The Galilean's Gospel

INTRO: Galilean's Gospel Podcast

• Kyrie Dicentis • Season 4 • Episode 1

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"A Christian is just one that does what the Lord Jesus tells him. Neither more nor less than that makes a Christian." — George MacDonald


IN THIS INTRODUCTION TO THE GALILEAN'S GOSPEL:

◼ Focus on Revelation

◼ Why a follower must know Jesus in His Incarnation, words, acts, deeds and commands.

◼ Why "Galilean" instead of "Christian"?

◼ Why many people don't really like Jesus or what He told us.

◼ The way this podcast works.

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Here's some things He said:

FROM THE BOOK OF JOHN - LAST SUPPER DISCOURSES

{14:7-24} "If you have known me, truly you have also known my Father. And from now on, you shall know Him, and see Him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, reveal the Father to us, and it is enough for us.”

Jesus replied, “Have I been with you for so long, and you have not known me, Philip? Whoever sees me, also sees the Father. How can you say, ‘Reveal the Father to us?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? 

"The words that I am speaking to you, I do not speak from myself. But the Father abiding in me, He does these works. Believe in me, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works. 

"... Whoever holds to my commandments and safeguards them: it is he who loves me. And whoever loves me shall be loved by my Father. And I will love him, and I will manifest myself to him.”

Judas, not the Iscariot, asked, “Lord, how does it happen that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world?”

Jesus said: “If anyone loves me, he shall embrace my word. And my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will make our dwelling place with him.  Whoever does not love me, does not keep not my words. And the word that you have heard is not mine, but is the Father's, Who sent me."

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TEXT Kyrie here.

THIS PODCAST IS NOT MONETIZED. LINKS:
Contact: kyriedicentis@gmail.com
CLOUD OF UNKNOWING Evelyn Underhill edition - free
HERETIC'S REDDIT HOME
Revelations of Divine Love [free PDF] Julian of Norwich
What the Gehenna?
The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross



◼ Focus on Revelation

REVELATION, as theological theory,  focuses on Jesus of Nazareth as the revelation of the Father's love.  In the Apopstolic Age, following His instruction to deliver the news of the Kingdom to all nations was to report Jesus’ words and actions, teachings and commandments—in other words the GOSPEL, of the Incarnate Jesus Christ. As He said at the very start of His mission, when He had called but four disciples: 

“Let us go into the neighboring towns and cities, so that I may preach there also. Indeed, it was for this reason that I came.” Mark 1:38

And later, the Samaritan woman at the well said to Him: 

“I know that the Messiah will come who is called anointed. When he comes, he will tell us everything.” 

Jesus told her, “I who speak with you am that one.” John 4:25-29

And when He finally went to the Temple to preach in the courtyard in John 8:25-29, and people asked who He was, He said

“Just what I have been telling you from the beginning,” Jesus replied.  “... He who sent me is trustworthy, and what I have heard from Him, I tell the world.”

They did not understand that He was telling them about His Father.  So Jesus said, 

“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” John 8:25-29

Thus, the Lord declares Himself the revealer of God to the world. Specifically, whatever God chooses to convey to Him. But Christ as the revelation of God encompasses the entirety of His Incarnate mission—not just words, but actions, deeds, reactions, advice, and commands. 

This entire podcast was originally titled the Heretic Christian and that introduction is still here. But as I have been writing and speaking and interacting, it has become  apparent how few people who want to be Christians, know what He said, did, taught, explained. They get mired in trying to read the old Jewish books and get discouraged, or lost in all the rhetoric and bombardment of “truth” that is simply not what we’ve been told by witnesses in the writings that convey Christ’s Gospel. 

We need to know The Galilean’s Gospel. But presently, we—at least in America—get most information not from our own reading, but from local preachers or social media. So, being the research nerd, writer and reader I am, here we get to know His Gospel through all the witness we have access to, as they did in the Apostolic Age. 


◼ Why "Galilean" instead of "Christian?"

Too many antiChrists and Christofascists these days have usurped the words "Christian" and "Christianity" for reasons far removed from spreading His Gospel and made those words emblematic of hate, bigotry, power and violence—the exact opposite of Jesus and His teaching. 

The Galilean is the name He was called and His followers were, early on in His Galilean ministry. They had a variety of names much later on, including "the Nazarenes" or "Nazirites." There were a lot of self-styled messiahs, prophets, magicians and such wandering about, including within the three Yahwist countries of Israel, Samaria and Judea. As tales of Jesus spread, He’d be “the Galilean one.” And His followers became the “Galileans” as for instance, the followers, or “sons of” —as disciples of teachers were called—John were called Johannines or later of Arius became the “Arians.”

So as His follower, I call myself a Galilean, and follower is defined as He taught us: those who safeguard His word and obey His commands. (Imperfectly, I admit.) 


◼ Why we must know Jesus and all He said and what He taught and did and commanded.

"whoever sees me, also sees the Father" —Jesus of Galilee John 14

"A Christian is just one that does what the Lord Jesus tells him. Neither more nor less than that makes a Christian." — George MacDonald

We cannot follow our Galilean, if we don't know the Galilean's Gospel, which is that which God wants us to know and do. He gave that knowledge to His first and only true follower, to give to us, as He said. That was why He came. 

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” —George MacDonald

By discarding His human will and following the Divine Will of the Father all the way  to and through the Crucifixion, the power of the Light He brought obliterated the darkness that obscured Eternity, destroyed the barrier between ourselves and God.  Jesus' body died on the cross, and the great lintel of the Temple cracked and the thick curtain that kept everyone from entering the Holy of Holies, the place the Jews thought God resided, was ripped in two.

People were told they no longer had to go through a human intermediary to know God, not a person or an institution or a set of invented practices and rituals.  We are in the Kingdom, and the veil is shredded, and He is here.

FAITH IS the theological virtue that brings together Christ—who is God's full revelation of Himself—and the soul insofar as it adheres and responds. —Glossary of the Complete Works of St. John of the Cross

And our souls can be joined to Him, as He was joined to the Father, if we know how, if we know what He taught us and do that.

FROM THE BOOK OF JOHN - LAST SUPPER DISCOURSES

{14:7-24} "If you have known me, truly you have also known my Father. And from now on, you shall know Him, and see Him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, reveal the Father to us, and it is enough for us.”

Jesus replied, “Have I been with you for so long, and you have not known me, Philip? Whoever sees me, also sees the Father. How can you say, ‘Reveal the Father to us?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? 

"The words  I speak to you, I do not speak from myself. The Father abiding within me, He does the works. Believe me, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works, themselves.”

The works? Which are what? The miracles?  In this verse, probably so. But this section of John is called “The Last Supper Discourses” and He has been telling them He is leaving them, He is telling them what is coming next. And what is next is His total submission to the will of God. He didn’t have to. Who will believe a man is of God and glorified when He dies the most ignominious death, the most shameful, unclean, death amongst the lawless and the wicked? In that death, He became fully God’s and belonged to nothing of this Earth - no religion, no nation, no person. 

But they did not understand. While He was incarnate, they almost never did, unless He explained it. Listen to this next part and what He was asked: 

"... Whoever holds to my commandments and safeguards them: it is he who loves me. And whoever loves me shall be loved by my Father. And I will love him, and I will manifest myself to him.”

Judas, not the Iscariot, asked, “Lord, why is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world?”

Jesus said: “If anyone loves me, they will embrace my word. And my Father will love them and we will come to them, and we will make our dwelling place with them.  Whoever does not love me, does not keep not my words. And the word that you have heard is not mine, but is the Father's, Who sent me."

But once we understand that we can know God through His Gospel, we have to ask ourselves: do we want to? 

◼ Why many people don't really like Jesus or what He told us.

Remember the rich young man in Mark 10:17? Jesus said to be perfect, He should sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor and follow Jesus. The rich young man walked away.

Or how about Matthew 25:41 Where at judgement Jesus will say to some to go to the left and into the fire of eternity because :

I was hungry, and you did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and you did not give me to drink; I was a stranger and you did not take me in; naked, and you did not cover me; sick and in prison, and you did not visit me.’

So at verse 44, they ask what are you talking about, when didn’t we do those things for you?

And Jesus tells them, ‘Truly, I say to you, whenever you did not do it to one of the least, neither did you do for me.’

Many people really don’t like Jesus, they want to tell the poor they deserve it, or should “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” or “go back where they came from.” 

They want to lie, to gossip, to buy a new cell phone instead of deliver food to a local charity. They want to kill. They want to believe God kills, that He sends natural disasters to destroy gay nightclubs. 

But Jesus is uncompromising, no anger, no revenge, loving and caring for everyone and praying FOR your enemy. NO lying.

And this natural enmity toward the Word of God through Christ is described in Scripture and fully justified by a “saint” and so-called “father of the church..” 


In Scripture, the “men without God” said:

Let us oppress the righteous poor; let us neither spare the widow nor revere the aged for hair grown white with time. But let our strength be our norm of righteousness; for weakness proves itself useless.

Let us lie in wait for the righteous one, because he is annoying to us; he opposes our actions, Reproaches us for transgressions of the law, He professes to have knowledge of God, and styles himself a child of the Lord.

To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us because his life is not like that of others, … He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. Wisdom 2:10-16

And from the 3rd chapter of John

19-21 And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.  But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God

Now let me introduce you to Tertullian, of whom you may have heard, but probably do not know.  

Tertullian, who lived from 155A.D. to 220A.D.,  was called a “Church Father” by some. He was born and lived in North Africa and wrote. A LOT. He was zealous for the church, but as a Montanist, criticized the Roman Church leadership for being more interested in personal power than the people and delivering the Gospel. 

I tell you all this so you will not judge him too harshly, as he was smply following the form of criticism that was used in those days: first attack the character of the person with whom you disagree and then attack their ideas with as much vituperation and sarcasm as you can must in ink on paper. Or vellum. Eusebius who wrote a history did the same as did Jospehus.

IN Tertullian’s atacks on heresies, and the hiersiarchs that promoted them, he included Marcion [85A.D. - 160A.D.] and Marcionism.

 He wrote a polemic against the teachings of Marcion,  even though Marcion had been dead for at maybe 90 years.  Reportedly, Marcion was the son of an Apostle, Philologus, Bishop of Sinope on the Black [Euxine] Sea in East Asia, now called Turkey. (see the maps) 

What people say of Marcion. He was a follower of Paul’s writings and created the first Christian canon, a nascent “New Testament,”  that included a collection of Paul’s letters, a gospel and an argument against the Hebrew god and their books we call the “Old Testament” which was not used by most of the Galilean’s followers in the Apostolic Age and beyond.

No writing identifiable as Marcion’s or his followers’ survives. Though some argue Marcion was a source for Luke as it is also said Marcion’s book of the Lord was in widespread use and survived for hundreds of years.  

Reportedly, Marcion believed Jesus showed us the true God, and the deity of the Jewish scriptures was not that. So what we have what people who never knew him wrote about him.  

Tertullian called Marcion’s version of the god as preached by Paul (who preached Jesus Christ) “Marcion’s God” and really didn’t like him. Preserved by the Church and found at the New Advent site in the Catholic Encyclopedia, we have all Tertullian wrote against Heresies and specifically against Marcion.  

Book 1 opens-

 and I swear this excerpt is brief compared to the extant version I’m quoting from, and I wish it didn’t seem funny because it was quite the horrible lot of ugly characterization as ever we have heard in modern times, and those thighs lead to wholesale slaughter and widespread injustice.

No record of Tertullian ever being in northern Turkey is known:

The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature, and deceptive in its name. As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. 

[He’s attacking the sea as having bad character]

The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation, when life is passed in waggons. They have no fixed abode; their life has no germ of civilization; they indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked. …

The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. 

In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature. The day-time is never clear, the sun never cheerful; the sky is uniformly cloudy; the whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North. Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice; their mountains are covered with heaps of snow. 

…Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there, fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the waggon-life of the Sarmatian, more inhuman than the Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the cloud, (of Pontus) colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more deceitful than the Ister, more craggy than Caucasus. 

Craggy, no less. So, Marcion is bad because he could never be good coming from this terrible place.

Now, we know climate change, but I did look up some present-day climate info on the Black Sea as I recalled it is a summer resort destination for the bordering countries when they aren’t at war. It’s like Connecticut or Illinois or anyplace in Europe, really in the mid northern latitudes.  I did find this quote: 

"In the Black Sea, one still finds bottlenose dolphins and about 180 species of fish, including tuna, anchovy, herring, mackerel and the famous white sturgeon."

FromPANDA

C’mon. How evil can the water be if there’re dolphins? Anyway, on to the ugly point I’ve been avoiding by looking at the bottle-nose dolphin pic at the site. 

Chapter 26. In the Attribute of Justice, Marcion's God is Hopelessly Weak and Ungodlike.

I thought the title to that chapter was enough. Moving on to his more detailed objections in Chapter 27, (I will not read the whole thing… you can at the link if you want) but here we can recognize many in our time that agree with Tertullian:

Chapter 27. Dangerous Effects to Religion and Morality of the Doctrine of So Weak a God.

…he [Marcion’s God] plainly judges evil by not willing it, and condemns it by prohibiting it; while, on the other hand, he acquits it by not avenging it, and lets it go free by not punishing it. What a prevaricator of truth is such a god! ….

Afraid to condemn what he really condemns, afraid to hate what he does not love, permitting that to be done which he does not allow, ….

This will turn out an imaginary goodness, a phantom of discipline, perfunctory in duty, careless in sin. Listen, you sinners; and you who have not yet come to this, hear, that you may attain to such a pass! A better god has been discovered, who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness! 

He is purely and simply good. He indeed forbids all delinquency, but only in word. He is in you, if you are willing to pay him homage, for the sake of appearances, that you may seem to honour God; for your fear he does not want. And so satisfied are the Marcionites with such pretences, that they have no fear of their god at all.

They have no fear of their God, at all. No, we don’t, if we know our Savior and His Gospel, that reveals the truth of God. And we never heard of Marcion, most of us. 

This polemic by Tertullian gets worse. But it also gets more reflective of his culture: the need for a god of vengeance and power and hate and war. The Old Testament God as seen by the movers and shakers of the Roman Church. The One Who would favor them and give them world domination. 

Oh, who can you think of who wants a God Who hates what they hate and takes vengeance and assures political supremacy? I know 4 in my building. 

Once you start to pursue Jesus in HIs Gospel, He will pursue you right back. More and more you’ll want Him. More and infinitely more He wants you.

Which is why a lot of people, really don’t want His true Gospel. And that’s all we have in the shop.


◼ The way this podcast works.

This podcast is devoted to communicating The Galilean’ Revelation of God to anyone who’s listening. In deeds, in words, in commands. And we will not be limited by the choices of men as to where we find His Word, but seek out the witness of those who knew Him wherever we find them. 

Commentary is labelled that, and commentary, while it can be informed by history or better translation of language, is always the work of someone NOT Jesus of Nazareth: Christ Our Lord. In this case, mostly me or a known mystic. 

The podcast is not monetized. Anywhere, in any way. Neither your host directly (me, Kyrie, Hello) nor some legal entity that I’d get money from, gets any money from this podcast. If You Tube or any place else sticks ads in it, it’s nothing to do with me.

To deliver the Word and take money is called “trafficking on Christ” and we are admonished to reject such people. Yes, I actually mean that priests and pastors should receive nothing. They need to get jobs. 

But the fact is, people who want to know Jesus, can go directly to Him. You might check out the early series on contemplative prayer here.

Next move on into Mark, there’ll be some commentary, and a message to the Pope, maybe. Not sure in what order.



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Kyrie Dicentis

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