbath is dawning as I write this, the Queen of Heaven is arriving, and I need to retreat to the quietness of my den and repent for holding grudges. Rather, for what it is worth, I shall pray for these "brethren."

May our readers enjoy a surprise of God's Grace as they participate in The Song of God -- Lectures on God's Universal Salvation.

ALTERNATE PREFACE
to the original manual

His torn and lacerated body lurched upward toward the heavens as ten inch spikes were hammered into both his wrists, the nerve endings torn and splintered along with his tender flesh, dislocating the inferior radio-ulnar joint, lunate, scaphoid, trapezium, triquetrum and hamate and other articulations. The tormented naked young Jew tried not to scream out with the pain but his emotions finally let fly with the thundering "FORGIVE THEM FATHER."

At once his onlookers were singularly astonished at this cry for mercy on his tormentors, his accusers, and those who pierced his hands and then nailed his feet to the trunk of the old almond tree. From a distance the crucified Jew looked as if he and the tree were one, and forming a sort of menorah. It was the way the seven main branches were perversely twisted upward toward the clouds along with his bloodied body on the main central bulk of the tree that gave everyone that impression. The priests were highly amused at the grotesque symbolism.

The sky was suddenly filled with flying flint. The already bloodied and tortured body of the crucified claimant to the Davidic Throne tried to retreat from the hostile bombardment accompanied by hoarse laughter from his murderers. "Look! He's trying to get away!" The Messiah lost control of his bowels.

Four Jewish victims of Rome were crucified along with the Nazarene King at the site of the Miphkad Altar on Mount Olivet. Two of them were impaled on crosses; two others on the same tree with the crucified King. Timber was in short supply in Jerusalem. There had been a recent and monumental Zealot attack on the Roman Fortress Antonia which was aligned to the Temple complex, at the instigation of the underground resistance leader Yeshua bar Abbas, at the precise same time Yeshua ben Yosef attacked and seized the Temple with Zealot support. The two wings of Zealot militant activity were to dovetail perfectly. Dovetail they did. But the revolution was quashed, and the shedding of Jewish and Roman blood was immense. Hundreds involved in the uprising were then crucified along the pilgrim roads leading to Jerusalem. Four of the ringleaders were sentenced to die with the Nazarene King.

Pilate had placed the official titulus above the head of Yeshua stating his crime in a number of languages so all would know the reason for his death: treason. "This is Yeshu Nazarene King of the Jews."

On his left, nailed to the tree, a writhing revolutionary cursed the Messianic Pretender, and in his pain and anguish he equally spat curses at the amused Romans who were crucifying him. On his right, nailed to the branches of the same tree, another revolutionary gasped to his King, "Remember me when you come into your Kingdom, Lord."

This was the gloomy and gruesome culmination of thirty three years of existence given selflessly to his fellow human beings in Salvific service. This was the culmination of his entire life's work. This was the climax of his teaching ministry. This was the abrupt conclusion of his "enlightenment" which he sought to share with others.

The Messiah found strength somewhere deep within to lift his bloodied eyeless sockets toward the heavens. He filled his burning lungs with air and screamed as loud as he could.

"Eli! Eli! L'ma Sh'vaktani?"

The horrible piercing shriek enveloped the entire region. As the final sheep was brought to the High Priest of the Temple to be slaughtered for his own sins with impressive ceremonial accompaniment the gathered pilgrims were alerted to the Mount Olivet where the cry emanated. The bleat of the final frightened lamb being led to its slaughter was overshadowed by the screeching bleat of the ultimate Passover Lamb of God dying for the sins of the world.

Another barrage of flint flew through the air and sliced into the dying body of the Reprobate Man.

Yeshua had suffered enough.

In the distance he could now hear the muffled thunder of galloping hoof beats as the centurion approached with drawn lance.

The onlookers noticed that it had suddenly become darker.

The clouds intensified.

A strong gale arose.

Sand blew into the crowd.

Yeshu hung silently awaiting His Father's response to His awful terminal cry of despair.

PREFACE

"And after they had sung a hymn they went out into the mount of Olives."
                                                                                                         - Matthew 26.30

The correct rendering of this text from the Messianic Scriptures of the Yeshua Party should be "And after they had sung songs of praise they went out into the mount of Olives."

These "songs of praise" are the hallel consisting of Psalms 113-118. On the Passover these Psalms were sung as part of the Jewish rituals. The thoughts expressed in them were therefore uppermost in the traumatised mind of Yeshua the Messiah the night he was betrayed into the hands of Rome.

In ancient pagan cultures a man was selected each year as a sacrifice whose blood was poured into the soil to grant blessing and fertility to both the land and the nation. The more horrendous the torturous ordeal prior to his death, and the more loudly he pierced the air with his terrified screams, the greater the blessing in his oblation. Precisely for this reason some cultures preferred little children to be offered as pure Innocents to these unseen gods.

Dressed in his finest clothes the sacrificial Victim was escorted to his death in a frenzy of singing and dancing for such joy was the sign of the hero, the god-king.

If he panicked while on his way to his divine appointment with the gods, or if his actions began to give even the slightest appearance of a frantic nature, this would be read by the attendant priests as an omen that destruction and pestilence rather than abundance and increase would come on the nation. So he went to his death, more often than not, conscious but in a drugged state of ecstasy and euphoria. That way good fortune, fertility and national health was assured.

So, too, on the night he was betrayed, Yeshua dressed in his best clothes and sang songs of praise with his disciples only hours before his agony and brutal death by crucifixion at Golgoleth on the Mount Olivet.

In the second and third centuries of our Common Era many churches maintained a tradition that at the Last Supper Yeshua formed his talmidim in a Hebrew dance circle, joined hands together and sang songs of praise as they all danced in this ring. As they sang and swirled into the night in a mild frenzy, their energies all the more liberated with the intoxication of the Passover wine, the Lord gyrated alone in the centre, the hero-king ablaze in an anthem of destiny. His disciples were unaware of what was to transpire that evening, and as they joyously swayed to the rhythm of the voices of the women, the Master clapped his hands to the beat and raised his voice in praise to the One he called his Father. The sentiments of the hallel flowed from mind to lips and he was conscious of the fact that he could actually hear the beat of his heart. His was a destiny he himself had carved out in order to show humanity that his Father was just in his dealings with men. In a few short hours his appointment with destiny would be met, and his Father's anger toward a rebellious and lost humanity appeased.

A surviving letter written by a disciple of Yeshua to his Hebrew Messianic brethren tells them that for the joy and bliss that was set before him he endured the torture tree, and treated with utter contempt its shame (Hebrews 12.2).  A joy indeed. This was the joy of the salvation thus guaranteed by his selfless sacrifice on behalf of the world that was lost.

"And after they had sung songs of praise they went out into the mount of Olives."

It was while Yeshua prayed with his disciples that his closest friend, Judah the Sicarii, identified the Lord to the Romans with a kiss. That Pontius Pilatus, Caesar's procurator over Judaea, had a prior knowledge of Yeshua is seen in his appointment of this same disciple as a guide to 'a detachment of soldiers' (Greek: speira - a Roman cohort consisting of 600 soldiers and including 66 cavalry) as well as being joined by the Temple police (John 18.2,12). That such an interest by Rome should be shown in the simple, humble, non-controversial activities of a somewhat effeminate carpenter's son defies the imagination and insults the intelligence of all but the dull of mind. Indeed, knowing nothing of effeminacy, the Messianic Scriptures of the Yeshua Party reveal a Yeshua who was a radical charismatic, influentially powerful, apocalyptic, eschatological and messianic. He was a man at once possessed germinally of the substance of an Idea whose Time had come. He was a man with a determined mission, ever cognisant of a distinct sense of destiny. Yeshua was a man who was totally in control of himself in contradistinction to the mellow, unobtrusive, muscleless pansy in crisp, permanent-pressed, whiter than white dresses that is the all too familiar image presented to little children in their Sunday School classes: Gentile Jesus weak and mild. Yeshua believed God was his Father. Yeshua was, in no uncertain terms, either a madman or the long awaited Mashiach.

Turned over to the Romans, Yeshua was subjected to all the inhumane treatment and savage barbarity that would be expected of hardened Roman soldiers, forged intolerant by the frequency of constant underground revolutionary uprisings aimed, not merely at agitating the troops of the hated Occupation, but ultimately at actually toppling the Imperial eagle standards of the imposed iron fist of Pax Romana. Beaten to a pulp, mentally and physically abused and then scourged as only the Romans knew how, the Jewish Messianic claimant to the throne of his ancestor David was finally nailed to a tree surrounded by a number of doomed zealots and other revolutionaries. Nailed above his head on that tree in Olivet, Pilatus spelled out precisely the reason Yeshua was crucified: treason. All the accusations were clear. He had announced himself King of the Jews (Matthew 27.37; Mark 15.16; Luke 23.38). The titulus could not be denied.

Yet today the Christian Church has displaced Yeshua as a Jew, divorcing the king from his kingdom, emphasising exclusively his Christhood. And the Church thinks of itself, with all its baptised paganism, its heathen trappings, and in its proclamation of a social gospel, as nothing less than the new Israel and the redeemed Zion.

The Church Yeshua founded has come a long way from the bloodied branches of the tree of torture and that pitiable, grotesquely contemptible Jewish Mashiach writhing in agony and screeching out into the darkness that enveloped Golgoleth, "Eli! Eli! L'mah sh'vaktani?" ("My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?")

It would take Sha'ul the emissary (Paul the apostle) to explain why God had forsaken Yeshua haMashiach at around 3 o'clock on that most significant afternoon almost two thousand years ago, as the slaughter of the Passover lambs at the Temple began.

It is precisely with this awful scream of Yeshua into the void that an historical event underwent a metamorphosis into theology.

And it is with this theology that our concern in this work lies.

- Les Aron Gosling

[This Preface became the basis of the Introduction to Messiah's Mum, A Controversial & Radical Reconsideration of the life of the Holy Family (2009) by Glenys Evelyn Gosling.]

QUESTIONS & ANALYSIS OF PREFACE

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "From a distance the crucified Jew looked as if he and the tree were one, and forming a sort of menorah. It was the way the seven main branches were perversely twisted upward toward the clouds..."

The Menorah which was located in the Temple was based (and sculptured) on the almond tree which the Jewish authorities argued was the original "Tree of Life" located in the Garden of Eden. Yeshua met his death in a garden (the Greek of John 19.41 calls it an orchard) called Gat'Sh'ma'nim (Gethsemane). The tree upon which Yeshua was crucified may well have been an Olive tree as the term Gat'Sh'ma'nim literally means "winepress of oils." Still, the symbolism of the almond ought not be overlooked, as God often utilises ancient concepts to align with historical realities. The orchard was obviously filled with fruit and olive trees in a variety of forms and without doubt the almond would have been at that time prolific.

The Messiah did not die on a "cross" nor was he impaled on a "stake." The Messianic texts make it decidedly plain that he perished nailed to a tree (See Messiah's Mum, 2009, 120,121; Dr E.L. Martin, Secrets of Golgotha, 1988).

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "The already bloodied and tortured body of the crucified claimant to the Davidic Throne tried to retreat from the hostile bombardment accompanied by hoarse laughter from his murderers."

The image of a dispassionate Christ hanging from a cross with a sad look on his face, a cosmetic trickle of blood on his forehead originating from the crown of thorns, must be discarded by believers in Yeshua for all time. The crucifixion was horrendous, torturous, and bloodthirsty fun for the cruel battle-hardened Roman soldiers who did the deed. The Romans often crucified their victims in a variety of twisted and grotesque positions in order to make a truculent mockery of their virtually insane victims in their final death throes. That Our Lord somehow escaped pain, or endured it without flinching, hardly seems a sensible, credible, rational or balanced view considering the horrible excruciating circumstances of his demise. Above all things, Yeshua was human.

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "Four Jewish victims of Rome were crucified along with the Nazarene King."

Tradition speaks of two "thieves" crucified with the Messiah. According to the biblical revelation there had to have been at least three victims along with Yeshua. We know that two hung crucified with Yeshua on "ONE tree" because that is what John records in the Greek of John 19.31-33 (sunstaurothentos). They weren't just "with him" but were crucified "together with him." Matthew 27.38 mentions that one was crucified on Yeshua's left, and the other on his right. Therefore when the Romans came to break the legs of the victims they went to the one on the left, and the right, and then came to Yeshua. This is difficult to explain if we accept three crosses, with Yeshua in the midst, instead of ONE TREE (upon which all were impaled) which John tells us was the actual case.

Most students of the biblical revelation miss the point that in Matthew 27.44 both the revolutionaries revile the Lord, a point made also in Mark 15.32. But in Luke's account only one revolutionary railed at him (Luke 23.39,40). John tells us that Yeshua was crucified "in the midst" of the others. With a larger number executed at that time and in the same close vicinity than simply the traditional two, this would indeed make better sense of the episode.

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "a writhing revolutionary cursed the Messianic Pretender..."

Those crucified with Yeshua were not "thieves," and they were not "robbers." Our Bible translators have tried valiantly to cover up the truth of their backgrounds which is spelled out precisely in the Greek manuscripts. These men were hardened members of the underground Jewish Resistance against the Imperial Pax Romana -- they were not mere thieves, they were revolutionaries, insurrectionists. Josephus uses the term lestai to refer to revolutionaries and it's the same word Mark utilises to describe the two men who were crucified with the Son of David. "Thieves" were not crucified. Crucifixion (and beheading) were punishments specified for those who had committed treason.

That the Zealots perceived Yeshua to have been sympathetic to their cause can be seen in the dying request of one of the revolutionaries: "Remember me when you come into your Kingdom." This Zealot had previously been exposed to the ministry of Yeshua as can be ascertained in his words. This statement also throws light on what was generally understood by the Jewish people in relation to the term "kingdom" to which Yeshua referred in his popular parables and stories.

Consider also that Yeshua had a number of revolutionaries in his immediate entourage: Sh'mon Zelotes (Simon the Zealot) and Y'Hudah the Sicarii (Judas Iscariot) to identify two of them.

Then we are confronted by Sh'mon Kefa (Simon Peter) the Galilean's lieutenant also called Sh'mon Bar Yona (son of Jonah). According to Jewish linguistic experts in Hebrew and Aramaic this term would read as Bar'yonim -- "[of] the lawless ones," "extremists." We know that while the Yeshua of the Gospels is a Man of Peace, His talmidim carried swords.

In Luke 22.35-38 Yeshua and the apostles finished the last supper together. In a few hours the Lord will be arrested and will soon fulfil the prophecy, "He was numbered with the transgressors (Heb. outlaws)" (Isaiah 53.12).

The Mashiach asks his disciples, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?" "Nothing," they answered. He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment." The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough," he replied" (Luke 22.35-38 NIV).

Notice that when the disciples come up with two swords that the Son of David says, "That is enough." If we are talking about building up military strength, would two swords be enough? Are two swords enough to defend 12 people? Hardly. Each man should have his own sword.

Yeshua said two swords were enough because His purpose was not to build up an armed force, but to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah 53.12, "And He was numbered with the transgressors [Heb., extremists or outlaws]." Our Lord was being accused of rebellion. Rebels must have weapons to create an insurrection. The two swords would make it appear that the disciples were leading an armed rebellion. In another place Yeshua says, "And what will I if it [the revolution against Rome] is already kindled?"

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "The antagonistic writings of Celsus, Lucian and Sossianus Hierocles (which miraculously survived the book burning sprees of Constantine's bishops) claim that the Romans viewed Yeshua as a magician, a fomentor of rebellion, who was surrounded by a hard core of Zealot bodyguards -- 900 of them!"

Sossianus Hierocles was the Prefect of Egypt who penned a two volume work during the reign of Diocletian (245-315 CE) and who had access to the still-circulating tradition which stated that Yeshua was associated with a personal entourage over more than 900 extremists. There is also a lost version of Josephus which stated that Yeshua "had more than 2,000 armed followers with him on the Mount of Olives." I would be delighted if an early unexpurgated and unabridged ms or mss penned by Josephus surfaced.

I hold my own view (shared by none to my knowledge) that the (until now unknown) Zealot revolution of 30 CE occurred in the week immediately prior to Pesach, and was timed to coincide with the seizure of the Temple by Yeshua accompanied by 900 Zealots. This is why there is no mention of a Roman intervention in the riot that followed -- the Roman troops were already preoccupied with defending the Fortress Antonia, which was built flush against the wall of the Temple itself, against the forces unleashed by the Zealot Yeshua Bar Abbas.

We know from the "NT" documents that Bar Abbas was in leadership of a rebellion that miserably failed. In the Gospel of Matthew he is called "a notable prisoner." In Mark, "lying bound with them who had made insurrection, men who in the insurrection had committed murder." Luke tells us he was one "who for a CERTAIN insurrection made in the city and for murder was cast into prison." No further details are given about this turbulent occurrence and what had recently transpired because it was common knowledge among everyone at that time. This evidence also reveals that the Gospel accounts were in circulation at a very early period in the history of the primitive church (Messianic Movement). The absence of details due to common knowledge has been overlooked by scholars who wish to place the composition of the Gospels into the early second century. Additionally, mention of 900 Zealots who accompanied Yeshua (at least at the time of his successful attack on the Temple precincts) also reveals that certain traditions would not die a natural death but persisted even into the third century and later.

The Messianic Rebbe wrote: "...the final sheep was brought to the High Priest of the Temple to be slaughtered for his own sins with impressive accompanied ceremony..."

It is not realised by many that the last sheep to die at the Temple on the Passover was one selected for the High Priest himself and this creature died at precisely 3 pm. The High Priest would call out "It is finished!" The irony is astonishing.

THUS CONCLUDES LECTURE ONE