On the Gospel of John, Part 27: Hirelings and Wolves

As we began our discussion of John chapter 10, we sought descriptions in the words of the prophets of Yahweh by which we may understand The Purpose of the Shepherd. This is necessary for us to do, because Christ Himself had said, in Matthew chapter 5, “17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” So if He came to fulfill the words of the prophets, then the action and the purpose of His ministry must be in conformance with their words, and therefore it is they to whom we must turn in order to better comprehend the purpose and intent of His ministry, so that we may understand what He had come to fulfill. If His intentions are not in accordance with their words, then He has destroyed them, and He cannot claim to have fulfilled them. But praise Yahweh God that He is True, and He is not a liar, since He does not change. The words of the prophets describe the purpose of Christ, and the epistles and actions of the apostles further verify that purpose. For that same reason we read in 2 Peter chapter 3 that Peter’s reason for writing was: “2 That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour”, because the purpose of the Shepherd was indeed the purpose which had been previously announced by the prophets.

Yahshua Christ, being the Good Shepherd, and the only true shepherd, had come only for the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”, to gather them to Himself, as He Himself had professed and as the prophets had described. Furthermore, the words of the prophets had not only explained what happened to those sheep and why they were lost, but they also inform us as to where those sheep had wandered and what would become of them. By the Word of Yahweh God through the prophets, since the only purpose of the Shepherd is to regather those same lost sheep to Himself, the apostles brought the Gospel of the Shepherd to Europe, Anatolia and Mesopotamia, because it was to those same places that the sheep had wandered and that is where they expected them to be found.

Thus far in this chapter of John’s gospel, Yahshua Christ had also explained that the good shepherd would enter through the door of the sheep, in verse 2 where He said “2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.” Then He asserted that He Himself is the door of the sheep, in verse 7 where He proclaimed “Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep.” So if He is the door, and if He came in through the door, how can these two concepts be reconciled? How can a door enter in through itself?

On the Gospel of John, Part 26: The Purpose of the Shepherd

The Bible is not two different books. The most radical, and correct, meaning of the word catholic is “down whole”, and the earliest Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian had used it to describe the reception of the whole of the faith, meaning the reception of both New and Old Testaments, as opposed to the rejection of one or the other by the Jews or by sects such as the Marcionites. One cannot properly understand the Gospel of Christ without first understanding the will of God which was expressed in the words of His prophets.

Neglecting the pericope of the woman caught in adultery, which clearly was not a part of John’s original gospel, it is evident that on the last great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Yahshua Christ was teaching in the temple, as John begins to describe the events of that day in chapter 7 (7:37). Then, upon His having been confronted by His adversaries, we see Christ reveal their true nature in the lengthy exchange which He had with them, as it is recorded in John chapter 8. So upon departing from them, He is found outside of the temple where He then healed a man who was blind from birth.

This act led to another confrontation with those who were opposed to Him, in which He declared: “For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.” They which “see not” are the lost sheep of the house of Israel for whom He had come, and “they which see” are the Judaeans who witnessed His acts and had heard Him speaking, but who nevertheless had rejected Him. This statement, from John 9:39, reveals the true significance of this event, where on this day He chose to heal such a man, as He had said earlier in that same chapter, when He was asked by His Own disciples why the man was born blind, that “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

So it should be evident that the man’s very life stood as a parable in order to provide a lesson to the children of Israel: that the purpose of Christ on the day wherein John’s gospel records that He revealed the true nature and character of His enemies was to heal the children of Israel from their own collective blindness, as it is they who are identified in the Word of God which is in the prophets as being blind, “they which see not” for whom Christ had come so that they “might see”.

Standing in the assembly hall in Nazareth at the beginning of His ministry, as it is recorded in Luke chapter 4, Christ had read from Isaiah in relation to Himself, and announced that “18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Once one learns that His sheep are the children of Israel exclusively, and that His enemies are all children of the devil, that is how the blind can see.

At the beginning of our last podcast I had presented a lengthy discussion regarding the recent assault on free speech being conducted by YouTube, the world’s only viable free video-sharing service, and some of the challenges which we face asserting our free speech rights on the Internet even when we host our own content. At that time I could not have known that I would face the prospect of troubles with my own hosting provider only five days later. As I write this, I have just received an answer to my defense of Christogenea against the claims of a certain non-White Social Justice Warrior who thinks that my website is unlawful because it offends him. I had already been shopping for new servers, only to get a head start if my defense did not prevail. Christogenea does nothing to violate the Acceptable Use Policies of its service providers, but quite frequently, those policies are often fluid and subject to change on short notice according to the whims of corporate lawyers.

There are a couple of start-up video sharing platforms that advertise themselves as free-speech alternatives to YouTube. One is Bitchute, and another is called Brighteon. But both of these have also already censored their users. Brighteon received pressure from its upstream providers over postings of the New Zealand shooting video, and had to remove it from their servers, thereby being forced to censor their own users. On some occasions censorship is merited, such as when it violates state or federal law. For example, one of the characters at the Daily Stormer complained that his open threats of violence against a certain tribal group were censored, but those threats were violations of the laws in every American jurisdiction, and certainly overseas. So Bitchute and Gab were probably trying to save a fool from himself.

I remember when the World Wide Web, which by popular misconception is considered by itself to be the Internet, was first opened to the public in 1993. Soon thereafter I had my own first website, but did not need a domain name because at that time Internet Service Providers were offering dial-up customers free websites in sub-folders on their own web servers. For a few years, the Internet was like a video game version of the proverbial Wild West, where anything went and if anyone didn’t like it, they just didn’t have to watch. Within a year, spam was ubiquitous in email and newsgroups, and it quickly became a plague. The Internet evolved around competing concepts. The first was the ideal of freedom of expression and free and open access to information, and the second was purely economic interest.

On the Gospel of John, Part 22: Best Witness

In the Christogenea New Testament, the text from John 7:53 through John 8:11 is not found, but it is certainly not missing. We have maintained the traditional verse numbering accompanying our translation, but John chapter 7 ends with verse 52, and John chapter 8 begins with verse 12. This is done purposefully, and it is for only one reason: that this pericope [a section or passage of scripture] is not found in any of the oldest Greek manuscripts, those known to predate the 5th century, and neither is it found in many of the manuscripts from the 5th century and later. According to the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, in both the 27th and 28th editions, verses up to 7:52 and beginning with 8:12 survived in both of the 3rd century papyri P66 and P75, but they do not contain any of the text from this pericope. The 4th century Codex Sinaiticus (א) can be viewed on line at the Internet website codexsinaiticus.org, and in John chapter 8 the text flows quite naturally from 7:52 to 8:12 with no indication of any break in the context. So there is no evidence in the Codex Sinaiticus for any of this passage from John 7:53 to 8:11. This is the way in which we have chosen to read John, but of course, the Codex Sinaiticus has no chapter or verse numbers, which were first added to copies of the Scriptures in the 16th century.

As a digression, translating the New Testament and observing all of the agreements and differences among the various ancient manuscripts, it is quickly realized that not all Codices are consistent in the frequency of their differences from Matthew through the Revelation. For example, while, the Codex Bezae has many interpolations in its copy of the Book of Acts, and many differences with the 4th century Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus in the letters of Paul, it much more consistently agrees with the readings of the Sinaiticus throughout the Gospel of John, with a significant exception here. Among all Greek manuscripts, this pericope is first found in the Codex Bezae (D), a manuscript of the 5th century AD.

But in addition to the two significant 3rd century papyri and the Codex Sinaiticus, this pericope is not found in the 4th century Codex Vaticanus, nor in the 5th century Codices Alexandrinus (A), Ephraemi Syri (C), Borgianus (T) and Washingtonensis (W). Even many later manuscripts, such as the Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus of the 6th century and the Codices Coridethianus (Θ) and Athous Lavrensis (Ψ), both of the 9th century, do not contain this pericope, and these are followed by a broad collection of other significant manuscripts of the 9th century and later in which it is also wanting. The pericope is found in some ancient Syrian, Coptic, and Latin manuscripts, but not in all of them. It is also found in some of the manuscripts of Jerome, who created the Latin Vulgate in the 5th century, but not in all of them.