Faith of the Apostles 11

APOLOGIA

(Apology in defense of The Apostles Faith)

What has been written, has been done with all honesty and with the intent of individual education in the Spirit. There is no hope that this scholastic endeavor will influence the body of the Christian faith to return to the ‘church’ as established by the living Christ, and practiced by his chosen Apostles.

That house of belief faded from the world at the advent of Paul’s ministry. And though the Apostles turned from him and his ways, to keep sacred those instructions of their Lord Jesus, the world turned away from them to follow the mystical path of the Hellenists.

Paul did not write of the birth of Jesus or of Jesus teachings, he has nothing to do with the empty tomb. He did not teach a living Jesus, but rather a raised Christ who had been defiled by death. He had no personal contact with Jesus of Nazareth, never heard him teach, nor was he intimately involved in the healing miracles of the Rabbi.

Paul’s ravings against the chosen apostles of Jesus, and his brother James, is scriptural fact. His doctrine was his own invention, devised from his understanding of Hellenistic philosophies, a bastardized Jewish text of God’s Holy Scriptures, and the ancient mythology of Mount Olympus.

Today, that religion which calls itself, Christianity, has little to do with Jesus. It is Pauline, it is Hellenistic, and it is inaccurate. It is based on tradition and man’s doctrine, and has virtually nothing to do with biblical truth. For this reason have I renounced the name, Christian, long ago. However, if my faith being so strong in that one personification of God’s true Messenger, dictates that I am, ‘a Christian’, then that faith must find itself in the original Palestinian church, the Jerusalem Church.

With this in mind, I must return to the beginning. I must find the dust of that church which the Apostles fostered until their deaths, and attempt to fathom the nature of their knowledge. For with them, and them alone, is the true enlightenment of Jesus of Nazareth, and the way that he intended for his own.

If to no one else, at the least, this one sees a dark and powerful hand that has hidden the true faith of the Apostles from man’s eyes for two thousand years. And I cannot believe that the Lord God would deliberately eradicate the church of those whom Jesus himself chose to be his own. It is that path I must find.

How many have attempted that lonely quest, I do not know. What they may have found possibly swore them to silence; perhaps they found nothing and went another way. The Jerusalem church, that establishment which saved for us the most intimate knowledge we have of Jesus, may be in utter silence, but it is no more dead than Jesus himself; Jesus who was called the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of God.

A. Victor Garaffa