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THE CULTING OF CHRISTIANITY

The Occult Roots Of

The Rapture Cult - Part IX

 

 

 

 

 

In the Culting of Christianity, we've traced the influence of the Sethian Gnostic writings, and we've shown the early Christians who opposed them inadvertently absorbed some aspects of the Gnostic worldview. We've also found the strange pattern of two clusters of New Testament manuscripts geographically centered on the North and the South of Jerusalem – which would have to be considered ground zero in the Spiritual war surrounding the entrance of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

The Northern collection of manuscripts was centered in Syria, and the Southern manuscripts coalesced in Egypt. As we've already shown, the Occult spiritual emanations which resulted in the Old Testament era Gnostic writings were heavily entered around Alexandria Egypt. The Egyptian manuscripts were textually manipulated by Egyptian influenced scholars such as Clement of Alexandria, and his successor Origen.

 

Once again, the Jewish colony in Alexandria was engaged in translating the Old Testament into Greek, centuries before Christ was born. Intriguingly, it was in the era preceding the arrival of the Gospel that we saw a series of political, military, and Spiritual collisions between the Syrian dynasty known as the Seleucids in the North, and the Egyptian dynasty known as the Ptolemies in the South. Both of these political powers desired to dominate Judaea and Jerusalem.

 

To rephrase this eerie irony, the era preceding Rome featured Jerusalem caught in between warring factions in Syria and Egypt, even as the supernaturally engineered transmission of the two clusters of competing Biblical texts was also divided between Syria and Egypt. 

 

In published research which stands apart from the present probe into the Spiritual influence of the Sethians, I've shown how the most intense opposition to the Jewish faith under the Old Testament was related to when the Syrian Seleucids corrupted the temple system in Jerusalem during their occupation of the city. This occurred between the period after the death of Alexander the Great in 330 BC, and the later overthrow of the last Seleucid despot, Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BC. The prophetic implications of this sequence of political developments emphasizes another aspect of Bible prophecy, which is beyond the scope of the present work, but they are extensively documented in the author's The Rise And Fall Of The Romerican Empire.

 

In the present context, the point is, after the LORD Jesus Christ turned the world upside down (Isaiah 29:16, Acts 17:6) with his astonishing death and resurrection, the scholars who still lived in Egypt sought to meld their Gnosticism with the Gospel – to the point of manipulating the writings which were circulating in the years immediately following the LORD's ascension to heaven.

 

Meanwhile, the Textus Receptus documents, which retained fidelity to the Apostolic Gospels, and the New Testament letters of Paul, were carefully guarded in places like Antioch in Syria, the place where the Word of God flourished, and the believers were first called Christians.

 

"And when [Barnabas] had found [Saul] he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch" (Acts 11:26).  

 

In an earlier chapter of The Culting of Christianity, we noted how the Gnostics sought to mingle the emerging New Testament documents with their own Occult writings. This process had already occurred with the Egyptian pre-Christian era writings, which were sprinkled in among the Old Testament books. Thus, we find pseudepigrapha (Fraudulent Writings) which crossed covenants.

 

As each faction's writings manifested the Spirit behind them, the Word of the LORD reached through the confusion to those that God had chosen to be His – and this supernatural anointing occurred in what became known as the genuine New Testament Scriptures. Some contemporary believers (such as the so-called "Messianic Jews") have sought to discredit both the Textus Receptus and the Alexandrian manuscripts, claiming their transmission through the Greek and Egyptian culture and language corrupted them.

 

These "Messianic" cults, touting the allegedly indispensable importance of their Hebrew heritage, claim the genuine Gospels were largely written in Hebrew, then translated into Greek. A mountain of antiquarian scholarship shows the exact opposite to be true. The fact that God chose to insert His only begotten Son into the world when the Greek language had overwhelmed both Jew and Gentile destroys this faulty worldview. Indeed, as Israel had completely fallen away from the ways of the LORD centuries before God dispatched Jesus Christ from the eternal throne of glory, for Him to revert to an exclusively ethnic and linguistic channel of transmission would severely contradict His declared plan to redeem the Gentiles as well as the Jews.

 

"I will also give thee for a light to the gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6).

 

Thus, while the genuine Christians were fighting off Gnostic attempts to marginalize the Greek records which were to become the New Testament, they were also fending off efforts by Jewish factions who resisted the recognition that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies which defined the life of the Saviour. These two factions would be yet another manifestation of Zechariah's "two parts" which are "cut off and die," even as the LORD's "third part" belongs to Him (see Zechariah 13:8 for details).

 

The effort to steer the Christian faith back to a reliance on the Old Testament law and customs was documented early on in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

 

"And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1).

 

Significantly, it was Paul and Barnabus, who arrived in Jerusalem from Antioch, who opposed the effort to shift the freedom in Christ back to a reliance on the written laws of Moses:

 

"When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question" (Acts 15:2).

 

The effort to mingle the faith in Jesus Christ with reliance on the Old Covenant re-occurred on a regular basis. Paul and Barnabas, who were effectively based in Antioch, became the champions of the New Covenant, repeatedly confronting the effort to shift the salvation of Christ back to the legalistic rigidity of the Old Covenant:

 

"Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (II Corinthians 3:5,6).

 

As the Spirit of the LORD moved through the writings of those whom He had chosen, those who were no longer chosen sought to counter the output of God's elect, using worldly means, such as political alignments, subterfuge, and even literary deception. These efforts by Jewish factions, who had lost their pre-eminence in the LORD's magnificent plan of salvation, was yet another manifestation of the mysterious formula where fleshly Israel was the apple of God's eye under the Old Covenant (Deuteronomy 32:10), was not under the New Covenant (Matthew 21:43), and sought to re-ascend to primacy.

 

"The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition…" (Revelation 17:8).

 

The body of Christians in Jerusalem, led by the Apostle James, failed to effectively neutralize the ongoing efforts of Pharisaical Jews who had half-heartedly embraced Christ. These sought to steer the faith back to Old Covenant tenets, in order to regain a fleshly Hebrew pre-eminence of the religion, but the LORD had other plans.

 

Ultimately, a tree is known by its fruits, and the violent insurrection against Roman rule resulted in the destruction of the city, the nation, and even the temple. However, in a divine act of preservation, the LORD had already moved the leadership of the Christian faith into the Gentile wilderness of Syria and, even though the Jewish factions relying on the Old Covenant were devastated, the now Gentile dominated Gospel shifted gears to focus on the Gnostic challenge.

 

 

-- James Lloyd

 

Next: The LORD Elects Paul to Teach The Believers to Seek New Jerusalem, So They Would Be Willing To Flee Jerusalem Which Is Below, And Be Preserved

 

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