My Developing Gospel of Jesus = the Book of Joshua Thesis

I get worried sometimes that when I start developing a great number of different posts on different themes at the same time that people lose site of what we are working on here. I am almost one percent certain that the reason that the text at the center of organized Christianity was called 'the gospel' was because it was understood that the year Jesus was crucified (the first month of the religious year of Israel in which Passover occurs) was a Jubilee year. I am not sure that many or all of my readers are familiar with the ancient Israelite concept of sabbatical years and Jubilees are.

The easiest way to envision the concept it to think of each successive year as a day of the week starting with the entry with Creation. The seventh year (= sabbatical year) was treated in a similar manner to the Sabbatical day (i.e. the Sabbath). The nation of Israel 'rested' so to speak. Yet the ancient Jews also venerated the fiftieth day or year (i.e. the day or year after seven Sabbaths). We see a number of ancient Jewish sects venerate the fiftieth day. The idea is at the heart of the celebration of Pentecost and the Jubilee is still celebrated (or at least calculated) by contemporary Samaritans.

The calculation of (1 + 7 x 7 years) continued from the beginning of the monotheism at the heart of Israelite religion. Yet to understand how it is connected with the gospel narrative is to revisit our original formula. The Gospel of Jesus developed from the story of Joshua in the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua. The things people have never quite understood of course is that we have to stop ourselves from assuming that because the name Jesus in Greek is used in the place of the Hebrew name Joshua in Greek translations of scripture that the person of Jesus = Joshua. We have talked about this at some length here.

The original understanding was that the figure later called 'Joshua' or Jesus in the LXX was originally named something else. The name Ἰησοῦς - or perhaps the mystical tenth letter of the alphabet i.e. iota or yod - became one with Oshea of the Twelve of Moses and transformed him into the prototype for the Savior of Israel. This was the original understanding at the heart of the 'Gospel of Jesus' narrative developed by Mark. In other words, at the end of time God gave humanity through a particularly 'loved' disciple the ability to transform ourselves through union with the divine name.

So what does the concept of Jubilee have to do with this? We have to start with the understanding that the conquest of Israel by the newly formed Ἰησοῦς in the Book of Joshua occurred in a Jubilee year. This is universally acknowledged among Israelite traditions. The 'Gospel of Jesus' is clearly the story of the announcement and then the realization of a similar event in a Jubilee year when Jesus was crucified before establishing the union with the divine name with a chosen disciple. There can be no doubt about this. This is not some radical revisionist concept. I have read books by the current Pope delving into this formula which is universally acknowledged on some level. The problem of course is that no one has ever been able to 'square the circle' as it were.

However I think the testimony regarding 'Secret Mark' in the Letter to Theodore changes all that. As I have noted many times here the rebirth through baptism of the disciple that Jesus loved clearly occurred on the same day as the reformed Ἰησοῦς in the Book of Joshua - i.e. the tenth day of the first month. The key to make sense of this is to note that after the initiation into the mysteries of the kingdom of God (a term which comes from the literature related to the Book of Joshua again) the 'secret gospel' says that one of the two men crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. I think the 'he' in this narrative is the disciple rather than Jesus.

The point here is that there can be no doubt that Irenaeus was locked in a disagreement with Clement's Alexandrian tradition regarding the length of the crucifixion of Jesus and more importantly whether it occurred in a Jubilee year. Irenaeus interestingly says that the reference to Isaiah 61's 'year of favor' at the beginning of the gospel has nothing to do with the Jubilee concept. Yet Clement and all the informed scholars of every period before and after Irenaeus disagrees with this assessment.

And as I will show in my next post, Clement clearly has in his possession a heretical gospel which has a very different form of the narrative where Jesus announces his Jubilee proclamation (Luke 4:14 - 30). I am certain that this will ultimately prove that Secret Mark was one and the same with the Marcionite gospel ...