Saved From What?

When a Jew says that he is seeking salvation he means that he wants to be free from his sins under the Torah and be brought into peace with the Holy One of Israel. However, Jesus was a Nazorean and the Nazoreans, also known as the Essenes, believed that a Messiah would soon come to the world and He would bring warfare and mass destruction. Jesus promised his disciples that he must die and rise from the dead. He promised them that He would come again on the clouds and with him would come a huge army of angels. Salvation for him meant that those who followed the Torah and believed in Him would be saved during the coming war and destruction. Membership in the Church was therefore an insurance policy that when all the coming war and destruction overcame the world, you would be saved. However, Jesus promised that he would come again to fulfill these prophecies before the last apostle died. 

By 95 CE, the last of the Apostles, Jude Thaddeus, called Thomas, was the only one of the Apostles still living and the events had not occurred. Instead the land of Israel had been devastated by the Roman armies and no angels had appeared to protect the people and save them. The Church leaders who had removed themselves from Jerusalem after the death of James decided that they must have misunderstood what Jesus was saying. As a result, the Gospel of John was written and in it salvation was redefined. 

In John's Gospel, one will be saved from hell by belief in the Name of Jesus. The book centers not so much upon what Jesus did but rather on who he was and also on how He performed the signs that He performed. Jesus was going to send the Holy Spirit as a comforter to protect believers until the time came for Jesus to return.  The book of John did believe in the imminent return of Jesus, but it decided that there would be no signs that would give us a clue as to when that time would be. 

In 2 Peter, the author, writing the last of the canonical letters, argues that Jesus is not slow. After all, for G-d a day is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day. People were losing faith in this religion of Jesus because not only did the religion, now co-opted by Pauline heresy, not have a strong moral and ethical basis, but in addition the prophecies of Jesus had appeared to be false in that they had not come to pass in the time he had said they would. 

The Revelation of St. John was written by a disciple of a disciple of John according to Eusebius in his Ecclesia  Historia. Eusebius doubted that it was an inspired book but rather argued that it was a false prophecy and should not be admitted into the then incomplete canon of Scripture. However, in order to keep further erosion of the Church, the pagan Emperor Constantine the Great conspired and tricked the Council of Nicaea into accepting the book into the Canon instead of Enoch, a book which was considered sacred by the Nasoreans and by Jesus and his family as is demonstrated by the Letter of Jude. It was necessary to have Revelation in order to give Christians an imaginary something to be saved from even though Jesus did not mean salvation from an afterlife hell but rather salvation from a current everyday real hell on Earth. 

So what do we do with Christianity? First of all, we return to the Gospel of Matthew and to the Torah which Jesus left us with a command to do much better than the Pharisees. See Matthew 5:19-21. Second, we require Gentiles to be circumcised and to keep the Sabbath and kosher laws. Isaiah 56:1-7. Third, we start saying the Eucharist around a pot luck meal on Friday just after sundown. Fourth, we abolish Paul and everything tainted by him and restore the ancient books of the Nazorean faith. Then and only then will Gentiles and Jews be saved from hell and the destruction when Messiah Jesus returns.